Google thought my entire office was located in Mexico a couple months ago, so all my Google services were in Spanish. The situation seemed to resolve itself just as mysteriously as it started. I was speculating that someone was doing a BGP attack to reroute our usual traffic through Mexico so they could phish all our passwords or something.
How big a deal is it, really, if they are? If they were and you actually wanted people to use your API, you'd just need to publish it under a permissive license. Otherwise it'd be unlikely to ever gain any traction. Also, if an API can be copyrighted, would that make everything implemented with that API a derivative work? If that were the case, I'm pretty sure AT&T would own the copyright on all computer code for the past 4 decades. Even Windows has some UNIX heritage. The idea of Bell Labs trying to actually assert that copyright is amusing enough that I kind of hope the Supreme Court rules that way.
If you put them in geosynchronous, you're stuck trying to pull head shots off with 2 second ping times. Doesn't matter how good your auto-aim is, that's just not going to work. If you put them lower, you'd need a satellite-tracking antenna. Actually you'd probably want at least TWO satellite-tracking antennas and you'd have to dick around with the protocol so that acquiring a new bird when the old one goes behind the horizon doesn't screw up that head shot you're lining up. Long story short, satellite internet is going to screw up your head shots, and that's why Google is laying fiber instead of launching satellites. OK, they're launching satellites TOO, just not for that.
I bet you could put together a software satellite simulator to test your design for significantly less than what it'd cost to launch one satellite. The math to describe an orbit isn't particularly hard -- it's basically just trig. Put a couple dozen fake birds in fake orbit, set up your fake antennas on the ground and start pushing fake packets between them. No sense in building a rocket if that tells you it's not going to work.
The hack is pretty much just putting the DVD in the slot and booting to it. It's just another OS install. Pretty sure you could do it with a USB memory stick as well. It pretty much comes down to personal preference, doesn't it? I've been using Linux since the mid 90's and UNIX since the late 80's. I work exclusively with free software and never purchased any OSX software. Things both Unixy and Javay always felt like second-class citizens on OSX -- directories were laid out in odd places, upgrading packages was clunky, getting X11 working felt awkward, trying to update pre-installed UNIX applications was a pain and so forth. I was maintaining this additional layer that I wasn't really using and which was getting in my way. So I decided to reformat the system over to Ubuntu.
Several of my complaints at that time revolved around Java updates for the system. I was doing a lot of Java development at the time and running on Apple software, the only game in town for Java updates was Apple and they just weren't doing them. Since then my attitude toward Java has shifted from mercenary ambivalence to outright hatred and that wouldn't really be an issue anymore. But the fact of the matter is that I'll always just feel most comfortable on a Linux system anyway.
The surface pro looks like it'd be a halfway decent little machine once you get done wiping windows and installed Ubuntu on it. And Ubunutu looks like it'd be a halfway decent OS once you got done wiping Unity and install Enlightenment on it. I've been keeping an eye out for a possible replacement for an aging 17" powerbook, which was also a pretty decent machine once you got done wiping OSX and installed Ubuntu on it. I'd mostly be previewing videos from a GoPro, processing them minimally with Kdenlive, and uploading them to youtube. It would be nice to have a few more gigabytes of storage than the current round of tablets offer, as less than a couple hundred gigabytes starts to get cramped awfully fast when you're pushing video around like that, but I wouldn't be out more than a week or so at a time and could just sync up with a file server at the house with git annex whenever I'm home.
I did a contract gig at Ericsson for about a year. As a white male citizen of the USA, I was in the minority in that company fir the first time in a 30 year career and it was awesome! That year I had several folks from the office over for Thanksgiving -- we had several people working contracts from overseas so they didn't have anywhere particularly else to go and a couple of them had never attended a Thanksgiving feast before. That felt very much like how people should get along -- just hanging out and having a good time without regard for nationality or sex. The office environment was much the same. It never felt like anyone was going out of the way to make anyone else feel like they fit in, but everyone just fit in. If your only experience is with US companies and their environment makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you should try a European one!
