nathanb

Container checkpointing -- very cool from a forensics use case! I hope someone produces a useful "container diff" tool to make visualizing differences between checkpoints easier!

Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Remote: Yes

Relocate: No

Technologies: C, C++, SAN, SCSI, Ruby

Linkedin: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/nathanb-nz

Email: nathanb+hn@vt.edu

I have 8 years of experience doing OS-level coding in the storage industry. I've dabbled in embedded on the low end and userspace / application development on the high end. I've worked remotely from New Zealand for a US-based company for about a year and have proven my effectiveness as a remote employee. Also completely keen for working locally with an Auckland company.

This is an excellent point. Your communication is only as secure as the weakest endpoint (in the same vein, perhaps your correspondents might be of the opposing viewpoint and might feel weird about their personal mails being stored by someone who's rolling his own IT and security).

That seems pretty cool. How long have you been doing this? For your primary email? How has it been working for you?

"Build and develop cross-platform applications using this application that only works on one platform"

So what if I were, say, a US citizen living abroad? I am legally able to work in the US and in my home country, but of course since I'm not actually living in the US some companies might find that problematic. Do you?

A fair comment.

I think it's important to note that a fear or anxiety reaction may not, as you say, keep us safe. When I'm calm and rational, I make better decisions than when I'm gripped by fear.

As an avid hiker and explorer, occasionally my fear of heights interferes with my enjoyment of my hobby. I try to push past it as much as possible, but when my heart is racing and my legs are shaking, a situation which would otherwise be safe can become dangerous.

Also, unlike you, I do have two friends who suffer from PTSD (it's common enough that one may be surprised to find that a friend one has known for years wrestles with PTSD in some aspect of life but doesn't advertise that fact). One of those friends has gotten off an elevator early because being in an enclosed situation with a stranger gave her a panic attack. Another called me on the phone nearly in tears because she had to stay late at work and walking across the deserted, dark carpark to her car was almost more than she could handle.

I think it would be great if a drug could help people like these two friends of mine go through life without feeling controlled by anxiety in situations like these. I also think it would be great if people like me whose day-to-day lives are unmarred by fear can do more things -- safely; the drug does not impair reason -- through this therapy. The tradeoffs are important to know (and as you say, the article does a great job exploring them), but to me this sounds really promising.

Yeah, that paragraph was where she completely lost me. The desire to ensure the poor are taken care of and given opportunities for advancement is not mutually incompatible with the automation of rote tasks. It is not incumbent on society to stop technological advancement in certain areas to ensure that no additional humans lose their jobs to automated processes.

Getting upset at the loss of jobs is the luddite position. The more socially liberal position is getting upset that the savings from the loss of said jobs are rolled up into the pockets of corporate executives and working to ensure that wealth is equitably distributed. The socially conservative position is that the additional wealth freed up by the automation will create new job opportunities elsewhere that the recently unemployed individual can seek out and pursue. I lean more to the socially liberal side (and hopefully this bias did not creep out in my description of the conservative point of view), but either one is preferable to putting the kibosh on progress because it might step on someone's toes.

I work for a company which makes network devices. We've detected many hostile intrusions in our network. If you make hardware or software that runs in enterprise datacenters, someone is surely going to be trying to steal your source code to find exploits and possibly put backdoors in.

We use multi-factor authentication just to get in the corporate network and a separate, airlocked engineering network to store our IP. From what I've talked to from my colleagues at other major device manufacturers, this is becoming the industry standard (seven years ago I scoffed at Ericsson's paranoia for having a sequestered engineering network. Turns out they just saw the attacks earlier than we did).

In our case, doesn't seem to be the NSA. Looks more like China. Could easily be either one, or yet another party. This is the world we live in.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's not unprecedented, but I also don't think a lot of the companies that get hit by something like this talk about it so publicly.

Can someone explain this to me?

Windows version: x64

Mac OSX version: x64

Linux version: x86

Why? Why do companies not release 64-bit versions of their programs for Linux? This seems to happen all the time, and it utterly baffles me.

This is interesting, because you're ignoring the fact that the author worked in this exact business for some time and claims that it did once work and doesn't anymore.

Either he was deluded at the time and overcame his delusion without ever realizing he was deluded (which is possible) or there's more to it than you make it seem. Because I think someone who says "this used to work and now it doesn't" may have something profound to say that the person saying "this has never worked" needs to hear.

Perhaps you're right and software outsourcing has never worked, in the sense that from a total cost standpoint it has never been better to contract development of a software project to a third party than to create it in house. I don't agree with this, but we'll accept it for the point of argument. You're still ignoring his point that the change in economics has caused a cultural change in the attitudes of those who lead outsourcing entities.

The article claims that previously, the economics allowed them the luxury of trying to deliver a result to their customers. Now, they are not able to do so because the economics require them to milk their customers for every cent in order to break even.

This may not directly affect you if you have always believed that outsourcing doesn't work and you disagree with his opening statements attempting to rebut that mindset. But it's still an interesting view from the inside.

Either the article doesn't make it clear or I'm bad at reading, and the YT Red site itself just tells me it's not available in my country: I assume this is $10 US a month?

Let's not lose sight of one thing -- this doesn't make chip-and-pin less secure than swipe-and-sign, it just makes it no more secure, in the worst case.

That's a very positive spin on the message. The way I read it is that developers and maintainers are encouraged to make Emacs work better on free than non-free platforms.

