Nobody who matters cares about Brianna Wu or GamerGate.
On the regard, I have a question for Brianna Wu:
How does it feel to be so irrelevant in your field that you have to piggy back your way to "fame" (or rather infamy) on the misplaced anger of a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do?
Dear slashdot owners,
the site has jumped the shark a while ago, but this is driving the final nail in the coffin of "relevance". Just close it down and be done with it. Turn it into ITBiz 2.0 and make it completely irrelevant. There are so many people you could interview who actually have something to say in their field of expertise, instead of this person who only got in the spotlight after a bunch of angry kids sent her a bunch of fake death threats. While I can understand this has a significant impact on your life and work, if it is the crowning achievement of your career in your rise to infamy then what could you possibly have to say that is remotely interesting to the audience of slashdot?
Just pull the plug already. I'll help. I'll log out now, and never come back. I haven't said it out loud, but you simply don't cater to my interests anymore. I scroll by the articles, sigh, and get back to what I was doing. But in the end, you're just wasting my time lately.
So long slashdot, it was fun the past 16 or so years... The last few not so much. Goodbye!
So in the future you may be able to use your Android phone's touch screen and accelerometer as a MIDI controller.
Or you can just use OSC as a protocol and do that right now with a handful of DAWs and VSTs. I've been using OSC on Android for about 2 years now with TouchOSC. I use Renoise and Ableton mostly, and those work well enough with that.
On that matter, let's be honest, a touch screen isn't the greatest replacement for buttons, sliders and knobs really. I almost always prefer using a piece of kit as compared to a touchscreen, with the exception of X/Y pads for controlling things like filters where you control cutoff frequency and resonance or bandwidth (for bandpass, etc). It's nice to be able to look at the filter graph where you're fiddling with it, instead of on screen while your poking at an x/y pad on a controller. I also often use TouchOSC when I run out of sliders or knobs while I'm testing/playing with something, but touchscreens are often too "fiddly" compared to a real controller.
I guess that Google is hoping that Korg & co will start porting their iPad/iPhone apps to Android, but quite frankly I don't see that happening anytime soon. Korg for instance has released an iphone app for uploading samples to their volca sampler, but hasn't done so for Android (and this doesn't even use a MIDI interface, just the headphone jack to communicate with the sampler over QAM). They've put the source code for the conversion and "protocol" online on github, so you can just build it on whatever and do your thing if you know how to, but quite frankly that goes to show they're just not interested in supporting Android at all.
There's also the fact that most people interested in this sort of thing have already gotten an iPad and have bought apps and what not, to do exactly that. After I sink money into a tool like a DAW or VST I tend to keep using it until I know it inside out, gotten out of it what I wanted to and got tired of it, which can take a very very long time. Many DAWs and VSTs come at fairly high price tags so a lot of people tend to stick to with what they've got, simply because throwing more money at the problem doesn't necessarily make better music. While this isn't the case for those iPad and iPhone apps, nobody is going to be jumping ship from a platform they've got several apps on, and the people who wanted to do this have already invested in the tablet and apps.
Quite frankly, I'd rather invest the price of a new phone into a real piece of kit that isn't a phone. On second thought, I've got what I need right now, and I'll just work with that and not mess around with tablets and phones for anything else than TouchOSC occasionally allowing me to mess around with more parameters than I have sliders and knobs for. Plenty of sound I can squeeze out of my current setup in ways I haven't begun to try yet.
You follow the local accepted customs, whether you think they are ridiculous or not.
"When in Rome, do as Romans do" works for simple examples, but some customs go far beyond what I feel is acceptable.
Let's take a parallel situation: In some countries, such as Australia I believe, you wear your shoes indoor. In some countries, such as Japan or my native Sweden, you always take them off.
I'm glad you brought up Japan as an example, because it allows me to take the analogy a step further. One such example is during a long stay in Japan, one of the people I was working with offered to take me to a restaurant where they would serve whale meat as one of the dishes. While I have no love for organizations such as Greenpeace, one has to be ignorant of the state of the world not to realize the precarious state of whales in the oceans. You now have two options really: accept the invitation and take part of the economy that thrives on making a species extinct, or decline and risk in offending your host and business partner.
Now, you can argue that neither accepting or declining will change the fact that the whale is dead and the meat will either be eaten or discarded anyway, and I could not argue with you on that point because obviously the whale will not be killed solely on my account. On the other hand, taking part in eating the whale meat could be interpreted as being okay with Japans policy on whale hunting "for scientific purposes", and on top of that you become (an albeit insignificantly small) part of the "demand" side of the economics justifying the sustained whale hunt. Does your choice in such matters change anything? Unlikely, and hardly the point, but it is a matter of principle.
There are plenty of examples of behavior in other cultures that I find from my own point of view at best "unwise" and at worst "unacceptable". While most people will agree that taking off your shoes inside someone's home is neither, and is just a custom you should just respect, I do not feel obligated to take part in things I find unacceptable by my own standards and morals.
I've spent quite some time there, and there are many things I find "unwise" or "unacceptable" with my own cultural background, and their own vision on some of these matters is often very divided, but each subject generates the same response which borders on apathy "It can't be helped" or "It is the way it is" from either camp. Now, it's not up to me to decide what views a culture should adopt or what is morally right or wrong, and that's probably for the best, but I personally refuse to take part in something that I find fundamentally wrong.
That said, there are many aspects of other cultures that could enrich our own cultures, and I don't think looking over our cultural borders every now and then and meeting eachother half way is a bad idea.
Those of you who have done programming work in your career: did video games influence your path?
Not really. My dad was the one who set me on this career track the day he came home with a Amstrad CPC 646 when I was 6. It came with one game on casette (my dad bought that extra), a book on BASIC in English (which was not my native language), and an insatiable curiousity (although that might have been there at the time). I was lost in the book at the point where it explained how to draw a circle on the screen, but I pounded in the code and started playing with the variables in and before those weird sin() and cos() functions.
And yes, I played videogames. I saved up months worth of allowance (money to buy candy, hey, I was 6) for that dinky little joystick, but I spent more time playing around with it than actually playing videogames on it.
When I was 12 I saved up for a "real" computer. An 8086 with 640KB of memory, and after I got used to working with DOS, floppies and a hard drive with a giant 20MB of space, I bought books on programming for the PC. Yes, I also played videogames, but it was the programming that fascinated me. Making that computer do things for me, albeit very useless but that wasn't the issue, it was doing things I had told it to do. I learned how the machine worked, what memory addresses were special, what interrupts were,... It was a fantastic journey.
By the time I was 17 a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, and it didn't take long for me to make the switch. A program crashing wouldn't take down the whole operating system anymore, and best of all, it was free (gratis), came with a compiler (again free), and it came with everything you ever wanted in documentation, and if that failed, there was the source code. I played games... I had to dual boot for it, but I played games and even organized a small LAN party with friends in the basement and learned the basics of networking as I went along. When the internet became a thing in my country I could e-mail people around half the globe about a bug in a program, send a patch file, download the source code to something I wanted to try, and learned something new every day.
I'm sad for a lot of the programmers graduating today. The fact that the phone in my pocket has thousands of times the resources of that old 8086 of mine means that inefficient code comes at a smaller cost for small programs. And sure, it doesn't matter in small programs, but when they start writing real code it shows and often in painful ways. Instead of learning how to program, they've learned how to play games. Aside from the graphics card, there's no real need for adding something to a desktop machine anymore, and even if it were it's all pretty much (actually working) plug and play these days. There's no incentive for people who play games anymore to tinker with a machine and learn how it works.
As time has progressed I've seen less and less interns passionate about computing, and more and more people who say "I went in IT because I'm good with the Internet, like chatting and playing games.". Oh, there's a big buzz around the usual hot topics, like "social", "big data", "cloud", "internet of things" and whatnot, and I'm not claiming that's a bad thing, after all times have changed and everyone adapts new models and technology, but still... There's few who are interested in the machine, and how to really make it do things. When a kid tells you a database with 2GB of data in it is "big data" and we should be putting that shit in "the cloud" I start wondering about the future. There are exceptions, but far and few in between.
