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Comment Re:Government waste (Score 1) 257

You ever try leaving a horse in a garage unattended for a few months, and then ride it when the time finally comes that you need it? Sure, a robot may need a little grease on the joints and a 10 point inspection after it has been in storage, but you don't need a bunch of land and people and resources to keep it healthy "just in case." Also, have you ever tried to field repair a horse with a detached leg? You can just screw it back together with basic tools, or send in another horse with a fresh leg, right?

Comment Re:Hope and change (Score 1) 330

You've picked an ironic day to spout that sort of nonsense. Today, October 1, 2013, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, started the major part of its implementation. That is a "gift" to the people of the United States from the Democratic party. There are plenty of difference between the two parties in terms of goals and policies. One thing they largely agree on is that allowing Americans to be killed in large numbers by terrorists is a bad thing. As a result President Obama has largely continued President Bush's counter-terrorism policies, but gone in very different directions with domestic policy. (Although it must be recognized that the differences in outlook have resulted in far fewer attempts to capture and interrogate terrorists due to the legal messiness that the Obama administration has helped create. As a result, they simply kill terrorists and lose the intelligence data.)

Surely, the Republicans are responsible for the current shutdown, and are werdly obcessed with killing Affordable Care Act. The Democrats have been trying to push through reforms that will benefit many Americans. I'm not saying tehre's no difference. But, you do know that Affordable Care Act is largely based on what was once a Republican legislative proposal, right? The republicans are mostly against Obamacare because the other team passed it. When the Republicans originally proposed it, the Democrats didn't like it very much mostly because it came from Republicans. The two parties really have relatively little difference in reality in terms of real policy goals in the long term. It's mostly about being opposed to whatever the other team is doing. That is a bigger driver for both of them than the real policy goal differences. (Which are indeed there. They just aren't really the dominant factor in determining what Congress does.)

Comment Protip: Cutaways (Score 5, Informative) 182

Taking advantage of the conversation audio was probably much better than trying to reshoot it while reading off a transcript. Good call there. That said, cutting from video of a person to a similarly framed still of a person is not a big improvement from a cinematic perspective. If you want to do more of these, and you want something to show when the video goes wonkey, you should get some other cutaway material. A great example in this case would have been some stills from her portfolio, Ken Burns style, with some simple annotations of what we are seeing. Another easy option would be occasional reaction shots of the interviewer. Obviously, you have4 complete control over that half of the connection so you can always capture decent quality video on your side. (It's a good excuse to clean up your bedroom, if nothing else.) You could also have images of the things that are being talked about. Pictures of cameras, screenshots of software, etc. At around 10:30, you say "I will have this cheapie as a spare" as you cut away from the video. Would have been perfect to cut away to a shot of the cheapie tos how what was being talked about. Or a shot from the cheapie. Etc.

And of course if you have more technical interviewees, you can ask them to record video of themselves on the call and send it to you after, while you have an audio Skype call for the interview. You can spend as long as you need downloading the already recorded video after the fact.

That said, good job providing the transcript below the video. Excellent model to follow.

Comment Re:So .... (Score 1) 178

There are certainly many ways that things can go wrong, but there are many technical people who do understand the costs of technical work. At the last place I worked, we could never get approval to buy some off the shelf software to do stuff that we had some very finnicky internal software. Everybody assumes that the development team would have wanted to make their own under all circumstances, but in that case the cost of maintaining the internal tool was enormous, and the cost in user time to deal with the unstable system was huge. But, bean counters could never see past the sticker price of what we had "for free" already, so we spent roughly the annual cost of the off the shelf tool every single month by not having it. Though, there was another department that had exactly the opposite problem. They had an internal file format that was supposedly very slightly better than the industry standard equivalent. (nobody had any numbers or tests to demonstrate this -- it was just 'known' because the developers were all assumed to be super geniuses.) A large team of people maintained plugins for commercial applications, libraries, tools, converters, etc., to support this internal file format. Bean counters might rightly question paying for the developer team on that project, but technology suffered from NIH syndrome so it persisted.

Comment Re:Why do we trust SSL? (Score 5, Insightful) 233

That made me wonder about something at work recently. All the machines at work are owned by the organization. It would be trivial for them to add their own trusted signing authority, so they could MITM every SSL web site. It wouldn't be terribly hard to auto-generate "valid" SSL certs, and have it tagged as whoever you want the signing authority to be. All they'd have to do is add their own cert, in this case named "GeoTrust Global CA", and they'd have perfect control. To do it perfectly, they'd just need to query the site you're going to, and match up the signer's CN and sign the new fake cert, and you wouldn't know the difference. Who tracks the fingerprint of every cert for every site they go to? Well, I'm sure in this crowd, a few do.

It's not merely possible. It's deployed, off the shelf technology. Not necessarily common, but many companies that do it see it as a cost reduction of more effective proxy usage, rather than anything nefarious.

