It was informative, and described USENIX well. It's diverse, and you have to pay real dues. That alone, will separate the audience into the tiers as well.
The remarks will probably sift into similar categories.
> Do you think Boeing would have used the high energy density if low energy density would have sufficed? They wouldn't have included those Li-Poly batteries and endured all the regulatory hassle that comes with them if they hadn't really needed it for their basic aircraft design.
Heh. Not my point at all. The design called for a battery, they choise Li, and now that choice is biting them-- after a waiver. They designed and deployed through all their "testing", this design, whichis biting them hard.
I don't decry Boeing wanting to design economical and efficient aircraft at all. What they did do is: not think it through, and in not doing so, caused themselves enormous amounts of grief. Big batteries? Small batteries? This is their engineering team making a choice that's causing worldwide quality concerns about their new and heavily delayed and criticized wonder-craft. Not very wise.
I don't think engineering teams are that thin skinned. To do what they did, they had to get a waiver from the FAA, according to reports. Did management apply for the waiver, or did the team convince management to get the waiver? I'm fairly sure, given experience, that it wasn't management saying: go use high-density batteries in this application, rather, it was part of an overall design to have that juice available nearby where it would be used, so as to save weight and complexity. But then again, this is Boeing, and they live by their own rules.
Seems more like a QA problem. Energy density is important, but reliability and safety trumps implementation waivers. There's an engineering team that's getting an earful, and rightfully so. Cheers to the airlines for having the guts to ground their fleets; ANA and JAL just went up on my list.
CBS won't be prosecuted. They become a Fox News of selective coverage. Their sense of fairness and ethics is dashed against the rocks of their sense of their business model, which has been perceived as corrupt, and perhaps is.
Journalists that I know that work for CBS and CNet (and other subsidiaries) are completely aghast. It's a WTF moment for them.
Freedom of the press allows CBS to have enormous lattitude, just like it does to the blather and BS of Fox News. CBS's management has allowed themselves to be knocked down any number of pegs as a direct result. It was a stupid move, and they'll be thought of in ways that are clearly assessed by this action.
Consider the flipside, however. My servers get attacked all the time, with known default password attempts. Sometimes it comes thru ssh when they smell the honey.
Some of this is really suspect because they should have been cracked open like an egg by now. Yes, the number of IPv4 addresses are small, but SCADA sticks out like a sore finger (pun intended).
Clueless? I'm not so sure. Honeypots? Yeah, could be. By now, they should have 'outed' or shamed a handful of these guys so as to be examples for the rest, but no one's done that. Perhaps the Hickeyville Water Company would make a good posterboy for being stupid, and the others would fall in line. So something smells here.
Which may break a lot of licenses already in existence for them. Fortunately, the term "personal computer" is just what Canonical purports that your smartphone will become with Ubuntu for Phones.
So don't be a bad person and use their SDK with other software, or distribute software incorporating a part of the SDK. Gotcha.
You can stagger on the low bands to avoid overlapping channels, or if the machines are modern, and support N-high, then use the non-adjacent N channels for even wider, non-overlapping support. Using N-high as your propose is a great idea, and forcing users to N if their hardware uniformly supports it, will speed the hell out of the network; make sure you have sufficient backhaul for the traffic, which could get huge. Also make sure you stagger DHCP IP address ranges to help preserve sessions.
Sadly, some RPCs will destroy sessions when you change APs, as will certain IPSec VPN-based connections during AP roaming. Session roaming often can work seamlessly, but some apps will balk, including printing/scanner/shared-network-peripheral apps and others. Have users stand still if they're using them if their sessions are getting hosed. Finish printing, then walk out of the conference room, etc.
And the Chinese, and others that don't like to be slaves to various operating systems plans like those from Google, Microsoft, and are plainly cut out of Apple's revenues, would jump on this.
People are so myopic in this industry. Canonical is trying to evolve their own online ecosystem, just like the top four. Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu One, their application stores..... it's all to have a comprehensive method that works across devices, anchoring on cloud referrer revenues to drop money into various pockets.
AT&T in 1980 is not in most reasonable ways, the AT&T today. It tries to act that way, but it's Southwestern Bell with lipstick, covered in testosterone patches.
