Personally, I went back to Windows 7 because I didn't like the constant switching / start screen.
The thing was that the start menu really was nearly entirely obsolete. None of its features really made sense.
Want to run a command by typing its name name? Win+R, type away
Want to actually search for something? The start screen makes more sense then the smallish non-resizable start menu window.
Want to get to the control panel, logoff, etc? The charms bar was perfectly fine (if nonobvious). And has a hotkey of its own (again non-obvious)
The actual hierarchical start menu? Worthless legacy cruft that has been more or less replaced by search anyway.
All that was left was the smart recent applications/recent documents stuff which was almost covered by pinning apps to the taskbar.
To 'fix' windows 8, I'd
restore the start menu button (hot corner makes no sense)
When the start menu pops up, you get back the smart 'recent applications / recent documents', and the ability to pin applications to it, and the search box.
Except the search box is simple, only looks at program names, and document filenames. That's it. It doesn't look at email, or inside documents, or music... for deep searching for that, I'll use the start screen search, or even more likely the dedicated application anyway (for email, music, photos etc)
And a button to bring up the full start screen. And another one to bring up the charms bar.
And make shutdown a direct option so you don't have to logout first, but that can be on the charms bar... i don't care. I don't shutdown more than once a day anyway, and many shut down once a week or less.
Then make hotcorners entirely optional in desktop mode.
That's really it. No "All Programs --> " on the start menu. if you need something from that go into the full start screen. No "Games" or "Music" or "devices and printers".
The resulting "start menu" is just a little taskbar gadget for quick search and application launching.
There are lots of good programmers who don't have time for extra programming, but the best programmers, in my experience, are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time.
There are lots of good telemarketers who don't have time for extra telemarketing, but the best telemarketers, in my experience , are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time.
That's why when my telemarketing company needs a new telemarketer, we just hold a contest and enthusiastic telemarketers clamor to do free telemarketing during their time off for a few weeks to show off their closing skills. I get a few thousand hours or free labour. One guy gets a position that needed to be filled anyway.
Except that telemarketers, even the one's that really enjoy it, aren't stupid enough to spend their free time forming teams to telemarket a product for someone else, generating as many sales for them as possible, for nothing.
They they know they are generating revenue, that the service is valuable, and that they should be paid for it.
How many electrical engineers do you know who would go submit solutions to problems IBM or Intel is working on that they solved in their spare time for free? If IBM wanted something hard solved that badly, why wouldn't I patent it, and license it to IBM, or sell the patent to IBM?
Why do so many programmers have rocks in their heads. Yelp is looking to develop an algorithm that would be very valuable to them. If you have the skill to do it, you should recognize that its valuable, and that you should be compensated for it. Yelp isn't your friend. Yelp isn't a charity. Yelp just wants a difficult and expensive to produce algorithm for nothing. Of course they would, who wouldn't? I like free stuff too.
I should host a contest. I'll do a 100 hours of programming for the company that provides me with the most valuable patent. All patent submissions become my property. I reserve the right to award nobody if no patents of sufficient quality are submitted. You may submit more than one patent. You may form teams. Corporations are welcome to participate. Yelp? Are you listening? I'll create a twitter account just to mention you on it if you win!! Submit your very best patents for the best chance of winning!
I mean there are lots of good companies who don't have time for extra patents, but the best companies, in my experience , are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time. I'm sure they'd be happy to submit me a few patents to show how good they are at coming up with valuable patents.
Also it's a long-term contest (8 weeks) instead of the "overnight hackathon challenge" you might be thinking of. You can make several submissions and get feedback for how your algorithm is doing, and how it stacks up to other teams....
Everyone complains about the HR "minefield" that sorts candidates by requiring useless or immaterial experience instead of raw coding ability. This is a new type of job search that doesn't have these problems.
This has worse problems. They plan to get a useful difficult alogorthm solved for free. (And multiple variations on it too.) This will apparently will require teams weeks of efforts to come up with. That's hundreds even thousands of hours of free unpaid labour.
I should have strata's landscaping done like this. Instead of paying a landscaper to come by everyweek I'll just hold a contest, and have 50 contractors each come in one week and do their thing. At the end I hire the best one for a one year contract.
The year after that... I'm not sure he's the best one anymore... I'll need another contest.
Free landscaping every other year is a pretty sweet deal.
The only flaw in the ointment is that unlike programmers, landscaping contractors don't work for free. And they don't buy into idiotic arguments that the best landscapers love landscaping and want to spend their time off doing it for free too.
I'd be surprised if coverity even bothers with syntax errors. I mean your compiler catches those and if the project doesn't even build its not something you can even theoretically release.
I think it focuses on: using unitialized variables, unreachable code, buffer overruns, memory leaks, division by zero, infnite loops, sql injection vulnerabilities.
potentially it might be able to catch some threading / synchronization / race condition issues as well.
I don't know, I'm just speculating, but a lot of this stuff can (at least sometimes) be detected by automated means.
never heard of that test, just looked it up, you mean this fizzbuzz?
for n=1 to 100
case:
n is divisble by 15: print 'fizzbuzz'; break
n is divisible by 3: print 'fizz'; break
n is divisble by 5: print 'buzz'; break
default: print n end loop
yeah, that's really sad* for a programmer job. (* and I probably goofed it, making me look ridiculous, lol) Doing it without testing for 15 makes the code more complicated and ugly though while using the 15 seems like a bit of cheat, in the sense that you are supposed to be testing for property x and y and this just happens to be a concise way of doing both at the same time, due to the way the math works... but its questionable that this code is maintainable or generalizable for any x and y.
