astangl

The failure stories I have heard convince me these are not fail-safe devices. If the thing shuts down in the winter and doesn't restart correctly, and you are away, you could come back to frozen/burst pipes. (Probably hasn't happened yet, but the failures have happened, so it's likely just a matter of time.)

So I would only use one of these paired with a conventional thermostat serving as a safety net, in case the Nest fails. But then I resent having to compensate for a manufacturer that cannot be bothered to build the failsafe into their own product in the first place.

In order for this to work, it would have to have some real teeth, i.e., spell out real jail time penalties for NSA staff if collection occurs beyond the cutoff date. Jail time for top staff, not just low-level scapegoats.

Also, eliminate their loophole -- spell out explicitly that any capture + storage of communications qualifies as collection, not that it requires a human to listen to qualify.

Alas, it will never happen.

With all the talk of spying and monitoring citizens' whereabouts via license plate scans -- can anybody setup a camera to take snapshots of license plates of cars entering & leaving NSA & other such installations, and cross-reference these against license records?

Reminds me of this

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2013/06/30

I still think Bill Gates' DONKEY.BAS (described by him as "very thrilling") takes the prize as worst game ever.

They discontinued the program to save just the 3 headers because now they've got other programs that save the entire email message. And phone calls, and text messages and tweets, etc.

Better idea -- stop acquiring crap in the first place. Where did all this crap come from, and was it crap when you acquired it, or did it morph into crap?

How well will the "two-person" rule work, once the second person starts to treat it like a rubber-stamp process? How do you prevent that from happening without introducing big inefficiencies?

Poser.

Big deal. So we'll start getting the updates from IBM instead.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html

Is anybody surprised? Even the inventor of the gun seems quite hesitant about how many times it can be fired safely. Anyone setting out to show how dangerous it can be can simply keep firing it until failure occurs. Voila!

If article made any mention of how many times that gun was fired until it failed, I missed it.

One place I worked went in a few short years from having free fancy coffees, etc. (for developers in their skunkworks office) to departmental secretary sending out an email complaining about the rate of consumption of cheap ballpoint pens from the supply closet. (A quick check online confirmed that if the consumption was reduced to zero, it would save less than $20/yr -- hardly worth the alienation and bitterness it caused.)

At that company I coined a rule that once companies start to focus heavily on "branding", it's time to bail.

I strongly suspect age discrimination comes into play, either consciously or unconsciously. In some cases, the team lead making hiring decisions is young enough to be my son, and experience on my resume goes back to around his birthdate. Putting myself into the young team lead's shoes, I think he isn't comfortable hiring the older, wiser developer, however stellar the resume -- he probably wants a team of hip, young 20 and 30-somethings, and if they come cheaper, so much the better.

So he doesn't even bother to respond.

It's not hard to extrapolate to a time when all the people making the developer hiring decisions think like this, and you see the writing on the wall, and try something else.

I put a (semi tongue-in-cheek) comment in some billing system code I wrote 8 years or so ago, pointing out a date overflow problem, something like Y292277026596 (can't remember the exact year now, but the comment was accurate). Comment went on to say that if the system was still in use at that time, then I would fix the problem.

I expected to be called out for this comment some day, but never have -- makes me wonder how often people read through code.

When I hear somebody say 900,000 milliseconds, it makes me wonder why he didn't quote the number in nanoseconds or worse.

On top of all the other problems with this puff piece, I couldn't shake the feeling that Microsoft will probably end up leading the way in buildings susceptible to viruses and other malware, consistent with their security record.

My expectation with implementing anything like this is that you immediately pluck some low-hanging fruit (fixing some inefficiencies) when the system goes online, and then it quickly becomes way more difficult to find further inefficiences to eliminate. The article makes it seem like there's an endless stream of inefficiencies they're finding.

It seems the author is not aware of John Tromp's IOCCC maze program. It uses working storage equivalent to one row of the maze. Very clever.

I don't see how borrowing (stealing?) 500K euro from many institutions is going to do anything other than get himself some publicity and then trial followed by jail time.

Capitalism has a lot of problems, but I don't see how anarchists offer better practical solutions. I lump libertarians (of which I once considered myself) into the same group.

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. For all the people running some Unix variant with local mail, the Python script seems pointless, versus just calling mail.