AT&T often rented your phone to you; you didn't even own it, as you mention. That's when Western Electric got its first competition, sometimes by GTE, ITT, and others. I lived through that entire era, battling what was AT&T through the breakup and ostensible reformation. I watched the squirrely tariffs, the State PUCs, the FCC, and all of the companies involved fighting. Prices went down, choices went up.
Today, not so much. The K Street Lobbyists are in control. They are more powerful than the Congress and the President of the United States, because they have wicked amounts of $$$$$$$$$.
We can agree on the size of AT&T and its monopoly in numerous areas. They were gargantuan. They became a monopoly through the actions of their board of directors, and what the directors did. The government gave tacit approval in most cases, to their actions.
MCI, Sprint, WorldComm, many other Tariff 12 Carriers started to thrive. When the data business blossomed, and cellphones looked to rule the day, many different actions happened. The breakup of AT&T lead to many other countries taking everything from token to incredible action to break up their PTTs. Then things changed again.
But AT&T prevented other companies from using their lines, their services, and so forth. Today, there's a sense of ownership by the telcos-- that they OWN the rights of ways, OWN the easements, OWN the frequencies, and so forth, as capex assets. They share whenever it makes economic sense, and not one femtosecond before that.
Your sense of history varies from mine, but let's say for a moment, AT&T was it, and there was no ConTel, no ITT, no GTE, and so forth. Yes, Judge Greene broke up AT&T, and then the landgrab was on.
Today, AT&T is a reverse merge of Southwestern Bell primarily, which had acquired Ameritech, Southern Bell, and so forth. Verizon took on GTE/ConTel, Nynex, and others. But there are landline and longlines assets, datacomm infrastructure (yes, real OC12-OC192+) that are intermixed.
I said nothing about cable, which is another travesty, but from a different direction.
The history of utilities until they became massive monopolists was that various jurisdictions granted them easements, right-of-way, and lots of other considerations in exchange for getting services built. The telcos were independent, and a long distance network consisted of AT&T, ITT, and others. Then came Judge Greene, a breakup of AT&T, GTE and ITT consolidations of the Baby Bells, and the sense that utilities were unbridled and focused on shareholder return based on serious assets.
The landlines were different than what is now the Internet. Most were analog copper cables that had muxed data channels. Fiber is only the last 20yrs.
So there is this mixed bag of monopolist thought as we've boiled down the US landline carriers to six, wireless carriers of significance to four, each with a territory in landlines. Some communities did their own fiber optic services, but they're rare. Communities became forbidden after their state legislators were sufficiently bribed to prevent community utility access. Co-ops went the same way, although there are still some around.
Collusion? The telcos shifted much away from the State PUCs to the Feds with the TCAct, so they'd only have to fight (I mean bribe) Washington and deal with the FCC.
And in reality: this is a huge freaking country, and trying to cover it with copper, fiber, or wireless still takes a lot of capital. How do you get capital? A business plan with a guaranteed return on investment. How do you get guarantees for revenue floors? Collusion? What a bright idea.
Utilities are unique and used to be cooperatives and had a ceiling on revenues, each price increase in front of a state or perhaps federal committee, breathing down their necks to keep prices reasonable. Government doesn't protect people much anymore, it protects the interests of business in the blind faith that says: in doing so, you're disciplining investment. Bullshit.
The pseudo-cloak of anonymity would reveal perhaps less than that, but maybe more. When you came here, your IP was recorded. Go anywhere, and using that, they know you and correlate you.
Oh, you used a proxy? Didn't hide much. You can be figured out fairly quickly. That means you, where you're sitting, reading this. They know. The ostensible mask of anonymity is vaporously thin.
The hoops you need to jump thru to really randomize yourself are getting farther and farther from practical. Sure, it might be on a vast ten-dot network with thousands of machines behind a few IP addresses. Doesn't take long to figure out the local IP, and to correlate that. Just using a single email send will start to reveal oodles about you and your machine. The more you send, the more is corroborated and the less is guessed.
The guise of anonymity is important, but on the interwebs today, it's plainly a thin veneer that's easily vaporized. Spew what you want; the direction and velocity of the chunks will give you away. True anonymity is pretty much gone.
Which I believe your central fallacy is about. Systems produce work that serves a purpose, most often: making money.
When a system is unavailable, it's not doing work, probably not making money. Data also has an asset value, we'll both agree. Data theft is but one security problem, albeit a large one. Pushing systems offline or tying them up in DoS attacks of any kind, is also production loss.