For example, here given x=3, y=5, and you can test for x^y (15). But only because 3 and 5 have no common factors and 15 is therefore the least common multiple. But If x=6 and y=9, the shortcut test would be to test for divisibily of 18 the LCM not 54 which is simply x*y....
So the convoluted logic approach might be the better way to go.
Quite bluntly, if I were confronted with fizzbuzz on an interview I'd spend more time wondering which solution was desirable -- than actually writing one. Are they looking to see if I'm good at math? Or are they seeing if I'm good at nested logic? Would they consider the math a desirable trait or a sign that I'll write opaque code as someone reading the code in the future may not understand why I'm testing for 15 given the specs.
Maybe a better implementation is something like:
x = 3 y = 5 for n = 1 to 100
printedflag = false
if n is divisible by x
print fizz, printedflag = true
if n is divisible by y
print buzz, printedflag = true
if not printedflag
print n end loop
or maybe im being tested on whether I know how to find something is divisible, and my pseudocode just glossed over that I'd write a modulus expression like if (!mod(n,x)) or is that opaque again treating a remainder as a boolean... maybe I should write a function to do that...
bool IsDivisible(int a, int b) return !(mod(a,b))
I hate writing tests when I don't know what is being tested.
My sleeper agent who was specifically trained to get a job at one of those places (although Facebook would be the best) will do the embedding.
If I was organizing any sort of wide-ranging criminal activity like terrorism, getting somebody inside one of those big companies would be one of my bigges priorities, as it would allow covert communications with almost no chance of detection.
How many employees do you think can just go in and modify the live content files at netflix, propogate the changes out all the ISPs where the data is locally hosted, etc.
And getting a sleeper agent who can do that is going to be your top priority? Good god what on earth for? What on earth are you going to distribute via sleeper modified netflix movies that wouldn't be just as easy to distribute any of a hundred other much simpler ways? You'd have to activate the sleeper so theirs risk of being tapped at that point if they are watching you. And you'd have to have some way of messaging the troops to download a particular movie to get the embedded instructions.
What does that really get you that some guy posting cat videos on youtube doesn't?
So does using SSL from a wifi hotspot.
Doesn't Netflix vary the quality based on the bandwidth? If so, there is no fixed hash. In addition, you now have to deal with some sort of live database that sums up the packets from Netflix to the destination, but only those packets that are the movie (no control packets), and keeps the running checksum/hash. Without deep packet inspection, this isn't possible.
Fair enough, they could have the interception/filter/logging mechanism right in front of the netflix servers. Makes things simpler. And netflix is a big enough data flow they could eliminate a lot of traffic by handling it directly at the source.
So, what are the open source alternatives here for comparison? (doesn't specifically need to be bittorrent) but a good open source multi-platform (win/mac/linux/bsd) sync tool.
I'm genuinely interested in what others are using/recommending in this area.
Windows ME didn't try to change anything about windows at all. It's pretty much exactly the same as Windows 98, except it crashed a whole lot more.
Window ME actually added a lot of stuff, but it was rushed. It was essentially originally supposed to be "Windows 2000 Home edition" but Windows 2000 just wasn't ready for home yet so they bolted a bunch of stuff on it to move it towards that goal* but overall it was a botched release.
* examples -- they brought over the TCP/IP stack from Windows 2000, updated the NDIS support for parity with windows 2000, brought over system file protection from Windows 2000.
They also introduced system restore, compressed folder support, and WIA, and UPnP (all features people usually attribute to XP)
Vista again seems to have been a driver problem, combined with underspecced computers trying to run an operating system they didn't have the power to run.
Those plus the long overdue switch to force people to run as non-administrators which conflicted with a lot of poorly written software that just assumed it would have full admin rights and stored its settings and data to places it shouldn't etc, and which resulted in constant UAC elevation requests which was a major complaint about Vista... which mostly wasn't Vista's "fault" per se.
I had a Vista laptop which had decent drivers and saw no problems with Vista on that specific machine.
Yeah, put Vista on a machine that really met the specs with decent drivers and avoid any craptastic software that uneccessarily wanted admin rights and Vista was downright pleasant.
By the time 7 came out the drivers were mostly fixed, the current versions of most 3rd party software already had cleaned up the permissions/UAC issues, and there was no reason to have less than 2-4GB of RAM. Meanwhile MS had tuned things up for performance a bit, and cleaned up the UAC to make it a little cleaner as well.
Windows 8, other than the Modern UI and the abolition of the start button / menu is really a continuation of 7. Its actually a pretty good release. There's not even anything really wrong with the modern UI in the right environments although the default start screen is bit garish. But the real problem is that they just dialed it over to "tablet mode" a little too hard and didn't let people set things they way they wanted them. And "tablet mode" doesn't make a lot of sense on a dual 24" screen desktop workstation.
They could very easily rectify the problem by just going back to the old interface. There's rumour they will in the next version.
They just need to recognize that once in "desktop mode" users don't want to be constantly thrown back into tablet mode. And that some users, particularly those on desktop workstations, don't really have much use for tablet mode at all.
