So how does it work then? some people are no doubt just brilliant at stuff due to pure natural ability even though they never practice? What utter bullcrap.

I am not saying that practice automatically makes people better programmers (you can practice for years in a lazy way and not get any better), but I do think that to be a better programmer a huge part of it is breadth of experience at solving different problems, facing different challenges and working around different constraints.

Being naturally gifted or having a way of learning that suits the topic may give some people a slight head start or advantage in terms of needing less practice, but ultimately everyone needs to practice a skill in order to hone their abilities.

Just look at the employment market for the most compelling evidence: Senior developers with at least 5 years professional experience command more money than people fresh out of college.

I think a better test of being in the advanced is how easily you can follow other peoples code, no matter how poorly written it is or different in style to your own.

The vast majority of people on slashdot though are towards the younger end of the spectrum (ie, recent graduates and students). As people get older they tend to get caught up in family and such and drift away from the site, or like me only come back once or twice a month. This means the highest peaks should be towards the rookie end of the spectrum.

The only way to get past novice or intermediate at programming is to get at least 10 years experience under your belt, at least 5 of which should be paid professional work on large complex systems or something equivalent in academia like a doctorate (anything else is just too easy).

I would also say that the only way to get to expert is to do this in at least 2 or 3 different languages that are fairly different from one another. Basically, nobody under 40 can really be an expert as they simply haven't had long enough yet.

(Personally, I selected Intermediate, but I reckon I am nearly into Advanced)

Who cares? Bias people are allowed to sit around and post any crap they like on their own time and equipment. Even employees of private companies should be able to do crap like this if there employer wants them to.

With public servants this is different though as they all technically work for us, the public. Sitting around, making edits to wikipedia entries detailing their own actions (real or alleged) is not something that most of the public would like to see officers doing. Maybe if they did less of this and more actual policing our streets would be a little safer.

As someone who has spent my whole life living under a system of DST I actually quite like it. Here in the UK it means that for the winter months i do not have to wake up while it is still pitch black outside in order to get to work for 8:30. It does mean it is dark when I am driving home but who cares then? it probably would be anyway actually as with the clock change it gets dark at about 4ish.

As to getting used to it? Wow, it is only one Saturday night that is either longer or shorter, half the time I don't even notice now as all my clocks just switch over automatically and I often get varying amount of sleep each night due to things like staying watching crap on TV or playing video games. My days of having a regimented bedtime that I had to stick to every night went away about 30 years ago. I find it difficult to believe that too many people really have trouble adjusting to this.

Refusing a patch that added bare bones compatibility with LLDB results in less functionality software.

There are many reasons to refuse a patch, but not liking the other products licence should not really be one of them.

No, not new to the industry being now in my late thirties and having worked for the last decade as and server admin and developer. Don't really have an agenda as I have moved into pure development now and have no interest in moving back to being a sysadmin as I have a family now and the out of hours on call bit of being a sysadmin sucks.

You say that but in my last sysadmin role I was responsible for supporting a pair of IIS servers we needed to serve certain crap developed for windows (needed to be case insensitive, and had occasional chunks of ASP). Windows 2003 Server was rock solid in this regard and managed similar uptimes to apache which we used for most stuff.

MS desktop offerings might be utter shit without a reboot but I was pleasantly surprised by IIS. I would still never choose to use again out of principle though as do I think open source is a good thing.

Jesus, why would you even think about using Ubuntu in a server anyway? Everywhere I ever worked or heard of used RHEL, Centos or occasionally Debian. Since I discovered Mint I would not even waste my time using Ubuntu on a desktop.

His mind, in this case is that a piece of free software should be less functional, in order to lock you in to not using LLVM if you use the Emacs debugger, just because both separate packages are from the GNU stable. This seems remarkable similar to the sort of tactic Microsoft has been accused of for years.

But equally, thousands of companies now trust systemd to run enterprise servers since centos or RHEL is pretty much the defacto linux distribution in this regard. The fact that this is the case does indicate that it must be pretty stable when correctly configured.

If there are bugs in systemd, then report them and maybe even help diagnose them to make it better. It has huge traction now so there is zero chance of it disappearing.

What about "people keep saying it crashes but they are making it up or blaming it when the fault is somewhere else just because they hate the developer and do not agree with the reason for its development"?

