I absolutely hate it when the www. is required. It's just lazy SysAdmin of the web server. The WWW is completely unnecessary. Must allow for other sub-domains however.

Lo, in the beginning the web was without interactive websites and the firmament was constructed from HTML and CSS only with a sprinkling of Perl script. Then was formed Linux which begat Apache whose cousins were MySQL and PHP and became known as the venerable LAMP stack and it was good. Then along came millions of amateur web designers versed in HTML and CSS and they quickly went to Barnes & Noble and Walden Books and eventually Amazon to buy PHP books galore the thicker the better. But woe, woe to the coders who did not learn but the bare minimum of secret knowledge for they have polluted the Internet with evil. Giving in to sinful lusts, they crafted such abominations that make even TheDailyWTF blush.

Seriously, the garbage PHP code out there is a direct result of amateurs with limited skills turning out web applications much the same way a bunch of similar so called programmers turned out with VB & MS-Access. There is room for this all over and it's not just the PHP language. Without a proper educational foundation in proper software development there is a lot of bad code out there irregardless of language.

True, more modern languages such as C#, Swift, others try to prevent developers from doing dumb things along with quality web app frameworks have forced best practices through opinionated development. It is still important for developers to learn the correct way to do things. Just because it works and or compiles doesn't mean it's not incredibly sloppy and seriously flawed. You don't need a degree but you do need to take care to learn things before jumping in and creating an incredible mess.

All said and done, PHP can be done correctly or it can be done incorrectly. That is the same for most any language even with some protections it won't prevent you from doing ridiculous things like re-inventing a standard library function cause you think you can do it better. Each language has its strengths and weaknesses but the biggest flaw is the human behind the keyboard who arrogantly believes they are a rock star.

Because it is federally illegal and across state lines. So therefore, the bank is at risk of having the money seized by the Feds. So they won't touch the legal marijuana business with a ten foot pole. No matter how much money there is.

Sure fine, but they had better get on the ball and make some serious changes because all it's going to take is some Silicon Valley startup to make them look remarkably outdated and stupid by offering really excellent banking services with realtime near instantaneous transactions. You see those delays make money for the banks so it is in their interests to slow things down.

Didn't their last satellite go kablooey? SpaceX Falcon 9 explosion on the launch pad during fueling destroyed Facebook's co-leased AMOS-6 Satellite Sept 1st 2016. The satellite was to provide Internet service to large parts of West, East and Southern Africa. The satellite cost approximately $200 million. Sounds like the new plan is smaller, simpler and cheaper lower orbit satellites.

I've fixed a heck of a lot of scrambled flash drives using the "testdisk" utility and recovered data that appeared lost.

Always unmount / eject even on Windows but especially any *nix including macOS. If Windows says it cannot eject, go figure out why then safely eject it. In some cases it's because you have an Explorer or Command Prompt / Powershell working directory set to the external drive. Or some security tool is running a scan, etc.

I've been in the computer industry for 38 years! The ad doesn't offend me. What it portends is the coming of the Post PC Era. It is true that iPads and Tablets are not quite there yet. But right now, the average home user can buy an iPad, keyboard, (optional) Pencil stylus and a wireless printer and never have to use a normal computer. Many of the Millennial's are using large smartphones and don't even own a computer. This is Apple's dream of a computer for everyone. Heck you hardly need any training with an iPad. Kids pick it up instantly. Google Chromebooks, Google Fuchsia, and who knows what else may be born to provide simple appliance computers to the masses. You can get an entry level iPad for $329.

That does not mean that computers are going the way of the Dodo Bird. You still need a computer to write the code for these mobile devices. Computers are still required to run the data centers that power the Cloud. You still need a real computer for programming, But let's face it, right now you can SSH over a cellular data connection to a cloud server and restore a GNU Screen or Tmux session and code your brains out in ViM/Emacs or other console editor. Disconnect and reconnect even with a different device and you can pick up where you left off. Easily collaborate over the Internet. You can graphically share a screen but it's not entirely seamless and feels like you are remote controlling something foreign due to the differences in user interface.

Could you one day see something like Xcode on an iPad? Well for coding iOS applications, it is quite likely. The latest iPhone as 6 CPU's, a high speed dual core, a low speed quad core plus a couple extra CPUs dedicated to Machine Learning. Give it a few more years and you could have 12 or 18 cores and ridiculous GPU in a mobile device. Go check out the benchmarks, an iPhone 8 comes very close to competing with laptops.