And yes, as the gray hairs on my head have started to become quite numerous, I still play videogames. But I still spend most of my time with the machine doing other fun things.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all.
I agree to a certain extent. For Skyrim certain mods have just become standard fare to install, like SkyUI which makes the UI at least usable. I'd be happy to pay a dollar for SkyUI (ignoring the whole SKSE thing for a second) if that would rid me of the default UI for Skyrim for the 200+ hours I've put into the game.
2) They didn't protect from fraud.
This was in my opinion the worst problem with the whole ordeal. Not just fraud, just the fact that they barely checked what was going on with the mods in question. Even their rules for mods that used other mods made it clear that they really didn't give it too much thought. A lot of mods are frameworks that make developing mods easier, or that make modding possible in ways the API of the creators of the game didn't allow (eg SKSE). With SKSE you start entering this legal murky area and I can't help but feel that Valve never gave it too much thought (and neither did Zenimax/Bethesda).
On top of that, modding communities are rarely good places to build a business in. Most of these people aren't professional developers, and while it's not unheard of that amateur developers can build a sane business model, let's not kid ourselves here. The minecraft modding community is the perfect example of amateurish behavior and so much drama. I don't want to generalize that entire community, since there are a lot of people doing a lot of neat things with that game, but there's been more than a few cases of a modder purposely breaking the game when another mod was installed simply because of some stupid fued between them.
Lastly, there's an implied expectation of a consumer that a modder will maintain his work when a game gets updated if he's paid to do so. Few publishers release preview builds for modders to work on, and even if they do with many of these amateurs even that wouldn't be a guarantee that they would update their mods in a timely fashion. Quite frankly, if I have to pay for SkyUI, I expect it to work without too much problems even years after I bought it.
3) They didn't share the profit well.
I'd like to agree on that point, except in the end Valve just agreed to the terms of the publisher and did the math on their own costs. But let's be honest here, Skyrim as a 4 year old game won't be getting anymore updates. Basically, from a community point of view, that's just Zenimax/Bethesda being greedy at this point. It's like a city council deciding that they're going to charge an admission to the sandbox if you're planning on building a castle, while the whole thing was built with community taxes. (Yes yes, not the most accurate of metaphors, but at least it's not a car) Sure, Bethesda could say something like "Yeah, we were planning on using that revenue to keep the game updated, provide a more complete API, interface with the community" etc etc, but let's face it. Bethesda is working on newer titles, and anything and everything Skyrim is just bookkeeping from now on.
What it is, is perfectly in line with the vision many of these companies have these days about what a community means to them. While I'm not a fan of the so called "Let's play" videos, if you look at the whole drama there about monetizing it's a perfectly good example of what's wrong with many publishers these days. Many publishers want a cut from the video revenues today, while in essence it's really free advertising they're getting. The arguments being made are that most people won't buy the game if they can just watch it being played online, but I don't think that argument really flies. To me, Let's Play videos are kind of like a gameplay video. Before I buy a game I go check it out on a Youtube channel that isn't clearly a marketing channel, and then decide on the gameplay I see if I buy it or not. If your game is so simple that a Let's Play ruins the expe
Yet Phoronix and now also Slashdot are shouting: "numerous features!
Just wait until they benchmark that xbox controller force feedback. They'll have useful graphs such as "Bootup time with and without xbox controller (lower is better)", "Strenght of feedback on odd and even numbered seconds (higher is better)", and the ever so important "Adbucks generated by pointless benchmarks on an xbox conroller (higher is better)".
Hell, I can't wait to see the graphs on that last one.
I'm not surprised with this. GIS is almost a mono-culture that has been dominated by ESRI since forever
The attitude is slowly changing though, with more and more open source tools becoming available. Like you said, gdal and qgis are adequate for most common use, but in the case of LiDAR there's PCL (point cloud library) offering a workable alternative for the traditional las/laz tools in some cases. On the server end there's PostGIS which is a really nice set of geospatial procedures for Postgresql which for a lot of uses is more than enough. There's geoserver, mapserver, and the various html/js frameworks like openlayers and leafletjs. If you're a bit on the creative side and have the expertise (or moderate experience and willingness to learn) in the field of remote sensing you can build quite a few nice applications.
The market is more than ready for a new player that will make reliable software (whether commercial or open source, doesn't matter to most as they are used to pay through the roof for ESRI software anyway).
There's been a few older smaller players that I've been in contact with that are not so happy with the open source tools available as they're seeing competitors pop up getting a headstart in their dev cycle with lower initial costs. The barrier of entry has been lowered really, which is a good thing, because a lot of the smaller players were feeling too comfortable in their own niche applications as well. Personally, I take great pleasure in watching those new companies come along and use and improve these open source tools and try to upset what is traditionally a very "embedded" market.
Sure, ESRI will still dominate the market for some time to come, but I think that they realize that in the not-so-far future they might lose that position. Moves like this fileformat seem like an indicator to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start pushing their format on instrument builders or the people involved in large scale data acquisition. They wouldn't be the first to do this, since las/laz by itself is not the best of formats for quickly seeking through unless you start building indexes (and even then it can still be... cumbersome). I've talked to plenty of people who convert their flightlines into nice quad- or octrees for their own tools with a dash of compression on top. Personally I'll still be asking for either las/laz or XYZ data. To me, the data itself is just a means to an end really, so I'd rather have a format I don't have bend over backwards to get what I want.
As for the price issue, for most people dealing with large enough datasets the real cost is in data acquisition, flight planning (when airborne), storage, and if you work in countries with strict privacy guidelines wrt remote sensing data there's a lot of cost in managing your data according to certain policies and oversight. If anything, that last one alone can be quite migraine inducing, although it's less the case with lidar I guess..
But I am noticing that in more and more environments where there's research being done, or where there's active development, people are more and more embracing other tools, often open source, which gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I've been seeing a lot of pre- and post-processing in python with gdal and numpy lately, and you notice on the internet that there's more and more people picking it up.
What would it take to get it back in line with TOS? Maybe a dose of optimism and belief in conquering great evils and striving for a greater society. Maybe it just isn't a widely held set of beliefs anymore
I like to think that the decline of Trek is a combination of various factors. If we disregard TOS, the series that is most in line with that line of thought is TNG. Picard (in the series at least) holds those ideas in high regard and acts in nearly all episodes as a strong moral compass. The hand of Roddenberry is strong in that series, but Gene Roddenberry died during the making of TNG yet somehow Picard hasn't made a complete 180 and the show retained much of its popularity.
The change in the Trek universe is much more visible in the series of DS9, which sets an overall darker tone with the Dominion war. The point has been brought up before that DS9 battled for viewers with B5 where the tone in general about the future is far less resembling the Trek utopia, although comparing it to most modern scifi it's not all that "grimdark". To be honest, one of my favourite episodes in all of Trek is "In the Pale Moonlight", where Sisko basically goes against everything he stands for because it was necessary to get the Romulans on their side.
Once you get to Voyager, the change is irreversable. Voyager pretty much throws nearly continuity and Trek philosophy out of the airlock as Captain Janeway happily trods her way through the delta quadrant making alliances with the Borg, violating the prime directive in an almost action-hero kind of style, using warp 9 at an almost daily basis (despite it being forbidden in TNG by starfleet), contemplating genocide with the Borg, oh and in the series finale violates the temporal prime directive... It did make for good TV though. Compare Janeway to Picard (in the series) and you'll notice that they embody totally different ideologies. You could argue that over 70 years away from the federation they had little choice but to go with the flow, but just imagine Picard in that position.
A lot of Trek fans attribute the change in Trek to Rick Berman, but I think it's more complex. The audience has changed, and above all science fiction (or rather special effects) became relatively cheap to make. Trek suddenly had to compete with a lot more shows, and instead of focusing on storytelling the choice was made to focus on things like action and effects. Voyager is the best example of having a lot of characters they could build incredible stories about, but opted not to. They take on a Maquis crew, but aside from a few episodes it hardly gets mentioned what kind of problems this causes. Bellana as a half-human, half-klingon could have had so much more character development but barely got any aside from 2 episodes in 7 years. The only character to really get any character development was 7 of 9, and even there the plot always felt so underwhelming.
