There has never been a "good" show about being an IT worker. Nor about being a doctor, cop, president, soldier, spy, lawyer, detective, scientist or any other job that comes to mind. Even the "reality" shows are completely artificial.
They are all depicted as disneyfied caricatures, since all jobs are tedious, unimaginative and dull. But people don't want realism on TV - that is what real life is for. TV only ever offers the concentrated, accelerated, no natural ingredients, version of "life" in whatever way it claims to reflect it.
If anyone thinks TV offers a "window" on peoples' lives, they are either being obtuse or have no actual clue.
Nobody cares what your code does. Don't even try to explain the nuts'n'bolts. You would be bored stiff if other people recounted every intricate detail of what they do.
If you can't suppress the urge to talk "geek" over the holidays (and really: you should - it's only a job, it says nothing about you as a person and that is what your family and real friends care about) then express your work in terms of how you have made things better. Although you won't have changed the world and your total contribution to anyone's life is certain to be insignificant, at least try to contextualise it in terms that other people can relate to.
So try things like "I spent the past 6 months saving the company $1Mill a year by automating something" or "I made it easier / harder for our government to spy on its citizens. Or "I made the falling snow in [ some obscure little video game ] look slightly more realistic.
If nothing else, this should give you some humility and remind you that in the overall scheme of things your work really doesn't mean much.
I have been able to order contact lenses on the internet using whatever prescription I please for well over 10 years. Spectacles too.
So what?
It is convenient and cheaper. I don't need a new optical prescription. Every time I do get an eye test, the numbers are pretty much always the same. And I have little doubt that the factory that churns out glasses or contact lenses by the million to internet customers is no different from the one that supplies the "full fat" high-street stores at several times the price.
Linux (and before that: UNIX) has always had a "look how clever I am, writing all this obscure code" mentality. Since not too long after its inception, complexity - as a way of displaying the developers' prowess - has always been favoured over simplicity and elegance.
Whether you look at systemd, or the print subsystem or emacs or sendmail. They are all over-complex and if not intended to freeze-out users without the time, inclination or ability to grok them, then to achieve this through bad design which leads to complicated implementations.
Good design is difficult. Too hard for most coders. And it does seem that with kernel development and the systems that surround it, most of the design decisions are simply left up to the people writing the code to make, themselves. While this is standard procedure for a teenager sitting in a darkened bedroom, knocking out.... code, it is strictly amateur-hour stuff. You would have hoped that the linux community would have moved past that in these last 30 years.
that'd be a pretty big black eye for those other space programs with ostensibly larger budgets, authority and reach.
Not really. Since the 1960's the goal of government space programmes has never been to get more people / things into space. (excluding of course things)
It has been a political tool to disburse money. Nothing more. If things or people actually got into space on a government rocket - well, that was nice. But it was purely incidental.
SpaceX is succeeding because it is the first entity - probably ever - to have had a commercial interest in pushing the boundaries. in 60 years (and 2 wars) the aircraft industry went from wooden biplanes to Jumbo jets. In the same number of years, the government space programme went from single use rockets to..... nothing better.
In the collision's wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation
So the scientists have "solved" half of their research questions.
If I was an astrophysicist I would be rather worried about my future job prospects at that announcement. Though I would be more concerned with the sloppy science behind doing a single experiment and assuming that every next time it repeats, the results will be the same.
I would be fervently hoping that the next time there is a neutron star collision, the data that comes in is very, very, different. Thus showing that all this conjecture means we don't really understand those "major questions", after all. Predictable science is so very dull.
We are told there are about 12 million BTC in existence. Although they weren't all bought for the current going rate of around $10k, let's make that assumption since they will probably rise further in value.
That means that BTC is "worth" about $120 Bn and it's a reasonable assumption that most of that value has come from criminals. So, at some time it wouldn't be beyond belief for someone with the technical knowledge, backing and infrastructure to either hack it or destroy it completely. This would be a modern day equivalent of the USA's "war on drugs".