Kidding about the "my terrorist buddies", but the point is that you can't discount any data transfer as having the information that you need to stop/solve a crime.
If you downloaded it from netflix, hulu, itunes, or amazon... how do you plan to embed your communications? You don't control the file, you can't modify it.
Unless you think netflix is a terrorist organization distributing movies with embedded communications. But it wouldn't be too hard for them to rule that out.
Meanwhile, as long as you have the hashes for the files, you don't even need to store the file. You can validate netflix sent party X a copy of Joe Dirt... so why bother permantly saving a copy?
You miss my point. The gridlock generally limits the ability of controversial legislation to pass.
The day to day operations of the government however tend to trundle on just fine, and I do approve of that.
The current Congress' isn't merely guilty of the usual good kind of gridlock, but they've taken it to a whole other level where even basic funding for completely non-controversial mundanities are being blocked as part of a policy of all out partisan obstructionism.
640 terabytes of data is transferred every minute.
And how much if you only record each youtube video once? . And log only meta information about vpn/ssl/https traffic. (source / dest / time...) And just ignore netflix, hulu, itunes, and the top 10,000 hollywood torrents...
There's little that is as dangerous as "effective government". The more gridlock, the better, I always say.
I've always believed this myself, and still do to a point, until recently.
But the analogy is unfortunately particularly apt.
What breaks through real gridlock? Emergency services vehicles, right. That's pretty much it.
And the same goes for government, the only legislation that cuts through the gridlock is are emergency response bills. Every body just gets out of the way and passes them through.
The problem with this is that those laws are always bad. Hastily written, poorly thought out, and reactionary.
We need some way of preserving some of the gridlock even after a catastrophe.
The question is unanswerable without knowing the cost, and the terms, and what it covers.
A local electronics store has an extended warranty program where you pay X$ for the extended warranty, and if you don't use it, when the warranty is finished, you get a gift certificate for X$ to use, on any purchase over 2 x X$.
So in 2005 I bought a $5000 DLP TV, and paid ~$500 for 5 year extended warranty, which I didn't end up using. In 2010 I bought a new LED backlit LCD for $2200, and used the $500 gift certificate.
Admittedly there is a bit a claim process to go through (much like MIR processes -- fill out an online form, warranty plan number, name, address, etc..), and you only have 6 months or a year or something -- it wasn't unreasonably sort, but there was a limit, after the extended warranty expires in which to make the claim,.
I felt it was really a tremendous value.
I gave the old TV to my parents and it lasted another 3 years before the color wheel motor finally died.
But another risk with the BYOD phone that a USB stick doesn't have, is how easily it can leak all the company information to highly insecure consumer cloud services (something an unmanaged PC can do as well of course).
Even managed PCs have this issue. People using their own drop and other personal cloud accounts with work laptops is an epidemic.
If the data can't/shouldn't be leaked, then a terminal services remote access scenario seems to be the most reasonable balance of functionality and remote accessibility and security that can really be struck right now. Both on phones, and laptops. BYOD or otherwise.
Full drive encyrption, and policy management get you some of the way there, but if you are working with typical sales reps and customer / client information the user is invariably the security weak spot.
If you're hosting a party with >20 people, it's simply easier to make a Facebook event, invite people, and see who says they're attending/maybe/not attending than actually calling/texting one and one person in order to invite them and check if they can make it.
As someone who is not on facebook, I find that it must be highly annoying for people like you to invite me to places... you do your whole facebook thing, and then still have to manually get in touch with the people like me who don't have facebook (at least you know that I'm not on your friends list), and worse, those who do have it, but who have stopped checking it. (where you might assume they'll get the invite but they never respond..)
But for what its worth I don't really care if it annoys you. My social life is already pretty booked, and if I miss an event where you couldn't be bothered to invite me in person... well how close of a friend are you likely to be anyway?
It's where most people upload their photos.
I'm rarely interested enough in someone else's life to log into facebook to see pictures of what they did, so I don't miss it.
Usually people show me their pictures when I see them in person anyway, which I find better since they tend to chat about the context of the picture (what happened, where it was, the adventures and mishaps... whatever) and I find that more interesting then the images.
It's an easy way to keep in touch with people I know, even though I don't know the email addresses or phone numbers of most of them.
Not having facebook means I do have the email addresses and phone numbers of people I want to keep in touch with.
most people check their Facebook account more frequently than their mail account, and many even have access to Facebook from their cell phone
maybe in your circle of friends. Not in mine. I know several have facebook on their phone, but just as many don't as they find the the crap-flow overwhelming, or its a work phone, or they just don't want facebook interupting them at work, etc. I've also got several friends that don't have accounts, or have created accounts but don't use them actively. So they can't reliably be reached. But they can all receive SMS. And most do have an email address on their phone... not to mention a phone number that I can just call them on.
It's a decent way to procrastinate.
Fair enough. But if you have internet access and still need help with that... lol.:p
One sparked a citiy wide lock down and door to door manhunt for the responsible party.
Presumably out of fear he would strike again.
In the other, the responsible party is well known, and remains a free man.
No one thinks he intentionally blew up his fertilizer plant to kill 14 people. And no one thinks he's plotting to blow up another one.
I do hope they charge and convict someone for the negligence there, but lets not pretend its the same thing as a bomber on the loose.
