stevear

This is one of those ideas that instantly makes sense.

I clearly see the value proposition right on the first page. If I could invest in this company I would. I am green with jealousy.

I am really glad someone else has noticed this and feels the same way.

This quote from that thread pissed me off all morning: "If you told the common man any time in history other than the baby boomer generation, that the way to get rich was 'hard work' and 'Budgeting' they would die of laughter."

Every day I feel more and more alienated by the victim mentality on Reddit. It seems to be the only tangible by-product of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

I don't even know why I visit Reddit anymore.

I forgot to ask another really important question: What dev enviroment?

Obviously I'm using Visual Studio 2010.

This would be a symptom of developers also being the sysadmins.

On another note, Microsoft typically has good documentation but I feel that they need a very simple 5 page 'Owners Guide' for some products that goes over the most important topics in a simple manner. We can't assume that only experts will use said products so at least provide a dead simple 'This is how to not screw yourself' guide.

The custom errors issue the article talks about is an insanely basic configuration error that is NOT the default. Someone started tinkering with a setting without realizing it's full extent.

I imagine the best strategy is to be yourself, answer the questions truthfully and have a good idea and not dedicate a bunch of effort to hacking the application.

It's like reading a bunch of books on how to get a first date. The actual getting the date is not the important part...it's the overall being a person that is worth dating that is important. If you are worth dating then getting a date isn't hard.

I am curious what PG has to say about this.

Is the preference for late night because 1) there are less distractions at night or 2) hackers are genetically prone to being night owls?

Personally when left to my own ways will migrate my schedule naturally to be nocturnal. Wake up at 2PM and go to bed at 6AM. I feel happier and am way more productive.

Has this been to the front-page yet? I have noticed this a lot...especially about frameworks and platforms.

Is there a good place to match non-technical and technical founders?

This is an honest question: Having been in IT and software development for over a decade, I have never encountered a problem that required me to look at the source code. As such, I've never really understood the open source movement. I can't imagine a scenario where the software I am using, the same software used by hundreds of thousands of others, would be broken to the point where I had to go into the source and fix it. I can't even imagine going into the source to figure out how it works-- usually the documentation and online help is sufficient.

What is the typical scenario where one really benefits in open over closed source? How often does it occur? I am curious.

Also worthy to note that Microsoft's BizSpark program provides free production access to Microsoft tools and products-- not Express editions but versions like Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server Enterprise, Windows Server Enterprise, etc. You also get a couple thousand free hours on Azure if you want to go that route. For training you also get three months of Pluralsight which brings you up to speed on the relevant tools and platforms.

I feel it's a really good time to be a Microsoft developer. The products are really solid, the skills are in demand and the barrier to entry is pretty much gone.

I realize after writing the above I come off as a big time evangelist, but this is only because I have had such a good experience for the last decade building on their platforms. Never regretted going all in other than sometime feeling like a black sheep on this site. Good to know there are a lot of other .Net folk on this site. ;)

So is a book.

I strongly agree with some of the interactions in this article.

Advice to Junior Programmers: Don't be 'that guy'. Don't be that guy that derails meeting and projects by trying to switch frameworks or languages or whatever. Writing code in your free time is different than writing code for a business on a team. Listen to your co-workers and go with the flow until you have a lot of experience under your belt.

Managers and Sr. Devs have a very keen awareness of when they run into 'that guy'. No one likes them and they are toxic to projects. Managers and Sr. Devs want to be completing projects and not defending why they are using XYZ technology.

'That guy' has a good technical ability but no business sense and usually ends up being let go. This leads to 'that guy' thinking they have been let go because no one can see their talent and adopting a victim mentality.

Be a facilitator, not an irritator.

After getting chastised not that long ago for not having the best work conditions for their human pickers... not enough breaks, not enough pay, unsatisfactory climate conditions...Amazon moves to robots. Problem solved.

If they halved their subscription fee I would sign up.

This is even worse of an idea than the balloon thing.

Those drones can stay in the air for at most 15 minutes. This means that you have to have someone constantly rotating the drones and changing their battery. So then you go and arrest whoever is running the drone 'base'.

I put a keychain camera on my $100 remote control airplane. I don't suddenly own a Predator UAV.

When you do a server side upgrade you are essentially doing an upgrade on behalf of every person who uses your product and it's sometimes difficult to roll-back. This is a really good reason to treat server side upgrades differently.

