What the fuck? One IRA bomb 14 years ago justifies an armed police presence all this time later? After years of IRA ceasefire, relative peace in NI and no other bombs in Manchester since?
Shit, by that metric we should still have regular sorties by Hurricanes and Spitfires incase the Luftwaffe pop by on another raid, the local militia should be wielding longbows to fight off the Scots and I should be carrying a sword in case the Romans invade again.
A history of problems that doesn't remotely justify that level of preparedness. Shit, at least reference the Government created drugs problem, the rival gangs, the no-go areas in the city or the other things that make Manchester a shithole, but a single fucking bomb 14 years ago? Shit.
£15 for a CD containing an album released twenty years ago that costs approximately 30p in materials and maybe another £1 in distribution costs is reckless profiteering and demonstrates the inequity of current copyright laws.
The obvious answer is to leverage the marginal cost of reproduction (zero cost at all to the content producer, as I'm paying for my own electricity, hardware and bandwidth) and give the copyright owner every penny they deserve: Fuck all.
Hell, I bought the album 20 years ago, you want me to buy it again? You want me to pay twice as much as its list price 20 years ago to buy it for my nephew, instead of just copying it onto his USB stick?
The business model is flawed. It's not failing anywhere near fast enough, and personally I want to encourage its failure. I think the world can survive without massive media companies sucking vast sums of money in and spending it on bad laws that inhibit online freedoms in the name of unfair profits.
Give me 10% of revenue and I'll give you half a dozen new business models.
You may not like them, they may not be ethical and they may not be profitable. But I'll innovate and I'll grab my 10% of your revenue.
What, I should work for free? But that's the inverse of the media distribution companies, that seem to think they should get revenue for doing fuck all.
At least I'm offering to try and help, instead of bribing politicians to legislate against my competition and suing my customers.
Thing is, GSB worked out at less than 10p/hour for me, and that's assuming I never play it again.
I plan to play it again.
Compare that to most free and open source space combat games that cost me precious time without entertaining me, and I'd rather give cash to the non-open but independent and well supported game that's fun to play.
(On the flipside I hate DLC and so he's not getting a sale from me on this race. But I'll buy the campaign expansion when that's ready..)
Interesting - which country are you in, and who is your bank?
Just that it costs banks a lot of money to do transactions, and international transactions are particularly expensive.
The bank isn't making money when you transfer funds, it's costing them money. It may be costing them less money than they're making on your account balances, and covering the cost of domestic transactions isn't unusual, but covering the cost of international transactions is very unusual.
How do they deal with currency conversions? Or is that where they make their costs back, through their exchange rates?
and yet, the one time I had an issue with an online merchant I'd bought from via Google Checkout, filling in Google's "it went wrong" form led to an immediate response from Google, and a couple of days later a refund in full.
When the process works seamlessly without me needing direct contact with a person, I'm willing to forgo that contact.
That's because they don't exist. Even if the statistics back you up (and I'll bet every penny I've ever spent via Paypal they don't) we hear about the illegitimate business practices and not the few successes.
Last time I tried to use Paypal they took money off my credit card, then refused to route it through to the recipient. As they were acting as a merchant acquirer in the transaction, and I don't have a Paypal account, by holding onto those funds they were effectively stealing money from me.
So I threatened them with court action, asked my card company to reverse the transaction, and complained to the FSA and to Mastercard.
I got my money back eventually, and now refuse to do business with anybody that only accepts payment via Paypal. It's inconvenient at times, but not as inconvenient as giving money to a corrupt business and still not receiving the services/goods I've paid for.
That's because we don't talk about penis size. Talking about such matters just isn't British (and we don't appear to have the insecurities in that area exhibited by certain other nations).
I interpreted it as 'flaming gay activists' aren't real people. Personally I lump them in with raging feminists, evangelical christians and other bigots and morons.
the tshirts mocking the lesbian stuck in a man's body
That tends to be a transvestite thing; most transsexuals invert their sexual preference when undergoing physical transformation, so a MTF that was attracted to women will become attracted to men (and vice-versa).
I fail to see any correlation between access to production servers and isolation from the user.
Developers (whether software engineers, code monkeys or heroic creators of beautiful masterpieces) are not system administrators. Those are two different roles.
Both roles need exposure to users, but neither role requires production server access to go and talk to a user or to be setup as a user (power user or otherwise) so that they can use the system from that perspective.
If your devs don't have access to copies of recent production data, they are hamstrung.
Conversely if your devs do have access to copies of recent production data, you risk contravening the DPA, pissing off the FSA (or the Federal Reserve, if you're in the US), breaching PCI compliance rules or otherwise leaking sensitive data.
There are reasons software engineering is a challenging discipline, and oddly 'programming' isn't one of them:)
* If there's a serious production failure, developers are often called upon to assist the admins, because while they aren't admin experts they generally have some administration skills.
