Imagine if google and bing decided that a certain candidate didn't exist and the name only returned some unrelated items. No news article links, no info sites, nothing.
You mean like what "traditional" media did to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein?
This story seems like a case of moving goal posts. Of _course_ the place people go to get information skews their thinking about politics and politicians.
If someone is mad about google potentially doing this, it's only because they'd prefer that newspapers and tv stations retained that role by divine right...
BMW has already been putting CF into weight-sensitive areas of the car, like the roof panels on certain models. Up high is one of the worst places to carry weight from a vehicle dynamics perspective; it makes nearly every aspect of vehicle handling worse.
One practical difficulty of CF for general automotive use is that it's not really repairable.
Of course, modern autobody repair is often about replacing affected panels with pristine replacements (either new or from junk yard cars), as opposed to trying to repair an existing panel. So, in that sense, CF might be a fine choice, as the lack of reparability is in practice a non-issue.
BMW is already gluing cars together -- for almost 10 years they have been building the front clip on certain models out of aluminum, and in effect gluing it to the remainder of the unibody, which is conventional steel.
Also, BMW has been designing recyclability into its cars also for at least 15 years. I seem to recall that the E46 3 series was something like 90% recoverable.
I don't expect they would turn away from their recyclability commitment, so they must have a plausible plan for how they would like to apply it to CF parts.
Well, for the specific case of rape, its hard to see what would be politically gained by a society advanced enough to deploy these. I view some atrocities as a by product of turning real humans into killers in a war setting.
The discussion is about fully autonomous devices. It makes no sense to program an autonomous device to project power as sexual violence instead of just violence.
Now, if we're talking about remote controlled machines..i fear we replace one kind of dynamic with another. We protect women from sexual violence from predatory men who are in theater, but introduce to the problem invincible machines being remotely controlled by guys who shoot the prostitutes in grand theft auto.
Almost nothing could be worse than to let humans control these machines remotely with live audio/video feeds. If that happens, You WILL see women stripping for the machines like cam girls, under threat, in fear....before being killed anyway after the operator has caused enough humiliation and anguish.
The office file formats have been stable for several releases.
One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.
Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?
There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.
I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.
Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.
As far as what doesn't happen in your area: what you say may be true of Comcast in your area, but certainly isn't of telephone companies.
The latter have a bizarre territory system that all of us are subject to.
I just recently called the ILEC of the neighboring town, only 4 miles away, that provides DSL service in that town. I am in a different ILEC service area (CenturyLink). CL can't even give me an analog phone that doesn't buzz, much less DSL -- even though I am in their territory, their switch is much too far away.
The neighboring ILEC cannot sell me any service of any kind -- even though I'm actually closer to their switch, and I cannot physically get the products I want from "my" LEC.
The reasons are not technical. They aren't even financial. The neighboring ILEC cannot trench cable to my site no matter how much I pay them -- because I am "owned" by some other ILEC.
Would you want your highway/city traffic information management operated by competing corporations?
Yes
Would you want your city and state police run by competing corporations?
Yes.
Please, imagine if you had to deal with Comcast to get from your house to work every day.
Yesterday, my son and I spent an hour dragging a box blade over 2 miles of dirt road with our tractor, in order to fix deep ruts in the road surface that were scraping on the bottom of my car the last time I tried driving that route.
Today, I used that road to drive into work and it was wonderful. I had a need, so I scratched it myself.
I have no idea if it is legal for private citizens to do road maintenance on public roads, but I chose to do so anyway.
By the way, I would love it if Comcast provided internet service in my area. I hate Comcast. But my only other choice is Verizon LTE, which is fast when it works, but which I try to use as little as possible since it is a pay-per-byte connection.
I've lived in urban areas my entire life until only recently. The whining you people do about broadband is hilarious. You have no clue how good you have it.
I think the problem here is that the ISPs want to be big media but they are really only telecoms trying to step out of line and disrupt the flow of information to get more money. They are greedy pigs.
Well, I agree with this.
We should nationalize them all and simply take over their operations.
But your "solution" is terrible. Your plan is to replace the current set of greedy pigs with something much worse -- greedy pigs who are stupid and yet think it is their mission to change the world using other people's money and talent.
No thanks. The last mile problem certainly sucks. But because of my situation, I've been heavily investigating what it takes to get my own WISP off the ground. Do you know what stops me from doing it? Nothing. Just my willingness and money.
