To me, being familiar enough with UML to sketch efficient and consistent diagrams on a whiteboard or whatever has justified the time spent learning it. I don't care about absolute correctness, but just having the reserve of ideas to draw from when you are trying to communicate a complex idea to a group of people has proven valuable to me throughout my professional career.
That's a good question. I definitely recognize the dilemma it creates, but I think it also sets up a nice potential conversation along the lines of "opinionated compared to what?" Which can lead to what is meant by 'opinionated' in the first place, which, under the right circumstances, can be a really valuable conversation to have, especially if your team isn't on the same page with why you would want something like Sinatra vs Rails or anything else.
I've never found that it causes any problems, but since I have been primarily in the .NET world lately, it's pretty rare for people to be all that familiar with anything elsewhere, and if they are, they generally get what I am going for when I say it.
I like to use anti-framework or un-opinionated framework. I think the key point of contrast is stuff like Sinatra gives you a way to build applications that doesn't really have much to say about how the app is structured once you get past the basic necessities of an HTTP-based app, whereas something like Rails guides your architecture much more rigidly.
It's not about her, it's about the little girl who is growing up thinking she could never be a scientist because it's too hard or girls can't do math or whatever inaccurate stereotype.
I never made the connection with Ryder trucks, that's an interesting one. It's sort of a reverse Q-tip effect, where instead of your brand being generically associated with your product, it's associated with the worst possible thing it could be used for. Few products have been so spectacularly misused as to warrant such treatment.
Anyway, my personal favorite has always been Philip Morris turning into Altria Group. I can just imagine the meeting where they came up with that one: "you know what, fuck it, let's just make up a nice sounding word."
I think this varies dramatically depending on your role. At my company, when we were evaluating office space, the consulting people came up with this "hotel" scheme where everything was an open floor plan and you didn't even have a regular desk, and they all loved the idea.
Meanwhile, I thought that sounded like the worst possible scenario imaginable.
I don't think that it's a necessity, but we're talking about the Romans, who are pretty notoriously paranoid about security issues since Rome was sacked by the Gauls. This concern seems in line with what I know of the general attitude of the average Roman citizen, especially if you're talking about slaves that came from the outer provinces, as most did in later years.
I just don't think you can ever be totally secure psychologically while you own slaves, but as I said elsewhere in this thread, there are a lot of things about the Roman mindset that are very difficult for the modern mind to identify with, so at best, this is marginally informed speculation on my part.
Right, and to be clear, I am addressing the scenario from the Roman perspective, not because I approve of it or whatever. Additionally, I am highlighting the notion that in order to mass produce written law and the other things necessary to successfully export a culture on massive scale over large distances, you actually do need a large population of literate slaves, which, if you're going to have slaves, is the last thing you want.
Edit: to clarify, slaves are necessary to export culture because someone has to transcribe all of the books and laws etc.
That makes it even more remarkable, really, because the investment required to avoid automation is incredible. You need schools to prepare slaves as teachers (taught by slaves, of course) to teach child slaves to read and write and whatever specialist skills required by scribes. You need schools to teach the kids to read and you need slaves to produce sufficient excess food to support all the other slaves. And at the end of the day, you end up with a highly literate population of slaves in the middle of Rome, posing a significant risk to stability. Either that or they were massively efficient in their reliance on written material, which in itself would be remarkable in light of how successful they were in exporting their culture throughout the empire.
This is a great example of where the mindset of the ancient civilization is just so dramatically different than our own that it's difficult to understand their motivations.
The more you think about it, the more impressive it is that they maintained such a far-flung and orderly bureaucracy (relatively speaking) without the printing press.
I don't have any insider info, but just from having followed Miguel's blog for awhile, my impression is that the Netflix stuff is more related to DRM than anything about Moonlight/Silverlight. I believe it boils down to there not being a PlaysForSure (or whatever their DRM is called, hard to keep them all straight they are so similar) implementation available to them, particularly on non-Windows platforms.