By the time Enterprise came out, I think most Trek fans were giving up on the franchise. I remember at the time that few people had something good to say about the show, so I skipped out on it.
As for the Trek movies. Picard in the TNG movies is no longer the Picard from the series. A complex man who upholds his principles and beliefs above all else was written into the role of an action hero,and in some movies even has a one-liner to finish off the villain. The TNG trek movies are action movies in line with the Trek universe, and I think the Trek reboot just makes the gap between the Trek ideas even bigger. I don't think they are bad movies, as long as you watch them as action movies and not as TNG Trek.
The problem with Trek, I think, is that the franchise is overused. The only way it can continue on and attract an audience is in a way that derivates from the original work but strays as far from it as possible. The traditional Trek audience won't be happy unless Picard 2.0 comes along, and the traditional Trek audience simply isn't as big as the generic-action-movie audience. With how
All of the money from this project will be used to extend the distance our drone can fly, so the more backers we have, the farther it will be able to go!
Ok, now I know it's a hoax/scam.
It's not a hoax, it's a hot air drone. Basically they're going to be burning all the money they got underneath the drone. If the pile is high enough and the wind is in the right direction, clearly it'll reach Pyongyang.
All Google needs to do is remove the camera. That way, it can still be used for notifications, searches of information and other overlays
The only applications I can think of where glass might work as a useful item actually all use the camera to do computer vision kind of applications. The appeal suddenly immensely decreases if it's unable to do that since what is left is just another interface for my phone or PC to show me messages I can see elsewhere irrelevant of any context.
An application I personally think would be useful is in large server environments. Imagine walking in to a serverroom and simply looking at a server to get a list of the name, IP addresses, its function, applications or virtual machines running on it, being able to view open (and perhaps closed) issues with the system. We already have plenty of software to view all that information with a browser, but it would be nice to have a way of viewing that sort of info just by looking at the server in question. Patch cabinets come to mind as well, etc etc.
The last thing I want to do is use this sort of thing as yet another way to take pictures, keep track of my appointments, see if I've got mail, etc. I've got perfect things for that: a phone, a laptop, etc etc. I really don't need more devices to manage my mailbox, in fact I'd rather have less of them as my mailbox already consumes enough time of my day.
Finally, I really don't want to go through everyday life wearing those things as I interact with people. For one shoving a camera in another persons face makes them quite uncomfortable, and wearing one on my face as I interact with people makes me kind of uncomfortable. I don't really see any practical use for glass in every day life. I don't want to read online reviews of the carton of milk I'm buying ("Very milky, 10/10, would drink again" -- xXxmilkmaster2kxXx), nor see recipes for lasagna when I'm buying tomatoes, not to mention how awesome it would be to see every bit of info in my field of vision scanned for possible advertisement opportunities.
I think there's a lot of useful applications that lie in the realm of augmented reality, most of which you need a camera for to do computer vision type of stuff. But at the moment from what I gather Glass is underpowered CPU wise (and tbh, I didn't expect anything else) and has terrible battery life, so the sort of thing I hope to someday see is probably far off. Sadly, most of the types of applications I keep hearing are the same stuff I do with my phone, and I don't quite need that on my face to be honest.
I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
If you want to build that social network utopia and get it to see some actual usage, you'll need to have a clear advantage and be able to get everyone and their grandma to move away from facebook, twitter and whatnot. For a media entity "decentralized social network" means "unreliable demographics" and "open source" sadly still means "not easy to monetize". Aside from that, you also need a certain momentum to build up, and have features that someone else doesn't have. Google+ is a perfect example of not being able to convince the greater public that you've got a better offer.
Personally, I can think of hundreds of more interesting hobby projects than hacking together an open source decentralized social network. But if you find it interesting, please do contribute code/documentation/fleshed out ideas to the community. Happy hacking!
This is a general problem with devices that are "paired". How do you securely establish the initial connection, when neither side knows anything about the other?
The problem isn't the initial connection really. Sure, there's an attack window there, but if it weren't for the actual problem it wouldn't have been as easily exploitable as it appears to be. The problem is that it is trivial once the Chromecast is connected to the WLAN to force it to reconfigure.
The Youtube video of his presentation (no transcript, sorry, go listen to it in the background while doing something else) makes it clear that it's trivially simple to get the device looking for a suitable partner again. If I understand it correctly the attacker sends one (or several) deauth frame(s) to the network and within 5 seconds the Chromecast will start looking for a new network at which point the attacker can take over control of the device.
The thing is, this was a userfriendly feature for when you're using your Chromecast device on other networks. If the developers had required a physical button press (on that nice reset button would've been fine), the attack window would've been just during the pairing, which is a much smaller attack window. While it doesn't take away the pairing issues you mentioned, but the beauty of this attack really lies in how easy it is to make Chromecast hop onto another network.
Semi-secure systems involve things like creating a short period of temporary vulnerability (as with Bluetooth pairing).
Which is the case as far as I understand it. The chromecast is vulnerable until it is configured. The attack just makes reconfiguration trivial because there's no physical intervention required.
The promise of having virgin subordinates in the afterlife is not a traditional Islamic belief.
Oh, are you one of those people who reads the Onion and is outraged at how factually incorrect their articles are? I'm sorry... For the record, I don't think there's a JihadBot 3000 prototype either. So don't spread that as truth either...
It's a matter of cost-cutting. Those virgins every holy warrior gets in the end cost a lot of money and aren't really contributing much to the cause themselves. The holy warriors themselves could unionize, but their union membership is rather short lived by nature. Aside from the membership problems, what exactly would they do? Threaten to blow themselves up? I'd explain into detail on the soon to be introduced JihadBot 3000, but the projects development costs have gone through the roof, and the prototypes have all blown up for some reason.
today's rising star could quite easily be in tomorrow's dustbin
Well, at some point Perl was a rising star...
No matter what you're going to pick, it won't stand the test of time in the end.
Perl? Dead, done for, the perl community invited to the funeral but the refused to come since they were too busy organizing their next YAPC and having fun.
PHP? Waiting to be killed off. CVE-2015-0001 will classify the entire PHP codebase as exploitable, and in a desperate attempt to fix things, the developers will just delete the entire repository except for the mysql_real_escape() function.
Ruby? Dead because of scalability issues. The Ruby community collapses onto itself trying to attent Perls funeral, but somehow get lost and finds itself at YAPC wondering why the Perl community didn't even bother showing up at the funeral.
Python? Dead because of GIL, and it's either running Jython or IronPython, and nobody wants to sleep with Oracle or Microsoft that badly.
Java? Death by 3 and 4 letter acronyms and frameworks of frameworks. Research has shown that long term webdevelopment in Java is considered harmful to your sanity.
Kidding aside, look for a set of qualities in whatever language/framework you want to use:
Does it make it easy to do what you want to do?
Is there an active developer and user community?
Is there decent documentation?
Does it offer a SIGNIFICANT advantage to port your existing stuff to this language/framework over the currently used language/framework? (Time being money, and all that)
After starting a (small) test-project with it, do you feel confident that it meets your standards for doing real work with it?
I know that it's probably generic bullshit you're getting from me, but you're going to get a thousand answers all screaming at once "Pyramid" "Django" "CakePHP" "CodeIgniter" and what not and unless you take a look at the languages and frameworks and see what people are / have been building with it you'll be none the wiser. Pick something you see yourself maintaining without pulling out all of your hair in the next couple of years.
Re:Yes, Perl is indeed dead and rotting
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Perl Is Undead
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· Score: 3, Informative
I moderated in this article, but this is something that I'd like to talk about for a bit, even if only anecdotal...