Do you think that would be the case if I needed to fight the government? Well, how long does it take to get roads repaired where you live?
As an aside, have you priced buying business-class bandwidth from a local provider? Nobody is offering it where I live, but in the nearest large town, I got quoted $550/mo for a 10 meg connection. Including tower rentals on both ends, the cost to backhaul IP to my area would be over $1000 / mo.
Of course, that's trivial compared to the $12k/mile it costs to dig and lay fiber..
And guess what? If I were in the WISP business, my 10 meg connection for $550/mo would support 2-3 Netflix streams. Yet everyone wants to stream Netflix from 6pm to midnight every night. At the same time. Do you think my 3 Netflix subscribers would agree to split $550/mo three ways? Do you think they'd complain bitterly if I oversold my 10 meg connection and none of them could stream Netflix?
If you think you can do better than the existing oligarchs, I encourage you to consider what barriers prevent you from competing with them and delighting your customers. In many cases, you'll find that Comcast has been granted a local monopoly by local governments. Ooops.
Anyway, if a particular state or municipality wants to do a community/local broadband project, and own the last mile, they should do so within the confines of their local constitution/charter.
But you said "nationalize". Even if I thought the government ought to be building and owning data infrastructure for business/residential use, I wouldn't make it the FEDERAL government's problem. This is Civics 101 stuff...
This is critically important, and, frankly, given the books that Ron Paul (and invariably, Rand Paul) have read and worked on, I'm not sure why he'd say something like this.
Nobody in modern libertarian/an-cap thought thinks there is intrinsic value to any currency or any commodity
So, I'm not sure what he's doing here. He's quoting Hayek.. but the later writers made it pretty clear that intrinsic value was a non-concept... maybe saying "intrinsic value" was a mental gaffe on the part of Rand Paul...and he meant "utility" value..
I use smartphones with prepaid sims and no data plans. I'm usually at home or at the office where there is ample wifi. Smartphones are quite usable without "persistent" internet connections.
Not everyone has or wants a smartphone with a network connection. Of course, even feature phones get their time from the cell network, which is reasonably accurate.
That said, I started wearing a watch again a few years ago when I became a father to twins. I found that I was often getting up in the middle of the night, running a bottle warmer, etc. I found that it was critical to have something with a countdown timer and basic alarm functionality that was physically attached to my body. Also, I needed to be able to see what time it was when I was laying in bed, so a good lighting source was critical.
A smartphone doesn't meet these requirements. A basic Casio digital watch does.
I wore the casio until the battery started to wear out. I took it to a watch repair place and they ruined it. In the interim, I purchased a $10 timex analog watch with an extremely thin case, because the casio (it was a g-shock mudman -- I recall being hard on watches when I was a kid) doesn't fit under the cuff of a dress shirt.
Right now I'm wearing a newer casio digital watch -- one that uses solar charging and reads the radio atomic time signal from Colorado. I hope to never have to open the case to replace the battery, and I don't ever think about setting it. It is cheaper than my phone, more durable, and it is always attached to my arm when I need it.
I think there is a market for a smart watch. I'm sitting at my desk right now with my phone in my pants pocket. It buzzes every now and then with meeting reminders. Which I don't look at.
If my wrist watch buzzed because it knew about my calendar appointments, that's something I would use and appreciate. But, I wouldn't wear such a watch unless it was durable and inexpensive.
once they HAVE a car, they will use it because it is simply faster and more convenient than mass transit can ever be.
It's interesting that you believe that mass transit necessarily is slower and less convenient for people, yet still want it any way.
Why do you hate people?
I understand that time is the one asset that is truly finite for all of us, and indeed, we never know how much of it we have left.
Who will say, on their deathbed, "I'm glad I spent an hour a day riding a bus" ?
Busses are a poor form of mass transit because they usually take the same roads that private cars do. A bus will never be faster than a private car unless you factor in the car's time to find a parking spot, and the city in question is terribly congested.
Subways, or any other transit system that is disjoint from the road system, can be MUCH faster than a private car. And I've chosen to use them even when I had a private car available to me.
People will and should use mass transit when it makes their life better -- when it saves them time and lets them do more fulfilling things with their life.
In places like Munich, Germany, it is possible to get most places in the city via very fast u-bahn lines. We lived there for about 2 weeks and didn't have a car. When we did have to go somewhere that u-bahn didn't reach, dealing with the bus system was jarringly bad in comparison. Suddenly we had to become aware of times, schedules, etc.