So sit next to the admin while he drives. Been there, done that.
* If there's a bug that makes it to production, the time it would take to fix the bug using proper procedures may cost more than doing a quick-and-dirty fix now and cleaning up using proper procedures later.
Again, ask the admin to make the change. Ideally give them a deployment to roll out.
I've detected, fixed, tested, regression tested, packaged, had admin deploy to a test env, regression tested and had admin deploy to production a bugfix in a couple of hours before now. (The bug was caused by legacy data quality issues.)
However, even if the fix needs to be "Add that value to the config file", "Delete that entry in the DB" or some other on-the-fly change, get the admin to do it for you.
* Diagnosing production-only bugs, which frequently require read-only access. For instance, developers may need read-only access to determine that their software didn't deploy correctly.
Sit with the admin. Get the admin to do ls -lRF and email the output to you. Get the admin to send you the log files. Write a deployment validation script and use it in the automated deployment process.
* Helping admins properly configure their software.
Absolutely sit with the admin.
At no point do developers need to log into the production system. You could possibly argue that the cost of my "sit with the admin" recommendations is too high. I would counter that the risks of any other approach are too high, and that the incidences of needing to sit with an admin will be low anyway. (If they're not, you have fundamental development process issues that will be costing you far more.)
Erm. The person you quoted meant touching a live system in a non-user capacity. Developers do not need non-user access to production systems to shadow a user and understand how the system is used.
If developers do need a system generated audit trail, they should write it into the system and ask the admin to grant them access to the audit trail (i.e. email them the log or give them a login to the web UI they wrote onto their logging DB).
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What the fuck? One IRA bomb 14 years ago justifies an armed police presence all this time later? After years of IRA ceasefire, relative peace in NI and no other bombs in Manchester since?
Shit, by that metric we should still have regular sorties by Hurricanes and Spitfires incase the Luftwaffe pop by on another raid, the local militia should be wielding longbows to fight off the Scots and I should be carrying a sword in case the Romans invade again.
A history of problems that doesn't remotely justify that level of preparedness. Shit, at least reference the Government created drugs problem, the rival gangs, the no-go areas in the city or the other things that make Manchester a shithole, but a single fucking bomb 14 years ago? Shit.
£15 for a CD containing an album released twenty years ago that costs approximately 30p in materials and maybe another £1 in distribution costs is reckless profiteering and demonstrates the inequity of current copyright laws.
The obvious answer is to leverage the marginal cost of reproduction (zero cost at all to the content producer, as I'm paying for my own electricity, hardware and bandwidth) and give the copyright owner every penny they deserve: Fuck all.
Hell, I bought the album 20 years ago, you want me to buy it again? You want me to pay twice as much as its list price 20 years ago to buy it for my nephew, instead of just copying it onto his USB stick?
The business model is flawed. It's not failing anywhere near fast enough, and personally I want to encourage its failure. I think the world can survive without massive media companies sucking vast sums of money in and spending it on bad laws that inhibit online freedoms in the name of unfair profits.
Fuck 'em.
Give me 10% of revenue and I'll give you half a dozen new business models.
You may not like them, they may not be ethical and they may not be profitable. But I'll innovate and I'll grab my 10% of your revenue.
What, I should work for free? But that's the inverse of the media distribution companies, that seem to think they should get revenue for doing fuck all.
At least I'm offering to try and help, instead of bribing politicians to legislate against my competition and suing my customers.
Meh. It's the Internet. The US built it. If you don't like it or the rules it's operating under, build your own.
We did. We added a new protocol too - you may have encountered it, it goes by the catchy acronym HTTP.
We're generous types: you can play too. Run along now...
Thing is, GSB worked out at less than 10p/hour for me, and that's assuming I never play it again.
I plan to play it again.
Compare that to most free and open source space combat games that cost me precious time without entertaining me, and I'd rather give cash to the non-open but independent and well supported game that's fun to play.
(On the flipside I hate DLC and so he's not getting a sale from me on this race. But I'll buy the campaign expansion when that's ready..)
Clearly I don't hold a high enough balance to have had that service offered to me :)
(Although in the UK there's a tradition of 'free' banking, so I pay my bank no money at all under most circumstances)
Interesting - which country are you in, and who is your bank?
Just that it costs banks a lot of money to do transactions, and international transactions are particularly expensive.
The bank isn't making money when you transfer funds, it's costing them money. It may be costing them less money than they're making on your account balances, and covering the cost of domestic transactions isn't unusual, but covering the cost of international transactions is very unusual.
How do they deal with currency conversions? Or is that where they make their costs back, through their exchange rates?
and yet, the one time I had an issue with an online merchant I'd bought from via Google Checkout, filling in Google's "it went wrong" form led to an immediate response from Google, and a couple of days later a refund in full.