Perl 5 is still charging full steam ahead in every sysadmin group I've been around. I know there are python advocates out there, but I have only encountered ONE major IT shop that is completely (or nearly so) python driven (and it happens to be Guido's employer -- hardly a good example)
Over the past 8 years my own usage of Perl in writing code has declined to zero. There has been a mentality change over the years in the shop I work in, and where we used to grab for Perl by default as a quick'n'dirty duct-tape & MacGuyver language, we now exclusively rely on Python. I think there are several reasons for this shift.
The most prominent one to me personally is that other languages have adopted CPAN-like repositories. I don't know about the statistics of numbers of modules, active development, number of commits, etc etc, and put bluntly I really don't care. Although these statistics are interesting into disseminating how active a language is to its developers, to me as a user of the language it only matters if a module is maintained and does what its supposed to do. The thing is, for most of the things I used to use Perl modules for, I now use Python modules, and can say "Well, it's good enough".
Our development teams composition has also changed. A lot of our older generation of programmers/admins have retired or switched jobs, and a lot of younger people were hired to replace them. The younger generation is definitely more familiar with Python, Ruby and other scripting languages than it is with Perl. The incentive for learning Perl has become a lot smaller. Perl was the de facto language for many when writing a CGI script, but then RoR and AJAX happened. While over time Perl adapted (think Catalyst and Dancer) other languages have adapted as well. Look at all the wsgi applications and frameworks in Python.
Our investment in Perl itself was more of the kind where we used a set of scripts to change data from format A to B at which point our Java and/or C++ code takes over, or some tools to deal with our logs, etc. The switch to Python for these tools was gradual (but quick) process, and we found ourselves not looking back. I can't really say that we were/are heavily invested in Perl or Python, but for day to day usage Python has completely taken over. Who knows where we end up in another 8 years from now?
Lastly, if you were to go around our shop, asking people what's new about Python 3 you'll get pretty much right answers. If you go around our shop asking people what's happening with Perl 6, you will get a blank stare. I remember clearly how Perl 6 was going to become the best thing since butter on toast,... There was general excitement about it all, and then there was a whole load of... well... nothing. We're 11-12 years further and there's still no sign of Perl 6. What the hell happened there?
Perl has only been dominant in the sysadmin space for less than 15 years... I wouldn't be surprised if it lasts at least another 10 more.
I don't doubt that Perl will be around for a whole lot longer. It has assembled a group of dedicated die-hard users and developers over the years, and in general it has a great community. There are older, more horrible languages that are still alive today, so I doubt Perl will be gone anytime soon.
However, while my entire post is anecdotal, I do think the Perl community is deluding itself a bit. The talk in the video (I actually listened to it in the background while working on something) mentions a lot of statistics that are interesting to the Perl developers and maintainers, but are hardly and indicator of usage or adoption. The more interesting part of the statistical talk was about the general decline of jobs available for scripting languages in favor of newer technologies, but even those statistics in general don't speak much about usage and adoption.
FWIW, may Perl be around a long long time. Having more tools at your disposal is never a bad thing.
At the request of the international community they'll stop sticking harpoons in whales, but the request didn't mention anything about nuking the whales.
I was more thinking about starting postgres before the server that uses that DB to store its stuff.
Allow to go off on a tangent here, but most of the setups I deal with keep databases and webservers on separate machines. Today we've got virtual machines coming out of our collective asses so even developers start separating their services from each other. What you're talking about is dependencies and how to deal with failure of a service. That goes far beyond the scope of what systemd can provide, since it's so cheap and easy to run stuff on different (virtual) machines these days. However, I realize that you're using this as an example, so I won't really press on the matter other than that this is the poorest example you can choose.
But it does speak to part of the problem. All I continuously hear about systemd as the greatest advantage is solving the "complex boot order" dependency problem, parallelizing boot scripts and decreasing boot-time. To me, as a sysadmin: I DON'T care. I'm pretty sure that 90% of the servers I have running take a longer time in POST than they do in booting. If I reboot something, I'm taking it OFFLINE. I'm not sitting there crossing my fingers "Please come up quickly", but I've got a failover setup and another machine has taken over before the server is rebooting. And "complex boot order" really? Is that really that big of a concern? I really hope you don't have to manage 500+ servers then, because you'll be in for a surprise on complexity.
This brings me to interesting questions that I hear nobody talk about. If you're doing failover type of things, you're bound to end up with heartbeat/corosync/... + pacemaker & co. As a sysadmin, for me those things are extremely important. Last time I checked (and granted, that was a while ago), none of these actually had a proper way to deal with the impact of systemd. I'm sure that the people behind the various failover solutions are working on it, but last time I checked I saw very little in official documentation, and only the occasional headscratching on mailinglists.
To me, systemd presents quite the challenge, with consequences even outside of the technical side of things. For a while I'm going to end up in a mixed environment, forced to write two sets of operational procedures, disaster recovery scenarios, etc etc. I'm going to have to retrain people on how to read system logs, have to deal with systemd's quircks (no offence, all software has its peculiarities, and so will systemd), and will probably have to completely rethink how we do failover scenarios. And all I gain, what I'm really interested in is... cgroups...
Projectors, usb disks and sticks, whatever... Those things have no place in a serverroom, and I don't care about it. And let's be frank, nobody in a corporate environment gives a shit about linux on the desktop. The few companies that I've been at that have linux on their desktop are small businesses with a near complete tech workforce.
Why would you want to convert rich information into a string and shove it down a pipe before you make use of it?
I think I know the answer to that question. Some environments need to archive their logs, for a long long time. Some things are more complex than a "simple" local syslog setup, and with that complexity comes a set of tools that often organically grows over the years or follows certain administrative procedures inside a company. In such environments, change is a difficult process, not because of people but because of corporate inertia and red tape bullshit. And it's great that systemd provides a syslog fallback for us text-junkies, at the very least it buys time...
The other side of the medal however is, nobody is really having a problem with text logfiles. The examples I continuously see are so contrived, or focussed on "the linux newbie" that it just reeks of a developer looking for something to do. My biggest frustration with lo
But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look.
No you don't. You get plenty of feedback on the beta site in the initial announcement of it coming online, and for the most part the comments were ignored. Ever since the beta came online, there's been people mocking it.
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready.
Saying it's not ready is the understatement of the year so far. The comment section is on fire so far, and this is actually the first time that I've seen people spend their modpoints to promote offtopic discussion of this nature on this scale.
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What? Is this the website equivalent of "We want the Call of Duty audience" ? This statement right here, goes to show how much you're out of touch with your core audience: News for NERDS... Slashdot will never be reddit, or some fancy ITBiz magazine. Reddit already exists and won't be going anywhere, and the ITBiz audience doesn't give a shit about this place since it's just another site that scrapes headlines from other places.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, ever since the advent of SlashBIcurious and the other nonsense you've been trying to push. Your "core audience" has been telling you this for quite a while now, but you've adamantly refused to listen, stuck your fingers in your ears and gone ahead as if nothing was wrong. And now you're surprised the comments section is ablaze?
We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories.
Experimenting with an established platform can come at a high cost. I don't mind the changes to the layout, and I don't give a damn that you want to polish the look, but in all fairness you broke the damn commenting system. It's the only thing that keeps this place worth visiting. Beta just makes we want to look for another home.
If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that.
Oh fuck off... You know when people start talking about communication? It's the excuse the network engineer makes to the IT Coordinator/Manager when his network melted while users have been making tickets about problems for weeks. It's the pseudo-managers way of saying "I'm not aware of any issues" despite his mailbox being a festering pit of complaints and misery.
You communicated well enough. You communicated when the beta came online, and you get plenty of feedback which you chose to ignore. Now you've got 25% of users getting an iteration of your shitty beta, and boy oh boy is your comment section a cesspool of complaints right now. And the message you send now is obvious: "It's coming, wether you like it or not. Suck it.". Yeah, the art of communicating is not lost on you guys at all.
And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive.
That's like the time I heard someone from management say "In hindsight, I feel that despite the negative outcome I've made the correct choice. We'll just have to adapt and move on".