There are many ways to foist an attack, and a few ways to get around them, depending on the nature of the attack. But security covers all that I've mentioned, and usability is an element of return on investment-- along with the cost of data acquisition and its intrinsic value both stored and lost (which are two different valuations).
Good security methods consider the productivity of the system as its ongoing ROI, and the asset value of the data in the same way that a profit/loss statement is different than a balance sheet. Both are differing views of the investment and its return, and the value of its assets. Security covers all of this, this is not confusing. Attempting to abstract leaks from intrusions are security disambiguations, as resiliency is a characteristic of the production, not the asset value of data processing.
Syn attacks might cause a buffer overflow and a root, but it's unlikely. It depends on the genre of the TCP stack, what service is being slaughtered in the stack, What it does do is chew up resources.
A Syn attack is just as much of a security issue as not parsing get/posts and blowing up an httpd. The job is to take someone offline or crash them intentionally, or root them, or make them cough data (that might be resold). Any DoS attack is a security problem because an asset is removed from production.
Syn attacks are indeed about security, just vastly less likely to make data vulnerable. There are theories about using other kinds of attacks to take down BIND or the DNS Services of Windows Servers, but that's a more onerous kind of attack.
You can port onto phones with comparative ease. But there are both limitations and enhancements.
You can use the phone's sensors, crowd source data, use location info more meaningfully, and interact with the user with whatever touch mechanisms are supported.
But there are severe limitations: storage is small and not getting larger quickly. User space isn't huge. You're limited to 32bit memory models. There aren't serious math co-pros, but ARM does integer math quickly enough. And despite what you've heard, ARM still uses power, and doesn't magically become a Xeon. Even with multiple cores, you don't get multiple work.
That said, the screen IO gets faster, juicier, and more colorful all the time. I'd love to have Debian underneath, rather than Google anything on my phone.
But I think that Shuttleworth doesn't understand cloud. Civilians aren't going to do much with cloud because Shuttleworth overestimates civilians. They don't have time to program, they just want to use this stuff-- that's why they pay others to do the work in the form of program loads and competitive *native* features. They're just not going to create and port a LAMP stack, then do geophysics array curve fitting. Instead: they're going to play games, and not ones they wrote themselves.
None of that was done; I have high respect for coders, and have managed projects. Whether outstanding or inexperienced, each can be discordant when it's proven why dischord is appropriate. Often it isn't. But code that must be maintained across teams, boundaries, revisions, and decades of use requires maintaining the disciplines needed.
I let people do their work. There is a place where all of the people in the project, including coders, artists-formerly-known-as-whatever, QA, SAs, have to march lockstep. Stupid code is still stupid code. Unreadable code still can't be read. This isn't about the composition, this is about putting the notes on the stave and getting the orchestra to play when the damn thing boots.
Your hat isn't of interest, and the world isn't perfect.
What is of interest is code that can be maintained, often by groups/teams or QA or patch-n-fixers in a systematic approach to sanity. While IDEs both enforce style and make some of the coding standards easier to understand within the context of the IDE, plentiful organizations do hand-crafted, state of the art, stupid things and nothing saves stupid code. But that's not the question at hand.
Minimalism isn't necessarily the right philosophy-- clarity is.
IDEs change, too. Even IDEs have problems. See clarity.
Exceptions, when they're necessary, have to happen, but not as often as some think (or try to get away with).
I have sympathy for the pain that's needed to comply. That sympathy doesn't extend beyond realistic boundaries where realism is watching someone dive through a library that contained scifi function calls written to get past a deadline.
Rarely I disagree with the FSF, but I do in their "indictment" of SaaS. More software is better, so long as you can store your data in a way that allows portability and the ability to get rid of bad or strangling SaaS providers. Getting invested into an SaaS provider can be money/time down a rabbit hole. But if the data formats are readable by competitors-- and this is becoming commonplace-- then quality rather than proprietary time sucks makes it all worth the endeavor.
Wanting to be exempt from standards because you're "special" is a sign of immaturity. He may not need to be canned. He just needs to grow up or go lone-wolf-coder where he can live in his own special world.
Slashdot Mirror
It was informative, and described USENIX well. It's diverse, and you have to pay real dues. That alone, will separate the audience into the tiers as well.
The remarks will probably sift into similar categories.