The Ubahn system is great because it's difficult to get on the wrong train, and you don't need to memorize a schedule... the next train will always be coming in a few moments.
When we toured Germany outside of Munich later on, we had a hired car, but we did not take it into urban core areas (like Berlin). We would park at a free park and-ride on the outside of town -- which were ajoined to s-bahn lines. Then we would take the s-bahn line to the hauptbanhof (centrail rail station) at the city core, and from there we'd take ubahn lines as appropriate to our various destinations.
For areas with high urban density, disjoint mass transit (like subways) is a great option, and having a personal car in the city core is usually a liability because parking it is so frustrating, and ultimately, expensive in terms of dollars and human time.
I love driving and have many days of race track time to my credit. I also built my own RV out of an old school bus and we take long family trips in it. In my family, we like driving and private cars.
However, when there is advantageous public transit available to me, I use it.
It is possible to build transit systems that work with the reality of how people live instead of some central planners idea of how she wishes people lived. Good systems can and will prosper.
Systems that don't improve the lives of their users should simply disappear so that better choices can come about.
Ok, I actually think you, me, and Theo all agree:)
1) We don't think a specific technical change would have _prevented_ the issue.
2) We all agree that better software engineering practices would have found this bug sooner. Maybe even prevented it from ever getting checked in (e.g. suppose the codebase was using malloc primitives that that static analysis tools could "see across", and that the code was analysis clean. Could this bug have existed?)
Who has claimed that using the system allocator, all else being equal, would have prevented heartbleed?
Who has claimed that heartbleed was an allocation bug?
I understand what freelists are and do.
The point here is that rigorous software engineering practices -- including the use of evil allocators or static analyzers that could actually understand they were looking at heap routines -- would have pointed out that the code implicated in heartbleed was unreliable and incorrect.
If you read the link you pointed at, after making a modification to OpenSSL such that coverity could understand that the custom allocator was really just doing memory allocation, Coverity reported 173 additional "use after free" bugs.
There are bugs from years ago showing that openSSL fails with a system allocator.
Don't you suppose that in the process of fixing such bugs, it is likely that correctness issues like this one would have been caught?
Theo's point from the beginning is that a custom allocator was used here, which removed any beneficial effects of both good platform allocators AND "evil" allocator tools.
His response was a specific circumstance of the poor software engineering practices behind openSSL.
Furthermore, at some point, openSSL became behaviorally dependant on its own allocator -- that is, when you tried to use a system allocator, it broke -- because it wasn't handing you back unmodified memory contents you had just freed.
This dependency was known and documented. And not fixed.
IMO, using a custom allocator is a bit like doing your own crypto. "Normal people" shouldn't do it.
If you look at what open SSL is
1) crypto software 2) that is on by default 3) that listens to the public internet 4) that accepts data under the control of attackers... you should already be squarely in the land of "doing every possible software engineering best practice possible". This is software that needs to be written differently than "normal" software; held to a higher standard, and correct for correctness sake.
I would say that, "taking a hard dependence on my own custom allocator" and not investigating _why_ the platform allocator can no longer be used to give correct behavior is a _worst practice_. And its especially damning given how critical and predisposed to exploitability something like openSSL is.
Yet that is what the openSSL team did. And they knew it. And they didn't care. And it caught up with them.
The point of Theo's remarks is not to say "using a system allocator would have prevented bad code from being exploitable". The point is "having an engineering culture that ran tests using a system allocator and a debugging allocator would have prevented this bad code from staying around as long as it did"
Let people swap the "fast" allocator back in at runtime, if you must. But make damn sure the code is correct enough to pass on "correctness checking" allocators.
Re:sad day for those who don't like 4chan trolls
on
'weev' Conviction Vacated
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not liking someone isn't a good enough reason to put them in jail.
Suppose it has a security vuln? Suppose it depends on a certain version of a legacy DLL we need to service for other callers? Suppose it was never localized beyond English? Suppose admins want to enable/disable it via group policy?
(etc)
For better or for worse, it is incredibly expensive to put something in the Windows Box.
We give away VS for free, in a variety of different versions/avenues. By not putting it in the windows box, we avoid a huge # of headaches.
Because Microsoft doesn't do the things YOU think Microsoft should do, you can ascertain the motivations and goals of Microsoft?
How interesting. Suppose we hire you to lead our CS education strategy. Can you promise results? Are you willing to bet your career on your prophecies coming true?
