if you build motto for your company vision, and it’s blunt like, for example, ‘don’t be evil’… people may notice when you decide to remove it. ‘do the right thing’ doesn’t sound so convincing and blunt. while the ‘don’t be evil’ is left in the last sentence of ‘Code of Business Conduct’ that employees need to accept, it’s softer and flattened. sign of new times?
it should be. it’s kind of tricky to get right and may feel a bit like an abstract concept. random values should be random (unless you’re talking about Debian randomness). so, let’s try that - take a cube in hand and throw it three times. what’s the probability that you’ll get three times the same number? small, but there is one. similar experiment - your friend throws coin ten times, and eight times there’s eagle. is the coin ‘prepared’? no, it just follows very complex process of spinning number of times (yeah, and i know about ‘if you’d like enough time and throw coin so many times…’ - that’s not about it). ...
NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources. ...
it’s hard to disagree with Bruce’s article. would blockchain-based solution be the best approach here for accounting? accounted access to data, accounted transactions … something must change. we can’t deal properly with data.
how bad our current patent system needs to be broken, to allow building companies just to do business on patent trolling? we see more articles about it but capitalsm doesn’t care. even when law enters the game, there’s often nothing that can be done having SDN in mind, and developers influence on how todays internet works, i’m thinking what we’ll be doing in couple of years (and how pitfully unprepared are companies today to defend any sensitive data - financial, biological - in “web 17.0” world). will we be able to sustain development as a society, or it will be reserved only for those rich, at the helm of big corporations? ...
…resent encryption. in particular those that were caught red handed doing mass surveillance of its own and foreign citizens. it’s worth to read this article to understand how PR (written by Camerons speech author) is trying to turn everyone using security and encryption to those helping terrorist. it’s enough today to name somebody ’terrorist’ and suddenly every option is on the table. interrogation, wiretapping, dropping bombs or simply investigating without any specific reason is fair call. ...
…discussions were already covered on my blog. arstechnica just published A/B/X test of Ethernet cables capable of suspiciously “enriching” sound and as you can imagine… there’s no difference in those priced at 340$ vs those priced at 2.5$. it’s good laughing experience to compare this review and the one provided by this fraud, that’s trying to say over his fake so called ’test’. please read comments as well - there’s interesting one, where one of the commenters mentions that 0=0 and 1=1 in digital processing, while the author (again, fraud) still claims there’s a big difference. ...
Life is unfair. And the unfairness is distributed unfairly.
…this is how you should build lean IT systems. in particular, I like this quote: And the new login system, which MPL launched in February 2015, is remarkable. It is faster and it is cheaper than the old one: The old system responded to requests somewhere between two and 10 long seconds; the new one takes 30 milliseconds, on average. The old login system cost $250 million to build and would have required another $70 million annually to stay online. The new system cost about $4 million to build, and its annual maintenance cost is a little less than $1 million. ...
…are of course one of the worst and evil habitats in this world. treating passengers like cattle during the entire process of boarding and exiting the plane (let’s not skip the “joyful” stage of buying a ticket, let alone attempting to modify it later) has become - generally - a new standard today. a few months ago I had the opportunity to fly back and forth in Poland on two different days - Monday and Wednesday. on Monday, security screening team couldn’t handle the onslaught of people coming in, so my hand baggage was scanned VERY briefly and team was actually urging me to stop blocking the doorway. there were many people whose baggage was even checked even more superficially - or not at all (despite the lack of cards confirming their air crew status they were allowed to skip the gates totally). On Wednesday, on the other hand, my backpack was completely undressed, including all the individual cables being pulled out. then finally gate securty agent asked me to start the computer and iPad. to my questions about the difference from Monday behavior, he could not give any meaningful answer except that “it is all through the European Union” and that “I am not interested, I have my duties”. I immediately felt better and safer as a passenger… ...