That said, I disagree with some of what was done in the Boston case too. And I strongly disagree with some of the even more extreme measures that a lot of people advocated for.
There are regulations about how different classifications of data can be moved around and stored.
When you say "classifications" you mean "Classified", etc? Ok, fair enough. I can't really imagine a situation where I'd be asked to carry those around in my own phone, though.
You can have things on your phone that you can't have in a briefcase in your car.
I'm hard pressed to imagine what I could have on my phone that couldn't be in a thumbdrive in my breifcase.
And there is more opportunity for a phone to be lost or stolen.
Seeing as I can remote wipe my own phone, and would if it were lost or stolen that seems moot. The unique security risk with a BYOD phone vs a corporate issued unit would be that when I leave the company I take data I shouldn't take.
Option b) is that it's my device and all that entails, I control it, not them. No different than my car, if I leave the company it's still mine. If something belonging to them is in the trunk, they can politely ask that it be returned, but they don't get a set of keys, or have permission to enter it.
If they don't like these terms, well... then its back to your option "a)"
BYOD is no different than using a personal car, or a breifcase, and having company documents in either.
Water can be recycled, from what I understand - and I expect that with all that solar energy, growing food wouldn't be impossible.
Plants don't convert sunlight into mass. They've got to have the building blocks to build themselves with. You'd need a pretty complete biosphere to be able to sustain food cycles (growth, consumption, excretion, decay/breakdown, new growth...)
But yeah, potentially water recyclying / reclamation could reduce how much water needs to be sent up, and a lot of the other stuff could potentially be reused between trips. Although someone would have to maintain and clean it between passengers and the cost of that might exceed the cost of sending new stuff up.
Everything about seatbelts either improves your capability to drive a vehicle, or is neutral with respect to your ability to drive a vehicle.
And yet when they were introduced a lot of people who didn't want to wear them cited cases where the driver had been unable to release the seatbelt and was trapped trying to escape a burning car, or a a car that was sinking. They also cited cases where the driver was thrown from a vehicle to safety during an accident where the drivers compartment was subsequently crushed. They also cited cases where seatbelts delayed getting passengers (children in particular) out of a car in hypothetically dangerous situations... stalled on railroad tracks with a train coming, on fire, sinking... etc.
There are all sorts of very real risks to wearing a seatbelt, and detractors found all of them.
That didn't change that wearing seatbelts were still far and away safer than not.
A smart gun system doesn't really impact operating a firearm any more than a trigger lock would -- if the lock jams, you can't fire it. If you panic and twist and break the key off in the lock your screwed... oh noes trigger locks are going to get people killed.
I concede the reliability of the smart gun system needs to be assessed and proven, but it needs to be assessed not knee-jerk rejected.
Yeah, maybe you live by yourself or something, but with kids in the mix I go through milk by the gallon. I'll buy 3, sometimes 4 gallons at a time to get through a week. I can't even imagine carrying my groceries home... there's so many big items.
The flats of juiceboxes for lunches, the bulk size of everything from ice-tea mix to peanut butter to laundry detergent, to loading up on canned soup, tuna, or jars of tomato sauce, cans of pop, etc when its on sale.
I have no one in my home who would misuse my guns so I don't see the need to lock them up.
Until some punk breaks in when you aren't home looking for some quick cash for his next hit, and finds a gun lying around ready and helps himself.
Until your kids bring their friends home, your have some friends over who bring their kids.
Spend a few minutes thinking about it, and all kinds possibilities present themselves.
Take ten minutes to do some actual research and you will find plenty of incidents where keeping a loaded gun handy has prevented rape, maiming and death.
I'll also find plenty of incidents where that handy loaded gun leads to an armed fatal confrontation where no confrontation would otherwise have occurred at all.
I'll also find plenty of incidents where that handy loaded gun was accidentally discharged and someone got hurt or killed.
And yes I'll find some self-defense scenarios where it worked out for the best too, where having the gun really was the ideal situation.
But I can find scenarios where people burned to death in a car or drowned because they couldn't get their seat belts off too; but the overwhelming evidence is still that seat belts save far more lives.
you probably are closer to Michael Bloomberg than Thomas Jefferson in the safety versus liberty argument
You would be utterly wrong on that score. I'm the guy who'd rather have the option to fly on non-TSA screened flights. The guy who'd give the gauntanamo bay prisoners civilian trials, or outright release them if we don't have enough evidence to make a likely conviction. The guy who'd live in a world where the occasional building is destroyed by terrorists rather than give the police any sort of additional surveillance or warrant-less search capabilities. And the guy who fully supports your right to own and operate as many guns as you like.
But I'm also not paranoid that the government is going to take the guns away either. I'm not worried about background checks, or registrations. My house is registered, my car is registered, my boat is registered, even my dog is registered... why would I be worried about the guns? We can take cars away from drunks and idiots, but we can't take away their guns. I disagree with that.
and that crowd is generally willing to accept almost any risk to be free of the imaginary risk my guns are causing them.
To look at the American gun injury and fatality rates compared to the rest of the civilized world and call them an 'imaginary risk' is ridiculous. You are in some sort of bizarre denial of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I went back to Windows 7 because I didn't like the constant switching / start screen.
The thing was that the start menu really was nearly entirely obsolete. None of its features really made sense.
Want to run a command by typing its name name?
