THE POINT IS IF YOU SIGNED UP FOR TWITTER YOU KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.
When I signed up for Gmail, I didn't expect to have all this crap about people following me, seeing my Google Reader posts, etc.
People signed up to Gmail for EMAIL. Now, they're are mixing Twitter functionality with something that I don't want associated with it, AND I HAVE NO CONTROL.
Too bad they fucked up their initial launch. Because of my privacy concerns, I have shut it off completely, and I will NEVER revisit Buzz again.
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
I know plenty of females that are competent in terms of technology. But the ones who are in leadership positions right now started out in tech 20+ years ago. They were the first wave. Now, we have more females in the general ranks, and they will filter their way up. But it takes time.
Force-feeding gender equality in a meritocracy won't work. They have to earn it just like everyone else. And when they do, no one will blink an eye or care, because everyone will think they deserve it.
I have 17 years experience in the Valley. I have a $165k/year base + 18% bonus. So I guess it depends where you work and in what areas you specialize in. If you're good, then you will be handsomely rewarded, I think. If you're only making $50k/year, you need to be more aggressive and move to where the money is. If you're too scared or would rather live close to where your family is, then don't complain you're not making enough as a programmer. Don't expect to be paid $165k/yr while living in places that don't value your talent.
If you are 7'2" and play basketball in the Antarctic Men's basketball league, don't be surprised that your talents aren't as valued as highly as if you were playing in the NBA.
the security for the horse and buggy was compromised by experts who simply offered the horse a carrot. This allowed full access and control to the vehicle. Experts are at a loss to fix this security hole, and are actively encouraging users to upgrade to a newer technology.
The worst programmers I've met are the ones who are heads down and program. They are usually very arrogant and think they are gods. Case in point, there's a guy I currently work with who is a disaster. People are in awe of him because he will work until 4am and has improved the performance of our application 100-fold.
The problem is that during the design phase, he completely disregarded all of our design recommendations and did things his way. It turned into a complete disaster, with nothing working as it should, deadlocks and complete lack of scalability, etc. So yes, he worked until 4am to improve things and did improve the performance from the initial disastrous numbers, but it was all his own fault! As well, because he was so arrogant and stubborn, he ended up producing something that no one wants anymore because the interface is too abstract and hard to use. Now, our the product is being shut down before it has even launched, because we couldn't convince any consumers to "wait until the next release" to get it to do what they actually want. All the fellow programmers think he's an asshole, but all of the managers who don't understand what he does will undoubtedly promote him.
The best programmers are the ones who keep it simple, design things excellently and program it once, with maybe a couple of iterations of performance enhancement. I've met plenty of brilliant programmers in my time, and these are the key traits that they exhibit. The "brilliant", nerdy programmers that heads-down program are rarely any better than a smart, easy-going programmer that both works hard and spends more time listening to their customers and making common sense design decisions.
It's funny how governments, especially the US government, are so worried about how cyberwarfare could affect their businesses, etc. However, they really couldn't give a rat's ass about human lives. Case in point, 100k+ Iraqi citizens killed in the war. What a horrible travesty and a crime against humanity that war was. I don't see them talking about how countries could stop attacking regular civilians, but oh, don't do anything that might destabilize our business infrastructure!
The Internet and Google cache are forever. You have no idea who or what could malign your good name. It might not be you, it could be someone else that posts on a message forum about you. You have no control over your name anymore.
The only protection you have is security through obscurity. I'm blessed with a very, very common name. That fact, in addition to my early decision in the mid 1990s to never post anything under my real name has made me completely anonymous. I have about 30 email addresses, each with different uses so that they can't be searched for. I have several different "personas" that I write under, and I try to maintain different writing style each time, different spelling mistakes, etc.
This is about the only thing you can do, it's too late for us, but you can keep your children's name generic so they can't be found easily on Google, and to teach them not to be complete dumbasses and do something they will regret forever.
Citi, JPM And Nelnet were implicated in a huge student loan conspiracy to commit fraud. Not only do they make hand-over-fist on student loan interest, they were apparently engaging in fraudulent activity such that they made EVEN MORE money. That's what greed gets you...