> Do you think Boeing would have used the high energy density if low energy density would have sufficed? They wouldn't have included those Li-Poly batteries and endured all the regulatory hassle that comes with them if they hadn't really needed it for their basic aircraft design.
Heh. Not my point at all. The design called for a battery, they choise Li, and now that choice is biting them-- after a waiver. They designed and deployed through all their "testing", this design, whichis biting them hard.
I don't decry Boeing wanting to design economical and efficient aircraft at all. What they did do is: not think it through, and in not doing so, caused themselves enormous amounts of grief. Big batteries? Small batteries? This is their engineering team making a choice that's causing worldwide quality concerns about their new and heavily delayed and criticized wonder-craft. Not very wise.
I don't think engineering teams are that thin skinned. To do what they did, they had to get a waiver from the FAA, according to reports. Did management apply for the waiver, or did the team convince management to get the waiver? I'm fairly sure, given experience, that it wasn't management saying: go use high-density batteries in this application, rather, it was part of an overall design to have that juice available nearby where it would be used, so as to save weight and complexity. But then again, this is Boeing, and they live by their own rules.
Seems more like a QA problem. Energy density is important, but reliability and safety trumps implementation waivers. There's an engineering team that's getting an earful, and rightfully so. Cheers to the airlines for having the guts to ground their fleets; ANA and JAL just went up on my list.
CBS won't be prosecuted. They become a Fox News of selective coverage. Their sense of fairness and ethics is dashed against the rocks of their sense of their business model, which has been perceived as corrupt, and perhaps is.
Journalists that I know that work for CBS and CNet (and other subsidiaries) are completely aghast. It's a WTF moment for them.
Freedom of the press allows CBS to have enormous lattitude, just like it does to the blather and BS of Fox News. CBS's management has allowed themselves to be knocked down any number of pegs as a direct result. It was a stupid move, and they'll be thought of in ways that are clearly assessed by this action.
Consider the flipside, however. My servers get attacked all the time, with known default password attempts. Sometimes it comes thru ssh when they smell the honey.
Some of this is really suspect because they should have been cracked open like an egg by now. Yes, the number of IPv4 addresses are small, but SCADA sticks out like a sore finger (pun intended).
Clueless? I'm not so sure. Honeypots? Yeah, could be. By now, they should have 'outed' or shamed a handful of these guys so as to be examples for the rest, but no one's done that. Perhaps the Hickeyville Water Company would make a good posterboy for being stupid, and the others would fall in line. So something smells here.
Which may break a lot of licenses already in existence for them. Fortunately, the term "personal computer" is just what Canonical purports that your smartphone will become with Ubuntu for Phones.
So don't be a bad person and use their SDK with other software, or distribute software incorporating a part of the SDK. Gotcha.
You can stagger on the low bands to avoid overlapping channels, or if the machines are modern, and support N-high, then use the non-adjacent N channels for even wider, non-overlapping support. Using N-high as your propose is a great idea, and forcing users to N if their hardware uniformly supports it, will speed the hell out of the network; make sure you have sufficient backhaul for the traffic, which could get huge. Also make sure you stagger DHCP IP address ranges to help preserve sessions.
Sadly, some RPCs will destroy sessions when you change APs, as will certain IPSec VPN-based connections during AP roaming. Session roaming often can work seamlessly, but some apps will balk, including printing/scanner/shared-network-peripheral apps and others. Have users stand still if they're using them if their sessions are getting hosed. Finish printing, then walk out of the conference room, etc.
And the Chinese, and others that don't like to be slaves to various operating systems plans like those from Google, Microsoft, and are plainly cut out of Apple's revenues, would jump on this.
People are so myopic in this industry. Canonical is trying to evolve their own online ecosystem, just like the top four. Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu One, their application stores..... it's all to have a comprehensive method that works across devices, anchoring on cloud referrer revenues to drop money into various pockets.
His/her post has survived being modded as a troll for almost fifteen minutes. There might be hope.
Not if the judgment goes to your estate.
AT&T in 1980 is not in most reasonable ways, the AT&T today. It tries to act that way, but it's Southwestern Bell with lipstick, covered in testosterone patches.
AT&T often rented your phone to you; you didn't even own it, as you mention. That's when Western Electric got its first competition, sometimes by GTE, ITT, and others. I lived through that entire era, battling what was AT&T through the breakup and ostensible reformation. I watched the squirrely tariffs, the State PUCs, the FCC, and all of the companies involved fighting. Prices went down, choices went up.