Win+R, type away
Want to actually search for something? The start screen makes more sense then the smallish non-resizable start menu window.
Want to get to the control panel, logoff, etc? The charms bar was perfectly fine (if nonobvious). And has a hotkey of its own (again non-obvious)
The actual hierarchical start menu? Worthless legacy cruft that has been more or less replaced by search anyway.
All that was left was the smart recent applications/recent documents stuff which was almost covered by pinning apps to the taskbar.
To 'fix' windows 8, I'd
restore the start menu button (hot corner makes no sense)
When the start menu pops up, you get back the smart 'recent applications / recent documents', and the ability to pin applications to it, and the search box.
Except the search box is simple, only looks at program names, and document filenames. That's it. It doesn't look at email, or inside documents, or music... for deep searching for that, I'll use the start screen search, or even more likely the dedicated application anyway (for email, music, photos etc)
And a button to bring up the full start screen.
And another one to bring up the charms bar.
And make shutdown a direct option so you don't have to logout first, but that can be on the charms bar... i don't care. I don't shutdown more than once a day anyway, and many shut down once a week or less.
Then make hotcorners entirely optional in desktop mode.
That's really it. No "All Programs --> " on the start menu. if you need something from that go into the full start screen. No "Games" or "Music" or "devices and printers".
The resulting "start menu" is just a little taskbar gadget for quick search and application launching.
my 0.02
There are lots of good programmers who don't have time for extra programming, but the best programmers, in my experience, are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time.
There are lots of good telemarketers who don't have time for extra telemarketing, but the best telemarketers, in my experience , are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time.
That's why when my telemarketing company needs a new telemarketer, we just hold a contest and enthusiastic telemarketers clamor to do free telemarketing during their time off for a few weeks to show off their closing skills. I get a few thousand hours or free labour. One guy gets a position that needed to be filled anyway.
Except that telemarketers, even the one's that really enjoy it, aren't stupid enough to spend their free time forming teams to telemarket a product for someone else, generating as many sales for them as possible, for nothing.
They they know they are generating revenue, that the service is valuable, and that they should be paid for it.
How many electrical engineers do you know who would go submit solutions to problems IBM or Intel is working on that they solved in their spare time for free? If IBM wanted something hard solved that badly, why wouldn't I patent it, and license it to IBM, or sell the patent to IBM?
Why do so many programmers have rocks in their heads. Yelp is looking to develop an algorithm that would be very valuable to them. If you have the skill to do it, you should recognize that its valuable, and that you should be compensated for it. Yelp isn't your friend. Yelp isn't a charity. Yelp just wants a difficult and expensive to produce algorithm for nothing. Of course they would, who wouldn't? I like free stuff too.
I should host a contest. I'll do a 100 hours of programming for the company that provides me with the most valuable patent. All patent submissions become my property. I reserve the right to award nobody if no patents of sufficient quality are submitted. You may submit more than one patent. You may form teams. Corporations are welcome to participate. Yelp? Are you listening? I'll create a twitter account just to mention you on it if you win!! Submit your very best patents for the best chance of winning!
I mean there are lots of good companies who don't have time for extra patents, but the best companies, in my experience , are those who really enjoy it, and will take on small projects for fun from time to time. I'm sure they'd be happy to submit me a few patents to show how good they are at coming up with valuable patents.
Same thing if you uploaded a video containing only white noise as the picture: it's there just to waste Google's hard drive space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7NbRFyg3Y
Good times.
Also it's a long-term contest (8 weeks) instead of the "overnight hackathon challenge" you might be thinking of. You can make several submissions and get feedback for how your algorithm is doing, and how it stacks up to other teams. ...
Everyone complains about the HR "minefield" that sorts candidates by requiring useless or immaterial experience instead of raw coding ability. This is a new type of job search that doesn't have these problems.
This has worse problems. They plan to get a useful difficult alogorthm solved for free. (And multiple variations on it too.) This will apparently will require teams weeks of efforts to come up with. That's hundreds even thousands of hours of free unpaid labour.
I should have strata's landscaping done like this. Instead of paying a landscaper to come by everyweek I'll just hold a contest, and have 50 contractors each come in one week and do their thing. At the end I hire the best one for a one year contract.
The year after that... I'm not sure he's the best one anymore... I'll need another contest.
Free landscaping every other year is a pretty sweet deal.
The only flaw in the ointment is that unlike programmers, landscaping contractors don't work for free. And they don't buy into idiotic arguments that the best landscapers love landscaping and want to spend their time off doing it for free too.
But most defects are not syntax errors.
I'd be surprised if coverity even bothers with syntax errors. I mean your compiler catches those and if the project doesn't even build its not something you can even theoretically release.
I think it focuses on:
using unitialized variables, unreachable code, buffer overruns, memory leaks, division by zero, infnite loops, sql injection vulnerabilities.
potentially it might be able to catch some threading / synchronization / race condition issues as well.
I don't know, I'm just speculating, but a lot of this stuff can (at least sometimes) be detected by automated means.
never heard of that test, just looked it up, you mean this fizzbuzz?
for n=1 to 100
case:
n is divisble by 15: print 'fizzbuzz'; break
n is divisible by 3: print 'fizz'; break
n is divisble by 5: print 'buzz'; break
default: print n
end loop
yeah, that's really sad* for a programmer job. (* and I probably goofed it, making me look ridiculous, lol) Doing it without testing for 15 makes the code more complicated and ugly though while using the 15 seems like a bit of cheat, in the sense that you are supposed to be testing for property x and y and this just happens to be a concise way of doing both at the same time, due to the way the math works... but its questionable that this code is maintainable or generalizable for any x and y.