My last review went kind of like this. My manager didn't really understand what I did, had no idea how well I'd accomplished my goals and told me outright that most of the department was getting an "average" review to insure that one guy in the department would get a raise that year. That guy left about a month later. My "this is a good company" score for them went down about 80% that day.
Well, yeah, I was being vague there. At some point we decide that somewhere in the universe is where the reference time should be measured. But if we put it in some lumpy gravity well, it'd probably lead to interstellar strife in a couple thousand years. Really, anywhere in the solar system is probably "Bad". Too many things distorting the space-time. I suppose you could put a few clocks around and average them. I think that's what they do with the current ones.
Add to the mix a huge bunch of incredibly low quality recruiters who swarm any resume update on the job boards. These can be Indian recruiters trying to find a body to fill a position to outright scams trying to convince you to buy something up front for a job opportunity, or just criminals looking to steal your identity. On the employer side, so many candidates are playing buzzword bingo to try to get through HR that it's impossible to identify a qualified candidate by looking at anyone's resume. It's a huge waste of time for everyone.
Basically the job boards are now so useless that your best bet is to start networking in-person with as many local companies as you can. I've already run across some companies that are starting to realize this and host technology meet-ups. While this isn't the best state of affairs, at the very least we might be able to start flushing out some useless HR staff that make it impossible to even interview remotely qualified employees. It'd be funny if this entire process goes full circle and we end up with job postings in classified sections of local papers. That would probably be better than what we have now.
Would they actually be able to detect the change in the flow of the time with just one clock, or would they need to have a reference clock somewhere and measure another clock relative to it? And if so, where do you keep the reference? Where in the universe is it the "correct" time?
I see the second skydiving video I uploaded yesterday has the option for 1080p60. The first one I uploaded that same day has 1080 but not 60 fps, though I processed it the same way (kdenlive on ubuntu.) The video does look a lot closer to the original GoPro footage than previous videos I've uploaded to youtube. I'm not sure if they'd enable it for a 15 minute high pull video where I'm just flying around looking at scenery. A friend of mine who's a fellow skydiver was complaining about video quality on youtube and looking around for another site to host his video on. At the time, Dailymotion had much better overall video quality but did seem to lose some frames here and there.
Of course, the new GoPro can record in 4K, so if you're a professional who gets more than a couple hundred hits on any given video, you're probably still better off hosting and serving your own video. Then you wouldn't need to worry about your service's processing mangling your video, or them crapping ads all over it.
No human endeavor is risk free. But it's OK to have that attitude. You'd have just been one of the guys who stayed home when Columbus set sail for the new world. Sure there's a lot of difference between tooling around in a sail boat and setting sail for a new world, but you don't just one day wake up and decide to build a ship that can take you and several dozen passengers to a new world. At some point before you did that, some rich guy would have built a sailboat.
Also: all the guys who stayed home the day Columbus set sail for the new world are dead now, too.
Hopefully Franklin's takeway from this is that one should never make suggestions ironically because some incompetent twit will think it's a good idea and implement it.
Your solution doesn't go far enough! We should all switch to UNIX epoch time and refer to time in seconds from Midnight, Jan 1, 1970, GMT. I know POSIX specifies UTC, but they don't track leap seconds so they're just confusing everyone and can therefore fuck right off. Then at last there will be no relationship to the celestial spheres that drove the creation of Time to begin with! If you really need your antique ("Wahh how do I know when lunch time is?") you can just modulo the time by 86400 to get the number of seconds since midnight, divide your longitude by 15, multiply that by 3600 and add the result to the number of seconds since midnight and if you're somewhere close to 43200, you're getting close to lunch time. Or ask Apple to put that number under the main time display on your smart watch. Der!
I actually ran across a story about it on Google news that tied the mailing to the Democratic party. They're apparently targeting registered Democrats that they consider to be reliably Democratic voters who are not so reliable about getting out to vote. I reckon they're probably desperate to get out the vote, which is key to them holding the Senate this year. There was some concern the tactic could backfire. This is clearly a far too simplistic tactic for the Republicans. They would have just sent out a vaguely threatening letter, and then blamed the Democrats (heh heh heh.)
