But if I have Location History turn off and then I use Google Maps or any mapping function, why would Google need to store that information for longer than it is needed. Shouldn't the information be erased when I close Google Maps?
First, Google starts making a search engine for the Chinese government that censors data. Next, they buy your credit card data from Mastercard. Now, they are spying on your location even after you turn location services off.
Google used to have an ethical code that made people believe that they were not some evil Silicon Valley company. I guess that is gone now.
Let's take a look at the issues Facebook is facing.
1. Fake news
2. Political ads by foreign powers
3. Censorship because of political views
4. Egregious selling of personal data to advertisers
The first two are difficult to detect because they are fake stories/ads posing as real ones. You have to think that with all the engineers Facebook has that they would have at least tried to solve this problem. But Facebook has really taken the position in the past that they really don't care. That is until their stock got slammed last month. Now they care.
The last two are within Facebook's control but chooses to ignore the problem because of political bias or outright greed. Greed is good, right?
Google had the motto of "don't be evil". Facebook's motto is "we just don't care".
That is, when you make fixed scope and fixed time commitments, because the boss (or product owner) says so, you're waterfall - it doesn't matter if you use story points and sprints to implement your waterfall product, because you've missed the fundamental point of agile.
I have to call out this BS when I see it. Fixed scope, fixed time commitments are not waterfall, it is called reality, It is called business. When you run a business, you know that you have fixed scope, fixed deadlines and fixed resources (developers, money, costs) to deliver a product. You are trying to use the most efficient methodology to accomplish that task. The zealots will cry that agile doesn't work for like that, but I have seen agile work well on fixed bid, fixed price contracts. I have also seen agile fail miserable where waterfall would have succeeded. Just to be fair, I have seen waterfall fail where agile would have succeeded.
When agile fails all the pundits cry that you were "not doing it right", or you were "not agile enough", instead of seeing the flaws and shortcomings of agile. I don't hold allegiance to one side or the other. I just try and pick the right tool for the job.
I am shocked but not surprise that Google and Mastercard got together to exchange very private, very personal information. These are two giant companies that decided that your private information was open to being bought and sold. No hacking company server and selling it on the dark web. No back alley meetings where a briefcase of cash is exchanged for a thumb drive of data. Just big corporations sinking to a new ethical low.
What is next, Google is going to ask BofA for my bank statements to see how much money is in my checking account so that they can display wealth appropriate ads to me?
Disclosure: I work in infosec and we treat PCI data (credit card data) like it is national security secrets. It is against everything we believe to think that anyone but the minimal number of parties have access to your data.
If I looked at the extra income we'd have if we had $250,000 between us each year? I'd still be really hard pressed to sign on the line for any mortgage resembling $6,000+ per month! We pretty much live paycheck to paycheck on the current income, by the time you consider the costs of raising 3 kids and the (I think reasonable) decision for both of us to buy nice, newer model vehicles to drive around.
When you have met your basic needs, all the income above that is disposable. If your income doubles, your food cost does not double, nor does your electric, gas, water, cell phone, cable, transportation costs. Your kids don't where twice as many clothes, your car payment doesn't increase. Basically, you are no longer living paycheck to paycheck.
The tendency for lenders to loan money and make recommendations on "what you can afford" based simply on percentages of your total income is what got a whole lot of people in over their heads with home buying before the last economic crash.
This was an exercise in what is possible, buying a home in San Francisco. The ultimate decision is still up to the individual.
During the housing boom and then bust, lenders were making loans up to 50% of stated income. That is a little crazy.
There's so much else to consider, including the rising cost of KEEPING whatever home you buy as its cost increases. If you have more land, you have more yard maintenance to deal with. Did you budget the cost of all that landscaping in? (I have a bunch of trees and shrubs that grow over the property line on both sides of my house, requiring constant pruning back. If you slack off on that, they clog the gutters and lead to water problems in the basement -- multiplying your cost of dealing with it all. Last time I got a quote to trim back just one side of that mess? The guy wanted over $2,000 for his landscapers to cut it all back to the fence line and haul it all away.) If you have more square footage, you owe more every year in property tax AND more in utility bills to keep that much air space heated or cooled.
Even our basic bills for sewer and water have gone up exponentially. Clean water used to be something most people just received as almost a "throw away" bill. You know.... every few months you'd have to send the water company $30-40 to keep it paid up. Not anymore! The cost to treat the river water where I live is really high, and they have to pass it on to customers. Quarterly bills of hundreds of dollars are the norm.