That said, the way SSL is handled by the browsers is absurd. Not notifying on changes compared to a cached fingerprint, and giving huge warnings on self certification are blatantly obvious errors in judgement. Conflating encryption and identity in one awkward mess has probably done more harm than good. IMHO, it should work a bit like SSH, where the first time you go to a website, you see a little unobtrusive popup saying, "This connection is encrypted. The site claims to be "Foo corp." The identity is (not verified || vouched for by the following : CA Bar, CA Baz). " Adding certs for CA's should be really obvious, not obscure black magic. So, if you attend University of Foo, you can add their self signed cert and all the servers on campus that you access over https will show up as signed by U of Foo. Untrusting certs should also be obvious in the UI. Some web of trust model should be available. If you ever get something other than what was cached, you should see the details side by side.

As is, the system is mostly useless. It fails utterly at identification. And, it scares people away from using encryption on self signed certs. (As if that were somehow worse than operating entirely in plain text...)

Comment Re:Just a moment! (Score 1) 478

But, get this: It was the 3rd time they tried to solve this problem with outsourcing, it was a replacement for a critical part of their infrastructure and it was still the same guy in charge that had messed it up two times before. And that is the real issue: Unsurpassed stupidity in local upper management.

Indeed, the problem with outsourcing isn't just the people who get the work. A big part of it is the people who send the work out. If an organisation has enough internal competence to understand the project and manage it, outsourcing some of the grunt work can be entirely successful. When somebody throws away the internal competence, throws money at a problem and hopes for the best, then it is nearly guaranteed to go badly.

A department at a company where I recently worked needed a developer. So, they hired a freelancer, gave them vague indications about wanting development done, didn't train the freelancer on the internal software stack that already existed, and were disappointed that the resulting tools mostly duplicated internal functionality and weren't very impressive. Nobody really liked the freelancer, so they fired the developer. I volunteered to help that department come up with requirements, etc. Instead, they immediately hired another developer. As far as I know, that department just thinks all developers are horrible people that are hard to work with, because they have refused to learn how to run a useful development project. It was just a steady cycle of hire/fire, never take a breath to understand what's wrong, because now we are even more behind our original schedule... They would have had the same results if they had outsourced to a foreign developer overseas, and they would have insisted that foreign developers are all bad. Sure, there are tons of shitty people calling themselves developers in the world, but if you refuse to have any internal expertise you will never be able to find the decent ones because you won't know them when you see them, and you will just annoy them into finding better work when you mismanage them.

Comment Re:what exactly can you print on these? (Score 1) 347

Washable? If printing eventually becomes sufficiently ubiquitous and refined, all you need care about is "recyclable." Toss the day's clothes in the bin. Pick what you want to wear tomorrow from a catalog, and let it print overnight. The fibers from today's garment will get recovered and added to the feedstock for the printer. The recycled fibers can be washed agressively without concern for the state of the garment they used to be. Eventually fibers wear out and you need some more feedstock.

Comment Re:Impractical? (Score 1) 347

And don't forget that your dealer would love to be able to download and print replacements and install them for you. No warehousing stock on hand. No shipping. No dealing with the manufacturer to source it. Just having the part for every model, for every year, "in stock" within a few minutes, guaranteed would be a huge win even if you didn't bother having a nice printer at home and installing the part yourself.

Comment Re:Account info? (Score 1) 250

You can also make accounts using the names of real students for the friend requesting, or completely random ones. Some people won't friend the "Mascott" account, but may approve a request from somebody they think they know. A lot of people won't even notice being friends with two "Steve Smiths," but you could change the name on the account after getting friended pretty quietly to avoid being accidentally contacted as the actual person.

Comment Re:What a scam (Score 1) 166

Figure out the human effort involved and work on that. "What the market will bear" means "How much can I rip a guy off without going to jail".

Except that charging more for semiconductors probably wouldn't land anybody in jail. So, your premise is very confusing. If somebody wanted to start a factory for NAND and charge more that what anybody else does, then they are perfectly entitled. It's not a very good business model, and they probably won't make any money because very few people would want to buy the product. But, they could do it if they wanted. You seem to have some very strange beliefs about how the economy works, which are pretty consistently contrary to how the economy actually works.

Just like your previous claim that "It's made by a machine, so it costs less." In the end, you are only ever paying for human labor or location. That's it. Whether naked people make a product bare handed, use simple stone tools, or high end fab equipment is all irrelevant. The chips cost a lot of money because somebody has to build the fab equipment, somebody has to operate it, and you need somewhere to put it all. They sell for a high price because there is a market of people who see that the product is more valuable to them than having that many dollars in their pocket.

Comment Re: 64-bit BS (Score 1) 512

You are absolutely right. The whole summary doesn't make any sense at all... first of all, the Macs run 32-bit applications just fine. Second, if you can emulate a 64-bit ARM, you can emulate a 32-bit ARM. Third, phone apps would suck on a laptop or desktop.

The logic of the article may still make some small amount of sense. Imagine a photo editor on iOS. Now imagine that there is an easy way to use your iOS apps on OS-XI. The only problem is that if your Mac Pro has 64 GB of RAM, and your iPhone is 32 bit, you may not get much benefit running that app on the bigger fancier system. OTOH, if the iPhone is 64 bit, then a future developer might make sure that the app has some extra bells and whistles in it that aren't very practical on a phone, but are really only useful when you run that app on a larger system.

It's not just a technical issue that the article seems to be trying to talk about. It's a broader ecosystem / psychology / platform possibility.

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