cleaver

I love it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work where you need smartcard chip readers. A lot of the world outside the US uses smartcard + PIN — I can't imagine America is too far behind. Hopefully they have that under development.

Comparison between the USA and Canada is probably more meaningful. In recent times, Canadian gun laws have been stricter, but that was not always the case. There's something else behind the numbers. Universal healthcare? Cold weather? Who knows?

I can't state for sure what is the legal status of UKNova. However, they have worked with copyright holders to ensure that they are not infringing. Most of the content is free to air British TV shows, that in many cases can be downloaded for free from within the UK. UKNova helps make this content available outside the country.

Their policy is to take down any content that is available commercially. IE: once the box set comes out, you can no longer share it. Other specific content cannot be shared even if there is no non-commercial source. It is easy to get banned from the service, so users are very compliant.

There are a lot of expatriate Brits who will miss the service, not to mention fans of British TV everywhere.

Sure bombing innocent civilians is bad, but for me it would be enough to simply say I won't run a large Oracle server for ethical reasons.

That paralleled my brief career in government. Managers are not promoted for efficient decision making—they are promoted for not having been associated with an unsuccessful initiative.

The full disclosure debate is almost as old as the Internet itself. There's a case to be made on either side.

Disclosers gonna disclose. Know what I'm saying?

I looked at doing BB development when it was it's prime. It was too expensive to get into and the cost of a BB enterprise server was prohibitive for a amall shop.

I don't think they lack in research, or at least spending on research. I think the main thing they lack is a culture of innovation. They sat on their laurels as the market leader and they avoided cannibalizing any of their revenue streams.

I doubt the smart ones are out of a job for long.

AOL might have a case... don't know, IANAL. Doubtless they could tie him up in court. However, I don't imagine they would try to touch him. The kid has the makings of a modern folk-hero—it could only result in bad PR for AOL if they did go after him.

The response from the AOL spokesperson makes it seem like they are taking the incident in good humour:

"It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office -- we just didn't expect it to work so well."

I can think of a few reasons for the grammar rules in the commit message...

It is direct, concise, consistent and tends to active voice rather than passive voice. Further, not everyone writing or reading the messages will be a native English speaker. Avoiding past-tense forms just makes it easier.

I had a BIX account! For me it was one of the cheapest ways to get Internet access (pre-web).

It was noteworthy for the coding discussions.

I know a developer who tried polyphasic sleep. He said it worked as far as productivity goes, but his unwelcome side effect was that he would get sick very easily.

An IBMer once shared a joke with me:

"Q: How do you rid the world of illegal drugs?

"A: Legalize them and put IBM in charge of marketing."

I can relate as a one-time business partner. Our biggest competitor was IBM Global Services. Once we even had a teleconference to discuss going after an opportunity. We dialed in, but no IBM. After waiting for 15 minutes, we called someone who was to be on the call. "Oh... we decided to do it ourselves." Didn't even bother to tell us.

OSX 10.7 and Chrome 18 is OK.

That's like shouting "Punk's not dead!" as you preen your greying mohawk.

The business model of monetizing a product that is on the way out is well established. At least that was my reaction to the announcement.

CA (Computer Associates) made this their primary product revenue stream by buying up old software (eg. Clipper, Ingres, etc.) that still had an installed base. They invested minimal amounts into product maintenance (make sure it works on the newest version of Windows) and rake in the licensing revenue from the remaining user base.

The only thing different is that Adobe is essentially doing it to themselves--monetizing their own long tail instead of selling to a long-tail specialist and moving on.

I think it is actually pretty common for authorities not to cover a story if it is in the public interest. For example, a kidnapping case in progress and so on.

The question then, is it in the public interest not to cover this story. I'd say it would probably not matter so much from a security standpoint, but more so for the amount of mayhem that could ensue at airport security if this was public knowledge.

"The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out."

At your best you can become antibodies in the global cultural organism.

Actually making presentations changes things a lot for a person. I've seen people who spoke so softly you could barely hear them improve dramatically with some practice. Try joining Toastmasters.

Sounds like me in a way... I love to talk to someone interesting one on one, but I don't tend to interact as much as a group.

I do have a theory that a lot of the people who engage you in smalltalk also have similar dislike for the practice, but they've been assured again and again that this is something they must do.

I once got caught up on sleep over a period of several weeks. I then started falling into the segmented sleep pattern like in the article.

I didn't get out of bed when I woke up, but I found I was extremely lucid. As soon as I could use the time for problem solving, I stopped waking up :(

Yep. That's what got Randal Schwartz convicted for running a security scan (as part of his job at Intel).

I attended a Startup Weekend event... It definitely gave me a boost in energy and enthusiasm and ended up presenting me with multiple opportunities for learning and for work. There should be other local or national events that could also fit the bill.

Definitely look for opportunities to collaborate with others--working with a like-minded team can push you further than you could get on your own. Contributing to open-source projects will be a boost too.

I've used both git and svn--probably a bit more time using git on the command line. I wouldn't want to say that git is the best choice for every system, but I've had more hair pulling with svn. Specifically, merging a commit from a branch into trunk got messed up. I did find svn pretty painless when used with Eclipse however.

The things about git that make me like it better are that the branching and merging are easy and the distributed nature of the system. If your development process doesn't exploit the features of git, then svn would be a reasonable choice.

EDIT: Another key thing I like about git is that repos can be nested. The parent repo simply ignores the child repos. This is something where I get a lot of benefit.

I don't actually, but I feel there is less lock-in. It wouldn't be hard to move off.

Also, the risk of S3 pricing changing greatly is constrained by the wide adoption. If DynamoDB failed to become pervasive, it would be relatively easy for Amazon to increase the price to make an underutilized service profitable. OTOH, if DynamoDB does become as popular as S3 your exposure to risk will be much less.

DynamoDB is not open source, at least according to a blog comment by Jeff Barr of AWS. (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb-internet-...)

I'm certainly not going to commit to platform lock-in like that. I know a lot of folks were hit hard by Googles app engine price changes and it could happen again here with DynamoDB.

Does nobody use rsync? I see no mention in the comments here (and the original site is down).

There's a few command line parameters to learn, but after that it is so simple, efficient and reliable that there is no need for a GUI client such as the various FTP FTP clients. I typically write scripts for specific purposes, syncing only the files that have changed. Using my SSH key means I don't have to type the password all the time.

More at: https://twitter.com/youranonnews

Yay freedom?