When it first came out I tried it and after discovering it's a complete waste of resources, I uninstalled it. For years now I have deliberately unchecked it during installation of NVidia drivers. I also turn off the system tray icon.
I feel that drivers must just do their job quietly in the background without ever bothering me. For those twice a year occasions when I need to tweak something, it's a 1.5 seconds away in a start menu search.
I definitely prefer NVidia's low key control panel on my home machine over the flashy horrific mess that AMD puts on my work laptop.
You're not wrong, the way that the UI works and how users use it is a big issue. SSL only provides a way for you to absolutely determine you're talking to a particular party, or that a party who you already trust has supposedly vetted that the party you are talking to, is the party you think it is. And I agree the issue with the green bar is that it just means that things "seem legit", but unless users understand how to inspect certificates for themselves, it's not actually much use. As we can't realistically expect all users to be better informed, it would instead be better to improve the UI.
However, what I was really addressing was this:
For example, a warning about a self signed cert on a website that I wouldn't mind using over plain text: that still more secure than plain old http, so I click off the warning.
I have bolded the part that is factually wrong, unless they are actually checking self-signed certificate thumbprints, the unverified certificate is no more secure (or at best, only negligibly more) than plain text HTTP.
Oh, so you're manually inspecting the self signed certificate every time you visit your website? If not, then how do you know nobody is intercepting your communication, making your self signed certificate as useless as having no encryption at all. What you should do is add your known self signed certificate to your local certificate store, which means that the warnings will stop, unless there is an actual attack or change in configuration which you absolutely do want to be warned about.
Is accusing me of being a shill your way of covering up the fact that people like you just hate (even modern) Microsoft on sheer principal regardless of the particular topic? You have no doubt convinced yourself your opinion is completely rational and justified, but you sound like someone with a college level of maturity who regardless of what they are presented, refuses to objectively re-examine the situation and, God forbid, revise their opinion, instead you prefer to point fingers and falsely accuse others without any facts of their motives aside from the fact their opinion is different to yours.
You are likely referring to the C++ telemetry injection into compiled output, which I agree is indefensible, but that is a different matter to the telemetry present in the.NET Core 1.0 compiler, which they were in fact completely open about if you read their initial announcement on their blog. I have not made up my mind about Windows 10 telemetry, but I was very grateful for the free upgrade on my Windows 7 machine at home which was feeling very old in comparison to my Windows 8.1 machine at work, which aside from the annoying Start Screen, was a definite improvement over Windows 7.
I'm clearly a bit of a Microsoft fan, but that's because as a C# developer I use, appreciate, and realise value from their products daily. I find using Linux/BSD quite frustrating by comparison, but I don't go around bashing them, I recognise and respect the value that Linux/BSD adds to society, so why can't people like you do the same in regards to positive initiatives by organisations like Microsoft? Like for example when they released.NET Core 1.0, certainly very useful software, made available on non-Microsoft platforms, made available at no charge, and even has the source code freely available? But in your opinion, that is all worthless because of some optional telemetry which I feel is there to actually serve the interest of the users.
I am not so bold to try proclaim that Microsoft is especially "great" overall, that they aren't still bad in some aspects, or even better than some alternatives, but the fact is that I, along with millions of other people, find Microsoft's products very useful on a daily basis.
Take it like a man Boo, acknowledge that no matter what Microsoft does, people like you will just always look for any reason to hate them. People like you seem to rely on selectively choosing the pieces of articles which validate their opinion, then selectively quote those pieces out of context, proclaiming how it's just further "evidence" of how X is bad.
That's your subjective opinion and you're entitled to it.
My subjective opinion is that in this case it does more good than harm. No personally identifiable information (aside from IP address, which might or might not be stored) is sent to Microsoft, but the community is likely going to benefit in that Microsoft will focus on features that actually get used rather than something which lands up never getting used.
Each to their own though, just ensure your comments are fair and informed.
You're clearly uninformed regarding the nature of the telemetry in.NET Core or you are deliberately spreading misinformation.
The runtime is not including telemetry at all. And while the compiler includes telemetry, it is highly specific and limited to essentially whether or not certain compiler flags are used.
Basically, in this case Microsoft just wants to know based on real numbers which way developers use very particular aspects of the compiler. The only conceivable use they could have for this information is to know where best to invest their effort, which is IMO a good thing for users of . NET Core.
They were completely upfront about this in their announcement of.NET Core 1.0, it was part of the announcement and had equal weighting to the features they were promoting. They explained in clear layman's terms exactly what they were doing and how you can turn it off if you're paranoid.
