Software code DOES get subpoenaed all the time in disputes. This doesn't even have to be criminal cases, in civil cases as well. If the code resides in a version control system of some sort they typically get all of that as well. (Some smart guys have tried to deliver code in printed form to bury the other party but the courts have mostly refused those 'smart' tactics. Email gets subpoenaed all the time as well. Again bot in civil and criminal cases. Also from outside vendors. This is not a big issue. A company gets a subpoena from a judge and they hand over the data. What is troubling with surveillance in the US is that it is happening on a massive scale without judicial oversight. Your latest paragraph is moot. Once served with a subpoena those materials HAVE to be turned over. It doesn't matter where the data resides. If people can see it and manipulate it it can be turned over.
Not really. While expensive, There is a reason Mr. Musk think we can hit his price point: By bringing down battery price by building his own largest battery fab in the world.
Tesla can switch a battery pack in minutes. (One of their business plans for the future is franchise stations where one would exchange batteries in minutes, the way one now gets gas). Except for crashes a car like the Tesla S has almost NO wear and tear compared to an internal combustion car. No gearbox, no oil, no injection systems no exhaust systems no cooling systems... The Tesla S's maintenance manual consist of such things as changing your wiper blades once a year etc...
As far as the pollution form the battery pack goes: While older battery technologies were stuffed with heavy metals, That is not the case with Li-Ion batteries. They are remarkably recyclable once used up.
I am typically the first guy to do an implementation. After that a bunch of guys come in and they refactor the code. I pass all acceptance tests. (Typically a cucumber suite). The people I work with know this. When I am contracting time is money. I don't refactor unless you pay me. I can refactor that code as well as anybody, but by that time I'm typically called away on another project. (My last assignment was writing a REST API while in Vietnam 5 subcontractors were writing a mobile app against my API on a nightly basis. That was a major pITA since they were 12 hours ahead of me. I prefer working against the West coast, three hours ahead is pretty much ideal.)
Now after I'm done In typically think of a much more elegant way of doing things, but by that time I'm usually on something else. One thing: My hastily written code is nicer today than my refactored code was 5 years ago. So I guess I am improving.
People that hire me typically couldn't care less about what tools I use, or how elegant my code is.(Unless you work for a software company; I deal with a lot of businesses in totally different fields that need an issue solved, and need it done quickly.)
Ever seen the Django framework documentation? Best I've ever used. (Also really nice source code so you can step through that when dealing with obscure issues. I can't do that with Cold Fusion ('shudder'))
>Yeah, fuck the fascist USA with their terror squads, We have those, they're called special forces and they will kill people in autonomic countries without permission of the government of said countries. We don't deny this, we're proud of them.
>secret death camps for civilians, The US has acknowledged innocent civilians being held in Guantanamo. Even though we know they are innocent, various legal and political issues keep us from releasing them. People do die and commit suicide in that hellhole.
>mass murders of citizens and what-not. We lost about 3,000 people on 9-11, Since then we've lost about 3 times as many US military lives and 30 times as many permanently injured. A high price to pay for the US. Since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan between 300,000 and 1,5 million citizens in those countries have lost their lives due to military type conflict.
>Fucking come on. I'm fucking coming into your ass right now...
Use your specs to write your acceptance tests and your acceptance tests to write your specs. There are plenty of tools available. We use cucumber. Cucumber comes with a very English-like language (Gherkin) that can easily be converted to actual tests. We pay our contractors only when all tests pass. No confusion: The actual spec is also the acceptance test. Our 'user stories' in Gherkin get written by business analysts, not programmers.
A HUGE amount of back end processing systems are Unix based. Because in the olden days, Biig Metal or Unix-type systems were the only ones that could handle large data processing reliably. (That is still the case: I have had Unix servers with up to a decade of up-time.) In the mid nineties MS went after the back-end processing market of businesses. While they had some success (And some spectacular failures) what prevented MS from gaining major foothold in enterprise data centers was the implosion of the Internet bubble and the availability of reliable, easy to use Open Source versions of Unix. I have been writing all enterprise based applications for the past ten years as web based apps. Our current mobile stuff is also Web based (with a thin webkit client to handle the presentation on the specific device). While MS does have an installed corporate base, I'm not buying any stock soon. Their only successful product in the last decade has been the X-Box.
