1,244 karma · joined January 12, 2012
In Russia, Afghanistan, and Venezuela, the laws don't seem to matter very much; if Putin or the oligarchs/warlords/chavistas want things to be a certain way, there isn't much to stop them despite laws that in theory constrain them. That's the rule of men, as opposed to the rule of law, and it's antithetical to a free society.
Edit: Oops, somehow I missed this part:
"You might imagine that these bike lanes decreased congestion by cutting down on the number of cars on the road. But if that played a role, it was very slight: on Columbus Ave., the DOT counted cars, and saw only a very slight drop in overall volume during morning rush hour, when travel times declined by 35 percent. Instead, it seems that a pair of design decisions are responsible."
But as the author alludes, the company is much better positioned for "the next one," so the investment actually has yet to pay off and there's plenty of upside left. From that perspective it was a huge win, since it appears that he came close to covering his costs, and now the company has a competitive advantage.
Your definition of support doesn't match that used by enterprises like Spotify, i.e. the ones with real money on the line. They don't care whether the debugging is in-house or elsewhere; they just want the problem solved, and they want someone they can call who will go solve it. That involves paying someone directly (Canonical or other support companies), indirectly (paying your own employees to learn and manage things), or both. I'm guessing the ecosystem thing is in play here -- it's just easier to find Ubuntu-competent people/firms than Debian-competent ones.
That said, the work done by the Debian team is very valuable (thank you), which it seems ought at some level be reflected economically. I have no familiarity with Debian's financial situation but the hosting and compute resources can't come for free. A reasonable business model might be for the Debian team, or a commercial branch or spinoff thereof, or even just some motivated entrepreneurs, to serve as a (potentially non-profit) service provider for the likes of Canonical. Seems like a natural evolution to me, but as I said I'm not familiar with Debian's economics.
> If the package you're having problems with is an old release that is not maintained anymore upstream
Wouldn't Debian suffer the same problem here, e.g. if some piece of software's maintainer gets hit by a bus? Or does Debian make the commitment to take "ownership", if necessary, of all the software it bundles? The latter seems logistically challenging but I am prepared to be (even more) impressed.
None of us is immune to the tendency. Each of us must eternally watch ourselves too. Political maturity comes when we can check our decisions by seeing both sides of an issue and carefully weighing the costs.
[0]: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/01/eternal-vigilance-is-...
OTOH it could also be just spending priorities of updating street signs vs. other things.
I knew nothing about the phasing-out of ß until reading the comments on this article.
Citation needed. I can accept "influenced by" or even "heavily influenced by" without too much argument, but "primarily dictated by" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary proof.
By my read it's just as bad as the OP suggests; the screenshots even show specific students' names with their "engagement index".
An aggregated view of student engagement seems like it would be quite useful, e.g. "hmm, only 5% of my students are spending more than a minute looking at this really important chart, I should emphasize it in my next lecture". But Panopticon-style policing, and as you say, comfort with that policing -- shudder.
(edit - fixed product name)
[0]: http://instructors.coursesmart.com/go/institutions/analytics
I've noticed that the words 'customer' and 'user' are starting to draw my conscious attention when I see them used (and misused) in mainstream journalism.
Consider: For most of the companies listed in this article, the customer is exactly that -- someone who pays the company for something, e.g. a cable or internet subscriber.
But for Google, Facebook, et al, the customer isn't the user; the customer is the advertiser. The user is the product. Google's customers could care less about privacy and user notification, except insofar as it spooks the users away from the service.
The distinction is worth keeping in mind when trying to gauge just how far companies might take this newfound willingness to resist.
Put simply: MySQL was written by and for people whose time isn't valuable. I.e. the assumption is that it's cheaper to throw low-grade people and brainpower at workarounds (OpEx) than to pay to have the problems avoided in the first place (CapEx). There's a reason people shell out the money for big-iron databases: the math can be easy when you factor in the costs saved (both the direct costs and the opportunity costs).
I take this to mean that I'm giving LastPass's web server my actual master password, and that they will do server-side decryption of my Vault and have server-side access to my passwords in cleartext.
Is that accurate?
[1] https://lastpass.com/index.php?securitychallenge=1&lang=en-U...
Consider items like these:
> The GOPATH environment variable specifies the location of your workspace. It is likely the only environment variable you'll need to set when developing Go code.
> If you keep your code in a source repository somewhere, then you should use the root of that source repository as your base path. For instance, if you have a GitHub account at github.com/user, that should be your base path.