JJ Abrams is already on the record saying he would be ridiculously happy with $50 million. $72 million is beyond his wildest expectations. All this nonsense about "is it good enough" is just completely masturbatory. The fact is that it has singlehandedly revived the franchise, and people who have no interest in Star Trek went to go see it. As long as Abrams can keep the storylines less fanboyish (he said he never was a fan, which is a good thing), it seems like he can keep getting people to go see it.
I've been thinking about this problem a lot. I've come to the conclusion that in order to build the best code, and to have the best design, we need the underlying programmers as dumb as possible, and just strictly implement exactly what the architect tells them to do, in a very specific well defined way, almost like a typist that you talk about.
Let me explain.
I live in the Bay Area, and a few years ago, a truck crashed underneath a main thoroughfare and caused a section of a main highway to collapse. The company that fixed it, fixed it in a couple of weeks, under budget and under schedule. It was amazing, because considering how much work is involved and the amount of coordination and how risky it was, they were still able to understand exactly how long the task would take.
I was wondering why we can't do this with software programming. Why is it so hard to estimate the creation of a piece of software?
It's because, unlike physical engineering projects, software engineering projects leave too much of the underlying implementation to the actual implementing engineer. This causes far too much variety and subsequent bugs.
Imagine if the construction company above left the mixing of the concrete to the person actually pouring the concrete? Of the choice of concrete? Or the choice of metal rods, etc? There would be absolute chaos. The only reason why it came on time and underschedule was because there were no underlying decisions of implementation. Everything was standardized and made in a standard way, and connected in a standard way.
In programming, the choice of algorithm is up to the programmer. Even things like the choice of using a while loop vs for loop, etc, is up to the individual programmer. This is what causes bugs and what causes schedules to overrun. There is absolutely no predictability in software design, and the only way to get it and to create bug-free software is to take any and all decision making capabilities from the underlying programmer, and to do it in a completely standard way. This means there is less variability in how different components of software interact with each other, and the permutations of different behavior decreases.
Believe me, I don't like the answer I came up with. I love programming, and I love the sense of creativity I feel when I'm programming. But in terms of what is a better way to develop software, I truly believe the above is the only way that as an industry we'll be able to survive. Right now programming is not "engineering" in the same sense of mechanical engineering, or civil engineering. There is far too much choice given to the left-nodes. Until we stop the leaf-nodes from making implementation decisions (turning them into little more than a bunch of typists), I just can't see this industry getting from under the stigma of buggy software, unpredictable schedules, etc.
If you don't know the value that Howard Stern brought to Sirius radio, then you completely don't understand the topic you're talking about and I suggest you stop talking about it.
Howard Stern is the only reason why satellite radio exists at this point. Sirius was built on his back, if you look at the subscriber growth before and after he joined, it's like night and day. I'm a Sirius subscriber and the only reason why I considered moving onto there is because of Howard. It makes the 45 min commute every day much easier. Everyone I know that has Sirius did it for the same reason.
Sure Sirius has good music and programming that is entertaining, but is it worth $12.95/month? No way. The only thing that is worth paying money for is Howard, and once he leaves I'll probably leave too, unless they drastically drop their price to around $5/month.
Why are we still talking about newspapers as we're still amazed at their losses, or as if there's a hope of recovery? AIDS patients and cancer victims have a better chance of survival than newspapers. Stick a fork in 'em, they're done.
I haven't read a newspaper in years. Mainly, I get them when I stay in hotels and it's left for me in the morning in front of the room. But I've already read most of the articles they are reporting on because it was on the Internet the night before. If not, it will be available on their web site for free.
Newspapers are irrelevant, and people who think there's any glimmer of hope is like an astronaut flying towards a black hole, and hoping that instead of being crushed to death he will instead of transported into another dimension. It's inevitable, newspapers are dead. So is the 6pm news hour. People my age and younger do not get their news from newspapers or the tv anymore. The only thing propping up viewership are older people, and as they die off, viewership will plummet. They will most likely not switch over to using the net, and that's fine, but they also don't benefit advertisers as much, so pretty soon, the entire industry will be dead.
In fact, I did ask professionals in the field, namely several auditors I know that audit many tech companies that you and I both know in Silicon Valley. They all said the same thing. SOX is tedious, but inevitably the transparency they provide is extremely beneficial for investors. The people who work at the companies hate it, but that's not what it's for. It's to protect the investors, something that wasn't around for the dot-com bust.