Let me tell you what IS true.
Microsoft lets me -- and many other MS employees -- volunteer to teach CS in public K-12 schools, 1 hour a day, before heading into the office for our "real jobs".
MS spends money to make this happen (volunteer matching hours), and gets less of my productive time (without docking my pay). There are full-time employees dedicated to this project. They have no other MS business function.
The program I am referring to is called TEALS (www.tealsk12.org)
It is just one of the ways that MS puts time, money, and people, into trying to build a better pipeline of students who can do CS.
I don't think stuffing GWBASIC back into windows is going to take us from where we are to where we need to be.
Luckily, tens of thousands of pioneers wouldn't have to be housed all in one starship. Spreading people out among multiple ships also spreads out the risk. Modular ships could dock together for trade and social gatherings
60 minutes has had credibility problems for a long time.
They _destroyed_ Audi in the 1980s. They fabricated the "tests" and the results. They modified the cars and rigged them to fail in the way 60 minutes wanted them to.
Nothing 60 minutes says about cars should be considered accurate.
If there was any justice in the world, the show and the people behind it would have been in prison 30 years ago.
Early in my Microsoft career, I built a system that provisioned thousands of windows machines on an as needed basis, differing by SKU level, language type, windows version, etc.
I'm was proficient in scripting the installs of windows machines -- even back when windows didn't natively support that sort of thing very well(e.g. NT4)
To be honest, Windows looks pretty good compared to any Linux distro I've worked with when it comes to automated provisioning and post configuration. That's a subjective comparison, of course, so I'll just say: I don't think windows was your problem.
It sounds like your management wasn't especially visionary nor technical, and that you failed to make an adequate business case to them regarding how much productivity the team would gain in the long run if you worked to automate these repetitive tasks.
That's a shame. I'm glad you moved on to greener pastures.
I apologize for misspeaking. I remembered that drag increased with velocity according to some power, but didn't remember which one. Thus, my sloppy language.
Most German cars (which is who Tesla competes with) have undercarriage engineering for reasons of sound and high-speed aero concerns. They are expected to sustain 200kmh, and the relevance of drag rises exponentially with speed, but also, controlling airflow is important so that the car doesn't have too much high speed lift. What you do NOT want is a vehicle that loses significant grip as speed rises, yet most cars are shaped like (poor) airfoils so this is a concern.
You may recall that the first gen Audi TT did not have a rear deck spoiler, but real world driving showed that there were many high speed loss-of-control accidents with the vehicle, so a rear spoiler was fitted later.
I would say it is more of an exceptional case, but I've worked with folks who have non-technical degrees (Philosophy) and those who have no degree at all.
I think most of our listings say they require a 4 year degree in CS or a related field. So, that's a pretty harsh filter.
If you're the kind of person that doesn't match resume filters, your best bet is to know somebody already in the company, and get referred by them.
It's probably easier than ever to get noticed in the software industry though. There is a whole world o open source projects out there for you to contribute to, and all of that work is, by definition, public knowledge.
When I see someone has listed work they've done on OSS projects on their resume, that tells me way more than whatever they write about education or school projects.
Your conclusion -- that good candidates never make it to my inbox because of recruiter filtering -- is certainly possible.
I think you've misunderstood what I wrote, however, on criteria.
Not only do we not have a policy of only hiring the top 20%, we don't even know how to measure that.
I am basing those comments on the observation that we talk to many more people than we're actually able to feel good about extending an offer to. I surmised it might be the top 20% based on the # of people I personally have had to "no hire" before I could recommend a hire. I apologize for not making that clearer.
I suspect that, as a college hire, you'd have been an ideal candidate for us. Clearly you had passion in the software space, given what you'd accomplished before finishing college. It's always possible that you'd bomb an interview question about doing something perverse in C with linked lists, but, that's really a matter of your technical competence and if you have any hangups about technical interviews (some people do).
fwiw, I went to a boring state university, and had a pile of UNIX/linux experience before and during college.
We have no restrictions or criteria at all as far as what universities people come from (we do have a finite amount of university recruiting money, so, we don't send campus recruiters to every college in the US.)
Regarding recruiting -- the recruiters we have are not programmers, but technical recruiting is the entirety of their job. And, they are not the only way people get into the pipeline. For instance, when I do campus recruiting trips, there is little to no pre-filtering of the resumes I get.
