kmasters

I believe if I remember correctly, LAPD had a stand down on high speed chases years ago due to the property damage and personal injuries of innocent bystanders.

The police have a job to do, but in some areas, the level of aggression with which they pursue their duties is beyond reasonable and seems like adrenaline addiction.

There are a lot of issues around bitcoin and seeking to build a pretty interface to it addresses none of them.

One of my objections to bitcoin is the suggestion that I use Tor to mask my IP to keep my actual IP from occurring in the blockchain.

I think if you are telling users to use Tor to "stay safe" thats a problem already.

Second, "balance" information from your wallet is also stored in the blockchain.

Thats comforting, an IP address combined with how much bitcoin I possess. We have seen where that ended up more than once. Why not just paint a target on my forehead?

Cold storage is one solution to backing up your bitcoin and keeping it offline until needed.

Needing to "create a new bitcoin address" for every transaction, also fishy.

I would rather someone build a solution to bitcoins defiencies than see a pretty screen.

lol I didnt say to actually DO THAT. It was to make a point that we all adopt things that bite us, many things.

"Nobody expects the Inquisition"

If I have too much money in the bank, I will not get out of bed. So being poor would help.

Once I hit a certain savings threshold, I quit my job because I know the whole (my bank account) is greater than the sum of its parts (putting up with horrible software shops)

Then...I do it all over again.

Before getting religiously high and mighty it might be instructive to run a security scan on the whole of the Internet and see how many SQL injection vulnerabilities exist on the websites of major US companies and small time startups.

The fact that MongoDB has in itself a vulnerability to unchecked input is not great. But consider that if you are dealing with client side browser or server side software, the entire stack is rife with security vulnerabilities because the components themselves right down to TCP/IP are inherently insecure.

Be careful out there, and write nicer bug reports. Use the process. If you were on the other end of that bug report, you would feel differently.

Give Opera Next a chance. I have been using it since it came out and although it has a couple rough edges it feels more user focused than Chrome.

A bit of a frustrating read. What exactly is a "performance swing"? Does that mean performance increased or decreased? I find the writing does not match the precision required to cover a highly technical topic.

Im OK with that, I think that libre office is open source as much as chrome is and opera launched it this week. So anyone could repackage open source office software in Java.

We need to ask bigger questions. As someone who has made a career out of Java and made over a million dollars doing it, I really dont see Java as a platform anymore.

I love the integration, and the support that you get with a dead language because its been around so long.

But Java is dead. Has been for a long time.

Im typing this on a desktop with 32GB of ram. Java cant use even that small sum of cheap ram without huge GC pauses, and it never will.

Java has tons of frameworks, some of the very good, but most of them are not. And Java never delivered on its promises and now we are seeing tons of languages port themselves to what is a great VM for JIT compilation, but completely unusable in real world use.

The JVM cant even use 32GB of ram efficiently, and yet we can buy servers with 256GB of ram for 5K.

Java has made a fortune for me, but not in the way it should have. Java will not survive the next 10 years. Get off the platform unless you want to do maintenance.

You are correct, No Nexus device from the time it was released to today has sold as much as the iPad or iPhone sells in one day.

Google has never had a successful launch of a hardware product, not even once.

There's a problem with glass. As far as I can tell.

What Google is hoping for is to tease us into wanting something, that no one has asked for.

Google is not alone in this historically.

Let's step back a decade, when we were all told that Microsoft (by Microsoft) had the biggest R&D budget in the world.

What products came out of that R&D? ZERO.

Apple on the other hand spent years developing the iPhone with iPod profits and never let on what they were going to reveal. What happened? A mobile revolution.

Google is telegraphing R&D to try and leapfrog Apple in the public mind while having no viable consumer product in the pipeline much less on retail shelves. Thats tantamount to product suicide.

I think Glass or something like glass could be important, but I think that Googles approach to pushing alphaware in front of the masses, will, if it really is viable force google to play catch up to Apple or someone else once again.

Google has never, not once, in its history, had a successful launch of a hardware product.

Maybe here's the anatomy of the addictive aspect

Let's say you have a web idea, its so "simple".

So you code it and do a "proof of concept".

Then you start coding, you think you have it nailed, you predict you can do this thing in a few thousand lines of code using bla bla framework.

So you write those few thousand lines of code. Its done. It works.

Except, it doesn't scale, it has no security, you have no hosting, load balancing, failover, replication, user authentication, marketing, no decent website, no android or iOS presence, no enterprise customers, it looks like crap, you have no graphic artists, you have no CSS experts, you do OK on those but its not professional.

And then the features: the "real" product you wish you were building is beyond your means.

Sure you can try to patch it together, but your "few thousand" lines of code delusion is just that.

That's a sure sign of code addiction. And Ive been there myself. Its not that you CANT do all of those things. Its that you spent your time ignoring all of those things to justify coding. And when you hit that wall, you will most likely stop in your tracks and ditch your idea and the work you put into it, to focus on your next "thing".

Programming for me since I was 12 has been addictive. Im 45. I don't regret that. I was a professional musician for almost 20 years before I went back to software.

As a musician I practiced 4-8 hours a day for 15 years.

As a software engineer I have had coding durations for much longer periods with more time in between due to burn out.

I think as in any pursuit, we can sometimes delude ourselves, that the more we do something whatever it is, the better we will get at it.

Its not true. In any performance related field, its acknowledged that there CAN be too much of a good thing.

And too much coding is just as bad for you as too much high-jump practice.

You will end up with a lot more text files expressing your desire, but you will not be improving.

So at some point we as software engineers have to make decisions and choices about how we spend our time and effort without making ourselves robots, pursuing ever diminishing returns, to the exclusion of our personal happiness and fulfillment.

