You must not have been a gamer ~30 years ago. In the age of coleco/atari/NES, while it was possible to pirate games, realistically most people didn't. Little kids who wanted a game that their parents wouldn't get them for their birthday did anything they could to round up the cash... Save up gift money, distribute the newspaper (That was the most common one in my area at least), sell off old toys, babysit...
Then they'd buy it.
Today those same kids generally will pirate it, then do the same as above to buy some overly expensive shoes or something.
Except that anyone using whatever is baked in their language of choice these days is already deriving a key from the salt then going from there. My cryptography knowledge is a little rusty, but I fail to see what a separate library can do beyond that?
Besides, if the machines got hosed to the point they could get the salts, they can get the secret from which keys are being derived and go from there anyway.
Who said it was a custom hash/salt scheme? Pretty much all mainstream languages used to make web apps with have built in, very secure ways to create strong hash/salts that are virtually impossible to break.
Most users use the same fucking password for everything!
To be fair, its almost unreasonable to ask an average non-techy user to do anything else. Passwords are simply a flawed system.
I use keypass to autogenerate different passwords and save them in its database. That works great, for someone who takes security a little more at heart. I end up having to use its very convenient search feature to find my passwords, because at this point I have something like 50-80 of them.
Now, anyone who isn't a sophisticated enough user won't do that. You want them to learn 50+ totally distinct passwords? Or you want them to learn a little tricky or mnemonic when picking passwords so they have a way to reverse them from whatever website they're used on while being different?
Yeah, most users will seriously prefer dealing with identity theft than with that at the end of the day. Flawed system is flawed.
As you said, kiosk...conference rooms, presentations, monitors embedded in a desk, designer-style monitor stands (the low, bent ones that let you look at the monitor from overhead), to quickly check your emails in the morning without sitting down...
Basically, to recycle older monitors and give them new purpose, or any situation where touch would be nice, but you wouldnt be willing to pay more than 10 bucks for it. There's a lot of these scenarios.
Yup. And often we have to estimate with very little info. Imagine if you had to do an estimate for software that was as detailed as a professional architect's schematics. That would be waterfall though...which is not as bad as people make it seems for static requirements, but the reality is software requirements evolve way too quickly for that.
I still like the "point" estimation technique. Since it basically boils down to estimating by comparing previous projects that were similar in scope, you end up pretty darn accurate. At my last job where we used it, we ended up accurate at with a 5%~ error margin or so after a few iterations. That's more than good enough.
New job though, we estimate in hours, again. That never works, everything is off, but estimated projects are only allowed to take a certain percentage of your time, and leave everything else as buffer for the unexpected, so it still works out in the end.
No, i'm not. I couldn't stop for the rest of my life. but 10-20 years? probably.
However, this isn't what I mean by equivalent. What I was trying to say, is that you have 1 person, who is beyond imagination, needing to hire thousands of people, all of them expecting a salary that is several times national average, and while not on the same scale, is still away and beyond what is necessary.
Basically, the top 3% arguing with the top 0.1%. For the remaining 97%, its still a freagin joke.
Right now Amazon is an extreme heavyweight in retail and multimedia fields, a little like Walmart, Apple (for the later), etc.
These companies have a lot of leverage. For a while, Netflix on the other hand, wasn't doing well at all, losing a lot of content providers under its wings...they ended up on the beggar role, to some extent. If Amazon says "Play by our rules or get out", a lot of companies will play by their rule. If Netflix says "play by our rules or get out", well, we saw what happened. They get out.
Netflix is very likely only trying to check a checkbox on their licensing contract, said contract made with the big movie umbrellas, who themselves represent people who are quite a bit detached from reality and/or sign blanket contracts that don't differentiate between usages. That big chains mean some licensees like Netflix have to fulfill requirements that don't necessarily make sense.
Apple successfully implemented a culture of "upgrading for the sake of upgrading", which Windows wasn't able to be a part of. "Omg, this new device is exactly the same as the previous one, but its BETTER!! BUY BUY BUY!".
So compared to that, Windows is "failing". The sales are exactly as expected between, as you said, machines being powerful "enough" for most users, and desktops/laptops simply not being needed nearly as much anymore in the realm of smartphones and tablets...but for journalists/analysts/investors, thats no longer good enough.