Once you are bit by a bad update you will be very shy about doing it again without a good cause. As an example, we updated to Recent Version - 1 of critical server software and had the thing crashing constantly thereafter. So then we upgraded to Recent Version and had a new bug that was introduced that was causing equal troubles. But now we were stuck and had to wait for next version to fix the bug. Made a really good case for not changing what works.

I respectfully disagree.

Being human is something we have washed away with dedicated PR staff. I feel 'numb' to public figures now, especially political and that takes something intangible away.

Elon is leading us into space by setting incredible goals and asking for the best from the best. He is a leader in more than one sense. Showing emotion and character is important in leadership and I thought it was appropriate and touching.

I really wish a reality show would focus on SpaceX and take us along for the ride so to speak. One way to really get kids excited about science again is bring things like this to the forefront-- show everyone it's an adventure, hard work and a ton of risk but ultimately leaving an indelible mark in history.

In order for this to work you have to get the balloon high enough where it won't be affected by simple weather patterns.

Then you have to make the device capable of withstanding extreme conditions.

Then you have to make the balloon stay in position.

Then you have to swap out the balloon's every X day to refuel and recharge.

Predicting the future here: they will make a balloon and radio system that works for about 20 minutes before it drifts off and then realize there is a whole lot more to putting computers in the sky than just announcing you are going to move your data-center into the sky.

I run a Windows shop and for the longest time we used a third party product called Radmin for our remote administration. Finally, after some time we switched over to RDP for a number of reasons... but one of the top ones is simply that is has such massive adoption. Any vulnerability that bubbles to the surface will be announced from the highest mountains as is the case here. When I was using a third-party product there could have been a critical update released and I don't feel I would have heard through the grapevine for quite some time.

In my opinion, having a vanilla Microsoft stack is useful in a lot ways, one of them being that news travels fast within the Microsoft ecosystem.

I agree with the author though, nothing is more eye roll inducing then when some unhelpful fellow chimes in with "Why are you doing it that way?" and 'that way' is the way million and millions of people are doing it.

I am in the same field and am interested to see if there is any collaboration opportunities.

I am guessing it's going to be a crowd-funding site once crowd-funding is made legal through the JOBS act.

If it is, contact me.

The threat to Bitcoin is it's adoption by nefarious entities-- money laundering, paying for drugs, DDOS extortion, etc. This creates an incentive for the government to step in and disrupt the Bitcoin system.

I would not be surprised to hear that a government project is in place to shut down or otherwise reduce the effectiveness of it.

Bitcoin could have dilluted this problem by really running with the unique strength Bitcoin has: micro-transactions. All of the sudden it was conceivable and somewhat simple to send someone $.05. Instead of focusing on this the Bitcoin community was more interested in creating an anarchic currency that was anonymous and beholden to no-one. I personally like to believe that if they had instead focused on ease of use, wide spread adoption through micro-transactions (tip jars, content that costs less than $0.75, etc) that it would have really gotten a lot more traction with the mainstream.

I would consider getting a position at a very young start-up.

A small start-up would appreciate the cheap labor and the enthusiasm for the field that you bring. You will appreciate the chance to sharpen your skills and get experience in all of the tasks that come with being a part of a start-up. If you have some programming knowledge and a solid work ethic you will be a welcome member to some organization. They are taking a risk hiring someone without a deep background and you are taking a risk working for cheap with a company that may not succeed.

Second, I ran across a quote from Linus Torvalds that was along the lines of 'Do you keep track of what Windows is up to when you are working on Linux?' Linus: 'No, I simply do the best that I can.'. I think you need to keep this in mind as you self analyze.

SQL Server has been one of my favorite software products of all time. As an admin it has been rock solid and not produced any headaches that weren't our own fault.

With that said, to really get the most out of SQL Server (and most likely most other SQL implementations) you really have to do your homework and put in the time to go through the features. Perhaps more than anything this is why NoSQL has taken off-- it's very simple to get going. At user groups I hear a lot of people saying they selected MongoDB because "They had millions of rows and SQL just couldn't keep up" and to me it just sounded like no one in their organization had any solid SQL experience.

It's too bad MS didn't build a 'SQL Admin' into their product that sent an email on occasion to say things like "You have a query that is called frequently and could be sped up if you simply included this column in this index. Here are some details!"

A good leader sets a goal that is outside of our comfort zone and little by little works towards achieving those goals. Along the way, as steady progress is made, that once lofty goal starts to become more reasonable and others start to buy in. This seems to be the approach Elon has taken with Tesla and SpaceX. From personal experience I can tell you that simply making these lofty goals has attracted a lot of young, idealistic folk that are willing to put in a lot of sweat to show that this kind of stuff is within our reach.