The conclusion I really want you to take away is that just because somebody has a degree in CS doesn't mean we can hire them.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like what "traditional" media did to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein?
This story seems like a case of moving goal posts. Of _course_ the place people go to get information skews their thinking about politics and politicians.
If someone is mad about google potentially doing this, it's only because they'd prefer that newspapers and tv stations retained that role by divine right...
BMW has already been putting CF into weight-sensitive areas of the car, like the roof panels on certain models. Up high is one of the worst places to carry weight from a vehicle dynamics perspective; it makes nearly every aspect of vehicle handling worse.
One practical difficulty of CF for general automotive use is that it's not really repairable.
Of course, modern autobody repair is often about replacing affected panels with pristine replacements (either new or from junk yard cars), as opposed to trying to repair an existing panel. So, in that sense, CF might be a fine choice, as the lack of reparability is in practice a non-issue.
BMW is already gluing cars together -- for almost 10 years they have been building the front clip on certain models out of aluminum, and in effect gluing it to the remainder of the unibody, which is conventional steel.
Also, BMW has been designing recyclability into its cars also for at least 15 years. I seem to recall that the E46 3 series was something like 90% recoverable.
I don't expect they would turn away from their recyclability commitment, so they must have a plausible plan for how they would like to apply it to CF parts.
Well, for the specific case of rape, its hard to see what would be politically gained by a society advanced enough to deploy these. I view some atrocities as a by product of turning real humans into killers in a war setting.
The discussion is about fully autonomous devices. It makes no sense to program an autonomous device to project power as sexual violence instead of just violence.
Now, if we're talking about remote controlled machines..i fear we replace one kind of dynamic with another. We protect women from sexual violence from predatory men who are in theater, but introduce to the problem invincible machines being remotely controlled by guys who shoot the prostitutes in grand theft auto.
Almost nothing could be worse than to let humans control these machines remotely with live audio/video feeds. If that happens, You WILL see women stripping for the machines like cam girls, under threat, in fear....before being killed anyway after the operator has caused enough humiliation and anguish.
The office file formats have been stable for several releases.
One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.
Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...
The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.
Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive
The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.
Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.
Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?
There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.
I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.
Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.
Oh, I already knew my beef was with government :)
As far as what doesn't happen in your area: what you say may be true of Comcast in your area, but certainly isn't of telephone companies.
The latter have a bizarre territory system that all of us are subject to.
I just recently called the ILEC of the neighboring town, only 4 miles away, that provides DSL service in that town. I am in a different ILEC service area (CenturyLink). CL can't even give me an analog phone that doesn't buzz, much less DSL -- even though I am in their territory, their switch is much too far away.
The neighboring ILEC cannot sell me any service of any kind -- even though I'm actually closer to their switch, and I cannot physically get the products I want from "my" LEC.
The reasons are not technical. They aren't even financial. The neighboring ILEC cannot trench cable to my site no matter how much I pay them -- because I am "owned" by some other ILEC.
I'm well aware of the term. I'm unsure why it is the entirety of your response.
Do you think _you_ advocate a technocratic approach, or that I do, or that we currently have one, or something else entirely?
Yes
Yes.
Yesterday, my son and I spent an hour dragging a box blade over 2 miles of dirt road with our tractor, in order to fix deep ruts in the road surface that were scraping on the bottom of my car the last time I tried driving that route.
Today, I used that road to drive into work and it was wonderful. I had a need, so I scratched it myself.
I have no idea if it is legal for private citizens to do road maintenance on public roads, but I chose to do so anyway.
By the way, I would love it if Comcast provided internet service in my area. I hate Comcast. But my only other choice is Verizon LTE, which is fast when it works, but which I try to use as little as possible since it is a pay-per-byte connection.
I've lived in urban areas my entire life until only recently. The whining you people do about broadband is hilarious. You have no clue how good you have it.
Well, I agree with this.
But your "solution" is terrible. Your plan is to replace the current set of greedy pigs with something much worse -- greedy pigs who are stupid and yet think it is their mission to change the world using other people's money and talent.
No thanks. The last mile problem certainly sucks. But because of my situation, I've been heavily investigating what it takes to get my own WISP off the ground. Do you know what stops me from doing it? Nothing. Just my willingness and money.
Do you think that would be the case if I needed to fight the government? Well, how long does it take to get roads repaired where you live?