The cost of maintaining that $1.6m house is not necessarily more. It isn't sitting on a larger piece of land, just sitting on a way more expensive piece of land. Landscaping costs, irrigation, tree trimming costs, utilities are all about the same, Property taxes are proportional to the value of the home.
The 1/3rds rule is stupid. If you do the math, you will find that you can a $1.6m house on 250K salary.
A quick look at the numbers.
Purchase price $1.6m - $320K down payment (20%), $1.28m financed (80%).
$1.28m mortgage, 4% int, Payment = $6,111/mo.
Monthly payments should not exceed 30% of your income.
Income = $6,111*12mo/.30 = $244,440
FB: We're an ASS, Ad Supported Site. Our business model is collect as much data as we can about you and sell it to the advertisers. We don't care about you, just your data. You don't get to opt out because then we would make less money and that would hurt my quarterly bonus. Once you give up your privacy, you lose it forever. Kind of like a Sexual Predator Registry site for the masses.
Developers, despite the weird obsession with solitude expressed in this thread, need to communicate more, not less.
I am all for developers communicating more. That doesn't mean you need an open office plan. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. There is email, IM, Skype, phone, WebEx. and a host of other ways to communicate, as well as, face to face. And with an office you can have a private conversation and not bother anyone around you.
Think about those people that work from home. They have to communicate. No different than if you have an office.
It is hard to get buy-in to open office plans if one of the requirements is that I need a space with no distractions. That just doesn't work with the open plan. Now if you are all in offices and want to collaborate with a fellow developer, you both can go into one office or book a conference room to share ideas. Best of both worlds.
Some methodologies are more about collaborate like pair programming. For that case, two developers can share an office. There is nothing about agile methodology that forces collaboration. I am working on an agile project right now and almost everyone is working independently, communicating when needed.
I have worked in open plan environments and ones where I had my own office. I was way more productive in my own office.
If someone feels they are more productive in the open plan, I don't begrudge them that. I say let the developers choose open plan or office, individually.
I see this all the time from business 'leaders'. It is always easier to dismiss the complain. Claim it is from a bunch of whiners than to actually fix the problem.
Call the complainant a whiner. Don't fix the problem. Sweep it under the rug. Where have we seen that before. Oh yeah, didn't Uber do that to the sexual harassment complaint. And Well Fargo, didn't they do that to the people complaining about the fake accounts problem.
I have had the exact same experience. People who need to communicate a lot like open plans. They want to talk to their coworker around them.
People that have to think, as opposed to talk, want quiet spaces, free from distractions. Headphones can block out some of the noise but not all of it. If you turn it up too loud it distracts your neighbors. Also, there is the visual distractions. Nobody has told me how to get rid of those.
It seemed like a good idea at the beginning. More worker crammed in less square footage. Save on office space rent. That's ok when you are paying all your worked minimum wage and productivity is not significantly impacted.
The reality is that you lose 30% productivity from a large group of highly paid employees. All so you save a couple of bucks on your monthly rent.
I don't know why companies like Apple hamstring their developers with these open office design abominations. Study after study shows that developers are most productive when they have an office with a door they can close. The pointy headed bosses argument that they can wear headphones or take their laptop and move to a conference room doesn't work in reality.
For the salary they pay software engineers, it would seem that companies would not still be practicing outdated, brain-dead policies that are costing their company millions. Or in Apple's case billions.
Richard Feynman had a way of communicating physics to an audience that they could understand. He used to give lectures on physics to the undergrads and then take questions on literally any topic in physics. His knowledge was vast, but is ability to communicate and enthusiasm is what enthralled his audience.
Kudos, to someone who mastered the subject and also, mastered the ability to teach it to the next generation.
Slashdot Mirror
But if I have Location History turn off and then I use Google Maps or any mapping function, why would Google need to store that information for longer than it is needed. Shouldn't the information be erased when I close Google Maps?
First, Google starts making a search engine for the Chinese government that censors data. Next, they buy your credit card data from Mastercard. Now, they are spying on your location even after you turn location services off.
Google used to have an ethical code that made people believe that they were not some evil Silicon Valley company. I guess that is gone now.
Let's take a look at the issues Facebook is facing.
