Youâ(TM)d have better luck getting fair or reasonable reporting about Apple from almost anyone but The Guardian. Even if what they write is true, itâ(TM)s always going to be framed in such a way as to make Apple appear evil. The Guardian hates Apple almost as much as Forbes does. The Guardian hates Apple almost as much as it hates Julian Assange. Almost.
Climate change and global warming are not the same thing. Human industrial activity is causing a rapid buildup of greenhouse gasses. This is causing the planet to warm. That's global warming. The global rapid increase in mean temperature is causing climates to change as more and more energy is shoved into the system, historical temperature regulators like the gulf-stream slow, move, or just change, reflective snow melts, permafrost melts releasing more GHGs, suboceanic clathrates collapse due to increased water temperature (also releasing more GHGs), and so on. These changes lead to things like "arctic vortexes" and regional drops in temperatures as well as other weather extremes. But the overall global trend is increased temperatures.
So to sum up:
1. Humans are causing global warming. 2. Global warming is causing climate change.
Global warming and climate change are related but they are not the same.
Increased levels GHGs are also causing the oceans to change PH, becoming more acidic. That's almost as serious an issue as climate change IMHO.
When I was in my 30s I started to wonder about the best way to progress my programming career. I went into management, became a CEO, then COO (when a new CEO came in with money conditional on him being the CEO —bad decision), then after a few years, decided to go back to being a freelance developer. I enjoyed that much more than being a c-suite type, but by then was in my late 40s. Good news was I'd made a firm decision to stick to coding, ignore the management siren call, and focus on what I enjoy. I phased out of Java (too much boring work) and Ruby (not enough innovation) and decided to focus on Javascript (es6, Redux, React and beyond) and blockchain stuff (Solidity).
By chance I was introduced to a firm in Sydney that convinced me to give up freelancing and come work for them. Best decision I ever made. Now in my 50s I am easily one of the oldest developers there, but I get to collaborate with a great mix of younger devs whose energy and insights impress me, even if they lack the tonne of real-world experience that I have. I enjoy mentoring younger devs, solving problems, being the firm-handed coding standards nerd, and working on client issues at a senior level. And by working with younger devs I get to fast-track my learning of new stuff. It's a real win-win. I've made it clear I have no intention of ever being promoted into management, although I am now the Javascript Practice Lead I have no management responsibilities. The firm has seen fit to promote me twice, with excellent pay rises and bonuses, and understands I am best left to continue being a developer and not a manager. I work 100% remotely and service clients out of both the Sydney and Hong Kong offices. There are a few other devs at work of my generation, and we mostly all work remotely. Working remotely deemphasises the age gap between developers.
I feel that what I do for the firm makes a real difference. I love my job, my employer likes me, I have a good relationship with the senior management team and the respect of the more junior devs. I have a rep as a problem solver, clear communicator, and as someone with rich life experience. I like to believe the work I do will be useful for at least another 20 years. I can't see myself ever retiring as such. I client yesterday was asking me if I'd still be working if I'd not lost a shit-tonne of Bitcoin when MtGox collapsed (they'd have been worth about $800k now —sigh) and I said of course. I do this job because it's an activity I enjoy, working with people I like, for clients with real problems to solve.
I've been living in India for the last six months and gave up on Uber very quickly due to their general asshattedness and also their dreadful customer support. I switched to Ola and have been very happy. I hope they do well. Their app is not quite as slick as Uber's but then they don't track you while you are not running the app either which is a plus. The drivers are, in my experience, better trained, mostly appear to actually have licenses (unlicensed driving is endemic here), and they have Ola issued GPS systems rather than Uber which relies on the drivers' own often inadequate mobiles to handle booking and navigation.
I'm one of those older coders who started out with assembly language, did some BASIC, APL, Ridl, etc, before finding Java, then Javascript. I've seen enough PHP to scare me. I've written enough Ruby to be used to its quirks. I've been writing Javascript since 1997 and it's still my go-to language for when I need to get something done quickly and reliably. I've taken code that took 12 hours to run in Ruby and turned it into a simple Node script that ran in 6 minutes. Like Ruby and Java there is a real culture of testing with Javascript and Node especially, which makes the inevitable refactoring a dream. I am thinking of kicking it all up a notch however and diving into Elixir.
