Posts by Notas Badoff 1061 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
Halverflake's statement didn't advocate foisting adware on users, but reiterated a reason 'why' it happens. So +1 for your being suspicious but -1 for reading comprehension.
And, you know, it is getting ridiculous the way everyone reflexively adds '!\!SA!!' to every discussion of malfeasance. Hey, remember Hanlon's Razor? Or like, you know, crop circles, aliens, poisoned wells, etc. etc. etc.
Turned off the voice recognition first thing I got the new set last December. I figured the 'smart' in the TV wasn't smart enough, so kinda obvious they'd be echoing onto the network.
(I also disabled the WiFi, which again disabled the voice recognition, tho when Samsung properly supports Netflix that'll change (sigh))
"The capacity of workers, after being displaced, to find a new job that will eventually provide nearly comparable pay most often depends on the general knowledge of the worker and the ability of that individual to learn new skills," Greenspan said.
'eventually'...
'nearly comparable'...
This is an academic economist talking about the real world, and the best he can offer for your life is: two steps forward, one backward, one forward, one backward, one forward, one backward ... until we decide you are unhireable.
The 20-hour work-week is nigh! Work for 25 years, out of work for 25 years, take the average ...
You are stuck out on one of the Lagrange points, aren't you? Not sure if you're coming or going, but definitely not in the here and now. And if you keep nibbling away at that asteroid in order to throw stones you'll just leave yourself hanging.
Besides the interesting efficiency of handling server requests (which is now possible with other software combos, I hear) there is the quite nice aspect of sharing code between the browser and server. Might not suit all projects, but sometimes it's nice to cut down the number of spinning plates.
And until Erlang and other "proper languages" are smoothly available on web clients, Javascript is moules frites du jour.
There's a new B at work. Even B'ier than the B'd!
What? What wrong with saying that? It was an acute realization.
I have seen the reports generated by the static analysis software at Coverity and find them *very* revealing. Someone registered an opensource project with them (free for opensource) and it found a couple _thousand_ "hey you might want to have someone look at these couple of lines right here". And some of those were "I'm pointing here at the dubious use of variable value, but that dubious value was set hundreds of lines earlier" gotchas.
I'm sure it would have generated an "unchecked possible use of null pointer" report on the mentioned bug line. And there are more than a couple other such services besides Coverity, free for some opensource projects at least.
May I ask WTF? How does a large critical opensource project not use free tools?
"And they have done so despite the Great Firewall of China. You could even argue thanks to it."
Why would China wish to foster non-domestic companies? If it is difficult to conduct business within the country *because* it is cross-border business in the *wrong* direction, well, that serves "build the country".
There are multiple styles of protectionism, and saying you Western companies just don't understand the domestic market is both somewhat true and a definite excuse for obfuscation and obstruction.
Everybody loves a winner. They are fascinated by them, hence the gushing press. And I don't say that the winners are pre-ordained, except in one respect. They will be native Mandarin speakers exclusively.
"729 teraflops ...
nearly 71,000 AWS cores for an eight-hour run ...
completed nearly 620,000 compute-hours."
Trying to figure out what this means in AWS latent capacity. Am I really reading that AWS has high NN K cores just laying around - unused - just waiting for customers? I can understand a couple K cores just kinda loping along poking the spare database or serving a web page, waiting for a 'real' question to come along. But towards and beyond 100 K cores shooting the shit waiting for a good stretch-of-the-legs? How much capacity have they got just 'waiting'?
I've spent whole flights stuck in the back of a jet between the tail-mounted engines reexperiencing Koyaanisqatsi - something about the sync/de-sync between them - enough to wonder whether the composer had been traveling quite a bit before inspiration. But then I've always had Glass in my ears. I think they call it 'tinnitus'.
Hey, you can't arrest me, you said you had pizza!
So sue us...
"On behalf of the Pizza Industry we are incensed that the police imitated a pizza delivery person in order to arrest a criminal. Such subterfuge harms our member companies! Without the public's trust in honest cheese and crust civilization will collapse!"