I feel like the secession/partition ideas you most frequently hear floated in the last 10 years or so are in a lot of ways the misguided desire to hold constitutional conventions. Splitting up gives you the chance to do that 'reset' and fix a lot of institutional problems that seem daunting otherwise, but you have the opportunity for the same 'reset' with a convention, although there's nothing to keep a convention from making it even worse.
By pure coincidence I have it on in the background right now in Arlington. I have FiOS but I assume Comcast has a similarly wide array of news channels. I chalked it up to the area. I've certainly never had it anywhere else I've lived, up and down the East Coast.
I can't speak for the interferometry side, but when it comes to reducing distortion caused by the atmosphere, a lot of advances have been built into the latest generation of big terrestrial telescopes that go a long way towards solving the problem. I have no idea what sort of improvement over the status quo you might need for such a system as described, but it's not unreasonable to think that at least that part of it would be feasible one day.
I'm not all that familiar with the guy or the case, but the way it reads to me is that he's implicitly saying there's no way she would've ended up with someone like him if she'd had a good childhood. As Vonnegut would say, he is a broken thinking machine, so it's difficult to ascribe motivation to any of his actions, but I do get that sense.
My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.
I actually do plan on using NuGet feeds internally. It will be great to have our CI server publish feeds for things like shared libraries or service contracts or anything you want to share and version with an explicit upgrade mechanism.
I'm confused because I have seen old episodes of Explorer and similar shows about them. I'm trying to figure out if it was the same chain of caves or not, but I remember a show dedicated to one cave system that had been turned into a massive fortress that the US basically had no choice but to ignore during the Vietnam war.
I think SearchWiki solved a different problem. It was about, approximately, globally curated results for certain searches. What's being described is personalized curation, at least that's how I read it. I'd definitely be into such a feature, and it really doesn't seem like a tremendous undertaking to make it something opt-in via Labs. I also recall SearchWiki being about specific results, which is not desired behavior for the personal curation experience I have in mind.
I thought about it, but like with the iPad, I ended up not bothering with it. My thinking is that now that 4g is rolling out and the next thing is probably in the wings, it's better to use your phone as a wifi hub and connect that way. I just got a g2 and t-mobile makes no attempt to prevent you from doing this, at least as far as I can tell, and their 4g service is super fast so far.
I have no affiliation with AppHarbor, but I do know a lot about Azure. I don't think it's really the best choice for running a platform like this, so I doubt they are using it. It's more of a greenfield platform because while you certainly can run legacy apps on it, in order to fully take advantage of the platform you have to design for it. For example. SQL Azure is a subset of what SQL Server 2008 R2 offers, so while if you use something like NHibernate, your app's data access code may still work, you may find that you have a reporting query that uses a specialized T-SQL feature it doesn't work.
This can be misleading. Often these sorts of things are built by 3rd party companies and simply released by Microsoft or hosted on MSDN/codeplex or etc. A lot of them are just people at companies with pre-existing relationships with MS coming up with good ideas. It's not the same as more OSS-style ecosystems, but it's also not a centrally planned marketing facade, either.
I am absolutely with you in thinking that politicians don't get this at all. My main point is that there is a context in which those terms are used that doesn't immediately mean that anyone who uses them doesn't realize that mass in space == potential big boom somewhere.
Maybe I shouldn't have used that term. I am aware of the basic physics of the situation, but that's not what I was talking about. I think it's likely there are already devices in orbit with the capability of launching "dumb" (i.e., non-explosive ) munitions to either take out other satellites or small targets on earth.
When people discuss the weaponization of space in terms of the treaties, implying ignorance because it isn't about basic physics doesn't provide any constructive input, and is frankly just needlessly hostile. These treaties are about weapons in a military sense, with the ultimate issue being the presence of nuclear weapons in orbit. I don't think it would be news to anyone that the whole business is inherently dangerous and that anything in orbit can come down anywhere on earth with little warning.
As much as I would prefer otherwise, it seems pretty clear that space has already been weaponized. Between the Shuttle the X-37, and whatever else exists, for all we know there are already satellites in orbit armed with kinetic kill vehicles.
I use a combination of semi-reliable stores, including a NoSql table storage provider, to implement durable messaging for distributed systems with nodes located in any number of data centers or clouds.