Sorry, but that's just about as disingenuous a statement as I've read in a long time.
You most certainly have a conflict of interest in this situation. That means that we cannot take your facts and your statements at face value, because you could most certainly misrepresent the situation because you have something to gain, much like you misrepresented that simple saying that you presented above. The fact that you failed to even mention your association to the web site pretty much says everything I need to know about you.
If you don't think that SOX is necessary, then you don't understand what it does.
Sarbenes-Oxeley is forcing all public companies to formalize their financial processes. What it is akin to is forcing programmers to document their code, not just comment it, but to create product and design specifications. This is so that it creates transparency so that outsiders, such as investors or auditors, can understand the flow of finances throughout the company. For most large companies, it probably didn't make a huge impact, but where it did make the most impact was for small and medium-sized public companies. It sucks, but it protects investors.
Why did they implement it? Because of the widespread fraud from the dot-com boom/bust. Before some fly-by-the-night startup can go IPO and make billions of dollars, they will need to submit themselves to this formalization of financial processes so that people can understand exactly what is going on. It sucks, it is onerous, but it is necessary.
Thanks for your input, I didn't realize they weren't vacuum sealed, but you make a great point about air expansion.
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
What if I do a dd on my drives, throw them out, some dumpster diver picks them up, uses it for kiddie porn, then forgets about the drive. 5 years from now, someone happens to find the drive, gives it to the FBI, the technology advances to the point where they can somehow recover my TurboTax documents that were supposed to be deleted but actually weren't. They will come knocking on my door, take me down for questioning, and my reputation is ruined.
It's the exact same reason why I have zero presence on the Internet with my real identity. Data is forever. People could get screwed by it's misuse, and I don't want to be one of them. I don't need to apologize for being overly cautious. This isn't the 1950s anymore, you need to use different measures to protect yourself. 10 years ago, people would have laughed at you for shredding your documents with a crosscutting shredder. Now it's standard practice. I think people should treat all their information the exact same way.
What about all the dust that is generated from drilling it? I'd rather just disassemble it and bend it, and then toss it in the dumpster. Hopefully if someone comes across it, the platters will have been mangled enough to make the data unreadable.
I have 15 hard drives that I've collected over the years, and I want to get rid of them. I tried wiping them clean using sdelete from sysinternals, but this is really, really slow, and I'm not certain of how good that will work. Afterwards, for each hard drive, I connected it to my computer using a USB conversion kit, then as I copied something to the drive, I took a hammer and smashed it while it was writing until it made very weird noises.
Unfortunately, this isn't good enough for me, so I started disassembling the hard drives, and physically bending the platters, as well as taking the strong magnets located in the arm, and using that to hopefully wipe out some of the magnetic data stored there.
My question: do the internals of hard drives contain some sort of chemical that I should be concerned about? I have about 15 of these drives I want to destroy, so any exposure to chemicals might be a lot.
Wrong, many states allow non-compete clauses. I think California is in the minority. You need to check with your state to ensure that non-compete clauses are not enforceable. This goes from management all the way down to blue-collar labor, such as plumbers, etc.
No, you get it, you're being far too small-minded about this. You have this single concept of what virtualization should be, and you're wrong because you can't see what it could bring in the future.
It's not about copying your documents back and forth. The entire interaction between you and your computer totally changes. Why exactly do I care where my desktop is running as long as I have access to it. Do I really want to copy my documents back and forth onto a single USB drive? Yeah, that's how we do it right now, but why even bother? Why not just have a single copy of my "desktop" and move it around from location to location. Who knows, maybe the cell phone will be the desktop in the future, and you just switch form factors depending on where you are or what you want to do. Virtualization is the first step to this, creating a homogeneous environment.
Look at the difference between having your POP3 client vs having all your mail on Gmail. Would you consider that the same as dropping asteroids onto a fly? With a POP3 client, you need to copy around all your mail files whenever you want to move around, you need to know the specific server settings, etc. I know this because my mother-in-law came over last month and needed me to set up her POP3 client for her because it didn't work here. If she used Gmail, things would "just work". Same thing goes with virtualization, you can copy your documents around, but maybe the computer you're using doesn't have the same set up. Maybe the versions of MS Word are different, etc.