As an aside, have you priced buying business-class bandwidth from a local provider? Nobody is offering it where I live, but in the nearest large town, I got quoted $550/mo for a 10 meg connection. Including tower rentals on both ends, the cost to backhaul IP to my area would be over $1000 / mo.
Of course, that's trivial compared to the $12k/mile it costs to dig and lay fiber..
And guess what? If I were in the WISP business, my 10 meg connection for $550/mo would support 2-3 Netflix streams. Yet everyone wants to stream Netflix from 6pm to midnight every night. At the same time. Do you think my 3 Netflix subscribers would agree to split $550/mo three ways? Do you think they'd complain bitterly if I oversold my 10 meg connection and none of them could stream Netflix?
If you think you can do better than the existing oligarchs, I encourage you to consider what barriers prevent you from competing with them and delighting your customers. In many cases, you'll find that Comcast has been granted a local monopoly by local governments. Ooops.
Anyway, if a particular state or municipality wants to do a community/local broadband project, and own the last mile, they should do so within the confines of their local constitution/charter.
But you said "nationalize". Even if I thought the government ought to be building and owning data infrastructure for business/residential use, I wouldn't make it the FEDERAL government's problem. This is Civics 101 stuff...
Kudos on the legendary Slashdot UID, btw.
This is critically important, and, frankly, given the books that Ron Paul (and invariably, Rand Paul) have read and worked on, I'm not sure why he'd say something like this.
Nobody in modern libertarian/an-cap thought thinks there is intrinsic value to any currency or any commodity
So, I'm not sure what he's doing here. He's quoting Hayek.. but the later writers made it pretty clear that intrinsic value was a non-concept... maybe saying "intrinsic value" was a mental gaffe on the part of Rand Paul...and he meant "utility" value..
I use smartphones with prepaid sims and no data plans. I'm usually at home or at the office where there is ample wifi. Smartphones are quite usable without "persistent" internet connections.
Not everyone has or wants a smartphone with a network connection. Of course, even feature phones get their time from the cell network, which is reasonably accurate.
That said, I started wearing a watch again a few years ago when I became a father to twins. I found that I was often getting up in the middle of the night, running a bottle warmer, etc. I found that it was critical to have something with a countdown timer and basic alarm functionality that was physically attached to my body. Also, I needed to be able to see what time it was when I was laying in bed, so a good lighting source was critical.
A smartphone doesn't meet these requirements. A basic Casio digital watch does.
I wore the casio until the battery started to wear out. I took it to a watch repair place and they ruined it. In the interim, I purchased a $10 timex analog watch with an extremely thin case, because the casio (it was a g-shock mudman -- I recall being hard on watches when I was a kid) doesn't fit under the cuff of a dress shirt.
Right now I'm wearing a newer casio digital watch -- one that uses solar charging and reads the radio atomic time signal from Colorado. I hope to never have to open the case to replace the battery, and I don't ever think about setting it. It is cheaper than my phone, more durable, and it is always attached to my arm when I need it.
I think there is a market for a smart watch. I'm sitting at my desk right now with my phone in my pants pocket. It buzzes every now and then with meeting reminders. Which I don't look at.
If my wrist watch buzzed because it knew about my calendar appointments, that's something I would use and appreciate. But, I wouldn't wear such a watch unless it was durable and inexpensive.
It's interesting that you believe that mass transit necessarily is slower and less convenient for people, yet still want it any way.
Why do you hate people?
I understand that time is the one asset that is truly finite for all of us, and indeed, we never know how much of it we have left.
Who will say, on their deathbed, "I'm glad I spent an hour a day riding a bus" ?
Busses are a poor form of mass transit because they usually take the same roads that private cars do. A bus will never be faster than a private car unless you factor in the car's time to find a parking spot, and the city in question is terribly congested.
Subways, or any other transit system that is disjoint from the road system, can be MUCH faster than a private car. And I've chosen to use them even when I had a private car available to me.
People will and should use mass transit when it makes their life better -- when it saves them time and lets them do more fulfilling things with their life.
In places like Munich, Germany, it is possible to get most places in the city via very fast u-bahn lines. We lived there for about 2 weeks and didn't have a car. When we did have to go somewhere that u-bahn didn't reach, dealing with the bus system was jarringly bad in comparison. Suddenly we had to become aware of times, schedules, etc.
The Ubahn system is great because it's difficult to get on the wrong train, and you don't need to memorize a schedule... the next train will always be coming in a few moments.