It's okay for someone to have legitimate concerns, but in this case you look like an ignorant person who is making a big fuss of something they clearly haven't taken the time to understand properly.
Considering that only a handful of countries in the world use Fahrenheit, it would have been nice for the editors to have both Celsius and Fahrenheit in the summary text.
I used to work for Blizzard Europe customer support, occasionally during my time there Virgin customers in the UK would complain of terrible latency and each time it was a result of some traffic shaping appliance that Virgin was using, which was incorrectly categorizing WoW traffic as being peer-to-peer. This was over 3 years ago, but happened at least 3 times during my time there.
However, as Apple traffic is likely over HTTP(S), it seems less likely to be mistaken as "questionably illegal traffic" and is probably more likely a peering issue of sorts. Perhaps the CDN servers that Apple uses are at a different ISP and there is a routing / peering issue making it all route internationally instead.
The article talks about how this makes them more effective as a team because they suffer less pain with integration and merge conflicts. This makes me think they are working with a very poorly organised code base, or as a team don't practice use of interfaces/contracts effectively. If they inherited a code base from someone else, then it may be largely unavoidable, but if it's always been their own code, then in my mind it's a bad smell.
I have been working on a project for 2 years with a team that is 7 developers which is in on time and the client just finished their final testing today with no significant bugs left outstanding. As a team, we were almost always able to each work independently on tasks due to early establishment of good patterns and architecture as well as regular design sessions for upcoming work by our two most senior team members. Each team member would typically push their SCM (Git) changes up to several times a day and merge conflicts were rare and practically always easy to solve. We even changed to better patterns 4 months into the project and due to good layout of our code, we could run the new patterns side by side with the old ones.
So how did we largely avoid stepping on each other's toes? Code was properly arranged so that areas of concern were appropriately isolated. When working on a front end use case, the only area of contention was typically registration of a module, after that all your code would be in its own independent area which no one else was working on. If it was a large use case with lots of screens, one developer spends 20 minutes stubbing out the code layout, commits, pushes to Git, then everyone else pulls and goes on their merry way. If use cases need to interact with each other, then one developer ensures the interface is correct, which may involve a 10 minute talk with a fellow developer, the interface is immediately updated and pushed into the repository and again each developer goes back along their merry way.
You may have noticed me mention that we push quickly into our repository, the article mentioned developers trying to merge a week of work and that terrifies me. If code is properly isolated, then your work can be incomplete, but not affect the existing working code, or other people's work in progress, so you should push *at least* once a day. If you need to alter an interface on your side for a colleague, but you were in the middle of something and weren't really in a position to push your code, then you: Git stash, update interface file, stub out implementation file if needed, push, then Git pop, you can carry on and so can your colleague. Additionally, our CI environment (Jenkins) is building and running tests on every commit, if someone pushes something that breaks the build the whole team is notified and it's fixed within 15 minutes.
Another comment has already mentioned that the quality of code would be higher with the team approach, but in my experience, as long as the code is reasonably efficient and more importantly, easily understandable to anyone else looking at it, improving quality beyond that in most circumstances adds little to no real value for our client. Since easy to understand code is mandatory, in the event it needs a bug fix, or in the rare case it needs to improved, perhaps for performance reasons, it's not especially hard for any developer in the team to do so.
Of course it will be different working on our code in 2 years time from now for ongoing improvements, but as we have been doing for the past two years any time we feel our process isn't working well, we will discuss it during our regular retrospectives and adjust our process to cope with the problem, could that process result in team programming like in the article? Possibly, but I highly doubt it.
I agree with you in principle that I would prefer a small amount of my fees act kind of act like "fraud insurance" so that I don't suffer the loss personally. But what would be nice if all organisations would make more of an effort to reduce fraud. But what happens instead is that when fraud is costing them too much, all they do is raise their customer's fees. I would really prefer not to be paying extra fees which do nothing more than go into the pockets of fraudsters.
Since the losses due to card fraud are almost entirely borne by the banks, I have to assume it is more cost effective to take the losses than to chip all of the cards.
And do you suppose the bank's employees pay for the fraud out their own salaries? Of course not! The cost of fraud is paid by their honest customer's banking fees. Even if you as a customer get refunded by the bank, when a fraudulent transaction occurs on your account, the money has to come from somewhere.
Once one realizes this, then they realize that the banks have no incentive to pay for improved security, hence, the only reason that US banks haven't improved their security is because they would rather raise customer's bank fees instead of making the effort to try elliminate the problem.
Excellent food or thought, this does somewhat redeem the plot in my opinion.
I'm not sure if the original story did something to draw the readers attention to this analogy with the existence of the universe, but I don't recall that happening in the movie, had the screenplay writers done so, I may have been feeling more thoughtful afterwards, rather than mostly frustrated.
