jacobquick

Scare quotes are what you use when the thing you are discussing is not the word you're using. They are completely appropriate there.

The guy who replied to you is correct, as everyone who paid attention in Econ 101 is aware: there is no reason for the US Federal Government to default, ever. It dictates the literal amount of its monetary units that exist on earth (another thing carefully defined and explained in Econ 101) by extending credit. It extends this credit with no collateral, no limits and no need for leverage. They create money when they want to for any reason, and they don't when they don't want to for any reason. They can, tomorrow, instruct the Fed to create $17T (roughly the national "debt") and credit it to whoever they want. The key difference between a central bank and all other entities: when it extends credit, it does not create a matching liability in the government's accounting. The central bank, or rather something with the power of a central bank, is the only entity in a society that can do this. That's what the "sole power to dictate the supply of money" means.

Any logic developed while thinking about debt carried by people, companies, cities or states, all of whom must add liabilities to their accounting books when they take on debt, does not apply to the entity that controls the central bank for the monetary units in question. Anytime anyone expresses concern about the national "debt" as if it wasn't something Congress could wave away with a pen in 15 minutes, they're being ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.

It is absolutely critical that you read up on and understand this. It puts the lie to a lot of the national dialogue about austerity, belt-tightening, and service cuts.

It's almost as if we should tax people proportional to their ability to pay.

Finally someone gets it right. There's already a bunch of comments in here comparing the federal government's "debt" to city, state, corporate, or individual debt. It's ridiculous and incredibly damaging to try to draw parallels between entities that have to account for their borrowing and a central bank that can extend infinite credit without collateral, debt or repayment any time it feels like it.

Those old people should have paid for the undercoating

Your CEO is like 10 years too late on this one, companies who offshored or outsourced mostly brought those projects back internal since. The companies that were successful got there by starting a development office in the country they wanted to ship work to, that's the only way to do quality control long-term. I've seen companies with less than $3M in revenue do it and then rent the team out to other people for projects. The contract outsourcing teams that were good realized how few of them there were, and then like any good American tech worker those teams raised their price. So the "myriad benefits" are: cost cutting by scraping the bottom of the barrel and accepting that in 3 years you'll have to pay an expensive grown up to redo it...and that's it.

If your CEO is bound and determined to warp you back to 2005, it helps to understand what you are renting when you contract tasks out. If you get a team of 10 people there's: one great coder, one pretty great coder, and 8 random shlubs they grabbed off the street. This absolutely includes contract development teams in the United States. The two good coders are the only ones you will be able to communicate with before you sign a contract. The money you pay them (cost: 1 good coder x10) goes straight to paying the two good guys and then the contracting company makes their margins off underpaying the 8 shlubs. Note none of these are management, project management, or anything else. At best one of the two guys is a Lead Developer but that isn't management.

So in order to do it effectively, you have to have an extra manager in your location whose entire job is to manage the offshore/outsourced team directly. Not a project manager, a literal manager of software engineers. He absolutely has to be able to do weekly code reviews because the two good guys aren't going to do it for the 8 other guys who need it. He has to watch that each of the 8 guys are doing work, checking in their own code (some of them will have their sister do it because that's how they got through college), and you have to have language in the contract where this in-house manager can jettison anyone who can't keep up. The price of that guy needs to be factored into the 'cost' side of the cost/benefit, along with the regular project manager and tech executive time at your end. These people will work twice as hard communicating everything twice to the remote team.

At this point you should be thinking "why don't I just hire this theoretical Managing Developer and then give him two mid-senior recs in-house and let them do the project themselves?"

You can try to offload trivial coding tasks to them but palidanx is right, do not dump infrastructure, foundational tech, or release engineering on them. They will screw it up and in the process they will screw up all your in-house people's work, too.

The definition of CDR, even though there's a standard, isn't really standardized between companies, networks, or hardware. The switches actually puke a huge blob of semi-trustworthy data in a long record and internally we called it something other than a CDR, though other companies may call it that. Then we had a bunch of other nicknames for different subsets of the data, the smallest one was referred to internally to the lab as a CDR. The full data record we pulled from the feature phone included any GPS reported. We couldn't get the exact same field from a 3g phone because that network was designed so the switch was kind of brainless about location, other than the direction from the base station. I think it was, at the time the network was built, the laziest possible way to achieve tolerable TCP/IP traffic throughput so that's what they did. Literally PPPoE.