This is, sadly, self-defeating. If Emacs were widely recognized as the best editor (or whatever of its myriad functions you use it for), "works best on GNU/Linux" could advance the cause of free software. As it stands, though, "only works well on GNU/Linux" instead just means that fewer people will be using it.

Thanks for the advice. I was not aware this was an option.

Is it "silly" to buy a house when you don't have $50k in your emergency fund? I have been very financially lucky, but I'd still have to sell a lot of stock -- dipping significantly into funds earmarked for other things -- to pay off a surprise $50k expense. I certainly couldn't have done so right after having bought my house.

It's kind of scary that something of this magnitude would depend on the kindness of the claims inspector. The one I dealt with was professional yet friendly and helpful (and climbed my wooden stepladder while wearing heels without a second thought). If she had been having a bad day, or just generally of grumpy disposition, or whatever, things could easily have gone the other way.

When one of my upstairs toilets started leaking in my house in the US, it finally got so bad that I noticed a stain on the garage ceiling. The insurance inspector said that insurance would not cover a "slow leak". I was very nice and polite and pointed out how soaked the subfloor was and that there was no way to know when the leak started (which was true). She wrote her recommendation that it be covered, which the company apparently accepted since they wrote me a check.

Definitely not $50k (more like $2.5k), but it's still disturbing that the line between insurance covering it and not covering it was so thin.

I wonder if a more thorough inspection would have caught it. Surely houses built around that time are routinely inspected for asbestos, lead-based paint, etc before purchase anyway. (Actually, going back and reading the comments, he actually addresses this point: http://www.jefftk.com/p/mercury-spill#fb-752340840802_752343.... Perhaps he could have made it a condition of purchase, that the seller pay for a mercury vapor inspection? Perhaps it's not such a common problem that such a requirement would be reasonable. Hindsight, etc.)

Seriously. I don't know a lot of people for whom a surprise $50k bill would be "unfortunately" rather than "disastrously".

This is actually really cool.

I can't tell you how many people I know whose livelihood essentially depends on their single, aging vehicle not dying. These are often folks whose university debt is, essentially, a monthly car payment.

I would guess that the greatest demand for Lyft drivers is outside or nearly outside normal working hours. If a person with no car can subsidize a long-term rental by spending their after-work hours being a Lyft driver, perhaps arranging to leave work slightly early to help with the after-work rush, that could be a huge benefit to a lot of low-income individuals and families.

It could also be a benefit to families with one car. If one partner uses the car to commute and the other can subsidize a rental, that could provide opportunities to earn something which might otherwise not exist (not every location is amenable to public transportation or cycling).

There are certainly some potential problems with this model. But looking through the eyes of an under-privileged family, I can see this being a huge opportunity too. I just hope the pay rate and the negotiated rental rate and fuel rate are enough to make more than a pittance at the end of the day.

Even more so with paywave, which is all over Australia and becoming more common in New Zealand. I don't think I actually inserted or swiped my card more than once a week in Brisbane.

I like where your head's at

If a picture contains comic sans, I don't need to view it that badly. I smell an opportunity for a new browser extension ;)

That works for stuff like emails and documents, but apparently not for web pages (I have actually done that on my Mac).

I support iFixit in their quest to get useful information about hardware to the masses. If you own a device, why shouldn't you be able to disassemble and repair it yourself? And why shouldn't we be able to know what's inside that device?

But releasing a teardown of the new Apple TV (and breaking NDA while doing so) is not doing that since, critically, the device is not available for purchase yet. I feel like this move is hiding behind "technology wants to be free and open" while actually making a grab for clicks and views.

You're not a martyr for the cause of freedom in this case. Nobody was attacking you. Apple was holding the sword and you fell on it. Had you just waited until the device was released, it would be a different story.

iFixit are making it really hard to be on their side.

I can understand why you're being downvoted, but I also understand the sentiment. There needs to be a way to tell the OS "I never want to see Comic Sans again".

Your point is valid, though perhaps misapplied in this case due to nostalgia-tinted glasses. FFV is a tremendously fun game, but I don't think it's accurate to say it received artisan-level craftsmanship. I don't think it was a transparent money grab the way the HD remake is, but compared to the ones that came before and after, it's...kind of the Godfather 3 of the SNES era. Plenty good on its own, but heavily overshadowed by the others bearing its name.

Great article.

When an indie developer does an HD remake, it's a labor of love. Each sprite is scaled up meticulously and a lot of thought is put into how to make the game look the best.

When a big company like Squeenix does an HD remake, they toss it to a third party, who will do...well, pretty much what you see here. FFV has never been a big moneymaker for Square (wasn't even originally released in the US, so the nostalgia factor isn't even there for many of us who grew up with their games), so I'm guessing "cheap and good enough" trumped "actually good".

What's funny is that those who are nostalgic for these games (or who just think they're better than most of the stuff on the market today) are willing to work long and hard with no monetary compensation to produce actually good versions of the game in question. I wonder if there's some way for Square to work with these folks to produce a legal, well-done version of the game for Steam. Probably too risky, but it's a shame.

This may be dissonance between audiophiles and regular people.

When I see that it works with my best, old-school speakers, I wonder if it has red and black posts for me to crimp my speaker wire to. But of course I know better and know that it will just provide line out audio. When they say "old school" they mean it has an RCA out jack, and when they say "speakers" they mean boombox, receiver, or modern powered speakers (the sort which often have an iphone connector on top to plug your phone into).

We as audiophiles know that the language used in the copy is imprecise and implies the wrong thing (hopefully we're also smart enough to know what it's actually implying). I suspect the average human would not be as confused.