Donnie Darko for example was weird and arguably paradoxical, but the way it was done left me feeling very thoughtful at the end, which I appreciate, even after a few watches.
Very interesting comment, having read it, I would indeed now rather say it is a stable time loop rather than a conventional paradox.
gurps_npc's comment does brings a minor amount of redemption to the plot, if that was indeed the intent of the story.
I still feel somewhat frustrated that it is a nevertheless impossible to have arrived at scenario, but yes, the existence of the universe is no less of a conundrum.
I watched this film and and followed the plot fine, but was left feeling very unsatisfied at the end of it.
Most movies involving time travel generally try avoid paradoxes or major plot holes, but with Predistination actively embraces time travel paradoxes, taking them to the extreme.
Maybe someone thought it would make for a "deep" and clever plot, and I had no problem following it, but as I understand it completely, I just felt frustrated with it in the end, because, the science fiction of time travel aside, it's an impossible scenario with no logical resolution.
Anyway, without posting major spoilers I won't say anything more.
You just happen to be super vigilant with your security and if Chrome had implemented a Firefox style password protected password manager it most certainly would not have met your needs either. You are very different from the vast majority of users and the most worthwhile measure you take above Firefox and Chrome, is that you compartmentalise your passwords. You however are a part of a very small number of people who go to those lengths and for the vast majority of users who have all their passwords in the same "vault", they would expose all their passwords within a day, making Chrome's strategy of leveraging Window's API arguably more secure than building their own. And keep in mind the vast majority of people would be infected for weeks or even months before they notice.
As for your argument about key loggers being "harder" to develop than other malware, keep in mind that a lot of malware these days is bought as a kit with a tonne of features. The people writing the malware are typically separate from the parties utilising the malware and once a password stealing module is written, it's available for everyone else to use, regardless of how hard it was write. Also, who said it had to be a key logger? It could be sniffing unencrypted memory, peeking forms in the browser window, it could be watching in countless different ways to avoid being detected as a key logger by AV.
And in regards to AV watching for key loggers, if they know to watch for key logger type activity, then it stands to reason they could also log attempts to read the password management API. In practice it's a cat and mouse game, as AV writers work to detect malware activity, malware writers work to avoid detection.
Malware writers are financially incentivised to come up with solutions, do not think that the hurdle required to get key sniffing is substantially different to that required for using the Windows API for password management, if it takes them a couple of weeks more to write one method, they might bill their clients more, or perhaps they are forced to include the feature so their clients don't use a competing product.
While you are a rare exception as you take extraordinary lengths to protect your credentials, for the vast majority of people, once they have malware, everything on their user profile is likely compromised and single password vault vs Windows API won't help them one bit, except that the Microsoft developed password vault is more convenient to users and likely better than a comparatively simple solution which would ship with a browser.
If you are infected with malware, that malware could just as easily watch the password you type into a password manager, if anything, for Windows users, using the supported, well tested and proven Microsoft APIs is likely to be much better than Google trying to reinvent a wheel, which at best would still not be quite as convenient for users.
Once you have any kind of malware on your computer, you have to assume anything you do within the context of that user account is compromised. Any malware which can read your password database could also just as easily be watching your activity and record the password the next time you enter a global password into a password manager.
As a user who is already used to quickly pressing Win+L to lock their computer each time they leave their desk, leveraging the Windows APIs is exceptionally convenient, especially when I consider that I don't have to manage yet another password independently of my Windows login password.
Also, those of us who recognise that it's no longer mid-2000 and that Microsoft has become a company who arguably sets one of the best examples on how to develop software securely, I have confidence that their API for this is thoroughly tested and proven. For Google to even attempt to come close, they would need to expend considerable effort which would ultimately achieve, at best, a reinvented wheel which would also be less convenient for Windows users.
Our project's team decided to move from SVN to Git a few months back. We develop for.NET and were all used to working with TortoiseSVN with code being managed on a server which could control access to different repositories.
We had one guy who recently joined our team who knew Git and felt it was worth taking the plunge and moving to it, acknowledging that we would initially be frustrated at having to learn a new tool.
We use TortoiseGit along with Gitblit to host the repositories and at this point I have to say I am super happy we made the move. Learning something new is always a little painful, but it was well worth it in this case. If you're used to TortoiseSVN, then TortoiseGit really helps and I personally have not had to use a single Git command.