The method described by multiple people in response to my post is how they attempt to triangulate 3g phones for law enforcement, and if a local sheriff from Cracker Barrel, Arkansas or something requests the data that's what they get: the subset of the call record and the estimated location along with a big disclaimer "THIS MAY NOT EVEN BE ACCURATE TO WITHIN 2KM!" We did constant hands-on tests trying to refine it. Statistically it seems like a good idea but when research tried it on specific people (ourselves) we ended up with no confidence it would work accurately even 3/5 times. We tested it in suburbs, cities, rural, all have different weird factors and significant problems associated with the technique. As a basic example you can be near a cell tower, which have directional antennae, standing at a specific angle to a couple tall buildings and the reflected signal will appear to have you standing in two places at once, or even teleporting between two locations on a minute by minute basis, at which point the data is useless. In theory we can model what highway you're driving on, in reality it's a coin flip what area code you're in.

I think this is also critical if you're thinking of law enforcement applications of this: the base station switches do not report the data back instantly or even in the order they receive it. So our fastest estimate if everything worked perfectly was a 3-4 hour turnaround. Sometimes one of the relevant CDRs for triangulation comes back THREE DAYS after the call is made. Incidentally this is the same data that would be collected by the NSA under the Snowden thing, so military applications would also be limited at best. I mean, if they were dumb enough to try to use it that way they might end up hitting schoolbuses or weddings with cruise missiles or something, and no one wants that.

The result of this was a heavy focus on femtocells, which have such a small area they know where you are because you can't possibly be outside the Starbucks or whatever. It turned out to have other smaller problems: femtocells get overpowered by nearby base stations all the time. I don't know how they were trying to use the one in the van when they caught those boston bombers but I expect the idea was the phone only knows to jump to the strongest signal and that way they could just stop any calls they made. In a neighborhood with a close base station this would be a lot less effective even if the femtocell was massively overpowered, the base station stuff is just this blast of signal and it reflects everywhere, the guy would get through or not randomly.

I think the most damning thing here is that no one who participated in the research would ever testify in a court that the method in question definitely places the phone in question at 123 Cherry Lane, or on the same block as Cherry Lane, or in Cherry Village, or if there was a car involved even in Cherry County. On the other hand, when your shiny new LTE phone is reporting back its gps on a millisecond basis with every call and tons of http headers, things will get a lot easier. For them. I won't be doing that kind of work again.

They call non-smartphones 'feature phones' and unlike 3g network phones, they all have gps as part of the CDR. LTE has it as well, only 3g doesn't. 3g network stuff uses old PPoE because phone companies are lazy.

I was at a different telecom a couple years back and legal handed down a ruling that we couldn't keep things beyond two years, even though we were research instead of billing. Research was the last group at the company to have to delete all that stuff, and we only had space for five years anyway, and even that was stripped down to 10% of its original data. However the researchers felt very safe in assuming that since the government has all of the data reflected off the antenna base station switches through its own network, there's no way they're deleting anything.

It's weird that at&t had to give them that data, unless you assume that up til now they had access to the nsa's copy and now the justice department says they have to have their own.

You should look up "regulatory capture" it means something very different than how you are taking it.

Just so it's not a low-content post, a company can lobby the government to change, weaken or not enforce existing regulations, and often they compound this with bribery of the regulator. Many large companies in the United States go further and lobby to extend or re-word regulations specifically to give themselves a monopoly over the regulated market. All of these actions are forms of regulatory capture.

Other examples of it: the present state of the us patent and copyright system, especially if you include enforceable work-for-hire clauses and the language in various treaties referring to copyrights. Elon Musk's difficulties selling his electric cars online in Texas and other states are due to regulatory capture by car dealerships in that state. In general, most government-backed monopolies or "public-private partnerships" can safely be expected to involve a significant amount of regulatory capture.

Still though you should look it up because both the term and the actual process are really useful at figuring out the hows-and-whys of US government domestic actions.

metadata is what they are looking at now. they collect everything else so they can look at it later when they break the encryption

There's a comment on that blog post that says "what is meant by 'the server'?" That's probably the best possible question here. What's the point of building another messaging system and key distribution method if they can show up with a secret subpoena and do whatever they want with your servers?

I actually got a peek at Facebook's behavior maybe 5 years ago when I signed up to beta-test a video game. They had used the Facebook login API for their beta forums without marking it on their site, so signing up for the game signed me up for Facebook.

Suddenly all the Facebook ads everywhere knew my name. Three weeks and about 40 emails to "update my Facebook profile" that I reported to Gmail as phishing later, I received the dubious honor of being banned from Facebook without ever using it.