I learned Coffeescript in an afternoon for a particular project (lots of Coffeescript devs) and while I do get the advantages of it, those advantages (especially with ES6) seem too slight to make me want to really deep-dive into it. I suppose I really ought to learn Swift though, as I expect it will become the new server-side hotness sooner or later.
I thought the Apple Watch would be a useless toy and never bought one. Then work offered to pay for one for me so I thought — yay, I'll get one and see what it's like. I love it. It's totally inspired me to be more active; that's a plus, but it's also comfortable to wear, and having siri on your wrist is great. I use it for text messages a lot. I like getting Slack notifications on my wrist, and overall the notifications system is a good balance between being informative and not too interrupting. Overall I'd say this is a winner of a product. I certainly see a heap of them on wrists on the metro and in various offices.
When I travel I always get a local SIM so as to avoid the roaming fees. This means a new mobile number. This is okay as I never really use my mobile to make actual phone calls any more, it's all about data for me.
Auth systems that rely on my mobile number being constant and abailsble are thus utterly useless to me.
From the bottom of the article: âoeApple is standing by its decision to implement end-to-end encryption, having conceded only to hand over the content of some messages to the FBI, rather than providing real time access as requested.â
If it can hand over the content of some messages then surely that implies that Apple has the ability to decrypt people's iMessages. Does Apple have its own back-door / master key?
It's a dense read but fascinating. Having all that in a searchable archive is worthwhile but it's not the first time this information has been revealed to the general public.
Many of the hotels I've stayed in iver the years, both major chains and smaller boutique hotels, and in several countries, have attested to MiM my secure mail server or http a sessions. Similarly I caught the Qantas lounge in Sydney trying this a few years ago. I never use hotel internets any more or airline lounges' wifi - it's just too creepy.
Presumably such a Time Traveller would have been given some training, or read up on the history of the time they are travelling to. Though, perhaps not, given the way some people behave now when they travel between countries. Maybe time travellers are accidental - that that also seems unlikely. In fact the whole existence of time travellers seems unlikely, deliberate or not.
Here's a short list of 32 book's I've read that really affected how I look at the world (with links to Goodreads):
0) The Dancers at the End of Time Trilogy by Michael Moorcock - A literary dandy of a series. Short, sweet, funny and eternally optimistic. Stays with you. 1) The Illuminatus! Trilogy By Robert Shae and Robert Anton Wilson. - Truly hilarious - the literary equivalent of taking LSD. Once you've read it you'll never see the world in the same way again. This book invented the Illuminati conspiracy myth as we know it today. 2, 3, 4, 5) Hyperion / The Fall of Hyperion / Endymion, The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons - Heavy, difficult, big-idea science fiction / space opera set in a deeply religious future. The end made me cry. (Also check out Drood by Simmons. It's creepy and great.) 6) Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - a moving and beautiful critique of the scientific process - also made me cry. (read any Lem you come across, it's all great) 7) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon- a monster of a book - took me 3 years to read - but worth every bit of it. Affects how you perceive the world. (Also worth reading the companion so you can see what you missed the first time around) 8) Accelerando by Charles Stross - Truly a book for our times. Read any Stross, it's all pretty good. 9) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - funny, trippy satire of the soviet era and religion. 10) The Sacred Book of the Werewolf - Funny, especially if you've read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov but ultimately this is a book about the nature of perception and reality. 11, 12, 13) American Tabloid / The Cold Six Thousand / Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy. - Shocking, funny, tense, amazing. You'll never look at US politics in the same way again. Very few sentences longer than about 4 sentences unless it's dialogue, newspaper extracts or wiretap transcripts. 14, 15, 16) The Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson - Terrific fun nerd core historical adventure that reveals the history of money and science. Then go read all of Stephenson's other books, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Anathem. 17) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - scary because it's true and increasingly relevant. You'll look twice at train carriages after reading this. 18) Any / all of the Culture books by Iain M Banks, but especially Surface Detail. 19 and 20) The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton - pure fun space opera. 21)
Here in oz tap-to-pay is the latest thing. You just tap your card on the device and the payment happens - no signature, no nothing. It's valid for purchases up to $100 and it's brilliant. Paying for your cab is just a quick tap and you are gone, none of this printing receipts for you to sign, or having to member PINs.