It would reduce the amount of underworld money in circulation drastically. Hopefully this would have a large detrimental effect on major criminals' ability to fund their activities. If a few speculators get to "take a bath", well: that might not be such a bad thing, either!
A major cost in the lifetime ownership of any car is the fuel it burns. 400,000km at 5 litres per 100km comes to 20,000 litres - well over €20,000 much more than £20,000 and I haven't a clue what it is in other currencies.
And most of that is tax. I cannot see governments anywhere being happy to lose that revenue when every vehicle on the road is electric. So it seems to me to be inevitable that sooner or later the electricity used to recharge EVs will become the subject of an additional level of taxation. Whether that is on the power itself, an annual tax on the vehicle (based on mileage) or some other levy.
So to suggest that the cost comparison made today, under the financial conditions that presently apply, is any reason to make a decision for anything but the near future makes no sense.
What WILL make a difference is when cars become autonomous. I can see a very fast transition from petrol driven to electric AVs. Purely because the insurance premiums on a human driver will become astronomical.
thieves tend to carry their cellphones with them to work. When they use their phones on the job, police find it easier to do their jobs. They can get cellphone tower records that help place suspects in the vicinity of crimes
Or not.
Just give your cellphone to a "friend" and have them make a few calls from somewhere a long way from where you are "working". Alibi established!
Even if it doesn't hold up, it could remove you from the list of "usual suspects" for at least the first phase. And you never know, the cops might stitch up someone else for your crimes. So for the small inconvenience (unless you like taking selfies as you break in) of laying a false trail, you'd have to think that criminals would already be doing this. I suppose that since cell tower data is regularly used, there are many very stupid criminals out there.
Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.
Performing a life-saving (or avoiding life-shortening) relocation simply on the basis of whether it is "cost-effective" is a disgraceful way for a government or corporation to behave.
Apart from anything else, who would trust a government (even less: a company) to perform that life-long remediation? To keep investing in an area long after the voters have forgotten what happened there. And who is to say that the remediation would not have effects: either inconvenience, suffering or grief for those concerned.
And in any case. We are told that prevention is better then cure
That newspaper has a long and proud history of representing men in a "certain way". They are quite open about their stance and do not feel the need to balance their reports, nor to apologise for it.
While they frequently campaign about the "injustices" of men-dominated professions such as I.T. they are quite blind to the imbalance in woman-dominated professions such as nursing and teaching.
It seems to be their "thing" to pursue a female readership and they don't see any harm in denigrating men if that helps achieve that goal. (Though you'd think that antagonising half the potential audience wouldn't be the brightest move, commercially.)
It seems to me that having two of the same type of technology does not do much to improve the overall safety factor. There are still systemic issues which lead to the possibility of both types of biological "kill switch" from operating.
What the researchers should be considering is a diversity of approaches to controlling rogue microbes: one biological and some other sort - physical, electrical, chemical, time-dependent. So if there was an "unknown unknown" that prevented successful killing, there was a fallback option that did not depend on any of the common factors that stopped the original (failed) system from doing what it should have.
Why in all the world would you put 1) - 3) in a release note?
Because you can never be sure that any piece of documentation won't be someone's first exposure to a piece of software. So for the sake of a few lines of text there is no reason to make the note user-hostile.
And given that release notes will be popular targets for searches, and their recent release will push them up search rankings it is not surprising when someone who has heard of an application and searches for it, find this first of all.
And finally: when did a little bit or relevant information ever hurt an end user? You add this stuff because there is never a good reason not to include it in EVERY document concerning a software release.
Unfortunately, most release notes are hum drum and uninformative: "bug fixes, performance improvements." That may be accurate, but isn't useful
Yes - nobody cares, except the geek who wrote the stuff and possibly their mother.