Git empowers you more as a developer because while SVN essentially forces its changes onto you as you fetch latest, with Git, you get much greater control in how and when you merge your changes with the repository. If you are uneasy about a merge, you can make a branch in just a few seconds and test it there first. The nicest though is how you can commit locally without having to push your changes to other users, this is especially useful if you are doing a refactor and want the ability to create rollback points every hour, but don't want other developers getting your not yet complete work. You create a branch locally, commit every 30 minutes or hour, then when the whole task is completed, you can merge your commits into one (if you want), then push to the central repository for the rest of the team.
If your refactor took a week, you can avoid the merge pain of other developers work by regularly pulling their changes into your perhaps every day or even every hour, and everytime you want to merge, you can roll it back if something turns our badly.
The thing to understand about Git is that there is no "central" repository authority like with SVN, instead everyone has there own repository and Git provides a nice way to selectively pull and push changes between different repositories in a way that you have much greater control over. In our corporate environment, we do use a central repository as that's where the backups happen and it's also much easier than trying to sync with peers. The end result is a process that in practice can work identically to SVN, but also gives developers greater power on their own computers, if they want it.
It really does empower you, but as with anything truly worth doing, there is effort required and you must be prepared to invest. I also recommended that at least one person on your team is already familiar with Git as an in person explanation to any issue you have is much faster than trying to research it online.
Cigarette smokers who do not recognize the imposing obnoxiousness of their entirely optional habit and the burden it places on society, are by definition, selfish.
As they have made themselves practically dependent upon their habit they will of course defend it tooth and nail. The very fact they made the completely irrational decision to smoke knowing all the negative impacts of it and then go on to *defend* their irrational decision, leads me to conclude they are either plain stupid or otherwise generally irrational, and hence, cannot be reasoned with.
Let me get this right, you've taken my general disapproval of a factually unhealthy and selfish habit which is a general burden on society, and compared it with genocide?
And you think *I'm* suffering psychological pathology?
Cigarette smoking is an unhealthy, selfish habit which is a general burden on all of society, but how does my wanting it to become undesirable through means of laws equate to "exterminating" people? What kind of person are you that you jump to such a conclusion?
Where I am, it is against the law to urinate in public, probably as it is a health hazard and in general the community finds such behaviour unpleasant. Smoking in general public areas is not yet illegal in all places unfortunately.
And even if there are designated smoking areas, why do I have to pay extra taxes so that a council can make a special smoking area in a park, or in the price of my meal, subsidize the cost of the restaurant to build a special smoking area? Urination is an avoidable part of the human condition, smoking is not.
In regards to other unpleasantness, I encounter the way too much perfume problem maybe once every few years or if it's at the work place, that is something that can addressed by company policy. I live in a city and have no livestock farms anywhere near me and if a neighbour decides to use manure in their garden, sure it's unpleasant, but it's once a year and doesn't have the side effect of poisoning their garden.
Cigarette smoking is a selfish habit which is a burden on society and it's negative aspects dwarf any possible aspects, as a member of society it is my opinion we should weigh up whether or not we should really put up with such a burden. The only kind of person who would say otherwise is said selfish cigarette smoker.
I recently moved from Ireland to South Africa and had a NAS, laptop and two LCD screens shipped over.
With the NAS (http://www.readynas.com/?cat=4) I put it in the original antistatic bag and then in its box, padded with a bit of bubble wrap and these packaging air bags. I shipped it with all its hard drives inside.
With the screens I had their original packaging, a simple plastic bag, then placed inside polystyrene packaging then in their cardboard box.
With the laptop (oldish now, so wasn't too fussed), I just put it in a regular packing cardboard box with some clothes around it.
All items arrived fine, perhaps I was luckier than some, but it seems the shippers were reasonably careful with my goods based on the state of the boxes.
For my actual computer, I disassembled it, threw away the case and the rest I put in my checked in luggage, that way I didn't have to wait the 3 months for the shipping to happen. Shipping took a long time as I didn't have much to bring back and it took a little while for enough other people to come along so there would be enough to fill up the container.
The fact that you needlessly made yourself addicted to cigarettes is entirely your own doing, many people are highly effective at complicated/stressful/tedious jobs without the need to smoke. Smokers almost always take more breaks than employees who don't smoke and if they don't take regular smoke breaks, then their productivity suffers until they get their "fix". Why should an equally qualified and experienced smoker who spends less time being productive due to their habit get paid the same as me?
It really makes perfect sense to discourage smoking as it ultimately reduces economic output.
As for the story summary, times have moved on since the time of those particular people, humanity now knows better. The world would be a better place if smoking became unacceptable and the newer generations didn't get as easily addicted to the expensive and harmful substance.