The ad is showing how useful an iPad is and how a kid might not care about a computer because that iPad does everything she can think of. Course she doesn't have a super geek dad teaching her C/C++/ObjectiveC/Swift/Ruby/Python, etc., etc.

Being a programer is not like it used to be. In the early days there were only a handful of languages and it was fairly easy to learn them and the computers were not that powerful by todays standards. Nowadays there are so very many different languages all geared to help solve different problems. That is what programming al all about, solving problems. Add to that all the frameworks and API's out there. The choices boggle the mind. The profession is very wide and stretches from embedded devices to mainframes and everything in between. No one can learn it all, most veteran developers have mastered 5-6 languages but there are deep concepts that are found across languages.

The question one should ask oneself is what sort of programming interests you? Web, Application, Mobile, Systems, etc., etc. There's a new field called DevOps where you are a Developer but you are also an Operations engineer. The DevOps lies between the programmers and the production systems. They help bring the two worlds together. Just because it runs on your laptop doesn't mean it will run on the production system scaled out across a thousand nodes in a giant data center. DevOps also helps setup code repositories, automated testing, how things push to production, how production is orchestrated, etc.

Starting with a scripting language such as Ruby or Python might be up your alley as neither requires compiling and both are pretty easy to read and understand. See if you like the idea of coding for long periods of time and banging your head against the desk in frustration. Jumping feet first into K&C ANSI C is a big leap into a shark tank, same with C++, Java, etc. All languages have a place in the scheme of things. It all depends on where you want to go. Pursuing some traditional college classes in software design can tune you into the big picture. It is a lot to wrap your head around everything.

The world needs more developers, go for it. Just realize it's a whole lot of work and the learning never ever stops. You will write code and look back at it years later and scratch your head wondering how you could have been so stupid. It truly is a non-stop learning experience that most talented people get better at over time.

Television is even more messed up. Within an hour after a new show airs, it's been pirated and uploaded, indexed and ready for download. Commercials have been stripped and the quality is 720p or 1080p. Game of Thrones was the most pirated show ever. HBO Now is trying to change that and it's already making HBO some serious money. $15/mo with no contract gains you access to the entire HBO library including old shows like Sopranos and Deadwood. They need to expand international availability of HBO Now and make it available on more devices. There are people who will pay if the price is right and they can get what they want when they want it.

Meanwhile if you want to be legit you need to have a cable or satellite subscription to stream content on most networks. That is just plain dumb. Ex-pats overseas can pirate whatever they want and get it instantly for free. You could get Downton Abby an entire season ahead of time while the USA was watching Season 2 you were already watching Season 3 because someone in the UK ripped it and uploaded it.

People don't watch TV the way they used to. It's now all on demand. There should be no channels just a list of shows and you should be able to stream or download digital copies for offline use across platforms and devices without restriction. There are pirate tools that completely automate the entire process so it feels quite like the entire Internet is your DVR. You tell the tools what you want and they find it and download it automagically. The only way the networks can compete is to do the same and change the way their business model works. Piracy is very much like disruptive technology smashing old barriers. If there is a will there is a way to get what you want when you want it.

The amount of money being lost is stupid, HBO Now proves you can make huge profits if you just accept the new reality and go with the flow. Stop beating your customers up and start serving them.

The losses are not the box office but the old fashioned video sales DVD/Bluray/Digital distribution. If the studios would just release their digital versions faster and with no DRM and drop the price to a more reasonable level they would make a lot more money. Right now, it's far easier to pirate and get what you want sooner and for free. This is how music piracy was before Apple iTunes started the turn around. You have to make it easier to be legit.

The movies are released in theaters overseas sometimes months prior to the USA theaters and their DVD/BluRay's are released early as well. All it takes is one guy in Vietnam to rip a movie and upload it and now you have millions downloading copies of it weeks before it hits the stores or even local on demand viewing. The file is high quality and has no DRM. A few months prior there are HD camcorder releases filmed in cinemas overseas. These are still very popular even though the quality is quite low.

The Internet is a global network, stop messing around with borders and distribution deals and start releasing stuff much faster and everywhere at once. There is no excuse to restrict distribution spread out over months to different regions. DRM angers end users who can only play it on certain devices and certain software. e.g. Apple iTunes only works on Apple systems. Digital downloads sell for the same price as DVD/Bluray, that's just wrong.

Plan for success against piracy:

1. Release On Demand and Streaming Rentals for the usual $5 a few short weeks after leaving theaters
2. Release downloads for $10 thirty days after On Demand / Streaming offers
3. Release it globally at the same time on all services all at once
4. Ditch DRM it only angers customers and doesn't stop the pirates at all
5. Release on physical media using same old slow channels, really who cares?
6. Release old classics online as well. Disney is guilty of not distributing some older content except for special release now and then.