A well-written release note should contain the following:
1.) A single sentence that describes what the software does. No acronyms. Just a functional "This app is a music player for.... "
2.) What platforms it works on. What other stuff is required for it to run
3.) What it does that is different from all the other applications in the same class
4.) What functional changes and new features make this version worth updating to
5.) Any killer bugs that have been fixed in this version
If the author cannot think of a short piece of text that fulfills any of those 5 categories, there is probably no reason for making this release. And even less for anyone to download it,.
Zapata estimates that [ the cost of a SpaceX crew deployment ] its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Sounds like it's time to sell-off NASA's space operations (or maybe just the non-exploration parts) to SpaceX.
They seem to be doing a much better job of it. More innovative, cheaper, faster turnarounds. Is there really any reason for NASA to do anything in LEO any more?
Many times (specifically in online newspapers) the introductory picture is used to say what would be completely unacceptable in the text.
So if your content is to appear in a biased, bigoted, populist, publication (I realise that doesn't narrow the field very much) then having a face of a member of whichever group you wish your readers to associate with whatever the article is about, speaks volumes that you couldn't possibly put into words.
It's like the music in a film's sound track. It "tells" us when we should feel sad. it programmes us to expect danger. It builds up tension, fear, light-heartedness. So the pictures do the same for an article.
For newspapers and corporations that feel they are too "enlightened" to specifically mention the race, gender, creed or age of someone - then a photo of them does the job without them dirtying their hands with a specific -ism.
And hopefully, the audience won't notice when one of those images just happens to be an advertisement!
If North Korea, a country of 25 million people - most of them scraping a living from subsistence farming - can hack american defence contractors and government facillities, then it is certain that any other country with a desire to, could do the same.
The only reason we do not hear of all those other countries hacking the US defence systems is either because they don't want to, or because they are better at it (than N.K.) and cover their tracks.
Rather than thinking that NK represents some sort of technological elite, intent on harming the USA, the government should remember that they are the least capable "power" trying to do this. So instead of defending against them and then thinking that is sufficient, a responsible attitude would be to understand that every other government is doing the same - but without getting caught.
We seem to have lots of independent, confusing, unconnected pieces. All of which appear to be separate and independent.
But that could easily because we can't see the "big picture". Once we develop an understanding of all the laws of the physical world, then it could be that there is inevitably only one way they could all be fitted together. There would be no need for an alien intelligence or "higher being" to have created them
The only question that would arise would be: who or what is the picture about?
If you collect every predictive scientific paper published this year and fast-forward 50 years, a proportion of them will turn out to be correct, simply due to sheer dumb luck.
However, there is no way of knowing now, in 2017, which ones will be correct. Or which ones will be right for the wrong reasons. Neither can we say today which ones look plausible but have missed an important point, could not possibly have foreseen something unimaginable that hasn't happened of just happen to have lucked out and pick the few truly significant causes / relationships / equations out of the mass of conflicting opinions circulating at present.
A 2 month break is just long enough for me to forget about my time "invested" in the show.
And that's the problem. In 2 months it will need all the marketing of a new show. Whereas people who used to watch it will have had enough time to get used to not watching it and will be unlikely to miss it particularly.
The only way I can see this break "saving" the show is if they pull a stunt like fast-forwarding several months or a year and re-boot.
Local journalism is just too expensive. it probably always has been, but the subsidies it got from advertising reduced the price charged to readers to an acceptable level.
But now that the advertising revenue has shriveled the public do not appear to be willing to pay to read about the local flower show, a traffic accident, what the Mayor did last week or who married whom. If you were involved in any local event, you probably already know about it. If you weren't you probably don't care - and aren't willing to pay to find out about it.
Independent experts say the real numbers are far higher.
Well, yes. Of course.
Signing up is free. None of the information provided can be validated. There is nothing to connect an account to an actual, living person (presidents excluded).
All those websites that force you to sign up with a FB or twitter account - they all get different, new, accounts so as not to get "interbreeding" between sites that have no business knowing about each other.