Of course it's susceptible to theft etc, but clearly it's not such an issue for the banks or they'd not all be tripping over themselves to roll it out everywhere.
Certainly the New Yorker has shown it doesn't know the difference between "insure" and "ensure". That error appears three times in their article. Standards sure have slippedâ¦
The book has been in beta as an ebook for about a year. I admit I was one if those beta readers, alas I never actually got around to opening it. The hard copy version is sitting on my dining room table right now glaring at me.
Be that as it may, it's profoundly useless if you can't edit the root URL however.
Also, given the UI swiftly becomes a morass of swirling links, pinning one down to doubly click on it is next to impossible. The back end of this might be great but the UI is total shit.
I mean seriously, you can't even edit the goddam URL field; hovering over nodes makes them glow (wooo) but clicking does nothing. Maybe it's an issue with the Unity plugin (yeah, Unity! seriously. FFS)
You obviously don't know anyone with kids then. I'd say pretty much every household I visit has at least one iPad (often 1 per child). Add to that a plethora of iPod Touches and iPad minis. Go to any airport lounge and you'll see more iPads than you can poke a shitty stick at. I guess it's because I live in a first world country though.
Wow thanks, I've been a Mac user since 1984 and I never knew about command` until I read your comment. You've just made my Sunday! Is there a similar command keystroke for switching through tabs in a single window?
If, as the USG is saying, Snowden is lying, can we also assume that he invented those PowerPoint slides too? And if so, wouldn't the slides look nicer? Seriously if you were going to make that stuff up, you'd make it look nice too.
Slashdot Mirror
Youâ(TM)d have better luck getting fair or reasonable reporting about Apple from almost anyone but The Guardian. Even if what they write is true, itâ(TM)s always going to be framed in such a way as to make Apple appear evil. The Guardian hates Apple almost as much as Forbes does. The Guardian hates Apple almost as much as it hates Julian Assange. Almost.
Climate change and global warming are not the same thing. Human industrial activity is causing a rapid buildup of greenhouse gasses. This is causing the planet to warm. That's global warming. The global rapid increase in mean temperature is causing climates to change as more and more energy is shoved into the system, historical temperature regulators like the gulf-stream slow, move, or just change, reflective snow melts, permafrost melts releasing more GHGs, suboceanic clathrates collapse due to increased water temperature (also releasing more GHGs), and so on. These changes lead to things like "arctic vortexes" and regional drops in temperatures as well as other weather extremes. But the overall global trend is increased temperatures.
So to sum up:
1. Humans are causing global warming.
2. Global warming is causing climate change.
Global warming and climate change are related but they are not the same.
Increased levels GHGs are also causing the oceans to change PH, becoming more acidic. That's almost as serious an issue as climate change IMHO.
I just tried it, several times, and consistently got 6 as my answer.
Also just to try I did the sqrt of 2 minus 2 thing that appears to flummox windows calc users and the iPhoneâ(TM)s calc happily reports 0.
This article appears to be bullshit.
When I was in my 30s I started to wonder about the best way to progress my programming career. I went into management, became a CEO, then COO (when a new CEO came in with money conditional on him being the CEO —bad decision), then after a few years, decided to go back to being a freelance developer. I enjoyed that much more than being a c-suite type, but by then was in my late 40s. Good news was I'd made a firm decision to stick to coding, ignore the management siren call, and focus on what I enjoy. I phased out of Java (too much boring work) and Ruby (not enough innovation) and decided to focus on Javascript (es6, Redux, React and beyond) and blockchain stuff (Solidity).
By chance I was introduced to a firm in Sydney that convinced me to give up freelancing and come work for them. Best decision I ever made. Now in my 50s I am easily one of the oldest developers there, but I get to collaborate with a great mix of younger devs whose energy and insights impress me, even if they lack the tonne of real-world experience that I have. I enjoy mentoring younger devs, solving problems, being the firm-handed coding standards nerd, and working on client issues at a senior level. And by working with younger devs I get to fast-track my learning of new stuff. It's a real win-win. I've made it clear I have no intention of ever being promoted into management, although I am now the Javascript Practice Lead I have no management responsibilities. The firm has seen fit to promote me twice, with excellent pay rises and bonuses, and understands I am best left to continue being a developer and not a manager. I work 100% remotely and service clients out of both the Sydney and Hong Kong offices. There are a few other devs at work of my generation, and we mostly all work remotely. Working remotely deemphasises the age gap between developers.