When the process works seamlessly without me needing direct contact with a person, I'm willing to forgo that contact.
That's because they don't exist. Even if the statistics back you up (and I'll bet every penny I've ever spent via Paypal they don't) we hear about the illegitimate business practices and not the few successes.
Last time I tried to use Paypal they took money off my credit card, then refused to route it through to the recipient. As they were acting as a merchant acquirer in the transaction, and I don't have a Paypal account, by holding onto those funds they were effectively stealing money from me.
So I threatened them with court action, asked my card company to reverse the transaction, and complained to the FSA and to Mastercard.
I got my money back eventually, and now refuse to do business with anybody that only accepts payment via Paypal. It's inconvenient at times, but not as inconvenient as giving money to a corrupt business and still not receiving the services/goods I've paid for.
That's because we don't talk about penis size. Talking about such matters just isn't British (and we don't appear to have the insecurities in that area exhibited by certain other nations).
watch ten good movies from the MPAA
I may have spotted a small flaw in your plan.
I interpreted it as 'flaming gay activists' aren't real people. Personally I lump them in with raging feminists, evangelical christians and other bigots and morons.
my friend Fish
This always bugs me. How come so many transsexuals have no taste in names at all?
It's like having parents from hell, but self-imposed. I remain perpetually confused..
the tshirts mocking the lesbian stuck in a man's body
That tends to be a transvestite thing; most transsexuals invert their sexual preference when undergoing physical transformation, so a MTF that was attracted to women will become attracted to men (and vice-versa).
You wouldn't recognize most trans-women
I disagree. But I'm occasionally wrong too.
these people often looked oddly feminine as men
Again, my experience strongly differs. Maybe it's different in the UK. And don't even get me started about the voices..
Realtime search is new? I've been getting realtime search results for weeks.
I sense the need for a new product on the market. I have a friend that sells crystals; wonder if she wants to branch out into a new industry..
No, I blame Gearbox for releasing a bug-ridden console port and lying about it being developed as a PC game.
Console gaming sucks donkeys. I hate console ports. Borderlands should have been far better.
Verizon's BOGO deals
Buy one get one?
Damn the market's nasty in the US if that's a deal.
The brits don't have anything much against the Spanish. We kind of like their football team too.
It's the French we hate. Fucking cheese eating surrender monkeys.
I fail to see any correlation between access to production servers and isolation from the user.
Developers (whether software engineers, code monkeys or heroic creators of beautiful masterpieces) are not system administrators. Those are two different roles.
Both roles need exposure to users, but neither role requires production server access to go and talk to a user or to be setup as a user (power user or otherwise) so that they can use the system from that perspective.
If your devs don't have access to copies of recent production data, they are hamstrung.
Conversely if your devs do have access to copies of recent production data, you risk contravening the DPA, pissing off the FSA (or the Federal Reserve, if you're in the US), breaching PCI compliance rules or otherwise leaking sensitive data.
There are reasons software engineering is a challenging discipline, and oddly 'programming' isn't one of them :)
I still feel proud of the day I joined a new company and kept a straight face when someone said they worked for the System Control And Testing team.
They used the acronym.
* If there's a serious production failure, developers are often called upon to assist the admins, because while they aren't admin experts they generally have some administration skills.
So sit next to the admin while he drives. Been there, done that.
* If there's a bug that makes it to production, the time it would take to fix the bug using proper procedures may cost more than doing a quick-and-dirty fix now and cleaning up using proper procedures later.
Again, ask the admin to make the change. Ideally give them a deployment to roll out.
I've detected, fixed, tested, regression tested, packaged, had admin deploy to a test env, regression tested and had admin deploy to production a bugfix in a couple of hours before now. (The bug was caused by legacy data quality issues.)
However, even if the fix needs to be "Add that value to the config file", "Delete that entry in the DB" or some other on-the-fly change, get the admin to do it for you.
* Diagnosing production-only bugs, which frequently require read-only access. For instance, developers may need read-only access to determine that their software didn't deploy correctly.
Sit with the admin. Get the admin to do ls -lRF and email the output to you. Get the admin to send you the log files. Write a deployment validation script and use it in the automated deployment process.
* Helping admins properly configure their software.
Absolutely sit with the admin.
At no point do developers need to log into the production system. You could possibly argue that the cost of my "sit with the admin" recommendations is too high. I would counter that the risks of any other approach are too high, and that the incidences of needing to sit with an admin will be low anyway. (If they're not, you have fundamental development process issues that will be costing you far more.)
Erm. The person you quoted meant touching a live system in a non-user capacity. Developers do not need non-user access to production systems to shadow a user and understand how the system is used.
If developers do need a system generated audit trail, they should write it into the system and ask the admin to grant them access to the audit trail (i.e. email them the log or give them a login to the web UI they wrote onto their logging DB).