Web professional here. We hand code everything. A design tool might be fine for a one-off (IF you can get everything to look right in the tool!), but it doesn't allow the same control hand coding does. HOWEVER the main thing is one of maintenance. ANY web site that is the least bit popular will go through changes. This is much easier in a human written piece of pain html.
Hand written pages are lighter (IE: Smaller. That matters on a busy website). Hand written pages can be written to be fully www3c compliant; I have yet to see a tool that can do that. Also a lot of web frameworks use some type of templating system. Those are written manually.
I don't know where you live; but tell your son to pick up a programming language and a web framework. Two good ones are Ruby on Rails and Python with django. Here in Atlanta they are dying for decent Ruby developers! Even if he is in high school or college, picking up coding at $50/hour beats working at McD's for $8.50...
the android SDK deal with this very well. Quote:"To make life easier every API includes a FEATURE_* constant. To control your app’s availability on the Android Market, you specify the features required for your app to work. I’d like to encourage you to add manifest Feature nodes for every API you use, specifying them as optional, or not, as appropriate using a manifest uses-feature nodes as shown below:"
I don't know a single other evolving platform that deals as well with these issues as android.
Although the amount of programmers programming in C/C++ might be decreasing as a a percentage of all prgogrammers; they still build the underlying foundations of all our software. (Note: I've mainly been programming in python the past 5 years) Virtual machines; interpreters; device drivers etc... are all implemented in C / C++. without those wizards who know how to handle memory and hardware at a basic level, merely competent people like me would be a whole lot slower...
Was one of the first to get one. Comments: It is low powered; booting up takes a while; loading rpograms takes a while. Once up and running it's fine. I don't like the window manager; The frame that pops up is annoying. I would do a skinny drop down of running apps when hitting the top-left corner, a list of available apps at top right corner etc... or something like that I HATE the journal as a file manager. This is the first 'activity' that needs to be replaced. The programming games are fun. My kids LOVE the logo like activity the best. Some of the software doesn't play well together. The documentation that comes with it is dramatically subpar. You really need to go to their faq to make any use of the machine. One of the issues with that is that some of the faq info (particularly abvout commecting to a network is not available to you before you are online...) (At least include a pdf with the latest version of the wiki and faq on it.) The battery life is very good. (This is before an expected update of the system software; particularly power saving features) early 2008) It is rugged; wifi reception is better than my Macbbok pro. Too bad you can't connect a cantenna easily that way one of these could bridge a few miles and the rest of the laptops could mesh network with it. I bought the laptop to do some good and mess around with it. I'll probably use this laptop on my boat (Will compare it to my toughbook; It's definitely a lot lighter!) Over all I think it's a success.
Physically there is no technology that can match a cable company's bandwidth to the house. As far as fiber is concerned Our internal network ran that for all our high speed internal links.Untill we start talking about pulling fiber into your house (Which will be a while; phone companies aren't doing that either in the US) Cable has major physical dvantages over any other currently common technology. Disclaimer: I wrote software managing the network for the third largest cable company in the US.
Norton Ghost is ideal for your situation. Back your ghost images to an encryopted share and you're set. Also in case of a hardrive failure you will be back up and running in an hour. I can't believe not everybody uses this scheme especially with storage running about $0.25 a Gig! I use the same system personally.I recommend it to all my clients. Haven't had any complaints yet!
Harvard does NOT consider one a dropout if you have passing grades (Which he did; he did quite well actually). I'm in the same boat. When you have passing grades and you leave you are officially on a leave of absence. (I guess they can't fathom that anyone with passing grades would ever drop out of their venerable institution)
Oh and on all the comments about him being a lousy coder: I call bullshit on that. I have worked on PDP11's, CPM machines etc... Virtually non-existent documentation, cosing in assembly, extreme memory constraints etc... This is the guy who rewrote a basic interpreter on the plane to his customer using paper and pen....