When we toured Germany outside of Munich later on, we had a hired car, but we did not take it into urban core areas (like Berlin). We would park at a free park and-ride on the outside of town -- which were ajoined to s-bahn lines. Then we would take the s-bahn line to the hauptbanhof (centrail rail station) at the city core, and from there we'd take ubahn lines as appropriate to our various destinations.
For areas with high urban density, disjoint mass transit (like subways) is a great option, and having a personal car in the city core is usually a liability because parking it is so frustrating, and ultimately, expensive in terms of dollars and human time.
I love driving and have many days of race track time to my credit. I also built my own RV out of an old school bus and we take long family trips in it. In my family, we like driving and private cars.
However, when there is advantageous public transit available to me, I use it.
It is possible to build transit systems that work with the reality of how people live instead of some central planners idea of how she wishes people lived. Good systems can and will prosper.
Systems that don't improve the lives of their users should simply disappear so that better choices can come about.
Ok, I actually think you, me, and Theo all agree :)
1) We don't think a specific technical change would have _prevented_ the issue.
2) We all agree that better software engineering practices would have found this bug sooner. Maybe even prevented it from ever getting checked in (e.g. suppose the codebase was using malloc primitives that that static analysis tools could "see across", and that the code was analysis clean. Could this bug have existed?)
Who has claimed that using the system allocator, all else being equal, would have prevented heartbleed?
Who has claimed that heartbleed was an allocation bug?
I understand what freelists are and do.
The point here is that rigorous software engineering practices -- including the use of evil allocators or static analyzers that could actually understand they were looking at heap routines -- would have pointed out that the code implicated in heartbleed was unreliable and incorrect.
If you read the link you pointed at, after making a modification to OpenSSL such that coverity could understand that the custom allocator was really just doing memory allocation, Coverity reported 173 additional "use after free" bugs.
There are bugs from years ago showing that openSSL fails with a system allocator.
Don't you suppose that in the process of fixing such bugs, it is likely that correctness issues like this one would have been caught?
Actually, it is you who are wrong.
Theo's point from the beginning is that a custom allocator was used here, which removed any beneficial effects of both good platform allocators AND "evil" allocator tools.
His response was a specific circumstance of the poor software engineering practices behind openSSL.
Furthermore, at some point, openSSL became behaviorally dependant on its own allocator -- that is, when you tried to use a system allocator, it broke -- because it wasn't handing you back unmodified memory contents you had just freed.
This dependency was known and documented. And not fixed.
IMO, using a custom allocator is a bit like doing your own crypto. "Normal people" shouldn't do it.
If you look at what open SSL is
1) crypto software ... you should already be squarely in the land of "doing every possible software engineering best practice possible". This is software that needs to be written differently than "normal" software; held to a higher standard, and correct for correctness sake.
2) that is on by default
3) that listens to the public internet
4) that accepts data under the control of attackers
I would say that, "taking a hard dependence on my own custom allocator" and not investigating _why_ the platform allocator can no longer be used to give correct behavior is a _worst practice_. And its especially damning given how critical and predisposed to exploitability something like openSSL is.
Yet that is what the openSSL team did. And they knew it. And they didn't care. And it caught up with them.
The point of Theo's remarks is not to say "using a system allocator would have prevented bad code from being exploitable". The point is "having an engineering culture that ran tests using a system allocator and a debugging allocator would have prevented this bad code from staying around as long as it did"
Let people swap the "fast" allocator back in at runtime, if you must. But make damn sure the code is correct enough to pass on "correctness checking" allocators.
Not liking someone isn't a good enough reason to put them in jail.
Usually. For now.
Suppose it has a security vuln?
Suppose it depends on a certain version of a legacy DLL we need to service for other callers?
Suppose it was never localized beyond English?
Suppose admins want to enable/disable it via group policy?
(etc)
For better or for worse, it is incredibly expensive to put something in the Windows Box.
We give away VS for free, in a variety of different versions/avenues. By not putting it in the windows box, we avoid a huge # of headaches.
Your conclusion is entirely wrong.
Because Microsoft doesn't do the things YOU think Microsoft should do, you can ascertain the motivations and goals of Microsoft?
How interesting. Suppose we hire you to lead our CS education strategy. Can you promise results? Are you willing to bet your career on your prophecies coming true?
Let me tell you what IS true.
Microsoft lets me -- and many other MS employees -- volunteer to teach CS in public K-12 schools, 1 hour a day, before heading into the office for our "real jobs".