In my experience most H1B programmers are not actually that much cheaper to hire that people already here. The real problem is that too many young geeks in the developed world are arrogant, over entitled assholes who are a pain to work with. Whereas generally that guy or girl from India or eastern europe is polite, professional and happy to work hard but without throwing a childish hissy fit when they don't get everything their own way. They just want to go to work and get paid.

Also, the best code is always produced by a team of developers who all practice things like pair programming and peer code review (every single commit should be reviewed by another member of the team). In that environment, not being an arrogant dick matters more than anything.

Nope. The real problem is that DDT is no longer effective against mosquitos in many parts of the world as they have evolved to be immune to it. The stuff that is still effective against them is so damn toxic that it has to be used carefully in case too much gets into drinking water, makes it into the food chain in other ways or even just poisons the rivers and kills all the fish on its way to the sea.

They want to listen in, not shut the conversation down so storming in anywhere armed with your court order is not a solution.

So many people here are ranting on about this but what he said is actually 100% reasonable in that he stipulated the government needing a court order. The truth is that if they can stand in front of a judge and convince him you are a legitimate target then you have very little expectation of privacy. Based on that judges say so they can legally sneak in to your home and plant listening equipment if they have information that indicates they have a chance of recording you discussing engaging in illegal activities.

A few years ago things were much simpler for them, they could ask a judge nicely and he could order a tap your phone line. Nowadays though, that does not help them as much as it used to. They can take that warrant to your ISP, get full access to all your email, and still be none the wiser about what you are discussing if you have decent encryption.

If some could come up with a perfect solution to this problem where a judge could order something decrypted and only then could government use their magic key to access it then I personally would have no problem with it, providing a few other safeguards were also in place, such as full disclosure in the case that nothing is found after 6 months or a year or something. Obviously, this magic key would also have to be bulletproof so that there was no possible other way that government or anyone else could decrypt it.

The problem is that this perfect solution is is not what government goes looking for, instead they always seem to look for something that provides us no safeguards whatsoever. So even if it is possible (which I personally doubt anyway), there is sod all chance of them ever coming up with it and if anyone else does I can seem them actually supporting it.

Quite right, I would actually consider that a perfectly legitimate form of protest providing the requests were coming from actual consumers who had paid for said product. You have to actually buy something in order to be a legitimate consumer.

I bet this is not what this retard was doing though, he was most likely triggering off thousands of illegitimate calls from PC's emulating the DRM system not from consoles owned by people who had bought a game.

Also, it is worth bearing in mind that some consumers out there who buy games (like me) actually like things like DRM because I do not see why some other free loading little shit should get free access to something that I pay my hard earned wages for. If you can't afford something like a game or DVD, you should go without it as they are luxury items anyway.

Here in the UK it probably doesn't really matter what you were actually doing, if your INTENT was to stop or prevent people engaging in a lawful activity then that is most likely a criminal offence. This is generally how our laws are written then we just let juries sort it out.

In this case we passed a law in 2006 called the Police And Justice Act. Here is an old register article about it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Our legal system generally has intent woven into its fabric at a far deeper level than in the US so that if the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) feel there is a reasonable likelihood of them being able to convince a jury that an individuals intent was malicious then they can drag you through the courts. In this case whether this retard is charged will probably depend on how clean his PC's were when they raided him.

You might note that I have zero sympathy for him, being susceptible to getting DDOS'd is not really a security issue worth exposing. If you throw enough traffic from a bot-net at an awful lot of sites they will go down. The simple truth is that when companies provision any sort of on-line infrastructure or offering you look and how much load it is expected to be under during normal operation then plan from there by adding a certain safety margin. In this case it sounds like this service was only going to be called each time a game was started so creating far more load then this by lots of bots pretending to start games over and over again thousands of times a minute was miles away from the intended traffic volumes.

I know some people say this vulnerability never should have existed as this phoning home is a form of DRM and this should not happen but the probably is that without it there are an awful lot of people out there who just freeload and play stuff without paying. Of course companies are going to try an make this difficult in order to stay in business, that is what capitalism dictates they must do in order to maximise shareholder returns.

I hope this guy also realises that he has utterly screwed over any chance he had in life of actually becoming a real paid security researcher with this stupid stunt. With a prior arrest on public record like this he is just not worth the risk, especially as he has not really showed any special technical skills. He will be lucky to get any sort of computer work for the next 10 years.