For example, here given x=3, y=5, and you can test for x^y (15). But only because 3 and 5 have no common factors and 15 is therefore the least common multiple. But If x=6 and y=9, the shortcut test would be to test for divisibily of 18 the LCM not 54 which is simply x*y....
So the convoluted logic approach might be the better way to go.
Quite bluntly, if I were confronted with fizzbuzz on an interview I'd spend more time wondering which solution was desirable -- than actually writing one. Are they looking to see if I'm good at math? Or are they seeing if I'm good at nested logic? Would they consider the math a desirable trait or a sign that I'll write opaque code as someone reading the code in the future may not understand why I'm testing for 15 given the specs.
Maybe a better implementation is something like:
x = 3
y = 5
for n = 1 to 100
printedflag = false
if n is divisible by x
print fizz, printedflag = true
if n is divisible by y
print buzz, printedflag = true
if not printedflag
print n
end loop
or maybe im being tested on whether I know how to find something is divisible, and my pseudocode just glossed over that I'd write a modulus expression like if (!mod(n,x)) or is that opaque again treating a remainder as a boolean ... maybe I should write a function to do that...
bool IsDivisible(int a, int b) return !(mod(a,b))
I hate writing tests when I don't know what is being tested.
My sleeper agent who was specifically trained to get a job at one of those places (although Facebook would be the best) will do the embedding.
If I was organizing any sort of wide-ranging criminal activity like terrorism, getting somebody inside one of those big companies would be one of my bigges priorities, as it would allow covert communications with almost no chance of detection.
How many employees do you think can just go in and modify the live content files at netflix, propogate the changes out all the ISPs where the data is locally hosted, etc.
And getting a sleeper agent who can do that is going to be your top priority? Good god what on earth for? What on earth are you going to distribute via sleeper modified netflix movies that wouldn't be just as easy to distribute any of a hundred other much simpler ways? You'd have to activate the sleeper so theirs risk of being tapped at that point if they are watching you. And you'd have to have some way of messaging the troops to download a particular movie to get the embedded instructions.
What does that really get you that some guy posting cat videos on youtube doesn't?
So does using SSL from a wifi hotspot.
Doesn't Netflix vary the quality based on the bandwidth? If so, there is no fixed hash. In addition, you now have to deal with some sort of live database that sums up the packets from Netflix to the destination, but only those packets that are the movie (no control packets), and keeps the running checksum/hash. Without deep packet inspection, this isn't possible.
Fair enough, they could have the interception/filter/logging mechanism right in front of the netflix servers. Makes things simpler. And netflix is a big enough data flow they could eliminate a lot of traffic by handling it directly at the source.
So, what are the open source alternatives here for comparison? (doesn't specifically need to be bittorrent) but a good open source multi-platform (win/mac/linux/bsd) sync tool.
I'm genuinely interested in what others are using/recommending in this area.
Even at worst that's not less secure. Troll fail.
Windows ME didn't try to change anything about windows at all. It's pretty much exactly the same as Windows 98, except it crashed a whole lot more.
Window ME actually added a lot of stuff, but it was rushed. It was essentially originally supposed to be "Windows 2000 Home edition" but Windows 2000 just wasn't ready for home yet so they bolted a bunch of stuff on it to move it towards that goal* but overall it was a botched release.
* examples -- they brought over the TCP/IP stack from Windows 2000, updated the NDIS support for parity with windows 2000, brought over system file protection from Windows 2000.
They also introduced system restore, compressed folder support, and WIA, and UPnP (all features people usually attribute to XP)
Vista again seems to have been a driver problem, combined with underspecced computers trying to run an operating system they didn't have the power to run.
Those plus the long overdue switch to force people to run as non-administrators which conflicted with a lot of poorly written software that just assumed it would have full admin rights and stored its settings and data to places it shouldn't etc, and which resulted in constant UAC elevation requests which was a major complaint about Vista ... which mostly wasn't Vista's "fault" per se.
I had a Vista laptop which had decent drivers and saw no problems with Vista on that specific machine.
Yeah, put Vista on a machine that really met the specs with decent drivers and avoid any craptastic software that uneccessarily wanted admin rights and Vista was downright pleasant.
By the time 7 came out the drivers were mostly fixed, the current versions of most 3rd party software already had cleaned up the permissions/UAC issues, and there was no reason to have less than 2-4GB of RAM. Meanwhile MS had tuned things up for performance a bit, and cleaned up the UAC to make it a little cleaner as well.
Windows 8, other than the Modern UI and the abolition of the start button / menu is really a continuation of 7. Its actually a pretty good release. There's not even anything really wrong with the modern UI in the right environments although the default start screen is bit garish. But the real problem is that they just dialed it over to "tablet mode" a little too hard and didn't let people set things they way they wanted them. And "tablet mode" doesn't make a lot of sense on a dual 24" screen desktop workstation.
They could very easily rectify the problem by just going back to the old interface. There's rumour they will in the next version.