You might not like the guy (I wonder why, I've never met him so I'm fairly neutral on the whole thing; Also how many people do you know giving billions of dollars to charity?). but one does not become that wealthy by being an idiot!
Second life has gotten hyped about its money making opportunities. STUPID! It's a friggin game. Investing in virtual real estate at the mercy of another company that can make limitless amounts of it: STUPID! However, hangliding, getting a cool outfit for your avatar, and chatting with friends that look better there than in real life: PRICELESS!
And NO: It is NOT a pyramid scheme. It totally does not qualify under the legal definitions of a pyramid scheme. It's entertainment. Don't expect to get rich of it. (In general work and things that make you money are not necessarily pleasant; That is why you get paid. If it were all fun and games you'd have to pay your boss!)
I run CentOS on my Laptop as a developer, At home I have an Ubuntu box and a Mac OSX system. These systems all work fine. I develop for a large telecommunications company. We run Redhat on all our servers as a standard. When you run hunderds if not thousands of blades in distributed data centers it becomes impossible to maintain a server OS that is very much in flux. Red Hat enterprise is typically "older" versioned software that has been tested in the field and then certified by redhat. We run Apache 1.3xx PHP 4.xx and MySQL 4.xx. These are quite rock solid which is how we like it. (People get very upset when they have no dial tone or the cable TV is out...) This is not about redHat vs. Debian vs. ubuntu etc... This is about the fact that it is very valuable to NOT have the latest of everything on your servers. OTOH: on my desktop/laptop machines I like to have the latest stuff so that I can take advantage of the latest hardware; software etc... It is a whole lot less if a problem when my self-written addressbook crashes then when our backbone goes down because of a vulnerable DNS server. (Like any other large company, and being a telco especially, we are a target for people with malicious intent)
The whole of Hollywood is about 10 Billion. Video games are about 10 billion, Porn is about 12 billion, Music is about 6 billion. While these figures are nothing to sneeze at (A billion is still about a thousand million!) It makes me wonder what idiot pulled the $250 billion number out of their Arsche. (On a sidenote with all the attention being paid to "Celebrities" and how much press the whole of Hollywood gets: The payroll of Norfolk Southern is about half of all the revenues of the whole Holywood film industry. Puts things in perspective doesn't it?)
I'm currently working as a contractor at a broadband provider. the company runs one of the largest MySQL implementations (6 billion records) in the world. We use it to monitor our network. The interface is written in PHP on Apache. Using a webserver based approach allows us to put more boxes in when needed. it basically scales linearly with a load balancer up front. PHP allows us to get applications written quickly. This is an in house application; we don't care about portability to other environments. (our OS, Apache and PHP are all custom compiled) Bottom line: it works! As far as PHP or basic or whatever leading to bad habits; I call BS on that. Bad habits wheter in coding or in real life come from giving priority to short term goals instead of long term goals. (I'm very familiar with this; I just set a date to quit smoking after 20 years...) It comes down to: the right thing is almost always the hard thing to do.
Where is the phone? My PDA saved my life professional life 10 years ago. Since then the best convergence has been with a phone for me. Now I would need to go back to a separate phone? No Thank you; I'll go for a pocketPC running skype and a functional phone build in.
I bought a mini for in the kitchen. It is hooked up to a 17" flat panel LCD TV. My wife would not have a PC case in th kitchen. This however is smaller than a toaster and looks way cooler. I hooked a wireless keyboard with one of those nipple mice up to it. Now my wife can quickly check email- look up a recipe etc... I have an iPod (40G and a shuffle) and the Bose speakers as well.
I don't care about games and for the naysayers: OSX is a Unix my wife and children can actually use.
Slashdot Mirror
Software code DOES get subpoenaed all the time in disputes. This doesn't even have to be criminal cases, in civil cases as well. If the code resides in a version control system of some sort they typically get all of that as well. (Some smart guys have tried to deliver code in printed form to bury the other party but the courts have mostly refused those 'smart' tactics.