You have to beat sale records after sale records regardless of market conditions. Once people trade in their foodstamps for the next version of Windows the way they do it for an iPhone, people on the internet will say it succeeded. And its totally binary: its either an iphone-like success, or its a failure.
In all seriousness, Windows is definately not going away. It will lose market and mindshare. Competition is good. I don't think it will ever die, at least not in the foreseeable future...it may just go down to a 50%~ marketshare instead of being a near monopoly. Thats still plenty successful, and good for the market. Not good for investors, but.....:)
The software engineers of the companies talked about in these discussions are not 1%, but they're stretching the definition of "middle class". My wife and I are senior software engineers, and according to any statistics I can find, we're squarely in the top 2-5%, depending on how you look at the data.
Yes, I know the curve there is definitely not linear, but you're still comparing people WAY above average, with other people way above average.
And I've posted this a few time, so someone will probably accuse of having an agenda or something, but whatever: Just look at Kendall square in Cambridge, near Boston. Thats one small area around a subway stop in a metro area, and right around the corner from one of the most famous CS colleges in the world. And yet the amount of positions that are open that will pay 6 figure++ with dream-like benefits and hours is staggering. Its ridiculous honestly. My job is way too fun to be worth nearly 200k total comp, and I sure as hell have a lot less to worry than most of the people who will hire me.
Agent the way you describe it is very close to being the norm in the industry, give or take a few big name companies that will only deal straight with potential employees.
The article is talking about agents in the artist sense....which is honestly the same thing, just with some pretense of being more than that tacked on.
The biggest consumers of H-1B visas do just that. Want to work at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whatever? If you're good enough, you can get a job there pretty much whenever you want. Their ads are all over the place all over the country, and obviously on all the big job advertisement web sites. The salaries are often totally out of wack compared to other jobs with similar education/experience requirements, and so are the benefits. And they're STILL looking for people.
I work for a a smaller (but still somewhat large, 1 billion-ish a year) company in Boston. Entry level positions give 80k, senior positions will go between 130-200k, all that not counting the really generous bonuses and options (that are actually worth using, and are paid out 100% of the time). The codebase is pristine, the technology stack bleeding edge, the desktop machines are extremely high end, food is free, and the projects are awesome.
Still have a lot of trouble filling in our positions. Why? Because we're competing with a -lot- of companies that give the same benefits. There's way more positions to fill than there are qualified people.
Now if the H-1Bs are used to hire random cheap morons, as I'm sure some do, thats a waste. We sure don't use them for that =P
Android's and iOS's web rendering components behave so completely different (nevermind on the javascript side...), especially in term of performance characteristics, that the fact they might have been both using webkit was more trivia knowledge than anything else...
stored procedures are just a mean to an end. What solves the problem is avoiding mixing queries with their parameters. When code invokes stored procedure, they are forced into the parameterized query pipeline, and that solves that (unless of course, you concatenate within the SP:)
There's a lot of ways to invoke the parameterized query pipeline... so even without stored procedures, you really shouldn't be doing that crap anymore. And yes, all relevent and even not so relevent RDBMs have client APIs that support this, and while it wasn't always the case, for the last 10+ years all mainstream languages do so too.
It totally baffles me that we even talk about SQL injection anymore.
There's a lot of good management people. They just all hire each other and end up working for the same few companies, and the rest pick up the scrap.
Something like (numbers out of my rear) the top 5% places to work for will eat up 95% of the good IT managers...the last 5% being made of people who want to take a crappy company and salvage it for recognition...
Actually, smart TVs, game consoles and blue ray players are regularly updated. Hell, my panasonic TV even can stream freagin CrunchyRoll, and that gets updates almost instantly. Rokus even have indie developers making channels for it and updating them regularly.
Even the freagin Nintendo DS gets regular updates for its streaming apps...
I'm no specialist by any mean, but I always thought houses built in wood in the US were not because of the cost of the material, but because of the labor cost. You can build up a wood frame house very, very, VERY quickly. Cement/brick need time to set in. Labor cost being significantly higher is generally the problem.
I'm in the market in Cambridge/Boston right now, and the difference in price between a place made out of wood and one that isn't in the same are with similar metrics/features is extreme (wood houses are free in comparison to those that aren't...)