Well, guess what... We'll adapt, and move on. Enjoy turning slashdot into ITBizz2.0 or whatever pipe dream you guys at Dice have.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody who matters cares about Brianna Wu or GamerGate.
On the regard, I have a question for Brianna Wu:
How does it feel to be so irrelevant in your field that you have to piggy back your way to "fame" (or rather infamy) on the misplaced anger of a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do?
Dear slashdot owners,
the site has jumped the shark a while ago, but this is driving the final nail in the coffin of "relevance". Just close it down and be done with it. Turn it into ITBiz 2.0 and make it completely irrelevant. There are so many people you could interview who actually have something to say in their field of expertise, instead of this person who only got in the spotlight after a bunch of angry kids sent her a bunch of fake death threats. While I can understand this has a significant impact on your life and work, if it is the crowning achievement of your career in your rise to infamy then what could you possibly have to say that is remotely interesting to the audience of slashdot?
Just pull the plug already. I'll help. I'll log out now, and never come back. I haven't said it out loud, but you simply don't cater to my interests anymore. I scroll by the articles, sigh, and get back to what I was doing. But in the end, you're just wasting my time lately.
So long slashdot, it was fun the past 16 or so years... The last few not so much. Goodbye!
So in the future you may be able to use your Android phone's touch screen and accelerometer as a MIDI controller.
Or you can just use OSC as a protocol and do that right now with a handful of DAWs and VSTs. I've been using OSC on Android for about 2 years now with TouchOSC. I use Renoise and Ableton mostly, and those work well enough with that.
On that matter, let's be honest, a touch screen isn't the greatest replacement for buttons, sliders and knobs really. I almost always prefer using a piece of kit as compared to a touchscreen, with the exception of X/Y pads for controlling things like filters where you control cutoff frequency and resonance or bandwidth (for bandpass, etc). It's nice to be able to look at the filter graph where you're fiddling with it, instead of on screen while your poking at an x/y pad on a controller. I also often use TouchOSC when I run out of sliders or knobs while I'm testing/playing with something, but touchscreens are often too "fiddly" compared to a real controller.
I guess that Google is hoping that Korg & co will start porting their iPad/iPhone apps to Android, but quite frankly I don't see that happening anytime soon. Korg for instance has released an iphone app for uploading samples to their volca sampler, but hasn't done so for Android (and this doesn't even use a MIDI interface, just the headphone jack to communicate with the sampler over QAM). They've put the source code for the conversion and "protocol" online on github, so you can just build it on whatever and do your thing if you know how to, but quite frankly that goes to show they're just not interested in supporting Android at all.
There's also the fact that most people interested in this sort of thing have already gotten an iPad and have bought apps and what not, to do exactly that. After I sink money into a tool like a DAW or VST I tend to keep using it until I know it inside out, gotten out of it what I wanted to and got tired of it, which can take a very very long time. Many DAWs and VSTs come at fairly high price tags so a lot of people tend to stick to with what they've got, simply because throwing more money at the problem doesn't necessarily make better music. While this isn't the case for those iPad and iPhone apps, nobody is going to be jumping ship from a platform they've got several apps on, and the people who wanted to do this have already invested in the tablet and apps.
Quite frankly, I'd rather invest the price of a new phone into a real piece of kit that isn't a phone. On second thought, I've got what I need right now, and I'll just work with that and not mess around with tablets and phones for anything else than TouchOSC occasionally allowing me to mess around with more parameters than I have sliders and knobs for. Plenty of sound I can squeeze out of my current setup in ways I haven't begun to try yet.
You follow the local accepted customs, whether you think they are ridiculous or not.
"When in Rome, do as Romans do" works for simple examples, but some customs go far beyond what I feel is acceptable.
Let's take a parallel situation: In some countries, such as Australia I believe, you wear your shoes indoor. In some countries, such as Japan or my native Sweden, you always take them off.
I'm glad you brought up Japan as an example, because it allows me to take the analogy a step further. One such example is during a long stay in Japan, one of the people I was working with offered to take me to a restaurant where they would serve whale meat as one of the dishes. While I have no love for organizations such as Greenpeace, one has to be ignorant of the state of the world not to realize the precarious state of whales in the oceans. You now have two options really: accept the invitation and take part of the economy that thrives on making a species extinct, or decline and risk in offending your host and business partner.
Now, you can argue that neither accepting or declining will change the fact that the whale is dead and the meat will either be eaten or discarded anyway, and I could not argue with you on that point because obviously the whale will not be killed solely on my account. On the other hand, taking part in eating the whale meat could be interpreted as being okay with Japans policy on whale hunting "for scientific purposes", and on top of that you become (an albeit insignificantly small) part of the "demand" side of the economics justifying the sustained whale hunt. Does your choice in such matters change anything? Unlikely, and hardly the point, but it is a matter of principle.
There are plenty of examples of behavior in other cultures that I find from my own point of view at best "unwise" and at worst "unacceptable". While most people will agree that taking off your shoes inside someone's home is neither, and is just a custom you should just respect, I do not feel obligated to take part in things I find unacceptable by my own standards and morals.
I've spent quite some time there, and there are many things I find "unwise" or "unacceptable" with my own cultural background, and their own vision on some of these matters is often very divided, but each subject generates the same response which borders on apathy "It can't be helped" or "It is the way it is" from either camp. Now, it's not up to me to decide what views a culture should adopt or what is morally right or wrong, and that's probably for the best, but I personally refuse to take part in something that I find fundamentally wrong.
That said, there are many aspects of other cultures that could enrich our own cultures, and I don't think looking over our cultural borders every now and then and meeting eachother half way is a bad idea.
Those of you who have done programming work in your career: did video games influence your path?
Not really. My dad was the one who set me on this career track the day he came home with a Amstrad CPC 646 when I was 6. It came with one game on casette (my dad bought that extra), a book on BASIC in English (which was not my native language), and an insatiable curiousity (although that might have been there at the time). I was lost in the book at the point where it explained how to draw a circle on the screen, but I pounded in the code and started playing with the variables in and before those weird sin() and cos() functions.
And yes, I played videogames. I saved up months worth of allowance (money to buy candy, hey, I was 6) for that dinky little joystick, but I spent more time playing around with it than actually playing videogames on it.
When I was 12 I saved up for a "real" computer. An 8086 with 640KB of memory, and after I got used to working with DOS, floppies and a hard drive with a giant 20MB of space, I bought books on programming for the PC. Yes, I also played videogames, but it was the programming that fascinated me. Making that computer do things for me, albeit very useless but that wasn't the issue, it was doing things I had told it to do. I learned how the machine worked, what memory addresses were special, what interrupts were, ... It was a fantastic journey.
By the time I was 17 a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, and it didn't take long for me to make the switch. A program crashing wouldn't take down the whole operating system anymore, and best of all, it was free (gratis), came with a compiler (again free), and it came with everything you ever wanted in documentation, and if that failed, there was the source code. I played games... I had to dual boot for it, but I played games and even organized a small LAN party with friends in the basement and learned the basics of networking as I went along. When the internet became a thing in my country I could e-mail people around half the globe about a bug in a program, send a patch file, download the source code to something I wanted to try, and learned something new every day.
I'm sad for a lot of the programmers graduating today. The fact that the phone in my pocket has thousands of times the resources of that old 8086 of mine means that inefficient code comes at a smaller cost for small programs. And sure, it doesn't matter in small programs, but when they start writing real code it shows and often in painful ways. Instead of learning how to program, they've learned how to play games. Aside from the graphics card, there's no real need for adding something to a desktop machine anymore, and even if it were it's all pretty much (actually working) plug and play these days. There's no incentive for people who play games anymore to tinker with a machine and learn how it works.
As time has progressed I've seen less and less interns passionate about computing, and more and more people who say "I went in IT because I'm good with the Internet, like chatting and playing games.". Oh, there's a big buzz around the usual hot topics, like "social", "big data", "cloud", "internet of things" and whatnot, and I'm not claiming that's a bad thing, after all times have changed and everyone adapts new models and technology, but still... There's few who are interested in the machine, and how to really make it do things. When a kid tells you a database with 2GB of data in it is "big data" and we should be putting that shit in "the cloud" I start wondering about the future. There are exceptions, but far and few in between.