Do not release in overseas markets first. You must release in theaters globally at the same time within a few weeks time.

eBooks same problem, try registering for Amazon or iBooks using an overseas credit card and address and you will find a seriously hampered catalog of what is available in the US/UK. It's down right dumb. It's all based on century old rules and regulations that no longer make sense in the age of super fast Internet.

This is what will happen to every major government department and agency. Trump will be nominating the cabinet members which require confirmation by Congress. The rest are appointees. Of which there will be about 4,000 of them. This is what happens at every single change in political control. When the agency / department head is replaced that person will then build their team by replacing all their direct reports most of the time. Those people head various groups within the agency / department and will be also replacing their direct reports and building their teams. This goes on and on down the chain of command. It could take a couple years for all that to shake out. We are talking management and middle management positions. The workers pretty much stay the same. The employment protections apply to the worker bees not management. Now you may very well have some disgruntled worker bees but if they raise their profile too high they will be found out and removed one way or another. If that person cannot be fired, they may be transferred, demoted, removed from a position of power, or possibly promoted and given a lot of rope to then make a big enough mistake to be fired. This is exactly what happens at every major corporation when leadership changes. A new CEO, CFO, etc. comes on board and restructures their department moving people around replacing a number of them, etc. It happens all the time. Internal corporate political battles are common. Executives have contracts with golden parachutes and extensive benefits well above the average employee. If they get fired, they likely still get paid until the contract is up and still get large severance package. At the CEO level that could be millions of dollars. In government, you get fired you go find a job in the private sector as a government consultant, etc.

So to think that anyone working in these positions could stealthily run the previous administrations goals without getting caught is pretty silly. At most they need to keep their head down and not attract attention to themselves. If they try to do anything drastic they will get noticed and the hammer will fall. There are protections for them but they are not absolute.

This same thing occurred when Obama took office in 2008 and again in 2012. The same thing happened when Bill Clinton took over and GW Bush, etc., etc. This is how it works. So if they don't cooperate now, they will have no choice when the top brass is installed. Right now, they don't work for Donald Trump but it's only a matter of time. It's also not unusual for transition teams to conduct these early communications. It is a bit unnerving they wanted a list of climate change staffers but it really doesn't matter. The culture of these places is going to go under a rapid 180 degree phase change and there is nothing to stop it. That is what winning looks like.

All it takes is one moron to click a phishing email link, executing the malware. Apparently, someone with privileges clicked the link. As in someone with enough access to production systems to infect the entire network. An IT worker got infected and using that IT workers user account the entire system was infected.

This is why those who are serious about security do annoying things like make IT workers use a different account with admin privileges that cannot actually be logged on directly but can execute processes with privilege. Needing to checkout a new password for that account daily and logging all usage of that account. Also removing local admin rights from the IT workers primary logon account. Because outsourced and low paid staff are morons. You know who gets infected the most in corporate America? It's those H1B1 Visa workers who can't afford their own computers so they take the work laptop home and surf sites back in India and Pakistan where many systems are infected.

Serious security means many layers of protection, deep packet analysis, cloud proxy that can decrypt SSL, endpoint analysis, etc., etc. Disaster Recovery is very important, there needs to be a DR SAN/NAS that is mirrored and switchable. Once you get the infection under control and confirm no more ransomware is spreading you flip from production to DR and thereby recover your data instantly. Backup critical systems as well. All this is not enough if you don't train your employees to not do stupid things like click phishing emails, download unapproved software, plug in a USB drive found in the parking lot, and give their password to a total stranger for a chocolate bar.

People are stupid... This happens at many employers. People still reply to all, it's really annoying. You simply cannot rely on people to not reply all, be smart. When sending out email to a large number of people you absolutely MUST USE the BCC line instead of TO. That way they can't reply all to everyone on distribution. Just leave that TO line blank...

I am so sick of the platform wars... Every time Apple comes out with something, there are a crap ton of articles such as the one saying Microsoft is more Apple than Apple and Linux is the answer, etc., etc., etc. Some are click bait and some are trying to restart the Microsoft / Apple / Linux wars. Well here's some information from someone who runs or ran just about every top tier OS ever made.