This is of course all besides the fact that smoking is an expensive, unhealthy and above all, highly disgusting and typically inconsiderate habit. To me, walking past someone who is smoking is about as pleasant as walking past someone urinating against a wall.
Slashdot Mirror
When it first came out I tried it and after discovering it's a complete waste of resources, I uninstalled it. For years now I have deliberately unchecked it during installation of NVidia drivers. I also turn off the system tray icon. I feel that drivers must just do their job quietly in the background without ever bothering me. For those twice a year occasions when I need to tweak something, it's a 1.5 seconds away in a start menu search. I definitely prefer NVidia's low key control panel on my home machine over the flashy horrific mess that AMD puts on my work laptop.
However, what I was really addressing was this:
For example, a warning about a self signed cert on a website that I wouldn't mind using over plain text: that still more secure than plain old http, so I click off the warning.
I have bolded the part that is factually wrong, unless they are actually checking self-signed certificate thumbprints, the unverified certificate is no more secure (or at best, only negligibly more) than plain text HTTP.
Oh, so you're manually inspecting the self signed certificate every time you visit your website? If not, then how do you know nobody is intercepting your communication, making your self signed certificate as useless as having no encryption at all. What you should do is add your known self signed certificate to your local certificate store, which means that the warnings will stop, unless there is an actual attack or change in configuration which you absolutely do want to be warned about.
Is accusing me of being a shill your way of covering up the fact that people like you just hate (even modern) Microsoft on sheer principal regardless of the particular topic? You have no doubt convinced yourself your opinion is completely rational and justified, but you sound like someone with a college level of maturity who regardless of what they are presented, refuses to objectively re-examine the situation and, God forbid, revise their opinion, instead you prefer to point fingers and falsely accuse others without any facts of their motives aside from the fact their opinion is different to yours.
.NET Core 1.0 compiler, which they were in fact completely open about if you read their initial announcement on their blog. I have not made up my mind about Windows 10 telemetry, but I was very grateful for the free upgrade on my Windows 7 machine at home which was feeling very old in comparison to my Windows 8.1 machine at work, which aside from the annoying Start Screen, was a definite improvement over Windows 7.
.NET Core 1.0, certainly very useful software, made available on non-Microsoft platforms, made available at no charge, and even has the source code freely available? But in your opinion, that is all worthless because of some optional telemetry which I feel is there to actually serve the interest of the users.
You are likely referring to the C++ telemetry injection into compiled output, which I agree is indefensible, but that is a different matter to the telemetry present in the
I'm clearly a bit of a Microsoft fan, but that's because as a C# developer I use, appreciate, and realise value from their products daily. I find using Linux/BSD quite frustrating by comparison, but I don't go around bashing them, I recognise and respect the value that Linux/BSD adds to society, so why can't people like you do the same in regards to positive initiatives by organisations like Microsoft? Like for example when they released
I am not so bold to try proclaim that Microsoft is especially "great" overall, that they aren't still bad in some aspects, or even better than some alternatives, but the fact is that I, along with millions of other people, find Microsoft's products very useful on a daily basis.
Take it like a man Boo, acknowledge that no matter what Microsoft does, people like you will just always look for any reason to hate them. People like you seem to rely on selectively choosing the pieces of articles which validate their opinion, then selectively quote those pieces out of context, proclaiming how it's just further "evidence" of how X is bad.
That's your subjective opinion and you're entitled to it.
My subjective opinion is that in this case it does more good than harm. No personally identifiable information (aside from IP address, which might or might not be stored) is sent to Microsoft, but the community is likely going to benefit in that Microsoft will focus on features that actually get used rather than something which lands up never getting used.
Each to their own though, just ensure your comments are fair and informed.
You're clearly uninformed regarding the nature of the telemetry in .NET Core or you are deliberately spreading misinformation.
The runtime is not including telemetry at all. And while the compiler includes telemetry, it is highly specific and limited to essentially whether or not certain compiler flags are used.
Basically, in this case Microsoft just wants to know based on real numbers which way developers use very particular aspects of the compiler. The only conceivable use they could have for this information is to know where best to invest their effort, which is IMO a good thing for users of . NET Core.
They were completely upfront about this in their announcement of .NET Core 1.0, it was part of the announcement and had equal weighting to the features they were promoting. They explained in clear layman's terms exactly what they were doing and how you can turn it off if you're paranoid.
It's okay for someone to have legitimate concerns, but in this case you look like an ignorant person who is making a big fuss of something they clearly haven't taken the time to understand properly.
Considering that only a handful of countries in the world use Fahrenheit, it would have been nice for the editors to have both Celsius and Fahrenheit in the summary text.