Of course, now we know how Timothy*cough* I mean... An "Anonymous Reader" leans in the elections, don't we?
I worked on testing with Jmeter a while back and Hypercard sounds pretty similar to it. It basically just holds a tree of mementos, which it serializes to XML for storage. They've more or less implemented an entire visual programming language with branching and looping, database and web page access. It's also easy enough to add new functionality to it by implementing a new java class.
The problems are that all variables are global and there's not a good way to create a function for it. It's not designed as a visual programming language but as a simple way to put together a bunch of simple tests that don't need to reuse a lot between them. If you want to share the code that logs into your web page every time, the easiest way to do that is cut and paste. Then you have to change 80 copies of it if you ever update that code. They were working on improving that situation last time I looked at it. You wouldn't ever want to use it to accomplish work in a production environment, but you probably would never want to use Hypercard to accomplish work in a production environment. Some people probably DID do that, but you wouldn't want to.
The problem with creating something like Hypercard is that it's very hard to hit that sweet spot where it's easy enough for non-programmers to use while being powerful (and secure) enough to be useful. Whenever people get their hands on something like that, they tend to start working around its deficiencies to accomplish their goals. You end up spending more time working around the deficiencies in the environment than you would have if you'd just written the application in a real programming language to begin with. There was quite a lot of THAT going on in the late 80s early 90s, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Google thought my entire office was located in Mexico a couple months ago, so all my Google services were in Spanish. The situation seemed to resolve itself just as mysteriously as it started. I was speculating that someone was doing a BGP attack to reroute our usual traffic through Mexico so they could phish all our passwords or something.
That I can't quite put my finger on. I'm pretty sure it means our society is broken.
*points to the next story* Stupid virus
When the walls fell
How big a deal is it, really, if they are? If they were and you actually wanted people to use your API, you'd just need to publish it under a permissive license. Otherwise it'd be unlikely to ever gain any traction. Also, if an API can be copyrighted, would that make everything implemented with that API a derivative work? If that were the case, I'm pretty sure AT&T would own the copyright on all computer code for the past 4 decades. Even Windows has some UNIX heritage. The idea of Bell Labs trying to actually assert that copyright is amusing enough that I kind of hope the Supreme Court rules that way.
I bet you could put together a software satellite simulator to test your design for significantly less than what it'd cost to launch one satellite. The math to describe an orbit isn't particularly hard -- it's basically just trig. Put a couple dozen fake birds in fake orbit, set up your fake antennas on the ground and start pushing fake packets between them. No sense in building a rocket if that tells you it's not going to work.
To solve this problem we should be more accepting of solutions we don't like? Nah, I don't buy it!
Several of my complaints at that time revolved around Java updates for the system. I was doing a lot of Java development at the time and running on Apple software, the only game in town for Java updates was Apple and they just weren't doing them. Since then my attitude toward Java has shifted from mercenary ambivalence to outright hatred and that wouldn't really be an issue anymore. But the fact of the matter is that I'll always just feel most comfortable on a Linux system anyway.
The surface pro looks like it'd be a halfway decent little machine once you get done wiping windows and installed Ubuntu on it. And Ubunutu looks like it'd be a halfway decent OS once you got done wiping Unity and install Enlightenment on it. I've been keeping an eye out for a possible replacement for an aging 17" powerbook, which was also a pretty decent machine once you got done wiping OSX and installed Ubuntu on it. I'd mostly be previewing videos from a GoPro, processing them minimally with Kdenlive, and uploading them to youtube. It would be nice to have a few more gigabytes of storage than the current round of tablets offer, as less than a couple hundred gigabytes starts to get cramped awfully fast when you're pushing video around like that, but I wouldn't be out more than a week or so at a time and could just sync up with a file server at the house with git annex whenever I'm home.
Baby I am SO ready to plug my brain directly into the Internet!