I've seen a lot of silver bullet fads come & go. I'll be glad to see the TDD fad go. Testing sure is a useful tool in the toolbox, but that's it.

It's funny this article quotes the asymptotic sort behavior, because that's almost identical to a real-world example I have used to debunk over-reliance on unit tests (AKA "false sense of security"). Back in the days when we still wrote our own sort functions, we were working on various QuickSort implementations. A popular optimization is to end with an insertion sort after a certain point. So your QuickSort can be completely broken, and the insertion sort at the end will still clean up the mess. Unit tests will typically just validate that the list is sorted correctly and completely miss the fact that the QuickSort itself is broken internally. Nobody has seen fit to comment on this example, so far.

Another fad I'd like to see gone is "no comments". My mind still boggles from a recent code review where I had to defend using comments. Sure, we've all seen worthless comments, and misleading comments, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and ban comments altogether! Self-documenting code is an ideal that should be aimed for whenever possible. But there's still a place for block comments in certain areas to explain key design and implementation decisions, tell a future maintainer what they might want to consider before changing or enhancing something, etc. It's not always possible to capture all that in code.

Woah, this is actually a thing people are doing?

Some of us still use FreeBSD on a desktop (well, maybe you don't consider xmonad a desktop...) But your point is valid -- it can be an exercise in frustration.

The big advantages Linux has now are mindshare, funding, drivers, and people that devote a lot of time to coming up with OS versions with binary packages that all work well together, so users don't have to build software from source. With FreeBSD that's theoretically possible, but if there's a big public repository of prebuilt binary packages for the latest (9.1) release, I am not aware of it, and my system doesn't know about it. So upgrades can be painful if you have a lot of ports and your machine isn't super-fast. And running into errors in the middle of the process seems par for the course -- then you get to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.

I have heard good things about PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) though. Apparently it's much more user-friendly for people looking to use it as a desktop environment.

Am I the only one who finds the requirement ambiguous?

Oldest guy who has been at the company the longest time? If I got a requirement like that I would first push back for a clarification, i.e., if employee A is older but employee B has been with the company longer, which is more of a candidate for elimination?

This seems much more serious than the much-ballyhooed Pentium FDIV bug. Hopefully Intel will be on the ball with notifying people and distributing the fix.

It's lame to write up a post accusing seller of selling device w/ shorted-out pins, but not even take the time to confirm the accusations with an ohmmeter.

I wish these perennial programming font lists would make clear up-front which fonts are designed with anti-aliasing (or ClearType) in mind.

I don't like the fuzzy look of anti-aliased fonts, plus I typically work with two monitors, one in landscape mode, and one rotated 90 degrees for portrait mode. I don't think ClearType works correctly in this case anyhow.

So far I haven't found anything I like better than BitStream Vera Sans Mono.

As Bill Gates would say, 23 GB should be enough for anybody.

One thing I haven't heard discussed about the "save data forever" model is that in some scenarios you WANT to purge old data and not have it recoverable, for legal reasons.

I guess Datomic is not suited to these situations?

Today's democratic state can be tomorrow's authoritarian regime, and "advances" like these help grease the wheels.

I would love it if this were true. I have been saying (only semi-tongue-in-cheek) for years that getting shot out of a cannon would be a great form of transportation, if only the bugs could get worked out (i.e., eliminate possibility of mid-air collisions). :-)

I think it's plausible that he's not crazy and everything on that blog is true. The whole situation is crazy enough that people probably approach it with preconceptions and interpret everything they read in that light.

There does appear to be rampant corruption in the government there. The press does seem interested in hyping the story, especially by portraying McAfee as a wacko. When I read the Jeff Wise story "Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness" recently, I was struck at how sensationalized it was, especially the part where he strains hard to make 8 shotguns, 2 pistols, and some ammo into "a small armory's worth of firearms", and "Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal." McAfee writing that Jeff Wise has some ax to grind, therefore, rings true to me.

I think the Russian Roulette trick involved palming the bullet, and was to make the point that things are not always as they first appear. Of course for anyone who's made up their mind that he's crazy, it's just simply more fodder to reinforce their beliefs.

The "Watchfulness" post does seem over the top, yet even that could be plausible. It's a shame -- the guy has been tried in the press already, so people assume he's crazy and a murderer.