I agree with your main point, but there's something to consider:
You're not a special unique snowflake for doing better when you can sit down and do straight work without interruption. Thats cool, until someone actually needs you. We have some people here who are pretty much geniuses and leaders in their fields. If let alone, they'll be ridiculously productive...but that also means no knowledge sharing, not supporting more junior employees, not being there for meetings that actually matter (not all meetings are useless...). So THEIR productivity would go up drastically, but the productivity of the company as a whole wouldn't.
If you were hired to be a ninja in the shadows, then no problem (we have those here). Very few people are hired like that though.
The browser that probably accounts for more traffic than the built in android browser
Built in android browser? Let see...::pulls out his nexus phone...::
You mean Chrome?
Oh wait, you mean the OLD android browser, from the version of android that barely worked on the internet at all, even though it still has more marketshare.
Yeah, no surprise that that shitty browser isn't on the radar either.
Humans have been building infrastructure, houses, buildings, for thousands of years, and they still make mistakes (honest or out of greed by cutting corners) and these life critical infrastructure still fail left and right.
Software is often more complex, require more people to build, and often have stricter constraints for people who don't understand it, even though we haven't been writing software all that long.
In a few thousand years, if software doesn't have the same failure rate as building bridges does today, wake me up.
Thats why the best option is to shell out for LLBLGEN. It costs money, but you have your cake and can eat it too. Its honestly superior to Nhibernate (but you can use Nhibernate with it at worse, it has support for it), and you get commercial support.
But yeah, NHibernate is better than EF. The only issue is junior devs have problems with learning it... and the community (especially the guy that manage the project) is extremely abrasive. So had you gone for it originally, someone in your team would have pointed out to these issues as the reason why you should have gone EF.
The article completely misunderstands the ecosystem.
No more people avoid open source in the.NET world than in other ecosystems. The difference is that in the.NET world, people avoid third party tools in general. If its built in, its ok. If its not built in and it doesn't come from Telerik, forget it.
The main difference here is that the standard.NET distribution now includes a ton of third party tools, and for the most part they're free, so for the most part they're open source.
I mean, the list you gave are all tools Ive used before...but very very very small minority wil use nhibernate over Entity Framework, even though nhibernate is vastly superior (part of it is its harder to use, but the main thing is, its not built in...)
Slashdot Mirror
You must not have been a gamer ~30 years ago. In the age of coleco/atari/NES, while it was possible to pirate games, realistically most people didn't. Little kids who wanted a game that their parents wouldn't get them for their birthday did anything they could to round up the cash... Save up gift money, distribute the newspaper (That was the most common one in my area at least), sell off old toys, babysit...
Then they'd buy it.
Today those same kids generally will pirate it, then do the same as above to buy some overly expensive shoes or something.
Except that anyone using whatever is baked in their language of choice these days is already deriving a key from the salt then going from there. My cryptography knowledge is a little rusty, but I fail to see what a separate library can do beyond that?
Besides, if the machines got hosed to the point they could get the salts, they can get the secret from which keys are being derived and go from there anyway.
Who said it was a custom hash/salt scheme? Pretty much all mainstream languages used to make web apps with have built in, very secure ways to create strong hash/salts that are virtually impossible to break.
To be fair, its almost unreasonable to ask an average non-techy user to do anything else. Passwords are simply a flawed system.
I use keypass to autogenerate different passwords and save them in its database. That works great, for someone who takes security a little more at heart. I end up having to use its very convenient search feature to find my passwords, because at this point I have something like 50-80 of them.
Now, anyone who isn't a sophisticated enough user won't do that. You want them to learn 50+ totally distinct passwords? Or you want them to learn a little tricky or mnemonic when picking passwords so they have a way to reverse them from whatever website they're used on while being different?
Yeah, most users will seriously prefer dealing with identity theft than with that at the end of the day. Flawed system is flawed.
As you said, kiosk...conference rooms, presentations, monitors embedded in a desk, designer-style monitor stands (the low, bent ones that let you look at the monitor from overhead), to quickly check your emails in the morning without sitting down...
Basically, to recycle older monitors and give them new purpose, or any situation where touch would be nice, but you wouldnt be willing to pay more than 10 bucks for it. There's a lot of these scenarios.
Wasn't that exactly what XHTML was supposed to become?
Yup. And often we have to estimate with very little info. Imagine if you had to do an estimate for software that was as detailed as a professional architect's schematics. That would be waterfall though...which is not as bad as people make it seems for static requirements, but the reality is software requirements evolve way too quickly for that.