I threw all their domains into loopback in my hostfile at home and haven't seen their site or ads on that machine since, but if I log into LinkedIn in my work browser it starts all over again, so I've figured for a while there's probably also an account for everyone who has LinkedIn.

Rust has it right, python is a programming language. One of its more common uses is for "scripting," because you can just write it and run it at a prompt, the compilation will happen automatically if you don't do it manually. That part of python is designed to feel like scripting, but it isn't.

Because it is a general purpose programming language, you can use it to make applications as well. Right now at work I'm using Salt Stack, which is a full application written in python. Django is another popular application written in python.

It's easy to think of python as a scripting language because a lot of people who graduate to python from perl only ever used perl for scripting, but that's a general purpose language as well.

Really the difference between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with restrictions placed on the environment you use it in. Where a normal install of python would let you code scripts or full applications, a purposefully limited version of it (for example a limited version of python is bundled as a mod tool in the game Civilization 4) makes that specific implementation "scripting" or "macroing" or however else you want to classify it. The language itself is still python, though.

Nothing. The answer is you don't monitor production processes directly, ever, it's a waste of your time and effort. Certainly this sort of foolishness should not be used to page an employee off-hours if that's where you're headed.

The only thing you need to monitor is: whether a server answers the network request it was designed to. Outside of that you might optionally want to know whether the disk is full, ram is maxed (thus putting linux into swap) or if the cpu runs too high to cope with losing some servers at peak, but really that's all optional if you're in ec2 and can just spin up more servers on a moment's notice.

You can gather all this data for yourself with Newrelic or if you want you can send data to graphite or if you're old-fashioned you can use Icinga in place of Nagios because it keeps history in a database. If the developers want to know about the process for the application they implemented you can put Newrelic on the server for them, and put the system Newrelic thing on there too, just don't pay attention to it or pretend it's important until something breaks.

The important catch here, the thing that is critical to this whole line of thinking: you have to have thought things through before you built them, focused on having one service per os and real redundancy throughout the environment, and then critically your kick should be fast enough that if a server has some kind of problem in production you don't fix it you just re-kick it. That means your kick throws the os on there, then triggers salt or ansible or chef to configure every single detail and then triggers a deploy of internally-developed applications. That means you have to test the kick to death before you can rely on it to rebuild you something live. If the problem is recurring you can use immediate tools, jdump or whatever, to get some data, give it to the application's developers, and let them try to recreate it in staging while you go ahead and re-kick the prod server and go back to writing documentation for lesser ops to not read, drinking at your desk, reading hackernews, acting as a cia listening post for cat pictures or whatever else passes the time.

Apple isn't a utility so isn't a relevant comparison. Cake isn't a utility either, that's a foolish aphorism and is not a relevant comparison because we aren't talking about a limited resource.

I can have both reasonable prices and universal service because now that Verizon is cutting people off from land-based phone lines, broadband is the country's communications utility, and it is entirely reasonable for a society to use its elected government to construct infrastructure and guarantee utility service to all of its citizens. It means both regulation and spending at the federal level: Verizon or Google or whoever picks up the cost of digging where it's profitable, taxes are spent make them whole where it isn't, but the regulation is they have to do whole counties at once. Yes, once you've gotten everyone to 1gbps or 10gbps or whatever "as good as it can reasonably get" is you can go ahead and deregulate for a while.

Municipal governments have, for good reason, the right to manage their local right-of-way, because no one outside of town cares about that one blind turn on Middleofnowhere Street where someone's going to get killed one of these days. That's the only scale of government that can or will manage traffic safety or road conditions for local streets, and they have to have a say on how construction is done.

The federal government will end up writing a huge novelty check to solve this or it won't happen. It'll be 10 times bigger than it needs to be because the corruption there is somehow just as bad as at the municipal level.

This article is ridiculous shilling. Who do you think lobbies state and local governments to keep the cost of entry high for access to the streets they've been digging around in? The "big cable" trade association who "shouldn't be blamed."

The cost argument is based on numbers that factor out long-term costs of letting contractors dig wherever they want. They rip the streets to shreds and since it's the lowest bidder the asphalt has to be completely redone after one or two winters. In Boston we watched this happen to most of the region during the big dig and that work was being done by the best people available.

The open access argument is absurd. What they mean is they want to run fiber down streets with high incomes and let the cable monopolies continue to gouge everyone else.

It's a real shame but if you want residential internet to get better in the US there's probably going to be a lot of federal spending involved. Which we could have managed back when all the cable lines were first being run. Back when we had a functioning government. In the 1970s.