1. Fake news
2. Political ads by foreign powers
3. Censorship because of political views
4. Egregious selling of personal data to advertisers
The first two are difficult to detect because they are fake stories/ads posing as real ones. You have to think that with all the engineers Facebook has that they would have at least tried to solve this problem. But Facebook has really taken the position in the past that they really don't care. That is until their stock got slammed last month. Now they care.
The last two are within Facebook's control but chooses to ignore the problem because of political bias or outright greed. Greed is good, right?
Google had the motto of "don't be evil". Facebook's motto is "we just don't care".
That is, when you make fixed scope and fixed time commitments, because the boss (or product owner) says so, you're waterfall - it doesn't matter if you use story points and sprints to implement your waterfall product, because you've missed the fundamental point of agile.
I have to call out this BS when I see it. Fixed scope, fixed time commitments are not waterfall, it is called reality, It is called business. When you run a business, you know that you have fixed scope, fixed deadlines and fixed resources (developers, money, costs) to deliver a product. You are trying to use the most efficient methodology to accomplish that task. The zealots will cry that agile doesn't work for like that, but I have seen agile work well on fixed bid, fixed price contracts. I have also seen agile fail miserable where waterfall would have succeeded. Just to be fair, I have seen waterfall fail where agile would have succeeded.
When agile fails all the pundits cry that you were "not doing it right", or you were "not agile enough", instead of seeing the flaws and shortcomings of agile. I don't hold allegiance to one side or the other. I just try and pick the right tool for the job.
I am shocked but not surprise that Google and Mastercard got together to exchange very private, very personal information. These are two giant companies that decided that your private information was open to being bought and sold. No hacking company server and selling it on the dark web. No back alley meetings where a briefcase of cash is exchanged for a thumb drive of data. Just big corporations sinking to a new ethical low.
What is next, Google is going to ask BofA for my bank statements to see how much money is in my checking account so that they can display wealth appropriate ads to me?
Disclosure: I work in infosec and we treat PCI data (credit card data) like it is national security secrets. It is against everything we believe to think that anyone but the minimal number of parties have access to your data.
"We must become masters of our AI overlords"
How do you save up for a 20% down payment for any mortgage?
If you are making 60k, you can buy a $400k house with a $80k down payment.
The percentages work out to be the same.
If I looked at the extra income we'd have if we had $250,000 between us each year? I'd still be really hard pressed to sign on the line for any mortgage resembling $6,000+ per month! We pretty much live paycheck to paycheck on the current income, by the time you consider the costs of raising 3 kids and the (I think reasonable) decision for both of us to buy nice, newer model vehicles to drive around.
When you have met your basic needs, all the income above that is disposable. If your income doubles, your food cost does not double, nor does your electric, gas, water, cell phone, cable, transportation costs. Your kids don't where twice as many clothes, your car payment doesn't increase. Basically, you are no longer living paycheck to paycheck.
The tendency for lenders to loan money and make recommendations on "what you can afford" based simply on percentages of your total income is what got a whole lot of people in over their heads with home buying before the last economic crash.
This was an exercise in what is possible, buying a home in San Francisco. The ultimate decision is still up to the individual.
During the housing boom and then bust, lenders were making loans up to 50% of stated income. That is a little crazy.
There's so much else to consider, including the rising cost of KEEPING whatever home you buy as its cost increases. If you have more land, you have more yard maintenance to deal with. Did you budget the cost of all that landscaping in? (I have a bunch of trees and shrubs that grow over the property line on both sides of my house, requiring constant pruning back. If you slack off on that, they clog the gutters and lead to water problems in the basement -- multiplying your cost of dealing with it all. Last time I got a quote to trim back just one side of that mess? The guy wanted over $2,000 for his landscapers to cut it all back to the fence line and haul it all away.) If you have more square footage, you owe more every year in property tax AND more in utility bills to keep that much air space heated or cooled.
Even our basic bills for sewer and water have gone up exponentially. Clean water used to be something most people just received as almost a "throw away" bill. You know .... every few months you'd have to send the water company $30-40 to keep it paid up. Not anymore! The cost to treat the river water where I live is really high, and they have to pass it on to customers. Quarterly bills of hundreds of dollars are the norm.
The cost of maintaining that $1.6m house is not necessarily more. It isn't sitting on a larger piece of land, just sitting on a way more expensive piece of land. Landscaping costs, irrigation, tree trimming costs, utilities are all about the same, Property taxes are proportional to the value of the home.
The 1/3rds rule is stupid. If you do the math, you will find that you can a $1.6m house on 250K salary.
A quick look at the numbers.