Today, not so much. The K Street Lobbyists are in control. They are more powerful than the Congress and the President of the United States, because they have wicked amounts of $$$$$$$$$.
We can agree on the size of AT&T and its monopoly in numerous areas. They were gargantuan. They became a monopoly through the actions of their board of directors, and what the directors did. The government gave tacit approval in most cases, to their actions.
MCI, Sprint, WorldComm, many other Tariff 12 Carriers started to thrive. When the data business blossomed, and cellphones looked to rule the day, many different actions happened. The breakup of AT&T lead to many other countries taking everything from token to incredible action to break up their PTTs. Then things changed again.
But AT&T prevented other companies from using their lines, their services, and so forth. Today, there's a sense of ownership by the telcos-- that they OWN the rights of ways, OWN the easements, OWN the frequencies, and so forth, as capex assets. They share whenever it makes economic sense, and not one femtosecond before that.
Your sense of history varies from mine, but let's say for a moment, AT&T was it, and there was no ConTel, no ITT, no GTE, and so forth. Yes, Judge Greene broke up AT&T, and then the landgrab was on.
Today, AT&T is a reverse merge of Southwestern Bell primarily, which had acquired Ameritech, Southern Bell, and so forth. Verizon took on GTE/ConTel, Nynex, and others. But there are landline and longlines assets, datacomm infrastructure (yes, real OC12-OC192+) that are intermixed.
I said nothing about cable, which is another travesty, but from a different direction.
The history of utilities until they became massive monopolists was that various jurisdictions granted them easements, right-of-way, and lots of other considerations in exchange for getting services built. The telcos were independent, and a long distance network consisted of AT&T, ITT, and others. Then came Judge Greene, a breakup of AT&T, GTE and ITT consolidations of the Baby Bells, and the sense that utilities were unbridled and focused on shareholder return based on serious assets.
The landlines were different than what is now the Internet. Most were analog copper cables that had muxed data channels. Fiber is only the last 20yrs.
So there is this mixed bag of monopolist thought as we've boiled down the US landline carriers to six, wireless carriers of significance to four, each with a territory in landlines. Some communities did their own fiber optic services, but they're rare. Communities became forbidden after their state legislators were sufficiently bribed to prevent community utility access. Co-ops went the same way, although there are still some around.
Collusion? The telcos shifted much away from the State PUCs to the Feds with the TCAct, so they'd only have to fight (I mean bribe) Washington and deal with the FCC.
And in reality: this is a huge freaking country, and trying to cover it with copper, fiber, or wireless still takes a lot of capital. How do you get capital? A business plan with a guaranteed return on investment. How do you get guarantees for revenue floors? Collusion? What a bright idea.
Utilities are unique and used to be cooperatives and had a ceiling on revenues, each price increase in front of a state or perhaps federal committee, breathing down their necks to keep prices reasonable. Government doesn't protect people much anymore, it protects the interests of business in the blind faith that says: in doing so, you're disciplining investment. Bullshit.
The pseudo-cloak of anonymity would reveal perhaps less than that, but maybe more. When you came here, your IP was recorded. Go anywhere, and using that, they know you and correlate you.
Oh, you used a proxy? Didn't hide much. You can be figured out fairly quickly. That means you, where you're sitting, reading this. They know. The ostensible mask of anonymity is vaporously thin.
The hoops you need to jump thru to really randomize yourself are getting farther and farther from practical. Sure, it might be on a vast ten-dot network with thousands of machines behind a few IP addresses. Doesn't take long to figure out the local IP, and to correlate that. Just using a single email send will start to reveal oodles about you and your machine. The more you send, the more is corroborated and the less is guessed.
The guise of anonymity is important, but on the interwebs today, it's plainly a thin veneer that's easily vaporized. Spew what you want; the direction and velocity of the chunks will give you away. True anonymity is pretty much gone.
Which I believe your central fallacy is about. Systems produce work that serves a purpose, most often: making money.
When a system is unavailable, it's not doing work, probably not making money. Data also has an asset value, we'll both agree. Data theft is but one security problem, albeit a large one. Pushing systems offline or tying them up in DoS attacks of any kind, is also production loss.