I used to work for Blizzard Europe customer support, occasionally during my time there Virgin customers in the UK would complain of terrible latency and each time it was a result of some traffic shaping appliance that Virgin was using, which was incorrectly categorizing WoW traffic as being peer-to-peer. This was over 3 years ago, but happened at least 3 times during my time there.
However, as Apple traffic is likely over HTTP(S), it seems less likely to be mistaken as "questionably illegal traffic" and is probably more likely a peering issue of sorts. Perhaps the CDN servers that Apple uses are at a different ISP and there is a routing / peering issue making it all route internationally instead.
The article talks about how this makes them more effective as a team because they suffer less pain with integration and merge conflicts. This makes me think they are working with a very poorly organised code base, or as a team don't practice use of interfaces/contracts effectively. If they inherited a code base from someone else, then it may be largely unavoidable, but if it's always been their own code, then in my mind it's a bad smell.
I have been working on a project for 2 years with a team that is 7 developers which is in on time and the client just finished their final testing today with no significant bugs left outstanding. As a team, we were almost always able to each work independently on tasks due to early establishment of good patterns and architecture as well as regular design sessions for upcoming work by our two most senior team members. Each team member would typically push their SCM (Git) changes up to several times a day and merge conflicts were rare and practically always easy to solve. We even changed to better patterns 4 months into the project and due to good layout of our code, we could run the new patterns side by side with the old ones.
So how did we largely avoid stepping on each other's toes? Code was properly arranged so that areas of concern were appropriately isolated. When working on a front end use case, the only area of contention was typically registration of a module, after that all your code would be in its own independent area which no one else was working on. If it was a large use case with lots of screens, one developer spends 20 minutes stubbing out the code layout, commits, pushes to Git, then everyone else pulls and goes on their merry way. If use cases need to interact with each other, then one developer ensures the interface is correct, which may involve a 10 minute talk with a fellow developer, the interface is immediately updated and pushed into the repository and again each developer goes back along their merry way.
You may have noticed me mention that we push quickly into our repository, the article mentioned developers trying to merge a week of work and that terrifies me. If code is properly isolated, then your work can be incomplete, but not affect the existing working code, or other people's work in progress, so you should push *at least* once a day. If you need to alter an interface on your side for a colleague, but you were in the middle of something and weren't really in a position to push your code, then you: Git stash, update interface file, stub out implementation file if needed, push, then Git pop, you can carry on and so can your colleague. Additionally, our CI environment (Jenkins) is building and running tests on every commit, if someone pushes something that breaks the build the whole team is notified and it's fixed within 15 minutes.
Another comment has already mentioned that the quality of code would be higher with the team approach, but in my experience, as long as the code is reasonably efficient and more importantly, easily understandable to anyone else looking at it, improving quality beyond that in most circumstances adds little to no real value for our client. Since easy to understand code is mandatory, in the event it needs a bug fix, or in the rare case it needs to improved, perhaps for performance reasons, it's not especially hard for any developer in the team to do so.
Of course it will be different working on our code in 2 years time from now for ongoing improvements, but as we have been doing for the past two years any time we feel our process isn't working well, we will discuss it during our regular retrospectives and adjust our process to cope with the problem, could that process result in team programming like in the article? Possibly, but I highly doubt it.
I agree with you in principle that I would prefer a small amount of my fees act kind of act like "fraud insurance" so that I don't suffer the loss personally. But what would be nice if all organisations would make more of an effort to reduce fraud. But what happens instead is that when fraud is costing them too much, all they do is raise their customer's fees. I would really prefer not to be paying extra fees which do nothing more than go into the pockets of fraudsters.
Since the losses due to card fraud are almost entirely borne by the banks, I have to assume it is more cost effective to take the losses than to chip all of the cards.
And do you suppose the bank's employees pay for the fraud out their own salaries? Of course not! The cost of fraud is paid by their honest customer's banking fees. Even if you as a customer get refunded by the bank, when a fraudulent transaction occurs on your account, the money has to come from somewhere.
Once one realizes this, then they realize that the banks have no incentive to pay for improved security, hence, the only reason that US banks haven't improved their security is because they would rather raise customer's bank fees instead of making the effort to try elliminate the problem.
Excellent food or thought, this does somewhat redeem the plot in my opinion.
I'm not sure if the original story did something to draw the readers attention to this analogy with the existence of the universe, but I don't recall that happening in the movie, had the screenplay writers done so, I may have been feeling more thoughtful afterwards, rather than mostly frustrated.
Donnie Darko for example was weird and arguably paradoxical, but the way it was done left me feeling very thoughtful at the end, which I appreciate, even after a few watches.