They just need to recognize that once in "desktop mode" users don't want to be constantly thrown back into tablet mode. And that some users, particularly those on desktop workstations, don't really have much use for tablet mode at all.
Kidding about the "my terrorist buddies", but the point is that you can't discount any data transfer as having the information that you need to stop/solve a crime.
If you downloaded it from netflix, hulu, itunes, or amazon... how do you plan to embed your communications? You don't control the file, you can't modify it.
Unless you think netflix is a terrorist organization distributing movies with embedded communications. But it wouldn't be too hard for them to rule that out.
Meanwhile, as long as you have the hashes for the files, you don't even need to store the file. You can validate netflix sent party X a copy of Joe Dirt... so why bother permantly saving a copy?
You miss my point. The gridlock generally limits the ability of controversial legislation to pass.
The day to day operations of the government however tend to trundle on just fine, and I do approve of that.
The current Congress' isn't merely guilty of the usual good kind of gridlock, but they've taken it to a whole other level where even basic funding for completely non-controversial mundanities are being blocked as part of a policy of all out partisan obstructionism.
640 terabytes of data is transferred every minute.
And how much if you only record each youtube video once? . And log only meta information about vpn/ssl/https traffic. (source / dest / time...) And just ignore netflix, hulu, itunes, and the top 10,000 hollywood torrents...
There's little that is as dangerous as "effective government". The more gridlock, the better, I always say.
I've always believed this myself, and still do to a point, until recently.
But the analogy is unfortunately particularly apt.
What breaks through real gridlock? Emergency services vehicles, right. That's pretty much it.
And the same goes for government, the only legislation that cuts through the gridlock is are emergency response bills. Every body just gets out of the way and passes them through.
The problem with this is that those laws are always bad. Hastily written, poorly thought out, and reactionary.
We need some way of preserving some of the gridlock even after a catastrophe.
The question is unanswerable without knowing the cost, and the terms, and what it covers.
A local electronics store has an extended warranty program where you pay X$ for the extended warranty, and if you don't use it, when the warranty is finished, you get a gift certificate for X$ to use, on any purchase over 2 x X$.
So in 2005 I bought a $5000 DLP TV, and paid ~$500 for 5 year extended warranty, which I didn't end up using. In 2010 I bought a new LED backlit LCD for $2200, and used the $500 gift certificate.
Admittedly there is a bit a claim process to go through (much like MIR processes -- fill out an online form, warranty plan number, name, address, etc..), and you only have 6 months or a year or something -- it wasn't unreasonably sort, but there was a limit, after the extended warranty expires in which to make the claim,.
I felt it was really a tremendous value.
I gave the old TV to my parents and it lasted another 3 years before the color wheel motor finally died.
But another risk with the BYOD phone that a USB stick doesn't have, is how easily it can leak all the company information to highly insecure consumer cloud services (something an unmanaged PC can do as well of course).
Even managed PCs have this issue. People using their own drop and other personal cloud accounts with work laptops is an epidemic.
If the data can't/shouldn't be leaked, then a terminal services remote access scenario seems to be the most reasonable balance of functionality and remote accessibility and security that can really be struck right now. Both on phones, and laptops. BYOD or otherwise.
Full drive encyrption, and policy management get you some of the way there, but if you are working with typical sales reps and customer / client information the user is invariably the security weak spot.
If you're hosting a party with >20 people, it's simply easier to make a Facebook event, invite people, and see who says they're attending/maybe/not attending than actually calling/texting one and one person in order to invite them and check if they can make it.
As someone who is not on facebook, I find that it must be highly annoying for people like you to invite me to places... you do your whole facebook thing, and then still have to manually get in touch with the people like me who don't have facebook (at least you know that I'm not on your friends list), and worse, those who do have it, but who have stopped checking it. (where you might assume they'll get the invite but they never respond..)
But for what its worth I don't really care if it annoys you. My social life is already pretty booked, and if I miss an event where you couldn't be bothered to invite me in person ... well how close of a friend are you likely to be anyway?
It's where most people upload their photos.
I'm rarely interested enough in someone else's life to log into facebook to see pictures of what they did, so I don't miss it.
Usually people show me their pictures when I see them in person anyway, which I find better since they tend to chat about the context of the picture (what happened, where it was, the adventures and mishaps... whatever) and I find that more interesting then the images.
It's an easy way to keep in touch with people I know, even though I don't know the email addresses or phone numbers of most of them.
Not having facebook means I do have the email addresses and phone numbers of people I want to keep in touch with.
most people check their Facebook account more frequently than their mail account, and many even have access to Facebook from their cell phone
maybe in your circle of friends. Not in mine. I know several have facebook on their phone, but just as many don't as they find the the crap-flow overwhelming, or its a work phone, or they just don't want facebook interupting them at work, etc. I've also got several friends that don't have accounts, or have created accounts but don't use them actively. So they can't reliably be reached. But they can all receive SMS. And most do have an email address on their phone... not to mention a phone number that I can just call them on.
It's a decent way to procrastinate.
Fair enough. But if you have internet access and still need help with that... lol. :p
One sparked a citiy wide lock down and door to door manhunt for the responsible party.
Presumably out of fear he would strike again.
In the other, the responsible party is well known, and remains a free man.
No one thinks he intentionally blew up his fertilizer plant to kill 14 people. And no one thinks he's plotting to blow up another one.