And yes, as the gray hairs on my head have started to become quite numerous, I still play videogames. But I still spend most of my time with the machine doing other fun things.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all.
I agree to a certain extent. For Skyrim certain mods have just become standard fare to install, like SkyUI which makes the UI at least usable. I'd be happy to pay a dollar for SkyUI (ignoring the whole SKSE thing for a second) if that would rid me of the default UI for Skyrim for the 200+ hours I've put into the game.
2) They didn't protect from fraud.
This was in my opinion the worst problem with the whole ordeal. Not just fraud, just the fact that they barely checked what was going on with the mods in question. Even their rules for mods that used other mods made it clear that they really didn't give it too much thought. A lot of mods are frameworks that make developing mods easier, or that make modding possible in ways the API of the creators of the game didn't allow (eg SKSE). With SKSE you start entering this legal murky area and I can't help but feel that Valve never gave it too much thought (and neither did Zenimax/Bethesda).
On top of that, modding communities are rarely good places to build a business in. Most of these people aren't professional developers, and while it's not unheard of that amateur developers can build a sane business model, let's not kid ourselves here. The minecraft modding community is the perfect example of amateurish behavior and so much drama. I don't want to generalize that entire community, since there are a lot of people doing a lot of neat things with that game, but there's been more than a few cases of a modder purposely breaking the game when another mod was installed simply because of some stupid fued between them.
Lastly, there's an implied expectation of a consumer that a modder will maintain his work when a game gets updated if he's paid to do so. Few publishers release preview builds for modders to work on, and even if they do with many of these amateurs even that wouldn't be a guarantee that they would update their mods in a timely fashion. Quite frankly, if I have to pay for SkyUI, I expect it to work without too much problems even years after I bought it.
3) They didn't share the profit well.
I'd like to agree on that point, except in the end Valve just agreed to the terms of the publisher and did the math on their own costs. But let's be honest here, Skyrim as a 4 year old game won't be getting anymore updates. Basically, from a community point of view, that's just Zenimax/Bethesda being greedy at this point. It's like a city council deciding that they're going to charge an admission to the sandbox if you're planning on building a castle, while the whole thing was built with community taxes. (Yes yes, not the most accurate of metaphors, but at least it's not a car) Sure, Bethesda could say something like "Yeah, we were planning on using that revenue to keep the game updated, provide a more complete API, interface with the community" etc etc, but let's face it. Bethesda is working on newer titles, and anything and everything Skyrim is just bookkeeping from now on.
What it is, is perfectly in line with the vision many of these companies have these days about what a community means to them. While I'm not a fan of the so called "Let's play" videos, if you look at the whole drama there about monetizing it's a perfectly good example of what's wrong with many publishers these days. Many publishers want a cut from the video revenues today, while in essence it's really free advertising they're getting. The arguments being made are that most people won't buy the game if they can just watch it being played online, but I don't think that argument really flies. To me, Let's Play videos are kind of like a gameplay video. Before I buy a game I go check it out on a Youtube channel that isn't clearly a marketing channel, and then decide on the gameplay I see if I buy it or not. If your game is so simple that a Let's Play ruins the expe
Yet Phoronix and now also Slashdot are shouting: "numerous features!
Just wait until they benchmark that xbox controller force feedback. They'll have useful graphs such as "Bootup time with and without xbox controller (lower is better)", "Strenght of feedback on odd and even numbered seconds (higher is better)", and the ever so important "Adbucks generated by pointless benchmarks on an xbox conroller (higher is better)".
Hell, I can't wait to see the graphs on that last one.
I'm not surprised with this. GIS is almost a mono-culture that has been dominated by ESRI since forever
The attitude is slowly changing though, with more and more open source tools becoming available. Like you said, gdal and qgis are adequate for most common use, but in the case of LiDAR there's PCL (point cloud library) offering a workable alternative for the traditional las/laz tools in some cases. On the server end there's PostGIS which is a really nice set of geospatial procedures for Postgresql which for a lot of uses is more than enough. There's geoserver, mapserver, and the various html/js frameworks like openlayers and leafletjs. If you're a bit on the creative side and have the expertise (or moderate experience and willingness to learn) in the field of remote sensing you can build quite a few nice applications.
The market is more than ready for a new player that will make reliable software (whether commercial or open source, doesn't matter to most as they are used to pay through the roof for ESRI software anyway).
There's been a few older smaller players that I've been in contact with that are not so happy with the open source tools available as they're seeing competitors pop up getting a headstart in their dev cycle with lower initial costs. The barrier of entry has been lowered really, which is a good thing, because a lot of the smaller players were feeling too comfortable in their own niche applications as well. Personally, I take great pleasure in watching those new companies come along and use and improve these open source tools and try to upset what is traditionally a very "embedded" market.
Sure, ESRI will still dominate the market for some time to come, but I think that they realize that in the not-so-far future they might lose that position. Moves like this fileformat seem like an indicator to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start pushing their format on instrument builders or the people involved in large scale data acquisition. They wouldn't be the first to do this, since las/laz by itself is not the best of formats for quickly seeking through unless you start building indexes (and even then it can still be ... cumbersome). I've talked to plenty of people who convert their flightlines into nice quad- or octrees for their own tools with a dash of compression on top. Personally I'll still be asking for either las/laz or XYZ data. To me, the data itself is just a means to an end really, so I'd rather have a format I don't have bend over backwards to get what I want.
As for the price issue, for most people dealing with large enough datasets the real cost is in data acquisition, flight planning (when airborne), storage, and if you work in countries with strict privacy guidelines wrt remote sensing data there's a lot of cost in managing your data according to certain policies and oversight. If anything, that last one alone can be quite migraine inducing, although it's less the case with lidar I guess..
But I am noticing that in more and more environments where there's research being done, or where there's active development, people are more and more embracing other tools, often open source, which gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I've been seeing a lot of pre- and post-processing in python with gdal and numpy lately, and you notice on the internet that there's more and more people picking it up.
Buzz Aldren: "Epic? (yawn) Call me when she snaps one from the moon."
Now now, everyone knows that Buzz at the age of 85 can't get his rocket up there anymore without the aid of a selfie stick.
What would it take to get it back in line with TOS? Maybe a dose of optimism and belief in conquering great evils and striving for a greater society. Maybe it just isn't a widely held set of beliefs anymore
I like to think that the decline of Trek is a combination of various factors. If we disregard TOS, the series that is most in line with that line of thought is TNG. Picard (in the series at least) holds those ideas in high regard and acts in nearly all episodes as a strong moral compass. The hand of Roddenberry is strong in that series, but Gene Roddenberry died during the making of TNG yet somehow Picard hasn't made a complete 180 and the show retained much of its popularity.
The change in the Trek universe is much more visible in the series of DS9, which sets an overall darker tone with the Dominion war. The point has been brought up before that DS9 battled for viewers with B5 where the tone in general about the future is far less resembling the Trek utopia, although comparing it to most modern scifi it's not all that "grimdark". To be honest, one of my favourite episodes in all of Trek is "In the Pale Moonlight", where Sisko basically goes against everything he stands for because it was necessary to get the Romulans on their side.
Once you get to Voyager, the change is irreversable. Voyager pretty much throws nearly continuity and Trek philosophy out of the airlock as Captain Janeway happily trods her way through the delta quadrant making alliances with the Borg, violating the prime directive in an almost action-hero kind of style, using warp 9 at an almost daily basis (despite it being forbidden in TNG by starfleet), contemplating genocide with the Borg, oh and in the series finale violates the temporal prime directive... It did make for good TV though. Compare Janeway to Picard (in the series) and you'll notice that they embody totally different ideologies. You could argue that over 70 years away from the federation they had little choice but to go with the flow, but just imagine Picard in that position.