Purchase price $1.6m - $320K down payment (20%), $1.28m financed (80%).
$1.28m mortgage, 4% int, Payment = $6,111/mo.
Monthly payments should not exceed 30% of your income.
Income = $6,111*12mo/.30 = $244,440
Math is your friend
Let me translate all the corporate speak for you.
FB:
We're an ASS, Ad Supported Site.
Our business model is collect as much data as we can about you and sell it to the advertisers.
We don't care about you, just your data.
You don't get to opt out because then we would make less money and that would hurt my quarterly bonus.
Once you give up your privacy, you lose it forever. Kind of like a Sexual Predator Registry site for the masses.
Not just that TV had antennas but when you changed the TV channel, you had to adjust the antenna to get the picture to come in.
This is a good place to start.
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/...
and
https://novicearshad.wordpress...
Developers, despite the weird obsession with solitude expressed in this thread, need to communicate more, not less.
I am all for developers communicating more. That doesn't mean you need an open office plan. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. There is email, IM, Skype, phone, WebEx. and a host of other ways to communicate, as well as, face to face. And with an office you can have a private conversation and not bother anyone around you.
Think about those people that work from home. They have to communicate. No different than if you have an office.
Are you saying that Apple doesn't make mistakes?
Didn't they fire Steve Jobs?
It is hard to get buy-in to open office plans if one of the requirements is that I need a space with no distractions. That just doesn't work with the open plan. Now if you are all in offices and want to collaborate with a fellow developer, you both can go into one office or book a conference room to share ideas. Best of both worlds.
Some methodologies are more about collaborate like pair programming. For that case, two developers can share an office. There is nothing about agile methodology that forces collaboration. I am working on an agile project right now and almost everyone is working independently, communicating when needed.
I have worked in open plan environments and ones where I had my own office. I was way more productive in my own office.
If someone feels they are more productive in the open plan, I don't begrudge them that. I say let the developers choose open plan or office, individually.
I bet >90% go for the office.
I see this all the time from business 'leaders'. It is always easier to dismiss the complain. Claim it is from a bunch of whiners than to actually fix the problem.
Call the complainant a whiner. Don't fix the problem. Sweep it under the rug. Where have we seen that before. Oh yeah, didn't Uber do that to the sexual harassment complaint. And Well Fargo, didn't they do that to the people complaining about the fake accounts problem.
I have had the exact same experience. People who need to communicate a lot like open plans. They want to talk to their coworker around them.
People that have to think, as opposed to talk, want quiet spaces, free from distractions. Headphones can block out some of the noise but not all of it. If you turn it up too loud it distracts your neighbors. Also, there is the visual distractions. Nobody has told me how to get rid of those.
It seemed like a good idea at the beginning. More worker crammed in less square footage. Save on office space rent. That's ok when you are paying all your worked minimum wage and productivity is not significantly impacted.
The reality is that you lose 30% productivity from a large group of highly paid employees. All so you save a couple of bucks on your monthly rent.
I don't know why companies like Apple hamstring their developers with these open office design abominations. Study after study shows that developers are most productive when they have an office with a door they can close. The pointy headed bosses argument that they can wear headphones or take their laptop and move to a conference room doesn't work in reality.
For the salary they pay software engineers, it would seem that companies would not still be practicing outdated, brain-dead policies that are costing their company millions. Or in Apple's case billions.
just my 2 cent worth.
This is a trick question...NONE OF THE ABOVE.
A business needs PROFITS. With profits a business insures it will be in business tomorrow.
How many of those companies that failed were profitable?
If companies would be required to pay at least $120,000 as one bill in the House requires, all the H1b problems go away.
Tech companies don't want to do this.
Why don't we just bring back slavery? It would be more honest.
Richard Feynman had a way of communicating physics to an audience that they could understand. He used to give lectures on physics to the undergrads and then take questions on literally any topic in physics. His knowledge was vast, but is ability to communicate and enthusiasm is what enthralled his audience.
Kudos, to someone who mastered the subject and also, mastered the ability to teach it to the next generation.
When I close my eyes and picture a Physics lecture, I DO SEE David Goodstein give another funny, entertaining, informative and inspirational lecture.
Yes, I went to Caltech.
Yes, I was taught physics by David Goodstein.
That is what going to the one of the finest universities in the country gets you.
Anybody here who would work for Infosys?
I used to work for Infosys a long time ago. I have to say that they are as dishonest as their reputation.