kmasters

I want to apologize for my earlier downvoted comment by saying that, I only said what anyone in a software organization would say. eg your boss.

If you dont know how to run DNS, then your the wrong guy to be running it.

Dont come out in public and whine about hackers. Its your job and yours alone to know how DNS works and what to do.

Its not even mildly interesting anymore than TCP/IP is interesting. So do your job.

Thats what my boss would tell me and thats what your boss should tell you.

Its not mean what Im saying. Its the truth.

Dont care about DNS, its your problem, fix it and stop whining about hackers.

Real journalists put people on the spot.

Their (the subjects) feelings dont matter. Go watch some 60 minutes Mike Wallace interviews.

If they can charm their way through the interview they win. If they cant well then we can all think about that.

But dont for one second think that a real journalists ideal should be to play host to technology bozos.

If being polite were a journalistic trait Nixon would still be in office.

This really only strengthens AWS, a self service cloud that anyone can manage.

IBM is chasing a dying consulting model "we know best". But they dont.

You yourself with the knowledge can outscale IBM using AWS.

IBM's business is profiting from enterprise ignorance.

Your mileage may vary...or be nonexistent.

What "countermeasures" has the US "installed" to prevent suicides? Just because they aren't occurring in a sweatshop makes them no less real.

In all sincerity please dont refer to Java and Android in the same sentence.

As far as Google is concerned, Java does not run on Android and you might be bearing witness to something that Google disclaims.

I dont think the media "gets it wrong", although they do endemically, I think that media is reflective of ourselves.

If we dont see a threat, we dont react. If we dont see a threat the media wont react to it either.

This can operate in reverse, if we see a threat but the govt tells us its not a threat, the media will try to soothe our anxiety.

Maybe what the media fears is being drowned out by the mill of a thousand voices, none of which have any credibility, and so they follow the "dont throw pearls to swine" rule of not getting in the way and wasting their breath.

In the world of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Ventura, Rand Paul, who wants to hear facts?

The "media" as we call it, is adjusting to the ability of our collective digestive tract to consume what they have to say.

And their adjustment is to say screw it. Its just (expletive ommitted)

I wont discredit your experience, however, I have been a consultant in several 64 bit shops, linux and solaris who had 64GB servers who could not scale above 8GB due to OOMs.

Also remember that if you are on linux doing that 28 GB heap you are living in the world of memory over-commit, which means if you actually tried to use that memory, you will probably segfault.

Again if you have done it great, no shop I have worked in, has been able to do it with app servers and keep their servers up reliably. Its a constant source of pain and I think JVM GC is not sufficient to scale at the level of current hardware.

I look at this a little differently, Im not going to opine on the character of the CEO or his employees.

Besides raw economic factors and the trend-happy game industry, I think its worth it to ask:

What on earth are we building? And why are we building it?

Its OK to build games we all need entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. But Zynga games were obsessive click factories which were as far as anyone can tell designed to be addictive.

As an engineer, I have worked at places that had so called "projects" designed to "get more clicks".

That may include a lot of web shops. Usually for ad revenue. But if you think about that from an engineering perspective, what a woeful, sad day it is to have your boss come to you with that mission.

Its the day you realize that what you built has no real value to the user, and is a self serving mechanism to get meaningless clicks out of your robot users.

In the old days we made software that people wanted to use and we didnt care how many times they clicked on a cow.

Or on an ad.

It seems the implication of the article is to say that we have potentially drawn the wrong conclusion on "which straw" broke the camels back.

And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals.

It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone".

But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers.

Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects.

Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".

There are many use cases for which EC2 is exactly perfect and not overpriced.

As a consultant recently I was tasked to build a service which (rather not say), I had good data on requests per day, total data storage, factored in ELB, etc.

The cost was less than 2K a year. Now consider that the company refused to buy hardware or pay anyone to support it because they had a full staff of sysops maintaining their (rather not say) at great cost in their own data center.

2K is absolutely nothing to a company. Most of us are not Netflix or Dropbox. Don't pretend you have those kinds of problems if you don't. It could have cost 3x that per year and they still wouldn't have noticed it.

AWS for manageable workloads is dirt cheap at scale. I think you'd have to be nuts not to use it.

Twist isn't solving a fake problem anymore the many services trying to solve the problem of hailing a cab.

That said, sometimes I think it would be nice if a lot of these micro solutions could be aggregated into macro solutions ;)

The trick is getting your company to pay for it and run the JVM on top of their VM. But yes, that's where I was heading.

While the JVM has an excellent garbage collector (maybe the best on the planet), it's performance is linearly degraded by the amount of memory a process is using.

If you go into any Java shop (which is where I live) and try to run a highly available system with more than 8GB of RAM in a server instance, you will be lucky to do that.

Servers on the cheap exist with 256GB of RAM, if you can't get to 12GB without OOMs, and GC pauses of 30 seconds, you will never get to a process that scales to this hardware. Your GC pause on a 100GB system would be over a minute complete stop the world probably more.

And that's a shame, because the only antidote, is to over-distribute, and over cluster, and not only slow everything down by 1000X compared to a single server, but the engineering and operational costs to distribute everything into tiny 4GB buckets are also unacceptable.

I think the industry should rethink GC, if it can get past this boundary. 4GB walls and 8GB walls compared to the current availability of hardware is embarrassing.

