I left programming to get into application security, and I love it. There is still some programming and a lot of reading code, but it's a million times more enjoyable than writing endless REST APIs for me.
407 karma · joined June 12, 2011
Developing software is almost always about building things for other people to use. It's inherently a social thing, and if you can't play nice with others, you will alienate and run off developers. Of course, there's a difference between getting your code critiqued in review and being treated like a child because you wanted to automate a build. I assume developers are smart enough to know the difference, though.
I realize f.lux was distributing a compiled binary instead of telling people to compile it from source, but I think Apple would have sent them a C&D just the same if it were just source.
Some people also get them because of loyalty to Apple from the past, or because OSX is unix-compatible.
The point I'm trying to make is, you can disagree with Apple and still use their products. I hate Apple but my work provided me with a mac mini and a macbook, which I use every work day. I also have developed iOS apps even though I've never owned an iPhone.
Also, if you are talking about iPhones, you are going to see a lot of those everywhere because you really only have 2 viable choices anyway.
A program is written to perform math, and it is generally considered bad to waste space with needless things. It doesn't aid the reader or the compiler or the execution to add unused variables. It's really bad in a program to do things in an unclear way.
Poetry can have ambiguities, good software can't.
They do both share some amount of necessity of context. Both often have abstraction. I would say poetry is kind of a playful use of language, whereas programming is really more of a clever use of math.
I'm always reminded of "Talking to god..."[1] when I read about these close calls with nuclear weapons. The most important paragraph in the entire short story is the following: "The only ones who reach level two are those who learn to accept and to live with their most dangerous knowledge. Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight. And frankly, they’re the only ones we really want to see leaving their solar systems. Species that haven’t achieved that maturity could not be allowed to infect the rest of the universe, but fortunately that has never required my intervention. The knowledge always does the trick".
Also, a common use of goto in C is when you're doing something in nested for loops and want to break out of all of them. A goto is actually much cleaner here than using sentinel values or boolean flags, or naughty things like setting your loop variables to be outside of the conditional bounds.
That's absolutely terrifying. I wonder how many of those are American citizens.
Perhaps this could lead to some sort of quantum FPGA equivalent within the next few years?
1: http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Sports-7015777-CATALYST-U-Lock/dp...
If you're asking the kind of people who have no consideration for others, and thus break parking and traffic laws, to be considerate to others, I think you're going to be sorely disappointed.
I think the problem is vendors and carriers wanting to modify and inject their crapware and custom UIs into Android. Google is happy to provide upgrades to the OS in a timely fashion (and are going to start monthly updates), it's the vendors/carriers that delay these updates or don't even bother to port them over to devices.
Google is moving much of the core Android functionality over to specific apps that they can update as needed from the play store, instead of integrating them directly into the OS. This is good, because it allows them to push the updates quicker. They run the risk that carriers will get sick of the lack of control over the "experience" they can provide, and fork android, but it's a necessary step in many ways to ensure things like this MMS exploit can be patched on some devices at all, as vendors abandon some phones quickly, leaving users vulnerable.
If every vendor and carrier used stock nexus android without modification, the updates could be pushed out in days. The linked article blames google for these problems, but that is, in my opinion, misguided.
Yes, you can jailbreak your iPhone and install unsigned code. You can even set up a compiler toolchain to build your iOS apps, but you shouldn't have to do all of that just to build an app for your phone.