Long ago in another age, MS stabbed IBM in the back and dropped OS2. A very prominent author got so irate at MS deep-sixing a finally rational API set, he swore he'd **never** write another book for Microsoft's APIs. Was that Petzold? Because strangely I have not in the last several years been able to track down exactly who that was... I sure though it was him, but can't find *any* mention. Very strange, as it was a big deal at the time.
Some fruit flies and the like will purposely select fruit that is fermenting, and naturally brewing alcohol, which normally is *not* a good thing for the larvae to be swimming through. When? If there are parasitic wasps hanging around (which amazing the flies can detect) then the flies lay their eggs on the alcoholic fruit. Because the alcohol helps retard or defeat the wasps' eggs should they try to parasitise the larvae. No wasps, then they pick healthy fruit. Wasps, then they pick noxious, hoping it will improve the chances for the larvae.
Is this stuff cool or what?
Now would *y'all* have thought of an idea like that to check out? Researchers don't stop at "huh?". They love "hey, why that screwy fly/whale/asteroid doing *that!*"
Is that Internet "decades"? Or "dog years"? In other words, not since we last coded such a thing in the hoary ancient past of 5 years ago. C'mon, CGI is only 21 years clock time old. Let's cut the bombast, okay?
No one *now-a-days* would code like they did years ago. Great, going forward. Problem is, who funds the effort to fix things coded 5 or 10 years ago?
What is the total technical debt accumulated across this industry, anyway? How many person-millenia would that come to?
“If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?” - John Wooden (?)
Does it benefit Chinese companies to have Western companies competing within China? Answer that with a view towards the medium-term - 10 to 25 years - with Chinese companies now still growing their capabilities. Now watch their actions in the next few years with that in mind. You can not be surprised.
CPC: We put the shove into chauvinism!
chauvinism noun
1. aggressive or fanatical patriotism; jingoism
2. enthusiastic devotion to a cause
3. smug irrational belief in the superiority of one's own race, party, sex, etc: male chauvinism
The phrase "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is mentioned a lot, but there is rarely a mention, and never praise, for "fumbling fingers". Given a large population of fumbling fingers, all bugs are hit multiple times. Then you only need one poor (but intelligent) sot to say "why did that happen?" and then go rooting around in the code. But remember, likely this bug was found because one person got clumsy with an editor in a script and wondered "where did that crap come from? oh, that looks like..."
Dyspraxics fall all over themselves to be helpful!
a) What would be the costs of a lengthy battle with the US govt over this issue. $100's millions.. $n billions?
b) What would be the public benefit to the company from this battle?
c) Profit!!!!
This just seems like a slamdunk to me. No matter what the outcome, their bottom line has to increase. Shoot, they can even take the legal costs off on their taxes, right? They have to be hoping the government steps over that line.
(Heck, it might even make me like them!)
"Did you contract to give X. Y. Z. a ride on such-and-such date?"
"They said you refused to provide service when you saw the service animal - explain please"
"And the 'missed connection' on such-and-such a date?"
"That is outside the rules and guidelines you agreed to"
"You are no longer a driver for Uber."
Do that for 5 or 10 drivers, and now you've got a pool of trustworthy drivers! If you don't select out the bad drivers, it all goes down. You have to choose, or you'll have no choice.
No, and I wish there was a once-a-day 50-downvote option for the same-old-same-old con-con-conspiracy sheeple-spewing idiots that plague this place. And, dude, Snowden is just the government's revenge against Assange to emasculate him and his reputation. Don't you keep up?
"All of the more than 700 attack domains the researchers have identified are hosted on Amazon, ..."
Well, then, shouldn't be too hard to identify the bad guys, really? Hello, Amazon, would you like to get that mud off your face? Oh, the easy money thing, huh...
Last time I looked at the output of a "non-partisan" group, they'd run three different $700K ad series each attacking different Democratic senators, and then the Democratic president for something different, as their 4 most recent actions. Um, yeah...
