emcrazyone

I think the article is fundamentally flawed from this comment alone:

"In well over a year of working in Scala teams there hasn’t been a single day where I felt that there was a shared mindset about how to develop a system or even approach a problem."

So this guy expects a programming language to create a shared mindset?

I've been developing software for close to 17 years in more languages than you can shake a stick at and none of them do this for you. It's always about picking the right tool for the job and/or team.

A shared mindset comes from other planning type activities like use cases, function/non-functional specifications, and general architecture type planning before you write code. Especially for larger projects.

I think software patterns tend to help drive synergy in a team environment. It's not perfect but my experience has shown me and the folks I work with at least, that adopting patterns helps to bring us together but those patterns are usually fleshed out during architecture planning activities.

I guess define Enterprise. The OS experience doesn't sound like "Enterprise" to me. Just install the JDK? Most enterprises I worked at, it was more like install WebSphere and it's clients.

I did hardly any of these things and I worked at a Fortune-5 company for close to 10 years on a mix of technologies; java being one. Much of the Java there was of the IBM variety. We had WebSphere and their over priced crap. As an insider, many of the DEVs preferred C#. I think much of this had to do with the better development tooling: Visual Studio vs. IBM's version of Eclipse and its infinite list of bolt on and buggy tools. My last 4-5 years there, just about all new apps. were going to C#/.NET platform. I was an insider in an architect role where one of my responsibilities was sitting on a board that oversaw every app. coming into our data center to make sure it followed best practices from language, tools, and general infrastructure stuff like Oracle vs. MS-SQL, SAN or local disk storage.

One of our major areas of problems was JMX Message queues and prioritizing them across load balanced clusters of WebSphere servers. It was extremely clunky where as the .NET had better alternatives.

Since we were an Enterprise (Fortune-5) by a reasonable definition, GIT and open source version control wasn't use. We use IBM Synergy which is another mess. My last year working there we actually did a trial using subversion which gained a lot of traction.

Another problem for Enterprises is single sign on. Especially when you have tons of vendors who want to vet user credentials against our backends. We looked at SAML, WS-Federation, and how much vendor support there was. Like many others at the time, we came up with a kluge based on shared cookies so both our Java apps and .NET apps could work. Largely these standards are too lose to begin with too. Enterprises with deep pockets are hard to work with if your small OEM who can't afford the same financial commitment.

In short, most "Enterprises" have a separate group of people who manage the development environment. You don't typically see DEVs setting these things up. We had standard loads for our developers to install and we had the same for our servers. Yea, there were occasions where we would install more JDKs and JREs to test to see if there was a bug or performance difference in the libraries but for the most part, none of the developers had to really mess with the dev environment or the version control stuff.

I was thinking they may be looking at how long it takes for a user to click the "I'm not a robot" link. A robot would probably load the page and quickly, without delay, send the HTTP POST but I have to imagine they thought of this already and bots writers would quickly add a sleep() call in there at some point... Yea, I wonder about their internal logic too.

Agreed. I went to college in the US and got a EE degree and along the way almost switched to Applied Physics because of a really awesome professor I had and during which the physics I was taking was making use of the EE courses I went through. I was introduced to Elctro-mag theory from a physics class that was again used in some of my EE classes. I still remember physics experiments of passing current through two conductors each placed on balanced aparatus and watching the repel and attract due to current direction.

I had (still have) a knack for math and science but I'm just so amazed by guys like Maxwell.

The one thing that strikes me over and over is how insightful guys like Maxwell were. At such a young age and time he was piecing together I guess what others living at the same time might call phenomenon. Same for Einstein and Tesla. I mean he literally devised the mathematical model that foretold what we would discover in the future. And some 20 years later, Hans Christian Ørsted obtained the first evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism is quite amazing to me.

I recall reading an article some time ago about Tesla and how it was described that Tesla literally envisioned and saw AC current and then struggled to write it all down. I write software and I can see a similar pattern in myself. I often know and see, in my head, how something should work is so hard to explain. Of course at a much more basic level than these guys. It's as if Maxwell just saw and imagine how things were connected.

I keep waiting for the link that adds gravity to the mix.

Very nice article.

I was about to mention this site too. I think that site is awesome. I found it a few years ago. The guy does a very nice job not only with FPGAs but also interfacing with current technologies like PCIx bus to create ethernet and acquisition boards for PCs. He also gets into windows device drivers to get the cards up in windows.