I still like the "point" estimation technique. Since it basically boils down to estimating by comparing previous projects that were similar in scope, you end up pretty darn accurate. At my last job where we used it, we ended up accurate at with a 5%~ error margin or so after a few iterations. That's more than good enough.
New job though, we estimate in hours, again. That never works, everything is off, but estimated projects are only allowed to take a certain percentage of your time, and leave everything else as buffer for the unexpected, so it still works out in the end.
No, i'm not. I couldn't stop for the rest of my life. but 10-20 years? probably.
However, this isn't what I mean by equivalent. What I was trying to say, is that you have 1 person, who is beyond imagination, needing to hire thousands of people, all of them expecting a salary that is several times national average, and while not on the same scale, is still away and beyond what is necessary.
Basically, the top 3% arguing with the top 0.1%. For the remaining 97%, its still a freagin joke.
Thats the point i was trying to get across.
Right now Amazon is an extreme heavyweight in retail and multimedia fields, a little like Walmart, Apple (for the later), etc.
These companies have a lot of leverage. For a while, Netflix on the other hand, wasn't doing well at all, losing a lot of content providers under its wings...they ended up on the beggar role, to some extent. If Amazon says "Play by our rules or get out", a lot of companies will play by their rule. If Netflix says "play by our rules or get out", well, we saw what happened. They get out.
Netflix is very likely only trying to check a checkbox on their licensing contract, said contract made with the big movie umbrellas, who themselves represent people who are quite a bit detached from reality and/or sign blanket contracts that don't differentiate between usages. That big chains mean some licensees like Netflix have to fulfill requirements that don't necessarily make sense.
Apple successfully implemented a culture of "upgrading for the sake of upgrading", which Windows wasn't able to be a part of. "Omg, this new device is exactly the same as the previous one, but its BETTER!! BUY BUY BUY!".
So compared to that, Windows is "failing". The sales are exactly as expected between, as you said, machines being powerful "enough" for most users, and desktops/laptops simply not being needed nearly as much anymore in the realm of smartphones and tablets...but for journalists/analysts/investors, thats no longer good enough.
You have to beat sale records after sale records regardless of market conditions. Once people trade in their foodstamps for the next version of Windows the way they do it for an iPhone, people on the internet will say it succeeded. And its totally binary: its either an iphone-like success, or its a failure.
In all seriousness, Windows is definately not going away. It will lose market and mindshare. Competition is good. I don't think it will ever die, at least not in the foreseeable future...it may just go down to a 50%~ marketshare instead of being a near monopoly. Thats still plenty successful, and good for the market. Not good for investors, but..... :)
It may not be dense in the Tokyo sense, but its dense but its probably dense enough to get real internet going by an order of magnitude or two.
The software engineers of the companies talked about in these discussions are not 1%, but they're stretching the definition of "middle class". My wife and I are senior software engineers, and according to any statistics I can find, we're squarely in the top 2-5%, depending on how you look at the data.
Yes, I know the curve there is definitely not linear, but you're still comparing people WAY above average, with other people way above average.
And I've posted this a few time, so someone will probably accuse of having an agenda or something, but whatever: Just look at Kendall square in Cambridge, near Boston. Thats one small area around a subway stop in a metro area, and right around the corner from one of the most famous CS colleges in the world. And yet the amount of positions that are open that will pay 6 figure++ with dream-like benefits and hours is staggering. Its ridiculous honestly. My job is way too fun to be worth nearly 200k total comp, and I sure as hell have a lot less to worry than most of the people who will hire me.
So yes, I'd say, clearly equivalent.
Agent the way you describe it is very close to being the norm in the industry, give or take a few big name companies that will only deal straight with potential employees.
The article is talking about agents in the artist sense....which is honestly the same thing, just with some pretense of being more than that tacked on.
The biggest consumers of H-1B visas do just that. Want to work at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whatever? If you're good enough, you can get a job there pretty much whenever you want. Their ads are all over the place all over the country, and obviously on all the big job advertisement web sites. The salaries are often totally out of wack compared to other jobs with similar education/experience requirements, and so are the benefits. And they're STILL looking for people.
I work for a a smaller (but still somewhat large, 1 billion-ish a year) company in Boston. Entry level positions give 80k, senior positions will go between 130-200k, all that not counting the really generous bonuses and options (that are actually worth using, and are paid out 100% of the time). The codebase is pristine, the technology stack bleeding edge, the desktop machines are extremely high end, food is free, and the projects are awesome.