MS spends money to make this happen (volunteer matching hours), and gets less of my productive time (without docking my pay). There are full-time employees dedicated to this project. They have no other MS business function.
The program I am referring to is called TEALS (www.tealsk12.org)
It is just one of the ways that MS puts time, money, and people, into trying to build a better pipeline of students who can do CS.
I don't think stuffing GWBASIC back into windows is going to take us from where we are to where we need to be.
Relevant:
http://everythingfunny.org/wp-...
Hrmm.
http://www.urbandictionary.com...
I don't think this will contribute to genetic diversity....
60 minutes has had credibility problems for a long time.
They _destroyed_ Audi in the 1980s. They fabricated the "tests" and the results. They modified the cars and rigged them to fail in the way 60 minutes wanted them to.
Nothing 60 minutes says about cars should be considered accurate.
If there was any justice in the world, the show and the people behind it would have been in prison 30 years ago.
Funny you mention that.
Early in my Microsoft career, I built a system that provisioned thousands of windows machines on an as needed basis, differing by SKU level, language type, windows version, etc.
I'm was proficient in scripting the installs of windows machines -- even back when windows didn't natively support that sort of thing very well(e.g. NT4)
To be honest, Windows looks pretty good compared to any Linux distro I've worked with when it comes to automated provisioning and post configuration. That's a subjective comparison, of course, so I'll just say: I don't think windows was your problem.
It sounds like your management wasn't especially visionary nor technical, and that you failed to make an adequate business case to them regarding how much productivity the team would gain in the long run if you worked to automate these repetitive tasks.
That's a shame. I'm glad you moved on to greener pastures.
Why didn't you script all of the activities you just described?
2 is an exponent :)
I apologize for misspeaking. I remembered that drag increased with velocity according to some power, but didn't remember which one. Thus, my sloppy language.
Most German cars (which is who Tesla competes with) have undercarriage engineering for reasons of sound and high-speed aero concerns. They are expected to sustain 200kmh, and the relevance of drag rises exponentially with speed, but also, controlling airflow is important so that the car doesn't have too much high speed lift. What you do NOT want is a vehicle that loses significant grip as speed rises, yet most cars are shaped like (poor) airfoils so this is a concern.
You may recall that the first gen Audi TT did not have a rear deck spoiler, but real world driving showed that there were many high speed loss-of-control accidents with the vehicle, so a rear spoiler was fitted later.
Of course.
I would say it is more of an exceptional case, but I've worked with folks who have non-technical degrees (Philosophy) and those who have no degree at all.
I think most of our listings say they require a 4 year degree in CS or a related field. So, that's a pretty harsh filter.
If you're the kind of person that doesn't match resume filters, your best bet is to know somebody already in the company, and get referred by them.
It's probably easier than ever to get noticed in the software industry though. There is a whole world o open source projects out there for you to contribute to, and all of that work is, by definition, public knowledge.
When I see someone has listed work they've done on OSS projects on their resume, that tells me way more than whatever they write about education or school projects.
Your conclusion -- that good candidates never make it to my inbox because of recruiter filtering -- is certainly possible.
I think you've misunderstood what I wrote, however, on criteria.
Not only do we not have a policy of only hiring the top 20%, we don't even know how to measure that.
I am basing those comments on the observation that we talk to many more people than we're actually able to feel good about extending an offer to. I surmised it might be the top 20% based on the # of people I personally have had to "no hire" before I could recommend a hire. I apologize for not making that clearer.
I suspect that, as a college hire, you'd have been an ideal candidate for us. Clearly you had passion in the software space, given what you'd accomplished before finishing college. It's always possible that you'd bomb an interview question about doing something perverse in C with linked lists, but, that's really a matter of your technical competence and if you have any hangups about technical interviews (some people do).
fwiw, I went to a boring state university, and had a pile of UNIX/linux experience before and during college.
We have no restrictions or criteria at all as far as what universities people come from (we do have a finite amount of university recruiting money, so, we don't send campus recruiters to every college in the US.)
Regarding recruiting -- the recruiters we have are not programmers, but technical recruiting is the entirety of their job. And, they are not the only way people get into the pipeline. For instance, when I do campus recruiting trips, there is little to no pre-filtering of the resumes I get.
The conclusion I really want you to take away is that just because somebody has a degree in CS doesn't mean we can hire them.