I do hope they charge and convict someone for the negligence there, but lets not pretend its the same thing as a bomber on the loose.
That said, I disagree with some of what was done in the Boston case too. And I strongly disagree with some of the even more extreme measures that a lot of people advocated for.
There are regulations about how different classifications of data can be moved around and stored.
When you say "classifications" you mean "Classified", etc? Ok, fair enough. I can't really imagine a situation where I'd be asked to carry those around in my own phone, though.
You can have things on your phone that you can't have in a briefcase in your car.
I'm hard pressed to imagine what I could have on my phone that couldn't be in a thumbdrive in my breifcase.
And there is more opportunity for a phone to be lost or stolen.
Seeing as I can remote wipe my own phone, and would if it were lost or stolen that seems moot. The unique security risk with a BYOD phone vs a corporate issued unit would be that when I leave the company I take data I shouldn't take.
Option b) is that it's my device and all that entails, I control it, not them. No different than my car, if I leave the company it's still mine. If something belonging to them is in the trunk, they can politely ask that it be returned, but they don't get a set of keys, or have permission to enter it.
If they don't like these terms, well... then its back to your option "a)"
BYOD is no different than using a personal car, or a breifcase, and having company documents in either.
grow the batteries too much and you start to look ridiculous.
Strange. I thought that was already the case with google glass.
Water can be recycled, from what I understand - and I expect that with all that solar energy, growing food wouldn't be impossible.
Plants don't convert sunlight into mass. They've got to have the building blocks to build themselves with. You'd need a pretty complete biosphere to be able to sustain food cycles (growth, consumption, excretion, decay/breakdown, new growth...)
But yeah, potentially water recyclying / reclamation could reduce how much water needs to be sent up, and a lot of the other stuff could potentially be reused between trips. Although someone would have to maintain and clean it between passengers and the cost of that might exceed the cost of sending new stuff up.
Everything about seatbelts either improves your capability to drive a vehicle, or is neutral with respect to your ability to drive a vehicle.
And yet when they were introduced a lot of people who didn't want to wear them cited cases where the driver had been unable to release the seatbelt and was trapped trying to escape a burning car, or a a car that was sinking. They also cited cases where the driver was thrown from a vehicle to safety during an accident where the drivers compartment was subsequently crushed. They also cited cases where seatbelts delayed getting passengers (children in particular) out of a car in hypothetically dangerous situations... stalled on railroad tracks with a train coming, on fire, sinking... etc.
There are all sorts of very real risks to wearing a seatbelt, and detractors found all of them.
That didn't change that wearing seatbelts were still far and away safer than not.
A smart gun system doesn't really impact operating a firearm any more than a trigger lock would -- if the lock jams, you can't fire it. If you panic and twist and break the key off in the lock your screwed... oh noes trigger locks are going to get people killed.
I concede the reliability of the smart gun system needs to be assessed and proven, but it needs to be assessed not knee-jerk rejected.
We're talking groceries here.
Yeah, maybe you live by yourself or something, but with kids in the mix I go through milk by the gallon. I'll buy 3, sometimes 4 gallons at a time to get through a week. I can't even imagine carrying my groceries home... there's so many big items.
The flats of juiceboxes for lunches, the bulk size of everything from ice-tea mix to peanut butter to laundry detergent, to loading up on canned soup, tuna, or jars of tomato sauce, cans of pop, etc when its on sale.
I have no one in my home who would misuse my guns so I don't see the need to lock them up.
Until some punk breaks in when you aren't home looking for some quick cash for his next hit, and finds a gun lying around ready and helps himself.
Until your kids bring their friends home, your have some friends over who bring their kids.
Spend a few minutes thinking about it, and all kinds possibilities present themselves.
Take ten minutes to do some actual research and you will find plenty of incidents where keeping a loaded gun handy has prevented rape, maiming and death.
I'll also find plenty of incidents where that handy loaded gun leads to an armed fatal confrontation where no confrontation would otherwise have occurred at all.
I'll also find plenty of incidents where that handy loaded gun was accidentally discharged and someone got hurt or killed.
And yes I'll find some self-defense scenarios where it worked out for the best too, where having the gun really was the ideal situation.
But I can find scenarios where people burned to death in a car or drowned because they couldn't get their seat belts off too; but the overwhelming evidence is still that seat belts save far more lives.
you probably are closer to Michael Bloomberg than Thomas Jefferson in the safety versus liberty argument
You would be utterly wrong on that score. I'm the guy who'd rather have the option to fly on non-TSA screened flights. The guy who'd give the gauntanamo bay prisoners civilian trials, or outright release them if we don't have enough evidence to make a likely conviction. The guy who'd live in a world where the occasional building is destroyed by terrorists rather than give the police any sort of additional surveillance or warrant-less search capabilities. And the guy who fully supports your right to own and operate as many guns as you like.
But I'm also not paranoid that the government is going to take the guns away either. I'm not worried about background checks, or registrations. My house is registered, my car is registered, my boat is registered, even my dog is registered... why would I be worried about the guns? We can take cars away from drunks and idiots, but we can't take away their guns. I disagree with that.
and that crowd is generally willing to accept almost any risk to be free of the imaginary risk my guns are causing them.
To look at the American gun injury and fatality rates compared to the rest of the civilized world and call them an 'imaginary risk' is ridiculous. You are in some sort of bizarre denial of reality.