Moving this concept out to cell phones is the next step, just like it was for email. I think it will take another 5 years, but I'm sure it's on its way. People will probably be docking their iPhones at work to download the desktop, working from home from their home docking station, etc.
It might be that you guys don't understand the benefits, but now that cell phones become part of the virtualization game, it really means that you can extend things almost anywhere. Think about what happened when the Internet moved out to cell phones, people are instantly connected to everything they want. They can communicate, etc from anywhere in the world.
If you can virtualize your desktop onto your cell phone, think about the possibilities. You're working at your desk and then you need to go on a trip to a different country. You "download" your desktop onto your cell phone/iPhone or whatever, and then you can keep working, and even maintain network connectivity. By the time this becomes mainstream, I'm sure cell phones will have multi-GHz equivalent chips with 20+ gb storage. Then, when you get to the hotel, you connect up your cell phone to the hotel's docking system with monitor and keyboard, etc.
You keep working, and then when you get back to the office, just transfer your virtual machine back onto your desktop. Or, if you want, just keep working from your cell phone.
Who knows what the possibilities will be, but this seems to be the point. Processors aren't getting much faster, guys, and the applications that need them have pretty much ended. I'm still using my 1 GHz laptop from 2004 without skipping a beat, and I don't imagine things needing much more than this for the next 5 years. I'm sure within a few years the cell phones will be more powerful than this.
VMWare has some cool functionality such that if you virtualize all your machines, at night time when the loads are lower, you can consolidate all your VMs onto a smaller number of physical machines, and automatically turn off the physical machines. Then, in the morning, as the loads increase, you can automatically power on the physical machines and move the VMs back onto these physical servers to handle the load. Not sure what it's called but when I heard about it, I thought it was really cool.
I work at Yahoo at the Mission College campus. This article is about oh, 6 months too late? We at Yahoo already figured this out, months ago.
The day that Jerry betrayed us and announced that they were doing a "trial" test of Google ads was the nail in the coffin for most Yahoos. If you cede search and search advertising, you might as well ditch every sense of innovation and technology that the company has. And he did that. I mean, honestly, what else is there at Yahoo in terms of technology? Nothing, we become nothing more than AOL, a content provider.
In the conference call he had with search when they first announced the "experiment", he said "I want to thank you for all the hard work that you did, and it's because of all your hard work that it allows us to try this experiment." How ridiculous was this statement? It was disgusting and I guess he didn't realize how backhanded that statement was.
OF COURSE Google wants to keep Yahoo weak. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but at least a combined Yahoo-Microsoft would have had a chance to compete against Google and wrest some of that advertising space away, with Microsoft's deep pockets. Instead of fighting, which all the Yahoos wanted to do, we are just a bunch of snivelling bitches of Google now. By doing this, they prevented any decently sized competitor from being created, and they kept their two second-largest competitors separate and ununified. It was a brilliant move on Google's part.
The fact is, projects like Panama and Apex failed. But if we give up, Yahoo is basically nothing, except for a bunch of perl scripts and html pages. The only chance that Yahoo had to capture some glory was to make a compelling ad system so that we could take some market share away from Google. Now, by feeding off the teat of Google, there is NO WAY that we will ever be competitive. It was truly making a deal with the devil, to increase short term revenues, and to make their earnings numbers better to save their own asses. Next is to go completely with Google ads, and then after that next after that is to drop search altogether. Why bother? Might as well go all the way, and lay everyone in MC2 off.
Jerry Yang has completely bungled this company, and will unfortunately go down in Silicon Valley history as the worst non-fraudulent CEO ever, that ruined his own company with his own ineptitude. He should have made the deal with Microsoft. You could even tell on the devel-random list how the tone changed. Even the most die-hard Yahoos now realize what a shell of a company Yahoo has become, and are just waiting around, playing foosball and surfing the web, while we all away the great Layoff of 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
THE POINT IS IF YOU SIGNED UP FOR TWITTER YOU KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.
When I signed up for Gmail, I didn't expect to have all this crap about people following me, seeing my Google Reader posts, etc.