"Non-partisan" has become a self-applied label meaning 'liar'. I thank them for their willingness to be clear about that.
And then the gov'ts said whoa! you can't delete that data, we have to investigate so keep it on hand so each group of us can ask for it over and over and ... Years it took for Google to be *allowed* to delete it.
"Its so sad when there is a bunch of a$$holes in charge of us. Sigh." Yes.
I used to work for a company that every year got rid of about 5% of the lowest performers. Always hiring a few, always dropping a few. Isn't this the way to keep your talent pool healthy?
Of course, later on that company laid off my whole group, spun off everyone else in the building into another company, and left the state entirely, because, well, we weren't in their "home state", where the company political pressure points were. So, not entirely proof against irrational and damaging behavior...
I so want a bill with the excruciatingly constructed result FECKOFF. When the always inquisitive congressmen ask, just tell'em it's an Indian word.
The Chinese blaming US government ineptitude for the 'necessity' of Chinese protectionism to aid domestic industry and defeat the Western imperialist dogs who scheme to overrun the motherland with their corrupting products and turn the minds of our dear youth to ruin.
It's so much worse if it is a foreign company than an internal company.
I've seen this before. One or another person on an open source dev team decides that something is just "not a problem" and it doesn't matter how many outside people say "WTF?!" No arguments will help to move the issue. In this article's case only shaming the entire team worked.
In my favorite illustration is the "Firefox won't do SVG fonts" issue. Opened in 2002, after ~150 comments it was closed in 2013 with "Oh, poo, implementation of SVG embedded in OpenType fonts will fix your problem." An experimental proposed feature that is still not standardized or accepted by other browsers over a year later.
It didn't even matter when an outside company offered to fund the development of an implementation with their own devs, FF devs simply said "Oh, but SVG fonts are just so ucky!" "Why, you can't even do font hinting with SVG, can you?" So obviously no implementation was ever so much better than a flawed implementation, right?
And the pleas kept coming in, with increasingly exasperated replies of "but you just don't understand our (FF devs) position of 'No'. How rude of you!"
So over 12 years later FF still doesn't have anything to offer and will not be swayed!. A big enough closed-minded open source team will quite well replicate the worst parts of the commercial experience.
"The persistent input validation vulnerability allows remote attackers to inject own malicious script codes on the application-side of the vulnerable service."
Um, so we ought to be hearing that they have thoroughly scrubbed all the data that could have had scripts inserted, right? But we didn't?
In fact, when we've heard about attacks allowing persistent storage of evil scripts, when did we ever hear that the 'fix' included checking that nothing evil remains stored?
Succinct, harsh, and true. And now they've 'forgotten' to educate how *many* generations in the ugly details? Such that a warped view of history is uniquely one-sided. It is mind-boggling to think how little of anything self-culpable is mentioned to Japanese students.
I have no stomach for American triumphalism, but nationalist revisionism is a crime. Visiting La Cambe cemetery removed any remaining animosity for me. Would visiting Yasukuni Shrine do that? No. And that stain committed more than a generation later by unrestrained nationalists.
TL;DR: Santayana, education, yadayada.
Well they would, wouldn't they?
Having repeatedly claimed that their ad campaign, social wave, or latest clumsy grab for attention on behalf on clients was worth the fees charged, but with 'social' measurements showing a mere fraction of the positive effect desired, they've found an 'explanation' that makes everything better (for them).
That campaign wasn't a borborygmal bomb, it actually generated 400% more positive comments that we couldn't measure! And as an industry expert publication, The Register, outlined, further modes of unmeasurable communication most likely enlarged the audience for your message!
Why, we ought to have charged you more for our services. But now that we have the existing working relationship that would be unseemly, yes? Anyway, for your next campaign we were thinking "flying monkeys, but the cute kind".
I count 15 active judges in the district. Don't immediately see how cases are distributed. But unless strict round-robin is enforced, you may be seeing the preference by some judges for *not* taking on the pain, and then the preference for those that *can* take the pain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_H._Koh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Northern_District_of_California
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