I think its important to remember that this is a WSJ interview meant to not to befriend industry leaders but to grill them on investors behalf. If you watch previous ATD interviews with Steve Jobs even, you see some of the same attitude from Kara, and Walt.

If you go back far enough in ATD, you can see Walt mocking Steve Jobs before he had completed their comeback. Mocking Steve's demo of iTunes. Which saved the company.

I think the worst you can say about this interview was, Tim Cook is not as disarming (and in some cases dishonest) as Steve Jobs was.

And it was boring to see WSJ tech reporters try and call him on the carpet to expose a vision, just to please the stock market.

We all were left unsatisfied by the excersis, but ATD shouldnt call itself a tech event, if its really just a second rate version of an investor conference call.

Nice to see a company that cares about users up its game. Opera is now at the forefront along with google, and unlike google, will actually make features people want.

Never having to use the chrome bookmark manager again (or firefoxes or safaris) is a huge sell for me.

As for all the features they dropped, Im sure there are or will be extensions for that. Personally, I prefer the browser to be screaming fast with just enough features that I need. I could never switch to opera in the past because it was simply too slow.

Also, I wont get ads for Google products in browser or prompts to "login" to my browser as Google has been doing lately. YAY!

I fail to see why referrer is part of any spec. Referrer is a 90's concoction when we were all so naive of future uses. I'm sure it's made a lot of porn sites some money, but affiliate marketing is not the purpose of web standards.

As far as analytics its all done with tracking cookies now, which is another issue that needs to be addressed, but Im not going to miss referer should it ever really go away.

Although this may be a little blunt, I don't see how a company that caters to media theft is going to compete with Dropbox. Although Dropbox intentionally lets people register many accounts to they can do more or less the same thing. (Ever know someone with 20 dropbox accounts?)

This is the 800 lb gorilla in the cloud storage room. Providers like Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, GDrive dont want to be cast in the light of Megaupload or BitTorrent, lest their business come under scrutiny. Hence they keep their data caps fairly low so you can't store a DVD on their service.

I dont use torrent software because Im not interesting in illegal content. I dont think regardless of their traffic stats BTSync is going to matter much to mainstream users.

You can guarantee that? I dont think so, Im not a sysop but if I was, you would need to explain why ICMP needs to be open.

Whether Im in Norcal or not. Most sane organizations are going to turn off ping, its not a cultural thing and it doesnt seem like you faced any friction since you got it opened in 2 hours.

Ive been working here in norcal my whole life and I dont see a culture of lax security in shops that have actual security requirements. Its not the country is the quality of the network administration team.

Your experience doesnt really apply to how production systems are managed. And 30 packages is enough and is useful. Production systems dont update themselves just because theres a new package in the repo, thats what people regular users do.

In production systems updates are rolled out only if there is a must have benefit, or a serious security patch.

I dont really get your point if you dont like linux then dont use it, its pretty easy to manage.

Javascript, is a legacy technology, with browser folks pushing the envelope into backend and front end solutions.

It should be clear to anybody working with whatever.js that this is not technology that is here to stay.

This is still a browser patch. And everything underneath anything.js is a patch or a port or a hook, or a kludge.

There is no memory management, no threading, no accurate concept of parallelism and no support for anything but what the browser makers want to support.

Javascript is not a real language. It encompasses no real technology. And it will be replaced.

Javascript is the new applet.

Isn't there a better question to be asked here? Federation is supposed to enable, well, federation. Google is not preventing XMPP federation in any way. Google is not "shutting down" XMPP or killing it.

Why is Google the company important to the XMPP community? I scarcely see that it should matter.

Open protocols are not exclusive clubs or infinite universes, anyone can opt in or out at any time, the rest of us will live.

I think its great when big companies such as Google or whoever participate in open standards, but I also appreciate that they are in the business of providing the best product for their users (in their eyes) and are free to do what they want.

When they do participate, we are getting a gift from them. Its not their obligation, right or even necessarily to their benefit. When they find other priorities fine, maybe someone more committed will move the project forward. And in other cases their NON-participation can be a gift as well.

So whats the big deal?

The terminal window seems to abide by the principles quite well. I know Im looking forward to it.

Look, there is simply no chance that Apple is going with flat UI and color coded icons. The changes wont be extreme, Apple is not going to fire their graphics department so they can implement flat squares. Yes they will get rid of the kitch.

Think how many peoples' apps would break if they went to Flat UI, think how many users they would alienate? Think how iOS is supposed to have some kinship with OS X design ethos. Is anything in OS X flat?

Linen is staying. Drop shadows, gloss and rounded corners are staying.

OK, sounds good but, Im getting the feeling that serializing database work across distributed parallel transactions queues is the solution. I think there is a little sunny optimism here about rollback frequency. Deterministic parallelism is not going to help you much when you have the same transactions failing across distributed nodes.

If you dont have a lot of rollbacks I can see this being ok.

Given the sublet abuse where there are people subletting apartments with 50 year old rent controlled apartments (500 dollars a month for 4 bedroom apartments) on West End Ave, I think NYC should take a quick look at itself, since WWII ended...a while back.

NYC rentals are hotels and always have been...and thats not a bad thing.

One thing to note re engine failure vs battery failures. In the 787 the electrical power generation for hydraulic systems has been replaced by electrical systems powered by these batteries.

If an engine fails, you can still land the plane. If these batteries fail, you cannot. You have no power to guide the plane to a safe landing.

AWS, is simply amazing infrastructure automation. Learning how to use it, even if your not a sysadmin, is going to be a part of your job as an engineer at some point in the future.

How many times has your boss or your organization said "we want xyz", but we cant hire admins and we have no hardware?

Every time someone hits that brick wall, AWS is right there. Although I rarely use the retail side of Amazon.com, I think AWS is a stroke of genius whose full impact wont be felt for a few more years.