People signed up to Gmail for EMAIL. Now, they're are mixing Twitter functionality with something that I don't want associated with it, AND I HAVE NO CONTROL.
Too bad they fucked up their initial launch. Because of my privacy concerns, I have shut it off completely, and I will NEVER revisit Buzz again.
'Nuff said.
"Director Alexandre Philippe distances his film from the one-sided fan rage films that lambaste Lucas, even though the title would suggest otherwise."
I suggest subbie take a course in reading comprehension.
"The People vs George Lucas" suggests that Lucas is going on trial, and arguments for and against his prosecution will be presented.
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
I know plenty of females that are competent in terms of technology. But the ones who are in leadership positions right now started out in tech 20+ years ago. They were the first wave. Now, we have more females in the general ranks, and they will filter their way up. But it takes time.
Force-feeding gender equality in a meritocracy won't work. They have to earn it just like everyone else. And when they do, no one will blink an eye or care, because everyone will think they deserve it.
I have 17 years experience in the Valley. I have a $165k/year base + 18% bonus. So I guess it depends where you work and in what areas you specialize in. If you're good, then you will be handsomely rewarded, I think. If you're only making $50k/year, you need to be more aggressive and move to where the money is. If you're too scared or would rather live close to where your family is, then don't complain you're not making enough as a programmer. Don't expect to be paid $165k/yr while living in places that don't value your talent.
If you are 7'2" and play basketball in the Antarctic Men's basketball league, don't be surprised that your talents aren't as valued as highly as if you were playing in the NBA.
the security for the horse and buggy was compromised by experts who simply offered the horse a carrot. This allowed full access and control to the vehicle. Experts are at a loss to fix this security hole, and are actively encouraging users to upgrade to a newer technology.
The worst programmers I've met are the ones who are heads down and program. They are usually very arrogant and think they are gods. Case in point, there's a guy I currently work with who is a disaster. People are in awe of him because he will work until 4am and has improved the performance of our application 100-fold.
The problem is that during the design phase, he completely disregarded all of our design recommendations and did things his way. It turned into a complete disaster, with nothing working as it should, deadlocks and complete lack of scalability, etc. So yes, he worked until 4am to improve things and did improve the performance from the initial disastrous numbers, but it was all his own fault! As well, because he was so arrogant and stubborn, he ended up producing something that no one wants anymore because the interface is too abstract and hard to use. Now, our the product is being shut down before it has even launched, because we couldn't convince any consumers to "wait until the next release" to get it to do what they actually want. All the fellow programmers think he's an asshole, but all of the managers who don't understand what he does will undoubtedly promote him.
The best programmers are the ones who keep it simple, design things excellently and program it once, with maybe a couple of iterations of performance enhancement. I've met plenty of brilliant programmers in my time, and these are the key traits that they exhibit. The "brilliant", nerdy programmers that heads-down program are rarely any better than a smart, easy-going programmer that both works hard and spends more time listening to their customers and making common sense design decisions.
It's funny how governments, especially the US government, are so worried about how cyberwarfare could affect their businesses, etc. However, they really couldn't give a rat's ass about human lives. Case in point, 100k+ Iraqi citizens killed in the war. What a horrible travesty and a crime against humanity that war was. I don't see them talking about how countries could stop attacking regular civilians, but oh, don't do anything that might destabilize our business infrastructure!
The Internet and Google cache are forever. You have no idea who or what could malign your good name. It might not be you, it could be someone else that posts on a message forum about you. You have no control over your name anymore.
The only protection you have is security through obscurity. I'm blessed with a very, very common name. That fact, in addition to my early decision in the mid 1990s to never post anything under my real name has made me completely anonymous. I have about 30 email addresses, each with different uses so that they can't be searched for. I have several different "personas" that I write under, and I try to maintain different writing style each time, different spelling mistakes, etc.
This is about the only thing you can do, it's too late for us, but you can keep your children's name generic so they can't be found easily on Google, and to teach them not to be complete dumbasses and do something they will regret forever.
Citi, JPM And Nelnet were implicated in a huge student loan conspiracy to commit fraud. Not only do they make hand-over-fist on student loan interest, they were apparently engaging in fraudulent activity such that they made EVEN MORE money. That's what greed gets you...