While apps like Whatsapp are actually useful and don't ask for anything (though obviously it has a phone number, and a name that may or may not be authentic), none of the social media websites provide anything of value, yet abuse what data they are given. So they don't get any. I would suggest that at least the top half of all their users: those people who don't refer to the internet as "wifi", have just one single email account or have passwords in the top 20 most easily cracked, understand this and have nothing much that identifies them on social media.
For the rest, that's what happens when you dabble in things you don't understand.
But at least the effects aren't as severe as ignorantly investing in that "sure thing" stock.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't even bring myself to repeat it!
Has there ever been a good show about geeks
There has never been a "good" show about being an IT worker. Nor about being a doctor, cop, president, soldier, spy, lawyer, detective, scientist or any other job that comes to mind. Even the "reality" shows are completely artificial.
They are all depicted as disneyfied caricatures, since all jobs are tedious, unimaginative and dull. But people don't want realism on TV - that is what real life is for. TV only ever offers the concentrated, accelerated, no natural ingredients, version of "life" in whatever way it claims to reflect it.
If anyone thinks TV offers a "window" on peoples' lives, they are either being obtuse or have no actual clue.
If you can't suppress the urge to talk "geek" over the holidays (and really: you should - it's only a job, it says nothing about you as a person and that is what your family and real friends care about) then express your work in terms of how you have made things better. Although you won't have changed the world and your total contribution to anyone's life is certain to be insignificant, at least try to contextualise it in terms that other people can relate to.
So try things like "I spent the past 6 months saving the company $1Mill a year by automating something" or "I made it easier / harder for our government to spy on its citizens. Or "I made the falling snow in [ some obscure little video game ] look slightly more realistic.
If nothing else, this should give you some humility and remind you that in the overall scheme of things your work really doesn't mean much.
Happy christmas!
I have been able to order contact lenses on the internet using whatever prescription I please for well over 10 years. Spectacles too.
So what?
It is convenient and cheaper. I don't need a new optical prescription. Every time I do get an eye test, the numbers are pretty much always the same. And I have little doubt that the factory that churns out glasses or contact lenses by the million to internet customers is no different from the one that supplies the "full fat" high-street stores at several times the price.
Linux (and before that: UNIX) has always had a "look how clever I am, writing all this obscure code" mentality. Since not too long after its inception, complexity - as a way of displaying the developers' prowess - has always been favoured over simplicity and elegance.
Whether you look at systemd, or the print subsystem or emacs or sendmail. They are all over-complex and if not intended to freeze-out users without the time, inclination or ability to grok them, then to achieve this through bad design which leads to complicated implementations.
Good design is difficult. Too hard for most coders. And it does seem that with kernel development and the systems that surround it, most of the design decisions are simply left up to the people writing the code to make, themselves. While this is standard procedure for a teenager sitting in a darkened bedroom, knocking out .... code, it is strictly amateur-hour stuff. You would have hoped that the linux community would have moved past that in these last 30 years.
that'd be a pretty big black eye for those other space programs with ostensibly larger budgets, authority and reach.
Not really. Since the 1960's the goal of government space programmes has never been to get more people / things into space. (excluding of course things)
It has been a political tool to disburse money. Nothing more. If things or people actually got into space on a government rocket - well, that was nice. But it was purely incidental.
SpaceX is succeeding because it is the first entity - probably ever - to have had a commercial interest in pushing the boundaries. in 60 years (and 2 wars) the aircraft industry went from wooden biplanes to Jumbo jets. In the same number of years, the government space programme went from single use rockets to ..... nothing better.
In the collision's wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation
So the scientists have "solved" half of their research questions.
If I was an astrophysicist I would be rather worried about my future job prospects at that announcement. Though I would be more concerned with the sloppy science behind doing a single experiment and assuming that every next time it repeats, the results will be the same.
I would be fervently hoping that the next time there is a neutron star collision, the data that comes in is very, very, different. Thus showing that all this conjecture means we don't really understand those "major questions", after all. Predictable science is so very dull.
We are told there are about 12 million BTC in existence. Although they weren't all bought for the current going rate of around $10k, let's make that assumption since they will probably rise further in value.