A lot of Trek fans attribute the change in Trek to Rick Berman, but I think it's more complex. The audience has changed, and above all science fiction (or rather special effects) became relatively cheap to make. Trek suddenly had to compete with a lot more shows, and instead of focusing on storytelling the choice was made to focus on things like action and effects. Voyager is the best example of having a lot of characters they could build incredible stories about, but opted not to. They take on a Maquis crew, but aside from a few episodes it hardly gets mentioned what kind of problems this causes. Bellana as a half-human, half-klingon could have had so much more character development but barely got any aside from 2 episodes in 7 years. The only character to really get any character development was 7 of 9, and even there the plot always felt so underwhelming.
By the time Enterprise came out, I think most Trek fans were giving up on the franchise. I remember at the time that few people had something good to say about the show, so I skipped out on it.
As for the Trek movies. Picard in the TNG movies is no longer the Picard from the series. A complex man who upholds his principles and beliefs above all else was written into the role of an action hero,and in some movies even has a one-liner to finish off the villain. The TNG trek movies are action movies in line with the Trek universe, and I think the Trek reboot just makes the gap between the Trek ideas even bigger. I don't think they are bad movies, as long as you watch them as action movies and not as TNG Trek.
The problem with Trek, I think, is that the franchise is overused. The only way it can continue on and attract an audience is in a way that derivates from the original work but strays as far from it as possible. The traditional Trek audience won't be happy unless Picard 2.0 comes along, and the traditional Trek audience simply isn't as big as the generic-action-movie audience. With how
All of the money from this project will be used to extend the distance our drone can fly, so the more backers we have, the farther it will be able to go!
Ok, now I know it's a hoax/scam.
It's not a hoax, it's a hot air drone. Basically they're going to be burning all the money they got underneath the drone. If the pile is high enough and the wind is in the right direction, clearly it'll reach Pyongyang.
All Google needs to do is remove the camera. That way, it can still be used for notifications, searches of information and other overlays
The only applications I can think of where glass might work as a useful item actually all use the camera to do computer vision kind of applications. The appeal suddenly immensely decreases if it's unable to do that since what is left is just another interface for my phone or PC to show me messages I can see elsewhere irrelevant of any context.
An application I personally think would be useful is in large server environments. Imagine walking in to a serverroom and simply looking at a server to get a list of the name, IP addresses, its function, applications or virtual machines running on it, being able to view open (and perhaps closed) issues with the system. We already have plenty of software to view all that information with a browser, but it would be nice to have a way of viewing that sort of info just by looking at the server in question. Patch cabinets come to mind as well, etc etc.
The last thing I want to do is use this sort of thing as yet another way to take pictures, keep track of my appointments, see if I've got mail, etc. I've got perfect things for that: a phone, a laptop, etc etc. I really don't need more devices to manage my mailbox, in fact I'd rather have less of them as my mailbox already consumes enough time of my day.
Finally, I really don't want to go through everyday life wearing those things as I interact with people. For one shoving a camera in another persons face makes them quite uncomfortable, and wearing one on my face as I interact with people makes me kind of uncomfortable. I don't really see any practical use for glass in every day life. I don't want to read online reviews of the carton of milk I'm buying ("Very milky, 10/10, would drink again" -- xXxmilkmaster2kxXx), nor see recipes for lasagna when I'm buying tomatoes, not to mention how awesome it would be to see every bit of info in my field of vision scanned for possible advertisement opportunities.
I think there's a lot of useful applications that lie in the realm of augmented reality, most of which you need a camera for to do computer vision type of stuff. But at the moment from what I gather Glass is underpowered CPU wise (and tbh, I didn't expect anything else) and has terrible battery life, so the sort of thing I hope to someday see is probably far off. Sadly, most of the types of applications I keep hearing are the same stuff I do with my phone, and I don't quite need that on my face to be honest.
I guess he's going back to reddit.
Something Awful actually. Hope he's got 5 bucks.
I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
If you want to build that social network utopia and get it to see some actual usage, you'll need to have a clear advantage and be able to get everyone and their grandma to move away from facebook, twitter and whatnot. For a media entity "decentralized social network" means "unreliable demographics" and "open source" sadly still means "not easy to monetize". Aside from that, you also need a certain momentum to build up, and have features that someone else doesn't have. Google+ is a perfect example of not being able to convince the greater public that you've got a better offer.
Personally, I can think of hundreds of more interesting hobby projects than hacking together an open source decentralized social network. But if you find it interesting, please do contribute code/documentation/fleshed out ideas to the community. Happy hacking!
I guess the internets are dead.
I gather many internets were given away yesterday at 4chan. You might try there, some people might still have some.
On second thought... better not.
It might be a silly question, but why don't they just use FreeBSD in that case?
You haven't heard? I'm sorry... My condolences, but the writing had been on the wall for a while though. Netcraft even confirmed it years ago...
*BSD is dying.
This is a general problem with devices that are "paired". How do you securely establish the initial connection, when neither side knows anything about the other?
The problem isn't the initial connection really. Sure, there's an attack window there, but if it weren't for the actual problem it wouldn't have been as easily exploitable as it appears to be. The problem is that it is trivial once the Chromecast is connected to the WLAN to force it to reconfigure.
The Youtube video of his presentation (no transcript, sorry, go listen to it in the background while doing something else) makes it clear that it's trivially simple to get the device looking for a suitable partner again. If I understand it correctly the attacker sends one (or several) deauth frame(s) to the network and within 5 seconds the Chromecast will start looking for a new network at which point the attacker can take over control of the device.
The thing is, this was a userfriendly feature for when you're using your Chromecast device on other networks. If the developers had required a physical button press (on that nice reset button would've been fine), the attack window would've been just during the pairing, which is a much smaller attack window. While it doesn't take away the pairing issues you mentioned, but the beauty of this attack really lies in how easy it is to make Chromecast hop onto another network.
Semi-secure systems involve things like creating a short period of temporary vulnerability (as with Bluetooth pairing).
Which is the case as far as I understand it. The chromecast is vulnerable until it is configured. The attack just makes reconfiguration trivial because there's no physical intervention required.
The promise of having virgin subordinates in the afterlife is not a traditional Islamic belief.
Oh, are you one of those people who reads the Onion and is outraged at how factually incorrect their articles are? I'm sorry... For the record, I don't think there's a JihadBot 3000 prototype either. So don't spread that as truth either...
Even suicide bombers are being rendered useless.
It's a matter of cost-cutting. Those virgins every holy warrior gets in the end cost a lot of money and aren't really contributing much to the cause themselves. The holy warriors themselves could unionize, but their union membership is rather short lived by nature. Aside from the membership problems, what exactly would they do? Threaten to blow themselves up? I'd explain into detail on the soon to be introduced JihadBot 3000, but the projects development costs have gone through the roof, and the prototypes have all blown up for some reason.
Pardon my stereotyping...
today's rising star could quite easily be in tomorrow's dustbin
Well, at some point Perl was a rising star...
No matter what you're going to pick, it won't stand the test of time in the end.
Kidding aside, look for a set of qualities in whatever language/framework you want to use:
I know that it's probably generic bullshit you're getting from me, but you're going to get a thousand answers all screaming at once "Pyramid" "Django" "CakePHP" "CodeIgniter" and what not and unless you take a look at the languages and frameworks and see what people are / have been building with it you'll be none the wiser. Pick something you see yourself maintaining without pulling out all of your hair in the next couple of years.
I moderated in this article, but this is something that I'd like to talk about for a bit, even if only anecdotal...
Perl 5 is still charging full steam ahead in every sysadmin group I've been around. I know there are python advocates out there, but I have only encountered ONE major IT shop that is completely (or nearly so) python driven (and it happens to be Guido's employer -- hardly a good example)
Over the past 8 years my own usage of Perl in writing code has declined to zero. There has been a mentality change over the years in the shop I work in, and where we used to grab for Perl by default as a quick'n'dirty duct-tape & MacGuyver language, we now exclusively rely on Python. I think there are several reasons for this shift.