Email gets subpoenaed all the time as well. Again bot in civil and criminal cases. Also from outside vendors. This is not a big issue. A company gets a subpoena from a judge and they hand over the data. What is troubling with surveillance in the US is that it is happening on a massive scale without judicial oversight.
Your latest paragraph is moot. Once served with a subpoena those materials HAVE to be turned over. It doesn't matter where the data resides. If people can see it and manipulate it it can be turned over.
I wrote that, but wasn't logged in...
Seriously, you know people are going to be all over this and root with some version of some alternate OS. Either android or one of the tablet Linuxes.
Not really. While expensive, There is a reason Mr. Musk think we can hit his price point: By bringing down battery price by building his own largest battery fab in the world.
Tesla can switch a battery pack in minutes. (One of their business plans for the future is franchise stations where one would exchange batteries in minutes, the way one now gets gas). Except for crashes a car like the Tesla S has almost NO wear and tear compared to an internal combustion car. No gearbox, no oil, no injection systems no exhaust systems no cooling systems... The Tesla S's maintenance manual consist of such things as changing your wiper blades once a year etc...
As far as the pollution form the battery pack goes: While older battery technologies were stuffed with heavy metals, That is not the case with Li-Ion batteries. They are remarkably recyclable once used up.
I am typically the first guy to do an implementation. After that a bunch of guys come in and they refactor the code.
I pass all acceptance tests. (Typically a cucumber suite). The people I work with know this.
When I am contracting time is money. I don't refactor unless you pay me.
I can refactor that code as well as anybody, but by that time I'm typically called away on another project.
(My last assignment was writing a REST API while in Vietnam 5 subcontractors were writing a mobile app against my API on a nightly basis. That was a major pITA since they were 12 hours ahead of me. I prefer working against the West coast, three hours ahead is pretty much ideal.)
Now after I'm done In typically think of a much more elegant way of doing things, but by that time I'm usually on something else.
One thing: My hastily written code is nicer today than my refactored code was 5 years ago. So I guess I am improving.
People that hire me typically couldn't care less about what tools I use, or how elegant my code is.(Unless you work for a software company; I deal with a lot of businesses in totally different fields that need an issue solved, and need it done quickly.)
"Innocent until proven guilty, remember?"
Uh NO! in immigration cases, like in tax law, the burden of proof is reversed.
Ever seen the Django framework documentation? Best I've ever used. (Also really nice source code so you can step through that when dealing with obscure issues. I can't do that with Cold Fusion ('shudder'))
>Yeah, fuck the fascist USA with their terror squads,
We have those, they're called special forces and they will kill people in autonomic countries without permission of the government of said countries. We don't deny this, we're proud of them.
>secret death camps for civilians,
The US has acknowledged innocent civilians being held in Guantanamo. Even though we know they are innocent, various legal and political issues keep us from releasing them. People do die and commit suicide in that hellhole.
>mass murders of citizens and what-not.
We lost about 3,000 people on 9-11, Since then we've lost about 3 times as many US military lives and 30 times as many permanently injured. A high price to pay for the US. Since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan between 300,000 and 1,5 million citizens in those countries have lost their lives due to military type conflict.
>Fucking come on.
I'm fucking coming into your ass right now...
Use your specs to write your acceptance tests and your acceptance tests to write your specs. There are plenty of tools available. We use cucumber.
Cucumber comes with a very English-like language (Gherkin) that can easily be converted to actual tests. We pay our contractors only when all tests pass.
No confusion: The actual spec is also the acceptance test.
Our 'user stories' in Gherkin get written by business analysts, not programmers.
A HUGE amount of back end processing systems are Unix based. Because in the olden days, Biig Metal or Unix-type systems were the only ones that could handle large data processing reliably. (That is still the case: I have had Unix servers with up to a decade of up-time.)
In the mid nineties MS went after the back-end processing market of businesses. While they had some success (And some spectacular failures) what prevented MS from gaining major foothold in enterprise data centers was the implosion of the Internet bubble and the availability of reliable, easy to use Open Source versions of Unix.