I had similar ideas too. I envisioned designing a PCB and then going to my nearest Rat Shack to pick it up like the one hour photo idea back in the day. I grew up in the 80s and have very fond memories going there and just browsing the electronic components. I think the hacker space is a great idea for kidspic but is probably not viable for the same reasons you mentioned.

agree and in the article when he gives advise to his friend, he mentions he has a leg up due to his ASM background. I first learned ASM on a Commodore64 and so I had a very close relationship with the hardware such as indexed addressing and indirect index addressing, etc... By the time I learned C some 10 years later, I already new what authors were talking about on the subject of pointers. Over the years, I wondered how I would have learned this stuff if I didn't have the ASM (assembly language background) and a knack for electronics.

Now a days, things are more complicated with MMUs and virtual memory concepts but I think the examples in the article are a good basis for anyone wanting to know what happens under the hood.

they go on these rants because the documentation is so dam poor. The OP lists blatant contradictions. Your response further up would be quite helpful in the code and/or in the documentation. I work in the embedded space and often read data sheets with similar contradictions or errors. It's almost like the documentation has to be as good as the code and idea. What good is the best mouse trap if no one knows how to use it. Poor documentation is a pet peeve of mine too and it's the poorly documented DBUS stuff is why I never bothered to even try to learn more about it.

Interesting perspective. I thought I read somewhere that ZeroMQ was championing becoming apart of the Kernel. I work in the embedded space and not knowing much about DBUS other than it's some fancy IPC and ZeroMQ, we went with ZeroMQ just because we saw a clear path for what we needed get done. Granted all our IPC communication was between our own apps. but after reading your post I keep wondering what REAL problems does DBUS solve besides having a standard messaging format? Could someone explain why a simple messaging format couldn't be deployed on top of something like ZeroMQ?

My attorney once told me that NCAs are very hard to enforce because it's essentially illegal for a company or anyone to prevent you from working for a living is the way he put it to me. My attorney also said that if an NCA becomes a legal matter in court, the authors of NCAs are typically more in the hot seat because because they drafted the agreement to begin with. INAL but as I understand it from my attorney, the author of legal agreements is the party that typically in the "hot seat" to explain themselves in court. Perhaps a layer can chime in and fill in the gaps.

These discussions usually amount to flame wars but I will offer some real world usage perspective. I use to work for a fortune-5 company that standardized on Linux. We compiled our own Linux kernel and we used the SUSE distribution from Novell. The main driver behind this was two fold. (1) Novell indemnifies us from a legal perspective and (2) they support us on IBM hardware. Any problem from drivers, to user space apps (CUPS, Syslog, etc...) they support us. These are pretty much required by large companies.

I'm still in the automotive field but now I work on embedded stuff. I'm one of the software developers behind CUE (Cadillac User Experience) and Linux is the go-to defacto standard pretty much because all the BSP (Board Support Packages) run Linux. For example, Freescale iMX processors and their demo kits are all Linux based and so brining up drivers for iMX ethernet, SPI, GPIO, I2S and I2C have some sort of vendor support.

The large fortune-5 companines indirectly support Linux by entering multi millon dollar support contracts with companies like Novell and RedHat. To give an example: We once had an issue with CUPS where the root cause was a software bug. Novell, under the support agreement, fixed the issue and then submitted the patch back to the open source community.

So from my perspective, I can see how Linux seems to have more traction than openBSD. Linux seems to have a larger following in the automotive sector but I'm not sure if Linux's success is because of these factors I'm pointing too or if these factors are because a lot of people just know of or about Linux more so than openBSD.

There also seem to be more company backed open source projects that support Linux before openBSD. Example is Yocto which advertises itself as an open source Linux build system. And recently Freescale has been moving their LTIB BSP tools to Yocto.

I would be interested in hearing how others industries are using Linux outside automotive.

If everything you state is true, then your sister is the exception to the norm. My wife works in HR and pretty much everything mentioned above is true. There is a very large, fortune-5, company going through a name & blame game with another very large supplier over an ignition switch problem and the PIP process mentioned above is what I've seen too. HR folks are not your friends.

no but you did write a check to your telephone company which everyone used at the time. And the problems were identical. You either got a busy tone or "all circuits are busy" message. Not trying to split hairs here, I agree on one hand that the technology is different but I am suggesting the problem is the same. We're talking about capacity issues and lobbyist. Although, telephone lines were subsidized where as I have a friend who lives just on the outskirts of local cable service and the cable company told him it would cost $30K just to run some coax down the street and under some railroad tracks. He's still stuck with dial-up as a result. Anyway...