The most prominent one to me personally is that other languages have adopted CPAN-like repositories. I don't know about the statistics of numbers of modules, active development, number of commits, etc etc, and put bluntly I really don't care. Although these statistics are interesting into disseminating how active a language is to its developers, to me as a user of the language it only matters if a module is maintained and does what its supposed to do. The thing is, for most of the things I used to use Perl modules for, I now use Python modules, and can say "Well, it's good enough".
Our development teams composition has also changed. A lot of our older generation of programmers/admins have retired or switched jobs, and a lot of younger people were hired to replace them. The younger generation is definitely more familiar with Python, Ruby and other scripting languages than it is with Perl. The incentive for learning Perl has become a lot smaller. Perl was the de facto language for many when writing a CGI script, but then RoR and AJAX happened. While over time Perl adapted (think Catalyst and Dancer) other languages have adapted as well. Look at all the wsgi applications and frameworks in Python.
Our investment in Perl itself was more of the kind where we used a set of scripts to change data from format A to B at which point our Java and/or C++ code takes over, or some tools to deal with our logs, etc. The switch to Python for these tools was gradual (but quick) process, and we found ourselves not looking back. I can't really say that we were/are heavily invested in Perl or Python, but for day to day usage Python has completely taken over. Who knows where we end up in another 8 years from now?
Lastly, if you were to go around our shop, asking people what's new about Python 3 you'll get pretty much right answers. If you go around our shop asking people what's happening with Perl 6, you will get a blank stare. I remember clearly how Perl 6 was going to become the best thing since butter on toast, ... There was general excitement about it all, and then there was a whole load of ... well... nothing. We're 11-12 years further and there's still no sign of Perl 6. What the hell happened there?
Perl has only been dominant in the sysadmin space for less than 15 years ... I wouldn't be surprised if it lasts at least another 10 more.
I don't doubt that Perl will be around for a whole lot longer. It has assembled a group of dedicated die-hard users and developers over the years, and in general it has a great community. There are older, more horrible languages that are still alive today, so I doubt Perl will be gone anytime soon.
However, while my entire post is anecdotal, I do think the Perl community is deluding itself a bit. The talk in the video (I actually listened to it in the background while working on something) mentions a lot of statistics that are interesting to the Perl developers and maintainers, but are hardly and indicator of usage or adoption. The more interesting part of the statistical talk was about the general decline of jobs available for scripting languages in favor of newer technologies, but even those statistics in general don't speak much about usage and adoption.
FWIW, may Perl be around a long long time. Having more tools at your disposal is never a bad thing.
So how would you redesign this aspect of the user interface of, say, the GNU Image Manipulation Program?
Please, let's not mention Gimp and UI in the same sentence unless you're looking for an internet fight.
At the request of the international community they'll stop sticking harpoons in whales, but the request didn't mention anything about nuking the whales.
I was more thinking about starting postgres before the server that uses that DB to store its stuff.
Allow to go off on a tangent here, but most of the setups I deal with keep databases and webservers on separate machines. Today we've got virtual machines coming out of our collective asses so even developers start separating their services from each other. What you're talking about is dependencies and how to deal with failure of a service. That goes far beyond the scope of what systemd can provide, since it's so cheap and easy to run stuff on different (virtual) machines these days. However, I realize that you're using this as an example, so I won't really press on the matter other than that this is the poorest example you can choose.
But it does speak to part of the problem. All I continuously hear about systemd as the greatest advantage is solving the "complex boot order" dependency problem, parallelizing boot scripts and decreasing boot-time. To me, as a sysadmin: I DON'T care. I'm pretty sure that 90% of the servers I have running take a longer time in POST than they do in booting. If I reboot something, I'm taking it OFFLINE. I'm not sitting there crossing my fingers "Please come up quickly", but I've got a failover setup and another machine has taken over before the server is rebooting. And "complex boot order" really? Is that really that big of a concern? I really hope you don't have to manage 500+ servers then, because you'll be in for a surprise on complexity.
This brings me to interesting questions that I hear nobody talk about. If you're doing failover type of things, you're bound to end up with heartbeat/corosync/... + pacemaker & co. As a sysadmin, for me those things are extremely important. Last time I checked (and granted, that was a while ago), none of these actually had a proper way to deal with the impact of systemd. I'm sure that the people behind the various failover solutions are working on it, but last time I checked I saw very little in official documentation, and only the occasional headscratching on mailinglists.
To me, systemd presents quite the challenge, with consequences even outside of the technical side of things. For a while I'm going to end up in a mixed environment, forced to write two sets of operational procedures, disaster recovery scenarios, etc etc. I'm going to have to retrain people on how to read system logs, have to deal with systemd's quircks (no offence, all software has its peculiarities, and so will systemd), and will probably have to completely rethink how we do failover scenarios. And all I gain, what I'm really interested in is... cgroups...
Projectors, usb disks and sticks, whatever ... Those things have no place in a serverroom, and I don't care about it. And let's be frank, nobody in a corporate environment gives a shit about linux on the desktop. The few companies that I've been at that have linux on their desktop are small businesses with a near complete tech workforce.
Why would you want to convert rich information into a string and shove it down a pipe before you make use of it?
I think I know the answer to that question. Some environments need to archive their logs, for a long long time. Some things are more complex than a "simple" local syslog setup, and with that complexity comes a set of tools that often organically grows over the years or follows certain administrative procedures inside a company. In such environments, change is a difficult process, not because of people but because of corporate inertia and red tape bullshit. And it's great that systemd provides a syslog fallback for us text-junkies, at the very least it buys time...
The other side of the medal however is, nobody is really having a problem with text logfiles. The examples I continuously see are so contrived, or focussed on "the linux newbie" that it just reeks of a developer looking for something to do. My biggest frustration with lo
But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look.
No you don't. You get plenty of feedback on the beta site in the initial announcement of it coming online, and for the most part the comments were ignored. Ever since the beta came online, there's been people mocking it.
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready.
Saying it's not ready is the understatement of the year so far. The comment section is on fire so far, and this is actually the first time that I've seen people spend their modpoints to promote offtopic discussion of this nature on this scale.
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What? Is this the website equivalent of "We want the Call of Duty audience" ? This statement right here, goes to show how much you're out of touch with your core audience: News for NERDS... Slashdot will never be reddit, or some fancy ITBiz magazine. Reddit already exists and won't be going anywhere, and the ITBiz audience doesn't give a shit about this place since it's just another site that scrapes headlines from other places.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, ever since the advent of SlashBIcurious and the other nonsense you've been trying to push. Your "core audience" has been telling you this for quite a while now, but you've adamantly refused to listen, stuck your fingers in your ears and gone ahead as if nothing was wrong. And now you're surprised the comments section is ablaze?
We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories.
Experimenting with an established platform can come at a high cost. I don't mind the changes to the layout, and I don't give a damn that you want to polish the look, but in all fairness you broke the damn commenting system. It's the only thing that keeps this place worth visiting. Beta just makes we want to look for another home.
If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that.
Oh fuck off... You know when people start talking about communication? It's the excuse the network engineer makes to the IT Coordinator/Manager when his network melted while users have been making tickets about problems for weeks. It's the pseudo-managers way of saying "I'm not aware of any issues" despite his mailbox being a festering pit of complaints and misery.
You communicated well enough. You communicated when the beta came online, and you get plenty of feedback which you chose to ignore. Now you've got 25% of users getting an iteration of your shitty beta, and boy oh boy is your comment section a cesspool of complaints right now. And the message you send now is obvious: "It's coming, wether you like it or not. Suck it.". Yeah, the art of communicating is not lost on you guys at all.
And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive.
That's like the time I heard someone from management say "In hindsight, I feel that despite the negative outcome I've made the correct choice. We'll just have to adapt and move on".
Well, guess what... We'll adapt, and move on. Enjoy turning slashdot into ITBizz2.0 or whatever pipe dream you guys at Dice have.
We're observing it some 12 million years after the fact. That hardly qualifies as "new".
Slashdot always lags behind the facts a few days, or more...