I did a contract gig at Ericsson for about a year. As a white male citizen of the USA, I was in the minority in that company fir the first time in a 30 year career and it was awesome! That year I had several folks from the office over for Thanksgiving -- we had several people working contracts from overseas so they didn't have anywhere particularly else to go and a couple of them had never attended a Thanksgiving feast before. That felt very much like how people should get along -- just hanging out and having a good time without regard for nationality or sex. The office environment was much the same. It never felt like anyone was going out of the way to make anyone else feel like they fit in, but everyone just fit in. If your only experience is with US companies and their environment makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you should try a European one!
My last review went kind of like this. My manager didn't really understand what I did, had no idea how well I'd accomplished my goals and told me outright that most of the department was getting an "average" review to insure that one guy in the department would get a raise that year. That guy left about a month later. My "this is a good company" score for them went down about 80% that day.
You can't make a whooshing sound without air resistance! I make a very nice whooshing sound at 130-145 mph!
The people who get the best jobs are the people who are great at schmoozing. You're just going to have to start the process earlier now.
Well, yeah, I was being vague there. At some point we decide that somewhere in the universe is where the reference time should be measured. But if we put it in some lumpy gravity well, it'd probably lead to interstellar strife in a couple thousand years. Really, anywhere in the solar system is probably "Bad". Too many things distorting the space-time. I suppose you could put a few clocks around and average them. I think that's what they do with the current ones.
Basically the job boards are now so useless that your best bet is to start networking in-person with as many local companies as you can. I've already run across some companies that are starting to realize this and host technology meet-ups. While this isn't the best state of affairs, at the very least we might be able to start flushing out some useless HR staff that make it impossible to even interview remotely qualified employees. It'd be funny if this entire process goes full circle and we end up with job postings in classified sections of local papers. That would probably be better than what we have now.
Would they actually be able to detect the change in the flow of the time with just one clock, or would they need to have a reference clock somewhere and measure another clock relative to it? And if so, where do you keep the reference? Where in the universe is it the "correct" time?
Of course, the new GoPro can record in 4K, so if you're a professional who gets more than a couple hundred hits on any given video, you're probably still better off hosting and serving your own video. Then you wouldn't need to worry about your service's processing mangling your video, or them crapping ads all over it.
Everyone hates the lizards, but if you don't vote the wrong lizard might get in.
Also: all the guys who stayed home the day Columbus set sail for the new world are dead now, too.
Having to get out of bed and go to work sucks. Switching the time back and forth is just a reminder that this is necessary.
Hopefully Franklin's takeway from this is that one should never make suggestions ironically because some incompetent twit will think it's a good idea and implement it.
Your solution doesn't go far enough! We should all switch to UNIX epoch time and refer to time in seconds from Midnight, Jan 1, 1970, GMT. I know POSIX specifies UTC, but they don't track leap seconds so they're just confusing everyone and can therefore fuck right off. Then at last there will be no relationship to the celestial spheres that drove the creation of Time to begin with! If you really need your antique ("Wahh how do I know when lunch time is?") you can just modulo the time by 86400 to get the number of seconds since midnight, divide your longitude by 15, multiply that by 3600 and add the result to the number of seconds since midnight and if you're somewhere close to 43200, you're getting close to lunch time. Or ask Apple to put that number under the main time display on your smart watch. Der!
Of course, now we know how Timothy*cough* I mean... An "Anonymous Reader" leans in the elections, don't we?
The problems are that all variables are global and there's not a good way to create a function for it. It's not designed as a visual programming language but as a simple way to put together a bunch of simple tests that don't need to reuse a lot between them. If you want to share the code that logs into your web page every time, the easiest way to do that is cut and paste. Then you have to change 80 copies of it if you ever update that code. They were working on improving that situation last time I looked at it. You wouldn't ever want to use it to accomplish work in a production environment, but you probably would never want to use Hypercard to accomplish work in a production environment. Some people probably DID do that, but you wouldn't want to.
The problem with creating something like Hypercard is that it's very hard to hit that sweet spot where it's easy enough for non-programmers to use while being powerful (and secure) enough to be useful. Whenever people get their hands on something like that, they tend to start working around its deficiencies to accomplish their goals. You end up spending more time working around the deficiencies in the environment than you would have if you'd just written the application in a real programming language to begin with. There was quite a lot of THAT going on in the late 80s early 90s, too.