I feel that what I do for the firm makes a real difference. I love my job, my employer likes me, I have a good relationship with the senior management team and the respect of the more junior devs. I have a rep as a problem solver, clear communicator, and as someone with rich life experience. I like to believe the work I do will be useful for at least another 20 years. I can't see myself ever retiring as such. I client yesterday was asking me if I'd still be working if I'd not lost a shit-tonne of Bitcoin when MtGox collapsed (they'd have been worth about $800k now —sigh) and I said of course. I do this job because it's an activity I enjoy, working with people I like, for clients with real problems to solve.
I've been living in India for the last six months and gave up on Uber very quickly due to their general asshattedness and also their dreadful customer support. I switched to Ola and have been very happy. I hope they do well. Their app is not quite as slick as Uber's but then they don't track you while you are not running the app either which is a plus. The drivers are, in my experience, better trained, mostly appear to actually have licenses (unlicensed driving is endemic here), and they have Ola issued GPS systems rather than Uber which relies on the drivers' own often inadequate mobiles to handle booking and navigation.
I'm one of those older coders who started out with assembly language, did some BASIC, APL, Ridl, etc, before finding Java, then Javascript. I've seen enough PHP to scare me. I've written enough Ruby to be used to its quirks. I've been writing Javascript since 1997 and it's still my go-to language for when I need to get something done quickly and reliably. I've taken code that took 12 hours to run in Ruby and turned it into a simple Node script that ran in 6 minutes. Like Ruby and Java there is a real culture of testing with Javascript and Node especially, which makes the inevitable refactoring a dream. I am thinking of kicking it all up a notch however and diving into Elixir.
I learned Coffeescript in an afternoon for a particular project (lots of Coffeescript devs) and while I do get the advantages of it, those advantages (especially with ES6) seem too slight to make me want to really deep-dive into it. I suppose I really ought to learn Swift though, as I expect it will become the new server-side hotness sooner or later.
I thought the Apple Watch would be a useless toy and never bought one. Then work offered to pay for one for me so I thought — yay, I'll get one and see what it's like. I love it. It's totally inspired me to be more active; that's a plus, but it's also comfortable to wear, and having siri on your wrist is great. I use it for text messages a lot. I like getting Slack notifications on my wrist, and overall the notifications system is a good balance between being informative and not too interrupting. Overall I'd say this is a winner of a product. I certainly see a heap of them on wrists on the metro and in various offices.
That'd be 4th Dimension. It was great. I built many a complex website back in the 1990s using 4D.
When I travel I always get a local SIM so as to avoid the roaming fees. This means a new mobile number. This is okay as I never really use my mobile to make actual phone calls any more, it's all about data for me.
Auth systems that rely on my mobile number being constant and abailsble are thus utterly useless to me.
From the bottom of the article:
âoeApple is standing by its decision to implement end-to-end encryption, having conceded only to hand over the content of some messages to the FBI, rather than providing real time access as requested.â
If it can hand over the content of some messages then surely that implies that Apple has the ability to decrypt people's iMessages. Does Apple have its own back-door / master key?
The Mitrokhin Archive was published in book form over 14 years ago. See https://www.goodreads.com/book...
It's a dense read but fascinating. Having all that in a searchable archive is worthwhile but it's not the first time this information has been revealed to the general public.
Many of the hotels I've stayed in iver the years, both major chains and smaller boutique hotels, and in several countries, have attested to MiM my secure mail server or http a sessions. Similarly I caught the Qantas lounge in Sydney trying this a few years ago. I never use hotel internets any more or airline lounges' wifi - it's just too creepy.
Presumably such a Time Traveller would have been given some training, or read up on the history of the time they are travelling to. Though, perhaps not, given the way some people behave now when they travel between countries. Maybe time travellers are accidental - that that also seems unlikely. In fact the whole existence of time travellers seems unlikely, deliberate or not.