That means that BTC is "worth" about $120 Bn and it's a reasonable assumption that most of that value has come from criminals. So, at some time it wouldn't be beyond belief for someone with the technical knowledge, backing and infrastructure to either hack it or destroy it completely. This would be a modern day equivalent of the USA's "war on drugs".
It would reduce the amount of underworld money in circulation drastically. Hopefully this would have a large detrimental effect on major criminals' ability to fund their activities. If a few speculators get to "take a bath", well: that might not be such a bad thing, either!
And most of that is tax. I cannot see governments anywhere being happy to lose that revenue when every vehicle on the road is electric. So it seems to me to be inevitable that sooner or later the electricity used to recharge EVs will become the subject of an additional level of taxation. Whether that is on the power itself, an annual tax on the vehicle (based on mileage) or some other levy.
So to suggest that the cost comparison made today, under the financial conditions that presently apply, is any reason to make a decision for anything but the near future makes no sense.
What WILL make a difference is when cars become autonomous. I can see a very fast transition from petrol driven to electric AVs. Purely because the insurance premiums on a human driver will become astronomical.
thieves tend to carry their cellphones with them to work. When they use their phones on the job, police find it easier to do their jobs. They can get cellphone tower records that help place suspects in the vicinity of crimes
Or not.
Just give your cellphone to a "friend" and have them make a few calls from somewhere a long way from where you are "working". Alibi established!
Even if it doesn't hold up, it could remove you from the list of "usual suspects" for at least the first phase. And you never know, the cops might stitch up someone else for your crimes. So for the small inconvenience (unless you like taking selfies as you break in) of laying a false trail, you'd have to think that criminals would already be doing this. I suppose that since cell tower data is regularly used, there are many very stupid criminals out there.
Remediation should be the watchword for the decision maker, not relocation.
Performing a life-saving (or avoiding life-shortening) relocation simply on the basis of whether it is "cost-effective" is a disgraceful way for a government or corporation to behave.
Apart from anything else, who would trust a government (even less: a company) to perform that life-long remediation? To keep investing in an area long after the voters have forgotten what happened there. And who is to say that the remediation would not have effects: either inconvenience, suffering or grief for those concerned.
And in any case. We are told that prevention is better then cure
While they frequently campaign about the "injustices" of men-dominated professions such as I.T. they are quite blind to the imbalance in woman-dominated professions such as nursing and teaching.
It seems to be their "thing" to pursue a female readership and they don't see any harm in denigrating men if that helps achieve that goal. (Though you'd think that antagonising half the potential audience wouldn't be the brightest move, commercially.)
It seems to me that having two of the same type of technology does not do much to improve the overall safety factor. There are still systemic issues which lead to the possibility of both types of biological "kill switch" from operating.
What the researchers should be considering is a diversity of approaches to controlling rogue microbes: one biological and some other sort - physical, electrical, chemical, time-dependent. So if there was an "unknown unknown" that prevented successful killing, there was a fallback option that did not depend on any of the common factors that stopped the original (failed) system from doing what it should have.
Why in all the world would you put 1) - 3) in a release note?
Because you can never be sure that any piece of documentation won't be someone's first exposure to a piece of software. So for the sake of a few lines of text there is no reason to make the note user-hostile.
And given that release notes will be popular targets for searches, and their recent release will push them up search rankings it is not surprising when someone who has heard of an application and searches for it, find this first of all.
And finally: when did a little bit or relevant information ever hurt an end user? You add this stuff because there is never a good reason not to include it in EVERY document concerning a software release.
Unfortunately, most release notes are hum drum and uninformative: "bug fixes, performance improvements." That may be accurate, but isn't useful
Yes - nobody cares, except the geek who wrote the stuff and possibly their mother.
A well-written release note should contain the following: .... "
1.) A single sentence that describes what the software does. No acronyms. Just a functional "This app is a music player for
2.) What platforms it works on. What other stuff is required for it to run
3.) What it does that is different from all the other applications in the same class
4.) What functional changes and new features make this version worth updating to
5.) Any killer bugs that have been fixed in this version
If the author cannot think of a short piece of text that fulfills any of those 5 categories, there is probably no reason for making this release. And even less for anyone to download it,.