I have been writing all enterprise based applications for the past ten years as web based apps. Our current mobile stuff is also Web based (with a thin webkit client to handle the presentation on the specific device). While MS does have an installed corporate base, I'm not buying any stock soon. Their only successful product in the last decade has been the X-Box.
Web professional here. We hand code everything. A design tool might be fine for a one-off (IF you can get everything to look right in the tool!), but it doesn't allow the same control hand coding does. HOWEVER the main thing is one of maintenance. ANY web site that is the least bit popular will go through changes. This is much easier in a human written piece of pain html.
Hand written pages are lighter (IE: Smaller. That matters on a busy website).
Hand written pages can be written to be fully www3c compliant; I have yet to see a tool that can do that.
Also a lot of web frameworks use some type of templating system. Those are written manually.
I don't know where you live; but tell your son to pick up a programming language and a web framework. Two good ones are Ruby on Rails and Python with django.
Here in Atlanta they are dying for decent Ruby developers! Even if he is in high school or college, picking up coding at $50/hour beats working at McD's for $8.50...
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-steps-to-future-hardware-happiness.html
the android SDK deal with this very well. Quote:"To make life easier every API includes a FEATURE_* constant. To control your app’s availability on the Android Market, you specify the features required for your app to work. I’d like to encourage you to add manifest Feature nodes for every API you use, specifying them as optional, or not, as appropriate using a manifest uses-feature nodes as shown below:"
I don't know a single other evolving platform that deals as well with these issues as android.
Although the amount of programmers programming in C/C++ might be decreasing as a a percentage of all prgogrammers; they still build the underlying foundations of all our software.
(Note: I've mainly been programming in python the past 5 years)
Virtual machines; interpreters; device drivers etc... are all implemented in C / C++.
without those wizards who know how to handle memory and hardware at a basic level, merely competent people like me would be a whole lot slower...
Was one of the first to get one. Comments:
It is low powered; booting up takes a while; loading rpograms takes a while. Once up and running it's fine.
I don't like the window manager; The frame that pops up is annoying. I would do a skinny drop down of running apps when hitting the top-left corner, a list of available apps at top right corner etc... or something like that
I HATE the journal as a file manager. This is the first 'activity' that needs to be replaced.
The programming games are fun. My kids LOVE the logo like activity the best.
Some of the software doesn't play well together.
The documentation that comes with it is dramatically subpar. You really need to go to their faq to make any use of the machine. One of the issues with that is that some of the faq info (particularly abvout commecting to a network is not available to you before you are online...)
(At least include a pdf with the latest version of the wiki and faq on it.)
The battery life is very good. (This is before an expected update of the system software; particularly power saving features) early 2008)
It is rugged; wifi reception is better than my Macbbok pro. Too bad you can't connect a cantenna easily that way one of these could bridge a few miles and the rest of the laptops could mesh network with it.
I bought the laptop to do some good and mess around with it.
I'll probably use this laptop on my boat (Will compare it to my toughbook; It's definitely a lot lighter!)
Over all I think it's a success.
Hajo
Physically there is no technology that can match a cable company's bandwidth to the house. As far as fiber is concerned Our internal network ran that for all our high speed internal links.Untill we start talking about pulling fiber into your house (Which will be a while; phone companies aren't doing that either in the US) Cable has major physical dvantages over any other currently common technology.
Disclaimer: I wrote software managing the network for the third largest cable company in the US.
Norton Ghost is ideal for your situation. Back your ghost images to an encryopted share and you're set. Also in case of a hardrive failure you will be back up and running in an hour. I can't believe not everybody uses this scheme especially with storage running about $0.25 a Gig!
I use the same system personally.I recommend it to all my clients. Haven't had any complaints yet!
Harvard does NOT consider one a dropout if you have passing grades (Which he did; he did quite well actually). I'm in the same boat. When you have passing grades and you leave you are officially on a leave of absence. (I guess they can't fathom that anyone with passing grades would ever drop out of their venerable institution)
Oh and on all the comments about him being a lousy coder: I call bullshit on that. I have worked on PDP11's, CPM machines etc... Virtually non-existent documentation, cosing in assembly, extreme memory constraints etc... This is the guy who rewrote a basic interpreter on the plane to his customer using paper and pen....