Here's a short list of 32 book's I've read that really affected how I look at the world (with links to Goodreads):
0) The Dancers at the End of Time Trilogy by Michael Moorcock - A literary dandy of a series. Short, sweet, funny and eternally optimistic. Stays with you.
1) The Illuminatus! Trilogy By Robert Shae and Robert Anton Wilson. - Truly hilarious - the literary equivalent of taking LSD. Once you've read it you'll never see the world in the same way again. This book invented the Illuminati conspiracy myth as we know it today.
2, 3, 4, 5) Hyperion / The Fall of Hyperion / Endymion, The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons - Heavy, difficult, big-idea science fiction / space opera set in a deeply religious future. The end made me cry. (Also check out Drood by Simmons. It's creepy and great.)
6) Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - a moving and beautiful critique of the scientific process - also made me cry. (read any Lem you come across, it's all great)
7) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon- a monster of a book - took me 3 years to read - but worth every bit of it. Affects how you perceive the world. (Also worth reading the companion so you can see what you missed the first time around)
8) Accelerando by Charles Stross - Truly a book for our times. Read any Stross, it's all pretty good.
9) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - funny, trippy satire of the soviet era and religion.
10) The Sacred Book of the Werewolf - Funny, especially if you've read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov but ultimately this is a book about the nature of perception and reality.
11, 12, 13) American Tabloid / The Cold Six Thousand / Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy. - Shocking, funny, tense, amazing. You'll never look at US politics in the same way again. Very few sentences longer than about 4 sentences unless it's dialogue, newspaper extracts or wiretap transcripts.
14, 15, 16) The Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson - Terrific fun nerd core historical adventure that reveals the history of money and science. Then go read all of Stephenson's other books, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Anathem.
17) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - scary because it's true and increasingly relevant. You'll look twice at train carriages after reading this.
18) Any / all of the Culture books by Iain M Banks, but especially Surface Detail.
19 and 20) The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton - pure fun space opera.
21)
Here in oz tap-to-pay is the latest thing. You just tap your card on the device and the payment happens - no signature, no nothing. It's valid for purchases up to $100 and it's brilliant. Paying for your cab is just a quick tap and you are gone, none of this printing receipts for you to sign, or having to member PINs.
Of course it's susceptible to theft etc, but clearly it's not such an issue for the banks or they'd not all be tripping over themselves to roll it out everywhere.
Certainly the New Yorker has shown it doesn't know the difference between "insure" and "ensure". That error appears three times in their article. Standards sure have slippedâ¦
I'm not sure fingerprints taken at birth would be much good to anyone.`
Oh for fuck's sake it's 15 seconds to comply. If you are going to quote of if the most excellent scenes in cinema history get it right please.
The book has been in beta as an ebook for about a year. I admit I was one if those beta readers, alas I never actually got around to opening it. The hard copy version is sitting on my dining room table right now glaring at me.
I guess I should actually read it at some stage.
Be that as it may, it's profoundly useless if you can't edit the root URL however.
Also, given the UI swiftly becomes a morass of swirling links, pinning one down to doubly click on it is next to impossible. The back end of this might be great but the UI is total shit.
I mean seriously, you can't even edit the goddam URL field; hovering over nodes makes them glow (wooo) but clicking does nothing. Maybe it's an issue with the Unity plugin (yeah, Unity! seriously. FFS)
File this under "utter shite"
You obviously don't know anyone with kids then. I'd say pretty much every household I visit has at least one iPad (often 1 per child). Add to that a plethora of iPod Touches and iPad minis. Go to any airport lounge and you'll see more iPads than you can poke a shitty stick at. I guess it's because I live in a first world country though.
Wow thanks, I've been a Mac user since 1984 and I never knew about command` until I read your comment. You've just made my Sunday! Is there a similar command keystroke for switching through tabs in a single window?
If, as the USG is saying, Snowden is lying, can we also assume that he invented those PowerPoint slides too? And if so, wouldn't the slides look nicer? Seriously if you were going to make that stuff up, you'd make it look nice too.
Seriously I think the greatest invention of the 21st C could be silent fans. That bike looks like great fun but the noise is a killer.