Still have a lot of trouble filling in our positions. Why? Because we're competing with a -lot- of companies that give the same benefits. There's way more positions to fill than there are qualified people.
Now if the H-1Bs are used to hire random cheap morons, as I'm sure some do, thats a waste. We sure don't use them for that =P
Android's and iOS's web rendering components behave so completely different (nevermind on the javascript side...), especially in term of performance characteristics, that the fact they might have been both using webkit was more trivia knowledge than anything else...
stored procedures are just a mean to an end. What solves the problem is avoiding mixing queries with their parameters. When code invokes stored procedure, they are forced into the parameterized query pipeline, and that solves that (unless of course, you concatenate within the SP :)
There's a lot of ways to invoke the parameterized query pipeline... so even without stored procedures, you really shouldn't be doing that crap anymore. And yes, all relevent and even not so relevent RDBMs have client APIs that support this, and while it wasn't always the case, for the last 10+ years all mainstream languages do so too.
It totally baffles me that we even talk about SQL injection anymore.
There's a lot of good management people. They just all hire each other and end up working for the same few companies, and the rest pick up the scrap.
Something like (numbers out of my rear) the top 5% places to work for will eat up 95% of the good IT managers...the last 5% being made of people who want to take a crappy company and salvage it for recognition...
Actually, smart TVs, game consoles and blue ray players are regularly updated. Hell, my panasonic TV even can stream freagin CrunchyRoll, and that gets updates almost instantly. Rokus even have indie developers making channels for it and updating them regularly.
Even the freagin Nintendo DS gets regular updates for its streaming apps...
I'm no specialist by any mean, but I always thought houses built in wood in the US were not because of the cost of the material, but because of the labor cost. You can build up a wood frame house very, very, VERY quickly. Cement/brick need time to set in. Labor cost being significantly higher is generally the problem.
I'm in the market in Cambridge/Boston right now, and the difference in price between a place made out of wood and one that isn't in the same are with similar metrics/features is extreme (wood houses are free in comparison to those that aren't...)
I agree with your main point, but there's something to consider:
You're not a special unique snowflake for doing better when you can sit down and do straight work without interruption. Thats cool, until someone actually needs you. We have some people here who are pretty much geniuses and leaders in their fields. If let alone, they'll be ridiculously productive...but that also means no knowledge sharing, not supporting more junior employees, not being there for meetings that actually matter (not all meetings are useless...). So THEIR productivity would go up drastically, but the productivity of the company as a whole wouldn't.
If you were hired to be a ninja in the shadows, then no problem (we have those here). Very few people are hired like that though.
Built in android browser? Let see... ::pulls out his nexus phone...::
You mean Chrome?
Oh wait, you mean the OLD android browser, from the version of android that barely worked on the internet at all, even though it still has more marketshare.
Yeah, no surprise that that shitty browser isn't on the radar either.
Humans have been building infrastructure, houses, buildings, for thousands of years, and they still make mistakes (honest or out of greed by cutting corners) and these life critical infrastructure still fail left and right.
Software is often more complex, require more people to build, and often have stricter constraints for people who don't understand it, even though we haven't been writing software all that long.
In a few thousand years, if software doesn't have the same failure rate as building bridges does today, wake me up.
Thats why the best option is to shell out for LLBLGEN. It costs money, but you have your cake and can eat it too. Its honestly superior to Nhibernate (but you can use Nhibernate with it at worse, it has support for it), and you get commercial support.
But yeah, NHibernate is better than EF. The only issue is junior devs have problems with learning it... and the community (especially the guy that manage the project) is extremely abrasive. So had you gone for it originally, someone in your team would have pointed out to these issues as the reason why you should have gone EF.
You couldn't win that battle.
The article completely misunderstands the ecosystem.
No more people avoid open source in the .NET world than in other ecosystems. The difference is that in the .NET world, people avoid third party tools in general. If its built in, its ok. If its not built in and it doesn't come from Telerik, forget it.
The main difference here is that the standard .NET distribution now includes a ton of third party tools, and for the most part they're free, so for the most part they're open source.
I mean, the list you gave are all tools Ive used before...but very very very small minority wil use nhibernate over Entity Framework, even though nhibernate is vastly superior (part of it is its harder to use, but the main thing is, its not built in...)