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/nelnet-whistleblower-scandal-hits-wikileaks-jpm-citi-and-nelnet-implicated-massive-conspirat
JJ Abrams is already on the record saying he would be ridiculously happy with $50 million. $72 million is beyond his wildest expectations. All this nonsense about "is it good enough" is just completely masturbatory. The fact is that it has singlehandedly revived the franchise, and people who have no interest in Star Trek went to go see it. As long as Abrams can keep the storylines less fanboyish (he said he never was a fan, which is a good thing), it seems like he can keep getting people to go see it.
I've been thinking about this problem a lot. I've come to the conclusion that in order to build the best code, and to have the best design, we need the underlying programmers as dumb as possible, and just strictly implement exactly what the architect tells them to do, in a very specific well defined way, almost like a typist that you talk about.
Let me explain.
I live in the Bay Area, and a few years ago, a truck crashed underneath a main thoroughfare and caused a section of a main highway to collapse. The company that fixed it, fixed it in a couple of weeks, under budget and under schedule. It was amazing, because considering how much work is involved and the amount of coordination and how risky it was, they were still able to understand exactly how long the task would take.
I was wondering why we can't do this with software programming. Why is it so hard to estimate the creation of a piece of software?
It's because, unlike physical engineering projects, software engineering projects leave too much of the underlying implementation to the actual implementing engineer. This causes far too much variety and subsequent bugs.
Imagine if the construction company above left the mixing of the concrete to the person actually pouring the concrete? Of the choice of concrete? Or the choice of metal rods, etc? There would be absolute chaos. The only reason why it came on time and underschedule was because there were no underlying decisions of implementation. Everything was standardized and made in a standard way, and connected in a standard way.
In programming, the choice of algorithm is up to the programmer. Even things like the choice of using a while loop vs for loop, etc, is up to the individual programmer. This is what causes bugs and what causes schedules to overrun. There is absolutely no predictability in software design, and the only way to get it and to create bug-free software is to take any and all decision making capabilities from the underlying programmer, and to do it in a completely standard way. This means there is less variability in how different components of software interact with each other, and the permutations of different behavior decreases.
Believe me, I don't like the answer I came up with. I love programming, and I love the sense of creativity I feel when I'm programming. But in terms of what is a better way to develop software, I truly believe the above is the only way that as an industry we'll be able to survive. Right now programming is not "engineering" in the same sense of mechanical engineering, or civil engineering. There is far too much choice given to the left-nodes. Until we stop the leaf-nodes from making implementation decisions (turning them into little more than a bunch of typists), I just can't see this industry getting from under the stigma of buggy software, unpredictable schedules, etc.
If you don't know the value that Howard Stern brought to Sirius radio, then you completely don't understand the topic you're talking about and I suggest you stop talking about it. Howard Stern is the only reason why satellite radio exists at this point. Sirius was built on his back, if you look at the subscriber growth before and after he joined, it's like night and day. I'm a Sirius subscriber and the only reason why I considered moving onto there is because of Howard. It makes the 45 min commute every day much easier. Everyone I know that has Sirius did it for the same reason. Sure Sirius has good music and programming that is entertaining, but is it worth $12.95/month? No way. The only thing that is worth paying money for is Howard, and once he leaves I'll probably leave too, unless they drastically drop their price to around $5/month.
Why are we still talking about newspapers as we're still amazed at their losses, or as if there's a hope of recovery? AIDS patients and cancer victims have a better chance of survival than newspapers. Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. I haven't read a newspaper in years. Mainly, I get them when I stay in hotels and it's left for me in the morning in front of the room. But I've already read most of the articles they are reporting on because it was on the Internet the night before. If not, it will be available on their web site for free. Newspapers are irrelevant, and people who think there's any glimmer of hope is like an astronaut flying towards a black hole, and hoping that instead of being crushed to death he will instead of transported into another dimension. It's inevitable, newspapers are dead. So is the 6pm news hour. People my age and younger do not get their news from newspapers or the tv anymore. The only thing propping up viewership are older people, and as they die off, viewership will plummet. They will most likely not switch over to using the net, and that's fine, but they also don't benefit advertisers as much, so pretty soon, the entire industry will be dead.