You might not like the guy (I wonder why, I've never met him so I'm fairly neutral on the whole thing; Also how many people do you know giving billions of dollars to charity?). but one does not become that wealthy by being an idiot!
Hajo
Second life has gotten hyped about its money making opportunities. STUPID! It's a friggin game.
Investing in virtual real estate at the mercy of another company that can make limitless amounts of it: STUPID!
However, hangliding, getting a cool outfit for your avatar, and chatting with friends that look better there than in real life: PRICELESS!
And NO: It is NOT a pyramid scheme. It totally does not qualify under the legal definitions of a pyramid scheme. It's entertainment. Don't expect to get rich of it. (In general work and things that make you money are not necessarily pleasant; That is why you get paid. If it were all fun and games you'd have to pay your boss!)
Hajo
I run CentOS on my Laptop as a developer, At home I have an Ubuntu box and a Mac OSX system. These systems all work fine.
I develop for a large telecommunications company. We run Redhat on all our servers as a standard. When you run hunderds if not thousands of blades in distributed data centers it becomes impossible to maintain a server OS that is very much in flux. Red Hat enterprise is typically "older" versioned software that has been tested in the field and then certified by redhat. We run Apache 1.3xx PHP 4.xx and MySQL 4.xx. These are quite rock solid which is how we like it. (People get very upset when they have no dial tone or the cable TV is out...)
This is not about redHat vs. Debian vs. ubuntu etc... This is about the fact that it is very valuable to NOT have the latest of everything on your servers. OTOH: on my desktop/laptop machines I like to have the latest stuff so that I can take advantage of the latest hardware; software etc...
It is a whole lot less if a problem when my self-written addressbook crashes then when our backbone goes down because of a vulnerable DNS server. (Like any other large company, and being a telco especially, we are a target for people with malicious intent)
The whole of Hollywood is about 10 Billion. Video games are about 10 billion, Porn is about 12 billion, Music is about 6 billion. While these figures are nothing to sneeze at (A billion is still about a thousand million!) It makes me wonder what idiot pulled the $250 billion number out of their Arsche.
(On a sidenote with all the attention being paid to "Celebrities" and how much press the whole of Hollywood gets: The payroll of Norfolk Southern is about half of all the revenues of the whole Holywood film industry. Puts things in perspective doesn't it?)
Hajo
I'm currently working as a contractor at a broadband provider. the company runs one of the largest MySQL implementations (6 billion records) in the world. We use it to monitor our network. The interface is written in PHP on Apache.
Using a webserver based approach allows us to put more boxes in when needed. it basically scales linearly with a load balancer up front.
PHP allows us to get applications written quickly.
This is an in house application; we don't care about portability to other environments. (our OS, Apache and PHP are all custom compiled)
Bottom line: it works!
As far as PHP or basic or whatever leading to bad habits; I call BS on that. Bad habits wheter in coding or in real life come from giving priority to short term goals instead of long term goals. (I'm very familiar with this; I just set a date to quit smoking after 20 years...) It comes down to: the right thing is almost always the hard thing to do.
Hajo
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
In 1899, then Patent Commissioner, Charles H. Duell reportedly announced that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
Where is the phone? My PDA saved my life professional life 10 years ago. Since then the best convergence has been with a phone for me. Now I would need to go back to a separate phone? No Thank you; I'll go for a pocketPC running skype and a functional phone build in.
It's not art and it's not science. It's engineering which takes a little of both.
I bought a mini for in the kitchen. It is hooked up to a 17" flat panel LCD TV. My wife would not have a PC case in th kitchen. This however is smaller than a toaster and looks way cooler. I hooked a wireless keyboard with one of those nipple mice up to it. Now my wife can quickly check email- look up a recipe etc...
I have an iPod (40G and a shuffle) and the Bose speakers as well.
I don't care about games and for the naysayers: OSX is a Unix my wife and children can actually use.