Very interesting comment, having read it, I would indeed now rather say it is a stable time loop rather than a conventional paradox.
gurps_npc's comment does brings a minor amount of redemption to the plot, if that was indeed the intent of the story.
I still feel somewhat frustrated that it is a nevertheless impossible to have arrived at scenario, but yes, the existence of the universe is no less of a conundrum.
I watched this film and and followed the plot fine, but was left feeling very unsatisfied at the end of it.
Most movies involving time travel generally try avoid paradoxes or major plot holes, but with Predistination actively embraces time travel paradoxes, taking them to the extreme.
Maybe someone thought it would make for a "deep" and clever plot, and I had no problem following it, but as I understand it completely, I just felt frustrated with it in the end, because, the science fiction of time travel aside, it's an impossible scenario with no logical resolution.
Anyway, without posting major spoilers I won't say anything more.
You just happen to be super vigilant with your security and if Chrome had implemented a Firefox style password protected password manager it most certainly would not have met your needs either. You are very different from the vast majority of users and the most worthwhile measure you take above Firefox and Chrome, is that you compartmentalise your passwords. You however are a part of a very small number of people who go to those lengths and for the vast majority of users who have all their passwords in the same "vault", they would expose all their passwords within a day, making Chrome's strategy of leveraging Window's API arguably more secure than building their own. And keep in mind the vast majority of people would be infected for weeks or even months before they notice.
As for your argument about key loggers being "harder" to develop than other malware, keep in mind that a lot of malware these days is bought as a kit with a tonne of features. The people writing the malware are typically separate from the parties utilising the malware and once a password stealing module is written, it's available for everyone else to use, regardless of how hard it was write. Also, who said it had to be a key logger? It could be sniffing unencrypted memory, peeking forms in the browser window, it could be watching in countless different ways to avoid being detected as a key logger by AV.
And in regards to AV watching for key loggers, if they know to watch for key logger type activity, then it stands to reason they could also log attempts to read the password management API. In practice it's a cat and mouse game, as AV writers work to detect malware activity, malware writers work to avoid detection.
Malware writers are financially incentivised to come up with solutions, do not think that the hurdle required to get key sniffing is substantially different to that required for using the Windows API for password management, if it takes them a couple of weeks more to write one method, they might bill their clients more, or perhaps they are forced to include the feature so their clients don't use a competing product.
While you are a rare exception as you take extraordinary lengths to protect your credentials, for the vast majority of people, once they have malware, everything on their user profile is likely compromised and single password vault vs Windows API won't help them one bit, except that the Microsoft developed password vault is more convenient to users and likely better than a comparatively simple solution which would ship with a browser.
If you are infected with malware, that malware could just as easily watch the password you type into a password manager, if anything, for Windows users, using the supported, well tested and proven Microsoft APIs is likely to be much better than Google trying to reinvent a wheel, which at best would still not be quite as convenient for users.
Once you have any kind of malware on your computer, you have to assume anything you do within the context of that user account is compromised. Any malware which can read your password database could also just as easily be watching your activity and record the password the next time you enter a global password into a password manager.
As a user who is already used to quickly pressing Win+L to lock their computer each time they leave their desk, leveraging the Windows APIs is exceptionally convenient, especially when I consider that I don't have to manage yet another password independently of my Windows login password.
Also, those of us who recognise that it's no longer mid-2000 and that Microsoft has become a company who arguably sets one of the best examples on how to develop software securely, I have confidence that their API for this is thoroughly tested and proven. For Google to even attempt to come close, they would need to expend considerable effort which would ultimately achieve, at best, a reinvented wheel which would also be less convenient for Windows users.
Our project's team decided to move from SVN to Git a few months back. We develop for .NET and were all used to working with TortoiseSVN with code being managed on a server which could control access to different repositories.
We had one guy who recently joined our team who knew Git and felt it was worth taking the plunge and moving to it, acknowledging that we would initially be frustrated at having to learn a new tool.
We use TortoiseGit along with Gitblit to host the repositories and at this point I have to say I am super happy we made the move. Learning something new is always a little painful, but it was well worth it in this case. If you're used to TortoiseSVN, then TortoiseGit really helps and I personally have not had to use a single Git command.
Git empowers you more as a developer because while SVN essentially forces its changes onto you as you fetch latest, with Git, you get much greater control in how and when you merge your changes with the repository. If you are uneasy about a merge, you can make a branch in just a few seconds and test it there first. The nicest though is how you can commit locally without having to push your changes to other users, this is especially useful if you are doing a refactor and want the ability to create rollback points every hour, but don't want other developers getting your not yet complete work. You create a branch locally, commit every 30 minutes or hour, then when the whole task is completed, you can merge your commits into one (if you want), then push to the central repository for the rest of the team.
