khill

You could use it for phishing. It might make users more likely to click through and provide security information if you display their correct full name and even Facebook URL.

Strange. I've been using Ubuntu for over four years as my only OS for work and home but I've never heard of this.

Lobster is exactly the same thing. Up until the mid-19th century, it was low class food - something only the very poor would eat. Now it's served with steak.

Agreed. You can choose from several different color schemes (foreground/background) for text on the Nook Color. I'm most comfortable with the cream colored scheme which is closest to actual print.

In addition to the points outlined in the article, Apple is also at fault for issuing a temporary password when the caller failed to answer security questions correctly:

From Honan's post:

"In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover."

Sounds like Apple support needs some lessons on social engineering prevention.

I think people want to hire young ("junior") programmers because:

1. They are cheaper

2. They are more likely to have less focus on work-life balance (i.e., willing to work crazy hours)

3. They can be more easily molded to a company's development philosophies or culture

That fish rots from the head down.

I've met a lot of smart and friendly developers who work for Oracle (or companies acquired by Oracle) so I know for a fact there are many people in that organization which are genuinely good and really smart.

However, it seems to be a culture which promotes aggressive "shark" type personalities into leadership positions - people who, in my experience, have less focus on ethical business practices and more focus on increasing profits, crushing competition, and advancing up the ladder.

It obviously makes for a successful company but it's a not one which I would trust to have my business' best interests at heart.

Haha, Exchange. Try Lotus Notes.

Exactly my feelings. They were a search engine I never used, a mail account which only received spam, some mailing lists which were moved to better open-source solutions, and then a "media portal company" which seemed like it just regurgitated content from other sites.

I like some of the products which have come from Yahoo like their JavaScript libraries and YSlow toolkit. However, there are alternative (and in most cases better) options for those libraries so I don't really know what I need Yahoo to do for me.

Another good reason is that it ensures the company can function without an individual for a week or two. This will encourage key people to document their work and share information so the company doesn't suffer when they drop off the grid.

Sure but people need to go on vacation, multiple projects need to be worked simultaneously, developers may leave their jobs, etc.

There are lots of good reasons to have multiple developers on a project other than simply throughput.

That percentage became less disturbing for me once the article broke it down by age groups:

"For example, while 93 percent and 67 percent of 9 year olds said that they believed Robovie to be intelligent and to have feelings, respectively, those percentages drop to 70 percent and just 43 percent when you ask 15 year olds the same thing. Older children were also much less likely to think of Robovie as a friend, but more likely to object to a person being able to sell Robovie."

As children get older, they understand that Robovie is not a friend but they object to selling an intelligent being. I think this just implies that younger children don't understand the concept of slavery as a violation of basic human rights.

I find that limiting line length to 80 characters causes some programmers to use overly terse variable names. This hurts code readability and can hide defects.

If you don't like the choices made by Canonical for Ubuntu, just use Debian.

It's a bit of a catch-22, though. People buying items on the Internet tend to prefer to buy via a well-established, highly-structured and secure marketplace. From a buyer's perspective, buying through the big companies you're talking about provides some measure of perceived safety in the transaction.

Sellers and buyers would both benefit from "small company" levels of customer service. However, marketplaces run by smaller or newer companies don't have the same perceived levels of trust and security as the bigger, more established marketplaces.

I know it's only a matter of perception but, in this case, perception is reality in terms of buyer comfort.

It always looks to me like it's running to get to the nearest bathroom - or that it didn't quite make it in time.

I totally agree with your point. However, unlike you, I didn't click on anything because (a) my time is valuable and I can't waste it on a site which may not provide value to me and (b) I don't trust web sites which don't explicitly tell me what they do or have an obvious "About" link on the home page.

Please add a sentence or two at the top of the page to tell me your target audience and why I should use the site.

Or why not create a dating site which only allows women to contact men?

By creating a one-way dating channel, you can filter out a lot of the behavior which drives women away from sites. Make it a virtual Sadie Hawkins dance.

I'm surprised I got 7/9 considering my inability to nicely position furniture in a room.

Why is everyone blaming the lobbyists?

If someone offers you a lot of money to do something unethical and you accept it, how is it the fault of the other person? You're the one doing something unethical.

Lobbyists are just doing their job. If people don't like politicians who are swayed by lobbyists, vote them out of office and elect someone who won't accept lobbyist money. That's one of the benefits of a democratic republic.

Bike lanes only work if they are physically separate from the road. Otherwise, they are covered with debris swept off the main road surface, populated by double-parked delivery trucks and cars,or a random hazard of opening car doors and cyclists who are too stupid to obey the rules of the road (e.g., riding the wrong direction).

That logic only applies if you think of an app as an end-in-itself, as the final product to generate revenue. While that may be a viable business model in some cases, I think it misses the true opportunities for making money with a mobile app.

In my experience, apps work best as a gateway to another revenue stream or as an add-on product to an existing service. I only use free apps but I have subscribed (and paid) for web sites associated with those apps for expanded services.

A good example is an exercise tracking app which records your exercise routines, maps routes, etc. If this app is free but uploads your data to a web site which provides expanded functionality, online communities, and other services, I'd gladly pay for an account on the site.

You are correct in saying that the virtual world is not free from hazards. However, the difference is in feedback and evolutionary development.

In the real world, you feel the snakebite or the hot stove burner. When approached by a stranger or walking through an unknown neighborhood, thousands of years of predator-prey evolution gives you the feeling that something is wrong and you should flee.

We haven't evolved these levels of intuition for the virtual world. I can open a harmless looking email and infect my home network with a virus and never know it happened. I can't reliably tell if the person I'm chatting with is a predator or a friend.

Read "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut.

Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft.

I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.

Is it possible there's a market for technical people who could help business guys like this with a prototype of their idea for a fixed price?

I wouldn't be willing to quit my full-time job and work with some unproven guy on a startup project. However, I might be willing to work during my personal time to help a business guy build a prototype which could be used to find a technical co-founder, vet an idea, or pitch the product to a customer or investor.

Of course there are the usual hazards of fixed price projects. However, if the deliverable is clearly defined and agreed to up front, it seems like a nice option for both parties. Business guy gets technical input and prototype, technical guy gets cash and an opportunity to become a co-founder if the product has value and a market.

If a school tried that, you would have parents complaining about the process because their child was placed into a "does not socialize well" track.

Why wouldn't a business just use Twitter or Facebook for announcing a realtime, short-term deal like that?

I follow most of my local businesses for that reason - many of them already tweet about on-the-spot deals which works the same way. Plus, it's an incentive for customers to follow their social media accounts which also helps with other types of advertising and promotion.

Starting in 2.7, the unittest module actually has the ability to discover tests so you can just do:

python -m unittest discover

The docs are here:

http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html#test-discovery

I've actually been using both unittest and pytest for a while - I like pytest better but they are both nice tools.

http://doc.pytest.org/en/latest/

I found Tarek Ziade's book useful when learning how to best set up and execute unit tests as part of my python projects.

Lucene doesn't have to commit document updates to make them searchable. You just need to grab the IndexReader via the IndexWriter.getReader() method instead of opening an IndexReader on the index directory.

We use this for NRT indexing currently on our site and it works fine - there's a small (500 millisecond or less) delay in changes appearing but it's close enough for us.

We don't use Solr, though - it's a custom search engine based on Lucene.