I appreciate good management. I can live with no management, but I can't handle bad management.

SCRUM has sort of become a device for a manager to avoid managing. The human in the picture is replaced with a sprint chart and backlog tracker. It lets bad managers get by, while good managers are really thrown out of the picture.

I hated scrum in my old job. But the new job just throws out a list of features to implement, ranks it and throws it at one of us. There are no punishments for missing a day, no tracker to guilt-trip you and most importantly, the stand-up meetings are just before lunch. And mostly, serves to keep our communication channels open across the team.

I hated the time-keeping TPS report style scrum, but I'm cool with the new approach. I love the idea of sprints and taking a week out of a month to hammer something out. But this system only works with motivated teams with a fair scrum-master.

But I repeat, it is not a replacement for good management. It is as good as a way of letting me manage my tasks,but please (for the love of God, please) do not use it to manage me.

Most of the action/epic movie genre shot in real life, rather than on a green screen heavily uses perspective effects to achieve drama.

Something like the famous contra-zoom would be a complete failure in 3-D. The entire sequence in LoTR where Gandalf and Frodo are in the same shot would just not work in 3-D unless you went in and fixed the perspective for every frame.

Half of the hollywood real-life special effects would need to be re-invented for 3-D to work right. Or the CGI versions need to catch up to the old-school effects.

And then there are people like me who accidentally distracted by the background. I take a look at it and then my eyes sort of complain about not being able to bring a backdrop object into focus. Totally kills the immersion for me. I want 3-D movies, but not this polarized lenses in each eye monstrosity (I wonder if I could get contacts with those).

Biometric, swipe cards or any other method they use will have loopholes when left alone. All it needs is a single teacher to watch everyone put their fingers there. But if I were in school I'd hate that too (*mutters* "fucking attendance nazis").

In my old 2nd language class in school, we would all file in, sit down and the teacher would go through the list & call out the students she thinks is absent. But it was all on paper and there was no tallying done until the end of the term.

But I must applaud the school for making the kids work harder to break the system, that's a definite way to select intelligence for "coolness" :)

I think this has sort of been prompted by what happened to Iran and the recent attack with the Stuxnet worm. India has a significantly advanced nuclear programme, which is (and should be) doing research into thorium based nuclear power, which has potential for export. The Kalpakkam reactor just finished the 25th year of its running and the next generation of engineers are picking up after the recent retirees from that programme.

If I had to guess this would be QNX-ish operating system, not a windows clone in any sense of binary compatibility. The "windows software" comment is very likely to mean that this is a GUI operating system, not an embedded firmware version.

There has been significant work into the Linux kernel locally (like the Param Supercomputer). So OS level work is not as alien to these people as you might think. Either way, it's a good initiative, even if it crashes & burns.

As a photographer, I like Shotwell. As a programmer, I like it a little more than the mono updates that come along with f-spot (and I don't like Miguel).

But here's what's kept me from abandoning gthumb2 for shotwell. Shotwell keeps pictures in ~/Pictures by default. There is no way for it to randomly pick up a directory and operate on it. I've often thought about hacking that up, but for Vala & the associated learning curve I've been too lazy to tackle.

And now, for an encore can we kick tomboy too out of the CD?

Love them for not doing the not-from-our-country crap. Probably the only newstertainment show I watch from the US for the same reason.

I know RIM is only providing meta-data on the content, but honestly, are you telling me that this *wont* be used to spy on a corporate competitor?

India is corrupt in a very "Who me?" way. This law has only abuses, in a country where you can buy a SIM for 5 dollars, with a photocopy of just about anybody's id. The terrorists don't need to bother with the BB or anything even remotely expensive - the underworld maybe (The D Company), but not the "kill them all and let God sort them out" category of terrorists.

But it's not like India is the first place to do this. Echelon was used similarly, I guess to spy on foreign firms.

There's so little taught in a university course that I couldn't read off a public library.

But here's the deal, I don't think the epistemological quest for knowledge motivates me. I learn purely as a way of solving the problems I have. Sometimes real life doesn't even let me near interesting problems, because the cost of failure (and the risk) is too high.

College and teachers have worked as a nice cycle breaker of that situation. They've thrown problems at me, which have taken weeks to solve (or groups of us, weeks to solve). Some of those have seemed pointless, but most of the stuff I remember still have been the ones that I've had to dig up again for some reason or the other (calculus, for instance).

Essentially, without teachers, I'd have never really sat down and banged on a problem for a week - mostly to avoid having the shame of going back without an answer.

On the other hand, I've had at least a few teachers who've cared enough about teaching me than making sure of their paycheck. I don't think the world needs less of those. And I don't think you (or anybody) should stop learning because they're out of uni.

(goes back to reading wikipedia on RCU data structures)

If a website can run unauthorized code by just visiting a page, does the jailbreak "innoculate" against the exploit it uses?

Or would apple's fix for the bug also break the jailbreak? (they'll do that, I guess).

For once, I see the standardized parts working as they are meant to be. Swapping components on a netbook is hard to say the least, but to see someone just grab a part & shove it into a netbook, tells me that this could very well turn out to be one of the "optional" features for people when ordering off their favourite supplier.

If I had to guess, I think it's a variant of an attack I've seen before.

Too many times have I said this. There is no silver bullet.

Security is not an option, it's inherent in the system or not all.

Nothing fixes bad code. Nothing can. Now there are things you can do to prevent writing bad code, like scream when your code goes and screws up stuff. You can automate the things you might do wrong, use a garbage collector, use prepared statements, use a filter to check for input. And it's hard work, but that's why you get paid. Now management can help you too (my boss gives me work that "needs to be done right, first time") by ensuring they don't make you cut corners. Most of us want to do the best job we can, but we're not allowed to - "Just Ship it and put a patch next month", because security is not really a feature that sells, it's assumed to be present and cannot be monetized properly. Bruce Schenier explained it brilliantly in - Market for Lemons.

But there's no silver bullet, in fact there's not even a silver band-aid. And sometimes the bug is in the shield itself. My usual policy is to have as little code as possible, so that I can read and verify it all the time. Smaller the chunks I build, the easier it is to test it apart. Easier it is to tear it apart, to replace a part or just anything. Code in ADA will be more auditable than code in PHP (trust me, I work with php all day). But eventually, you can't really write bad code, push it production and slap security over it.

So tell me, how will you fix this bug that was there in your security tool, Recursive Ventures? :)

What do the decency groups know about indecency?

(. ) ( .)

Are these decent? I'm sorry, you can't wash out the filth out of my brain ... you can try, but I see the a-style logo and I see what I see, because of the filth in *my* brain.

If you see the same ... well *giggle*

If they are nothing like us, that will be a bigger problem.

This particular idea almost collides with the idea that aliens will make our life better in some way when we encounter them. They might treat us just like the old world treated the new world and its inhabitants. If simple cultural differences can cause such trouble, imagine whole species encountering each other.

I sure hope for aliens who have evolved into societies like ours, completely independently. I (and in extrapolation, the rest of humanity) will not be able to deal with something like a hive mind of consciousness in an incoming attacker. But I'm sure with the regular kind of invaders, I shall be able to achieve some sort of truce

Because you see, I for one welcome ... (bah, that was too easy).