> To compile and run a simple program, first choose a package path (we'll use github.com/user/hello) and create a corresponding package directory inside your workspace:
> $ mkdir $GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello
Keeping the above snippets in mind, here's my thought pattern while reading the page:
So... I have only one workspace for all my work and I can set GOPATH once, in my .bashrc? Or I have one workspace per project and I need to set it differently for each project, kind of like a Python virtualenv? But then what's the difference between a "workspace" and a "project"? I do have a github account with a bunch of different projects -- err, repositories -- so that seems to reinforce the first way, but I don't typically work on them at the same time, so why would I combine them into a single Go workspace? And what's a "base path"? I must have missed that definition... nope, it's not in there, ok, I guess it's the root of where I'll put my... _new_ code? (Is it going to sync down all my repos?) But wait, here's an example where they say to create a Go "package" directory github.com/user/hello -- AHA! A Go "package" is like a git repository! Wait, that doesn't make sense... I'm planning to check this whole directory structure into github as a single project -- err, repo. Or am I not supposed to do that? But then I'd have to recreate all this on any machine where I want to work... is that really the intent? Yep, sure enough, they eventually say I should put the package directory into its own repo. So yes, I'm really only supposed to have one workspace for all my Go projects (I think). I wonder how Go manages dependency isolation for completely unrelated packages -- err, projects? -- that have the same output filename but are in the same workspace? Anyway, it sure would be nice to have a shell script or something to set up the workspace scaffolding for me, since I'm not supposed to check it into github...
And so we end up with folks like the OP doing exactly that. I'm sure there's a way to beat your head against this stuff until you eventually "get it", but it ought to be far easier than that to teach people coming from other environments.
At the very least, it would be helpful for this page to start by explicitly defining the mappings between the way Go uses words like "workspace", "package", "project", etc. and the way other languages/environments use them.
Thanks for your even-keeled comments here; helpful and refreshing.
True, but I'd expect that to be dwarfed by the I/O time required to load even a single 4k page from disk, vs. keeping one copy of a big dynamic library like glibc loaded for the whole system, with fixups done per-process.
Good points about ASLR and static-linking frequently-exec'd-and-exited processes like the shell; and certainly for embedded and HPC it makes sense. I guess the moral, as always, is to measure.
Bear in mind that the objective isn't to weed out people who can't solve it. There are plenty of people who are fine coders who wouldn't quickly hit the solution for any number of reasons, including nervousness. The objective is to weed out the charlatans and amateurs who managed to get past the HR resume filter, so that as little time as possible is wasted.
I disagree:
- If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech? Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes.
- I didn't mention solutions to the problem because my post was already long enough.
Solutions would involve (at least):
- Persuading people to take their media viewership and loyalty away from the worst offenders (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.). Hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. Do this by pointing out the emperor's nakedness. - Persuading people to give their media viewership to sources and outlets that don't pander to them (not quite the opposite of the first point). This gives influence (money) to media voices who, eventually, can credibly call our leaders to task for their race-to-the-bottom mentality. - Improved critical thinking curricula in formal education at all levels.
The above improvements would have gradual second-order effects on civic life, e.g. you might eventually end up with real town hall meetings instead of staged, scripted tripe. It really wouldn't take much overt change to see results -- you don't have to boil the ocean.
Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.
Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).
The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.
Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.
In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.
Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
"Engineers 3-10x more productive"
If this were generally true (of any technology X) the dollars would be flowing that way in an unstoppable torrent, and anyone using anything else would be the subject of ridicule and/or pity. It would be like writing custom websites in C.
Since that isn't happening, I have to take assertions like that with a sizable chunk of salt. The alternative would mean that there's a gigantic arbitrage opportunity that's being missed by a bunch of highly motivated people. So yeah, citation(s) please.
I think what they've done here is to allow each manager in the chain to decide how to handle their organization's evaluation and compensation. You could be VP of a 500-person division and instruct your directors and managers to rank everyone in your org in a single pool; or you could delegate to your directors and tell them to do what they think is best for their groups within their own individual budget constraints, which you assigned.
I think you just confirmed the OP's point -- MongoDB makes a good cache, not a good primary store. I'm guessing you didn't do updates into that MongoDB store, and always treated the SQL source as "authoritative" when it became necessary. Am I right?
You're right that copyright and trademark law are two different things. That said, the word "trademark" occurs on that page only in the footer, applied to the name Debian. Nowhere (on that page at least) are the images asserted as trademarks, whereas there's a prominent copyright notice near each logo. I suppose the copyright could be read to apply to the license text and not to the logo, although that would be odd, and inconsistent with the explicit copyright wording of the open use logo.