I would rather not build a server that can't use all the memory I want it to without falling over.

My minimum required RAM metric is 256GB for a process. That could even be a fairly small (code wise) system that just needs a lot of RAM in which case manual memory management is a piece of cake.

Wow thank you for that!

Do the news outlets that that quote Steve Jobs bio incessantly have to pay Walter Isaacson to do so?

I have read so many print articles on news sites from the book that Im sure I have read it by now.

I kind of wish media would stop reprinting this stuff over and over. Its not news.

The headline is a little misleading. What SFLC is saying is that patent licensing agreements are orthogonal to enumerated license terms of the GPL.

The construction of a patent claim has little to do with the license terms of the source.

Since no Android device makers will bother to challenge MS in court, we'll never really know what cards if any MS is holding. Must be nice to make millions of dollars for making a phone call.

Im confused by the use of the occupy lingo. Is occupy just a meme now for any protest?

Hm. Am I reading into this or is this article suggesting that we "help" the Iranian people avoid their governments censorship by setting up encryption and Tor nodes?

Are we to believe that folks in Iran trying to avoid the govt dont have these tools already?

And if they dont, do you want to be the person that shows someone how to setup encrypted communications over Iran's "Internet" and potentially put that persons life in danger?

Funny you should post this I saw the exact same thing. What seems to be happening is that Yahoo is starting to source links from a ton of different sources in the news feed.

They have even started to include Onion stories and there was a story from a satire site called HollywoodAndSwine. Which is odd to have fake news mixed in with real news mixed in with opinions mixed in with cat videos.

I think this is a new "lets see what sticks to the wall" strategy to get more mileage out of the news feed which prior to this has been major news outlets, wire outlets and that horrible Yahoo Contributor network.

Since its algorithmic (Im only assuming) in nature, I think we will be seeing more of this as sites that are now showing up will try and figure out how to game Yahoo's system.

Im sure sites that are Yahoo advertisers will likely start to get preference.

I could have done without the teacher-on-dog story.

Staring at traffic for 4 hours a day is no way to treat oneself.

Thats exactly what Ive been doing. Every day isnt a party but I worry that the culture of software shops has changed in ways that I will never be happy in a software job again. And I hate pretending Im OK with stuff Im not OK with.

Its gotten to the point where no matter how much I lower my expectations, they are never low enough.

Its actually OK. I write code when I get an idea. There's worse things than being bored. At least Im not spending my time checking facebook all day.

Im bored.

I dont think TechCrunch is right on this one. Automation is not putting people out of work. The failure of future reward for a lifetime of effort is turning careerism on its head regardless of your career field.

Ive been a software engineer for 15 years, I have chosen to not work for almost 2 years.

I could get a job tomorrow, but I would quit in a couple months because the working conditions in software shops is pretty bad and the economic reward that looks good on paper doesn't really translate into anything I need or want.

And its not that I cant get a GOOD job. The working conditions at big company X, Y, Z are frankly terrible. Ive been there.

I may not represent the average unemployed person (and no I dont collect unemployment) but I can see where people are coming from, and I empathize.

Economic motivation will always trump automation.

I hesitate to add to this conversation if thats what this is. I've seen alot of comments saying that "if RMS can post his opinions then we can post ours"

Thats completely true, its also completely juvenile and unnecessary.

RMS is a controversial figure, but I dont think this debate over something as (by comparison) trivial as "What madonna requires backstage before a concert", has any productive value.

You can justify your own judgements of him based on what you perceive his value judgements of others to be all you want.

At least he's willing to be honest about who he is.

20-30 years of baggage or not, leave the guy be and go do something to make the world a better place.

From bitcoin.org

Bitcoin is not anonymous

Some effort is required in order to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the owner cannot be associated with their Bitcoin address until personal information is revealed by the owner during an exchange. This is why it is recommended for Bitcoin owners to use many different Bitcoin addresses; in fact, you should create a new one each time you receive money. This is especially important for public uses such as websites. You might also want to consider hiding your computer's IP address with a tool like Tor so that it cannot be logged.

I didnt mean that the second wouldnt have to be redefined at all only that if it was defined in metric, it wouldnt be any more or less prone to adjustment (which I though was the first comments point) than our current system which is inaccurate.

So if our current system still has to be adjusted periodically to fit nature, then what is the real impact of changing the duration of a second? Besides the obvious: breaking every clock on earth LOL

How can you possibly make an argument for not caring about failed deployments? "Skip over", "do it again", "its fast".

You can't possibly be talking about deployment here. Deployment is the result of moving tested, proven, known working artifacts into an environment in which they can execute or be accessed by an executable environment.

There is no skip, retry or anything resembling failure in a deployment model that Im aware of. So Im not sure why I would use a tool assuming it would fail to do what its intended to do.

I agree its a little bizarre, but as for the length of days, changing to a metric equivalent wouldnt really require changing the length of a second would it?

We have a fixed system right now and when its off we just say this day is a minute longer and clocks synchronize.

There's nothing inherently accurate about 60 60 24.

What I cant wrap my head around is the lack of timezones. If I switched to UTC or something based on UTC right now would I be waking up every day at 5 PM? I dont know and I dont much care.

But it seems like there is tension between local/global requirements and right now we favor local because its where we live.