Go is going to become very popular for network services other than http. It is likely to be used by anyone who gets really sick of bind or postfix and decides to make their own network daemon. Additionally it will probably be used for high volume commercial network applications like mmo backend servers, because those devs are c++ guys and go will seem like a goddamned miracle to them.

It has some promise for the client end but the killer apps will probably come server-side, and full-service apache-style http has already been handled (and re-handled in tomcat and nginx).

"Before it launched in private alpha in March, Drizly formed a vital partnership with Gordon’s Liquors in Watertown. Gordon’s is currently the main store out of which Drizly’s deliveries originate. The service delivers to most of Boston as well as parts of Brookline, Newton and Cambridge; however, Drizly is looking to expand their liquor store providers and delivery zone very soon."

This is what will put Drizly under in the end, the liquor stores in those towns who are not part of Drizly will complain to the municipal government and then all the laws they were afraid off will suddenly appear. Local brick and mortar stuff is still really expensive and profits are still marginal and they are often owned and run by people who aren't qualified to do anything else, so if Drizly thinks the other liquor stores are just going to roll over and get 'disrupted' when they can protect themselves with a phone call they're delusional.

It was cut and paste from an ama on 4chan. Really you should understand this already.

They'll make the same money, if not more, charging $40 for the game downloaded via xbla than they will for charging $60 at retail. Retail stores are incredibly expensive compared to web anything and so they take a huge cut.

MS' long-term plans probably involve cutting the publishing middleman out of their dev relationships.

The text for this is incredibly misleading, the headline of the article is the exact opposite of "Mozilla Moving Persona moving servers outside the US". This submission should be deleted.

Actually we can't. We specifically don't get to vote on foreign relations, ever, and it doesn't pass through the normal bicameral legislative thing. It's just the president draws up whatever and then the senate OKs it.

Last election they ran all the 'progressives' out of the senate, next election there will be no anti-surveillance candidates except to the house where no one can do anything.

There are a lot of benefits to organization beyond simple salary negotiations. Other professions in very high demand like doctors organize themselves to an incredible extent, and are able to have significant pull with both employers and governments as a consequence. They have meaningful input into the laws and regulations that apply to their craft. Doctors don't have organizations with the word "union" in the title, but the AMA, essentially the doctors' trade association, was maybe the second most powerful player who opposed meaningful healthcare reform (and they won).

An equivalent association of developers could basically dictate terms for software patents/licensing/ownership issues and software-related IP regulations in the US. They could secure absolute limits on the length of their work week. They could easily block Zuckerberg, et al.'s H1B visa expansion garbage.

And yeah, on top of all that, they could include QA in their little club and maybe get them some health insurance or job security or literally anything approaching just and fair employment terms.

This is ridiculous, it wasn't an employee it was the CEO, who dropped hints they were doing it all through April. Shouldn't expect better from Wired I guess.

This being a entrepreneur tech site, it looks like there's a market for non-terrible companies providing video game-related software and services to niche multiplayer communities.

Should change this link to an actual news item, currently it goes to their front page which of course provides no information. I know reddit's crappy but this post is actually doing a good job aggregating info as it becomes available: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_compet...

This should probably be a really big story covered and analyzed by all the serious video game journalists... just kidding those don't exist. If we're lucky maybe Forbes will cover it or something.

If that were sales for your own company's product would you really come to the conclusion that iTunes caused CD sales to drop? Seriously, imagine for a moment it's your business on the line so you'd damn well better get the analysis right: it looks like "my product's" sales dropped off at close to the same rate before and after iTunes even existed.

How did iTunes kill music sales if the downward trend started before iTunes was even available (which is plainly on that chart)? What would an honest trendline from the CD sales peak to the trough say about iTunes' impact?

iTunes charges a dollar per song, about the same cost/song as Walmart used to charge for a CD in Nebraska back when everyone got in trouble for price gouging, and iTunes takes less of a % than Walmart ever did. If that chart is even close to accurate, Steve Jobs is about 90% of the reason the music industry still exists.

Every time I follow a link to CNN I get more convinced that they've given up, and I'm starting to wonder why people bother linking back to these news organizations at all.

this is no longer the case, if you want a grizzly bear song that appears only on a warner bros soundtrack you have to buy the whole soundtrack

Isn't "a game company that empowers its employees" the same story as Gabe Newell and Valve? It's cool that there's another company doing it but that management style has plenty of previous examples, some basic research would've made for a better article.

I thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?

So did Borders. Was it book piracy that did that, or digital distribution?