There are many ways to foist an attack, and a few ways to get around them, depending on the nature of the attack. But security covers all that I've mentioned, and usability is an element of return on investment-- along with the cost of data acquisition and its intrinsic value both stored and lost (which are two different valuations).
Good security methods consider the productivity of the system as its ongoing ROI, and the asset value of the data in the same way that a profit/loss statement is different than a balance sheet. Both are differing views of the investment and its return, and the value of its assets. Security covers all of this, this is not confusing. Attempting to abstract leaks from intrusions are security disambiguations, as resiliency is a characteristic of the production, not the asset value of data processing.
I wish more people thought like you do. I protect all hosts like they were real assets or potential vectors for local 10./ infection.
Because they are. Pubic facing? Secure perimeters? False security.
Syn attacks might cause a buffer overflow and a root, but it's unlikely. It depends on the genre of the TCP stack, what service is being slaughtered in the stack, What it does do is chew up resources.
A Syn attack is just as much of a security issue as not parsing get/posts and blowing up an httpd. The job is to take someone offline or crash them intentionally, or root them, or make them cough data (that might be resold). Any DoS attack is a security problem because an asset is removed from production.
Syn attacks are indeed about security, just vastly less likely to make data vulnerable. There are theories about using other kinds of attacks to take down BIND or the DNS Services of Windows Servers, but that's a more onerous kind of attack.
You can port onto phones with comparative ease. But there are both limitations and enhancements.
You can use the phone's sensors, crowd source data, use location info more meaningfully, and interact with the user with whatever touch mechanisms are supported.
But there are severe limitations: storage is small and not getting larger quickly. User space isn't huge. You're limited to 32bit memory models. There aren't serious math co-pros, but ARM does integer math quickly enough. And despite what you've heard, ARM still uses power, and doesn't magically become a Xeon. Even with multiple cores, you don't get multiple work.
That said, the screen IO gets faster, juicier, and more colorful all the time. I'd love to have Debian underneath, rather than Google anything on my phone.
But I think that Shuttleworth doesn't understand cloud. Civilians aren't going to do much with cloud because Shuttleworth overestimates civilians. They don't have time to program, they just want to use this stuff-- that's why they pay others to do the work in the form of program loads and competitive *native* features. They're just not going to create and port a LAMP stack, then do geophysics array curve fitting. Instead: they're going to play games, and not ones they wrote themselves.
None of that was done; I have high respect for coders, and have managed projects. Whether outstanding or inexperienced, each can be discordant when it's proven why dischord is appropriate. Often it isn't. But code that must be maintained across teams, boundaries, revisions, and decades of use requires maintaining the disciplines needed.
I let people do their work. There is a place where all of the people in the project, including coders, artists-formerly-known-as-whatever, QA, SAs, have to march lockstep. Stupid code is still stupid code. Unreadable code still can't be read. This isn't about the composition, this is about putting the notes on the stave and getting the orchestra to play when the damn thing boots.
Your hat isn't of interest, and the world isn't perfect.
What is of interest is code that can be maintained, often by groups/teams or QA or patch-n-fixers in a systematic approach to sanity. While IDEs both enforce style and make some of the coding standards easier to understand within the context of the IDE, plentiful organizations do hand-crafted, state of the art, stupid things and nothing saves stupid code. But that's not the question at hand.
Minimalism isn't necessarily the right philosophy-- clarity is.
IDEs change, too. Even IDEs have problems. See clarity.
Exceptions, when they're necessary, have to happen, but not as often as some think (or try to get away with).
I have sympathy for the pain that's needed to comply. That sympathy doesn't extend beyond realistic boundaries where realism is watching someone dive through a library that contained scifi function calls written to get past a deadline.
Rarely I disagree with the FSF, but I do in their "indictment" of SaaS. More software is better, so long as you can store your data in a way that allows portability and the ability to get rid of bad or strangling SaaS providers. Getting invested into an SaaS provider can be money/time down a rabbit hole. But if the data formats are readable by competitors-- and this is becoming commonplace-- then quality rather than proprietary time sucks makes it all worth the endeavor.
That's if they're working on a team-based-project or doing code maintenance, or generally playingwellwithothers.
Wanting to be exempt from standards because you're "special" is a sign of immaturity. He may not need to be canned. He just needs to grow up or go lone-wolf-coder where he can live in his own special world.