I tend to agree. As an ISP owner, the problem is fundamentally the point to point technology involved along with lopsided peering agreements you can't avoid.

Torrents really expose these issues very well and it's the same sort of thing you see going on between Netflix and Comcast.

One solution is for consumers to have more choices. I recently read an article where some town I think in Colorado put in their Internet access by lighting up dark fiber they had. It use to be something the cable companies fought citing that municipalities could have a monopoly.

The other game changer is WiMAX and generally speaking, faster mobile data rates. If I no longer need my buried cable to get fast Internet coupled with the fact I can take my device with me, is a huge selling point.

But like cable companies, you can have traffic pile up on a cell tower but it seems easier to add more radios to a cell tower than it is to lay more fiber and/or coax.

Maybe the solution is to get rid of TCP/IP and use something different such that traffic can spray out like a torrent and be recollected from different route paths. For example, if you have Internet from two or more cable companies, there is no way to dynamically balance traffic between those two circuits between two parties. You have a default gateway and there isn't much more you can do with that at the end user level.

That's not exactly correct either. Around 1984 I was in Highschool and you could get "on line" via Compuserve. It was dial up but it used T1 and leased lines with other locations like the Airlines so you could, for example, view flights book a trip via Compuserve. I believe AAA (a travel service in the US) as also linked up this way too. It was not an always-on connection, but then neither was the Internet for many in the early 1990s. I ran a BBS in the 80s on a Commodore computer and I would use a dial-up feature to log into other BBSes to trade data and make it available on my site. One commercial service was called Don Best Sports that offered betting spreads (aka football lines). Don Best Sports, just to pick on one example, is now available with your Web browser but in the 1980s I could get Las Vegas spread data through a coax connection (data connection) from a local telephone or certain participating cable companies. This was all available in the mid to late 80s via an always on connection like the Universities were. Don Best Sports, in particular, would give you a cable modem that had a DB9 connection for serial data and it was a live feed in 1985 when I was involved with it.

not exactly correct. The Internet that we know today existed long before 1977. Around 1987, a freshman in college, I could ftp and gopher with other Universities. I was tickled pink when I found out I could query a time server in Japan from my dorm room of a Michigan University!

Agree. ISP owner here. Not all web sites or IP addresses contain 100% illegal material. Virtual hosting (hosting more than one web site from same IP address) poses problems as does content among sub-domains. I don't have the resources to monitor and track such things and if I were forced into it, I would either go out of business or try to become a search engine.

This may be true but it doesn't seem necessary if you believe this:

During the Government’s investigation, which was conducted jointly by the FBI and HSI, an HSI agent acting in an undercover capacity (the “HSI-UC”) successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site reserved for BENTHALL and his administrative staff. By doing so, the HSI-UC was able to interact directly with BENTHALL throughout his operation of the website.

yea, but, there is this tid-bit:

"During the Government’s investigation, which was conducted jointly by the FBI and HSI, an HSI agent acting in an undercover capacity (the “HSI-UC”) successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site reserved for BENTHALL and his administrative staff. By doing so, the HSI-UC was able to interact directly with BENTHALL throughout his operation of the website."

I realize it's vague but seems conceivable this level of access would allow you to connect the dots. No?

seemingly good point but I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic. To make more clear what I mean, I wonder how your electric company would deal with a set of problems like when a torrent shows up on one of your customer's computers? Not to mention that IT support is probably more expensive than having your gas line checked for a leak.

why "come out." Why do you feel you need to tell others you're gay? I don't feel like I need to tell everyone I'm straight.

I never understood this. You're gay, so what? What is this thing with some people feeling like they just have to tell others about their personal sexual orientation; especially in the context of business article. This has nothing to do with Apple.

If they wanted to report on Apple's equality they could have left things with the two sentences:

"The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California."

and be done with it.

I simply don't get why he has to mix this article along with Apple's view of "The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California."

And in general, I think it's inappropriate to mix personal views with business matters. No body fucking cares if your gay or what color you are. If they do, then they are not people I would want to associate to begin with. What we do care about, are your products the company produces, support, what you're doing to fix bugs, etc...

Stop bringing personal BS to the business tables. Cook is way out of line for using his position at Apple (iPhone6 in the background) as a stage to push some personal gay message about himself.

I would have guess it to be a scam. Why does the State of Delaware use a Birmingham, NY address?