Zapata estimates that [ the cost of a SpaceX crew deployment ] its only 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost the government.
Sounds like it's time to sell-off NASA's space operations (or maybe just the non-exploration parts) to SpaceX.
They seem to be doing a much better job of it. More innovative, cheaper, faster turnarounds. Is there really any reason for NASA to do anything in LEO any more?
So if your content is to appear in a biased, bigoted, populist, publication (I realise that doesn't narrow the field very much) then having a face of a member of whichever group you wish your readers to associate with whatever the article is about, speaks volumes that you couldn't possibly put into words.
It's like the music in a film's sound track. It "tells" us when we should feel sad. it programmes us to expect danger. It builds up tension, fear, light-heartedness. So the pictures do the same for an article.
For newspapers and corporations that feel they are too "enlightened" to specifically mention the race, gender, creed or age of someone - then a photo of them does the job without them dirtying their hands with a specific -ism.
And hopefully, the audience won't notice when one of those images just happens to be an advertisement!
The only reason we do not hear of all those other countries hacking the US defence systems is either because they don't want to, or because they are better at it (than N.K.) and cover their tracks.
Rather than thinking that NK represents some sort of technological elite, intent on harming the USA, the government should remember that they are the least capable "power" trying to do this. So instead of defending against them and then thinking that is sufficient, a responsible attitude would be to understand that every other government is doing the same - but without getting caught.
But that could easily because we can't see the "big picture". Once we develop an understanding of all the laws of the physical world, then it could be that there is inevitably only one way they could all be fitted together. There would be no need for an alien intelligence or "higher being" to have created them
The only question that would arise would be: who or what is the picture about?
However, there is no way of knowing now, in 2017, which ones will be correct. Or which ones will be right for the wrong reasons. Neither can we say today which ones look plausible but have missed an important point, could not possibly have foreseen something unimaginable that hasn't happened of just happen to have lucked out and pick the few truly significant causes / relationships / equations out of the mass of conflicting opinions circulating at present.
A 2 month break is just long enough for me to forget about my time "invested" in the show.
And that's the problem. In 2 months it will need all the marketing of a new show. Whereas people who used to watch it will have had enough time to get used to not watching it and will be unlikely to miss it particularly.
The only way I can see this break "saving" the show is if they pull a stunt like fast-forwarding several months or a year and re-boot.
An internet connection should be an automatic fail in any security audit.
But now that the advertising revenue has shriveled the public do not appear to be willing to pay to read about the local flower show, a traffic accident, what the Mayor did last week or who married whom. If you were involved in any local event, you probably already know about it. If you weren't you probably don't care - and aren't willing to pay to find out about it.
Independent experts say the real numbers are far higher.
Well, yes. Of course.
Signing up is free. None of the information provided can be validated. There is nothing to connect an account to an actual, living person (presidents excluded).
All those websites that force you to sign up with a FB or twitter account - they all get different, new, accounts so as not to get "interbreeding" between sites that have no business knowing about each other.
While apps like Whatsapp are actually useful and don't ask for anything (though obviously it has a phone number, and a name that may or may not be authentic), none of the social media websites provide anything of value, yet abuse what data they are given. So they don't get any. I would suggest that at least the top half of all their users: those people who don't refer to the internet as "wifi", have just one single email account or have passwords in the top 20 most easily cracked, understand this and have nothing much that identifies them on social media.
For the rest, that's what happens when you dabble in things you don't understand.
But at least the effects aren't as severe as ignorantly investing in that "sure thing" stock.
HP, Mashable reports, has recommended the HP Envy 5600
Note to NASA: Make sure you sign up for Instant ink "Get ink delivered to your door for as low as $2.99 a month."
A hell of a lot cheaper than getting it Space-X'd up there.