In fact, I did ask professionals in the field, namely several auditors I know that audit many tech companies that you and I both know in Silicon Valley. They all said the same thing. SOX is tedious, but inevitably the transparency they provide is extremely beneficial for investors. The people who work at the companies hate it, but that's not what it's for. It's to protect the investors, something that wasn't around for the dot-com bust.
Sorry, but that's just about as disingenuous a statement as I've read in a long time.
You most certainly have a conflict of interest in this situation. That means that we cannot take your facts and your statements at face value, because you could most certainly misrepresent the situation because you have something to gain, much like you misrepresented that simple saying that you presented above. The fact that you failed to even mention your association to the web site pretty much says everything I need to know about you.
If you don't think that SOX is necessary, then you don't understand what it does.
Sarbenes-Oxeley is forcing all public companies to formalize their financial processes. What it is akin to is forcing programmers to document their code, not just comment it, but to create product and design specifications. This is so that it creates transparency so that outsiders, such as investors or auditors, can understand the flow of finances throughout the company. For most large companies, it probably didn't make a huge impact, but where it did make the most impact was for small and medium-sized public companies. It sucks, but it protects investors.
Why did they implement it? Because of the widespread fraud from the dot-com boom/bust. Before some fly-by-the-night startup can go IPO and make billions of dollars, they will need to submit themselves to this formalization of financial processes so that people can understand exactly what is going on. It sucks, it is onerous, but it is necessary.
Thanks for your input, I didn't realize they weren't vacuum sealed, but you make a great point about air expansion.
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
What if I do a dd on my drives, throw them out, some dumpster diver picks them up, uses it for kiddie porn, then forgets about the drive. 5 years from now, someone happens to find the drive, gives it to the FBI, the technology advances to the point where they can somehow recover my TurboTax documents that were supposed to be deleted but actually weren't. They will come knocking on my door, take me down for questioning, and my reputation is ruined.
It's the exact same reason why I have zero presence on the Internet with my real identity. Data is forever. People could get screwed by it's misuse, and I don't want to be one of them. I don't need to apologize for being overly cautious. This isn't the 1950s anymore, you need to use different measures to protect yourself. 10 years ago, people would have laughed at you for shredding your documents with a crosscutting shredder. Now it's standard practice. I think people should treat all their information the exact same way.
What about all the dust that is generated from drilling it? I'd rather just disassemble it and bend it, and then toss it in the dumpster. Hopefully if someone comes across it, the platters will have been mangled enough to make the data unreadable.
I have 15 hard drives that I've collected over the years, and I want to get rid of them. I tried wiping them clean using sdelete from sysinternals, but this is really, really slow, and I'm not certain of how good that will work. Afterwards, for each hard drive, I connected it to my computer using a USB conversion kit, then as I copied something to the drive, I took a hammer and smashed it while it was writing until it made very weird noises.
Unfortunately, this isn't good enough for me, so I started disassembling the hard drives, and physically bending the platters, as well as taking the strong magnets located in the arm, and using that to hopefully wipe out some of the magnetic data stored there.
My question: do the internals of hard drives contain some sort of chemical that I should be concerned about? I have about 15 of these drives I want to destroy, so any exposure to chemicals might be a lot.
Wrong, many states allow non-compete clauses. I think California is in the minority. You need to check with your state to ensure that non-compete clauses are not enforceable. This goes from management all the way down to blue-collar labor, such as plumbers, etc.
No, you get it, you're being far too small-minded about this. You have this single concept of what virtualization should be, and you're wrong because you can't see what it could bring in the future.
It's not about copying your documents back and forth. The entire interaction between you and your computer totally changes. Why exactly do I care where my desktop is running as long as I have access to it. Do I really want to copy my documents back and forth onto a single USB drive? Yeah, that's how we do it right now, but why even bother? Why not just have a single copy of my "desktop" and move it around from location to location. Who knows, maybe the cell phone will be the desktop in the future, and you just switch form factors depending on where you are or what you want to do. Virtualization is the first step to this, creating a homogeneous environment.