If your refactor took a week, you can avoid the merge pain of other developers work by regularly pulling their changes into your perhaps every day or even every hour, and everytime you want to merge, you can roll it back if something turns our badly.
The thing to understand about Git is that there is no "central" repository authority like with SVN, instead everyone has there own repository and Git provides a nice way to selectively pull and push changes between different repositories in a way that you have much greater control over. In our corporate environment, we do use a central repository as that's where the backups happen and it's also much easier than trying to sync with peers. The end result is a process that in practice can work identically to SVN, but also gives developers greater power on their own computers, if they want it.
It really does empower you, but as with anything truly worth doing, there is effort required and you must be prepared to invest. I also recommended that at least one person on your team is already familiar with Git as an in person explanation to any issue you have is much faster than trying to research it online.
I'm somewhat surprised that neither the article or summary mentioned how this seems inspired by Gattaca.
Your nickname suits you very well.
Cigarette smokers who do not recognize the imposing obnoxiousness of their entirely optional habit and the burden it places on society, are by definition, selfish.
As they have made themselves practically dependent upon their habit they will of course defend it tooth and nail. The very fact they made the completely irrational decision to smoke knowing all the negative impacts of it and then go on to *defend* their irrational decision, leads me to conclude they are either plain stupid or otherwise generally irrational, and hence, cannot be reasoned with.
Let me get this right, you've taken my general disapproval of a factually unhealthy and selfish habit which is a general burden on society, and compared it with genocide?
And you think *I'm* suffering psychological pathology?
Cigarette smoking is an unhealthy, selfish habit which is a general burden on all of society, but how does my wanting it to become undesirable through means of laws equate to "exterminating" people? What kind of person are you that you jump to such a conclusion?
Depends on where you are.
Where I am, it is against the law to urinate in public, probably as it is a health hazard and in general the community finds such behaviour unpleasant. Smoking in general public areas is not yet illegal in all places unfortunately.
And even if there are designated smoking areas, why do I have to pay extra taxes so that a council can make a special smoking area in a park, or in the price of my meal, subsidize the cost of the restaurant to build a special smoking area? Urination is an avoidable part of the human condition, smoking is not.
In regards to other unpleasantness, I encounter the way too much perfume problem maybe once every few years or if it's at the work place, that is something that can addressed by company policy. I live in a city and have no livestock farms anywhere near me and if a neighbour decides to use manure in their garden, sure it's unpleasant, but it's once a year and doesn't have the side effect of poisoning their garden.
Cigarette smoking is a selfish habit which is a burden on society and it's negative aspects dwarf any possible aspects, as a member of society it is my opinion we should weigh up whether or not we should really put up with such a burden. The only kind of person who would say otherwise is said selfish cigarette smoker.
I recently moved from Ireland to South Africa and had a NAS, laptop and two LCD screens shipped over.
With the NAS (http://www.readynas.com/?cat=4) I put it in the original antistatic bag and then in its box, padded with a bit of bubble wrap and these packaging air bags. I shipped it with all its hard drives inside.
With the screens I had their original packaging, a simple plastic bag, then placed inside polystyrene packaging then in their cardboard box.
With the laptop (oldish now, so wasn't too fussed), I just put it in a regular packing cardboard box with some clothes around it.
All items arrived fine, perhaps I was luckier than some, but it seems the shippers were reasonably careful with my goods based on the state of the boxes.
For my actual computer, I disassembled it, threw away the case and the rest I put in my checked in luggage, that way I didn't have to wait the 3 months for the shipping to happen. Shipping took a long time as I didn't have much to bring back and it took a little while for enough other people to come along so there would be enough to fill up the container.
You've really answered your own questions.
The fact that you needlessly made yourself addicted to cigarettes is entirely your own doing, many people are highly effective at complicated/stressful/tedious jobs without the need to smoke. Smokers almost always take more breaks than employees who don't smoke and if they don't take regular smoke breaks, then their productivity suffers until they get their "fix". Why should an equally qualified and experienced smoker who spends less time being productive due to their habit get paid the same as me?
It really makes perfect sense to discourage smoking as it ultimately reduces economic output.
As for the story summary, times have moved on since the time of those particular people, humanity now knows better. The world would be a better place if smoking became unacceptable and the newer generations didn't get as easily addicted to the expensive and harmful substance.
This is of course all besides the fact that smoking is an expensive, unhealthy and above all, highly disgusting and typically inconsiderate habit. To me, walking past someone who is smoking is about as pleasant as walking past someone urinating against a wall.