1. Apple Macs are more than just tech specs. You cannot compare hardware chipsets and revisions between a Mac and anything else. The OS varies. It is the combination of elegant hardware, drivers and operating system that work together to provide a very nice overall user experience. You simply have fewer problems overall. If you are a programmer it is the best platform. You get all the developer tools for free and anything open source runs on it. Plus you get Microsoft Office and Adobe apps, etc. that won't run on Linux. Mac's are fantastic for anyone managing a Unix/Linux data center or doing DevOps, etc. It's not just for those graphic artist weenies and photographers. It's a great family home machine as it will less likely get hacked and abused by malware (if properly setup). TimeMachine backups work, it's saved my bacon many times to the point of having a dead hard disk and being back in business a couple hours later with a new drive. Is it the right choice for everyone? Hell no!

2. Linux is great, absolutely amazing; on servers. It sucks badly on laptops. Disclaimer: it is getting better and with System76 and Dell providing very nice Linux hardware platforms. But the GUI is nowhere near consistent with way too many choices. For me it's all command line all the time. Meanwhile, Microsoft is embracing Linux because of the Cloud. They are porting SQL Server to Linux, running Linux in Azure, bringing some Linux/GNU goodness to the command line in Win10, etc. Most everything that runs on Linux runs on Mac. I think the Linux and Open Source guys are winning!

3. You want to buy a Dell XPS Developer Edition with Linux or maybe a System76, go right ahead. You want to strip out Ubuntu and run ArchLinux, more power to you! Just don't go claiming it is a viable replacement for a Mac cause it's not even close. I know all about Linux, been using it prior to the kernel 1.0 release, back when you had to rewrite two boot floppies to get the CDROM to install and there was no broadband. I know how to tweak it and make it sing. I've spent a million hours tweaking it. This is the reason I didn't buy an Android phone. It's a tool an appliance, I don't want to spend all my spare time tweaking it. I want it to work out of the box and I want the OS to get the hell out of my way. Open bag, pull out Mac, flip open lid, unlock, do work, close lid, slide back into the bag, rinse and repeat day after day after day. Plug it in to charge when it needs it. Reboot when you have to. Backups? Make sure TimeMachine or CrashPlan is working, done.

4. Windows has actually improved quite a bit but it's still frustrating. There are still a lot of problems. I don't run Windows at home except for a few virtual machines because I fix computers all day long at work, I don't want to do battle with malware at home on my wife's PC. I converted her to Mac a long time ago and she never has issues. She brings her friends laptops home for me to fix running Vista on a PoS ancient laptop. I now charge $500 to even look at it cause it will consume the next 72 hours of my life fixing it.

I've got 5 Mac's at home, a few iPads and iPhones it all works nice together. I have a SmartOS private cloud with 24TB's of storage at home as well. It's running about 50+ virtual machines many of which are Linux servers. A few Win7/Win10 VMs for when I need them. I run Plex and stream video to AppleTV's and iOS devices. I rarely have problems of any kind. Would I give my wife a Linux laptop to use as her primary computer? Nope, not gonna happen. Have I run Linux as my main system, most definitely yes but lately they hum away in the private cloud with zero GUI and I manage them from SSH and Chef.

You know what? Use what works for you man. Build it yourself but for crying out loud stop fighting about it. People who like Apple are the same kind of people who like BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. They like their computers to look good to the eye, perform well, and be slick. Others will buy an old Toyota Supra juice it up and smoke Ferrari's and Lambo's on the weekends. Or they will take a Honda and juice it up and drag race those luxury cars. Top performance in computers is silly, in three months there is always something faster and better. Of course you can build a tower that will stop a Mac Pro but it's not gonna be as small and fit on the top of your desk and it won't be as quiet, etc.

These new MacBook Pro's with USB Type-C Thunderbolt 3 ports and the Touch Bar with TouchID are fascinating but I am no hurry to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe some time down the road it will make sense in a year or two. But there is no reason for me to run out and buy one right now. I do know they have an Esc button so that's good but for me I will wait for iTerm2 to support the TouchBar and some other things to kick in and be compatible, like a 3rd party dock or that LG monitor to be available. Meh... just not that impressed other than it's a major overall improvement.

Flame on my Slashdotter brothers and sisters, Flame on...

I bet it's the same damn billionaires who fear A.I. -- These guys are way too deep in tech, they believe the movie The Matrix. Perhaps it was this simulation concept that inspired the movie... Course both directors of The Matrix have transitioned into women so that makes a lot sense. Women who were into Kung Fu, Anime, Comics, and Sci-Fi. Yep it's possible I guess. Women trapped both in a male body but they are really little boys who never became men. Oof, brain popper that one.