Look at the difference between having your POP3 client vs having all your mail on Gmail. Would you consider that the same as dropping asteroids onto a fly? With a POP3 client, you need to copy around all your mail files whenever you want to move around, you need to know the specific server settings, etc. I know this because my mother-in-law came over last month and needed me to set up her POP3 client for her because it didn't work here. If she used Gmail, things would "just work". Same thing goes with virtualization, you can copy your documents around, but maybe the computer you're using doesn't have the same set up. Maybe the versions of MS Word are different, etc.
Moving this concept out to cell phones is the next step, just like it was for email. I think it will take another 5 years, but I'm sure it's on its way. People will probably be docking their iPhones at work to download the desktop, working from home from their home docking station, etc.
It might be that you guys don't understand the benefits, but now that cell phones become part of the virtualization game, it really means that you can extend things almost anywhere. Think about what happened when the Internet moved out to cell phones, people are instantly connected to everything they want. They can communicate, etc from anywhere in the world.
If you can virtualize your desktop onto your cell phone, think about the possibilities. You're working at your desk and then you need to go on a trip to a different country. You "download" your desktop onto your cell phone/iPhone or whatever, and then you can keep working, and even maintain network connectivity. By the time this becomes mainstream, I'm sure cell phones will have multi-GHz equivalent chips with 20+ gb storage. Then, when you get to the hotel, you connect up your cell phone to the hotel's docking system with monitor and keyboard, etc.
You keep working, and then when you get back to the office, just transfer your virtual machine back onto your desktop. Or, if you want, just keep working from your cell phone.
Who knows what the possibilities will be, but this seems to be the point. Processors aren't getting much faster, guys, and the applications that need them have pretty much ended. I'm still using my 1 GHz laptop from 2004 without skipping a beat, and I don't imagine things needing much more than this for the next 5 years. I'm sure within a few years the cell phones will be more powerful than this.
VMWare has some cool functionality such that if you virtualize all your machines, at night time when the loads are lower, you can consolidate all your VMs onto a smaller number of physical machines, and automatically turn off the physical machines. Then, in the morning, as the loads increase, you can automatically power on the physical machines and move the VMs back onto these physical servers to handle the load. Not sure what it's called but when I heard about it, I thought it was really cool.
I work at Yahoo at the Mission College campus. This article is about oh, 6 months too late? We at Yahoo already figured this out, months ago.
The day that Jerry betrayed us and announced that they were doing a "trial" test of Google ads was the nail in the coffin for most Yahoos. If you cede search and search advertising, you might as well ditch every sense of innovation and technology that the company has. And he did that. I mean, honestly, what else is there at Yahoo in terms of technology? Nothing, we become nothing more than AOL, a content provider.
In the conference call he had with search when they first announced the "experiment", he said "I want to thank you for all the hard work that you did, and it's because of all your hard work that it allows us to try this experiment." How ridiculous was this statement? It was disgusting and I guess he didn't realize how backhanded that statement was.
OF COURSE Google wants to keep Yahoo weak. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but at least a combined Yahoo-Microsoft would have had a chance to compete against Google and wrest some of that advertising space away, with Microsoft's deep pockets. Instead of fighting, which all the Yahoos wanted to do, we are just a bunch of snivelling bitches of Google now. By doing this, they prevented any decently sized competitor from being created, and they kept their two second-largest competitors separate and ununified. It was a brilliant move on Google's part.
The fact is, projects like Panama and Apex failed. But if we give up, Yahoo is basically nothing, except for a bunch of perl scripts and html pages. The only chance that Yahoo had to capture some glory was to make a compelling ad system so that we could take some market share away from Google. Now, by feeding off the teat of Google, there is NO WAY that we will ever be competitive. It was truly making a deal with the devil, to increase short term revenues, and to make their earnings numbers better to save their own asses. Next is to go completely with Google ads, and then after that next after that is to drop search altogether. Why bother? Might as well go all the way, and lay everyone in MC2 off.
Jerry Yang has completely bungled this company, and will unfortunately go down in Silicon Valley history as the worst non-fraudulent CEO ever, that ruined his own company with his own ineptitude. He should have made the deal with Microsoft. You could even tell on the devel-random list how the tone changed. Even the most die-hard Yahoos now realize what a shell of a company Yahoo has become, and are just waiting around, playing foosball and surfing the web, while we all away the great Layoff of 2008.