Better idea: Encrypt the data, stick it on SD cards, and then mail them to random people. Be sure to email yourself with their addresses just in case you ever need to get the data back. Imagine the thrill they'll get from receiving a brand new 64 GB SD card in the mail for free!
Then again, maybe that's not such a good idea. But it is still more reliable than cloud storage.
I only review products I buy, "verified purchase" appears in the review. The problem is, every time I submit a 1 or 2 star review with a description of why, it gets rejected. The bad review has to be stripped down to something so simple that it's not accurate anymore. And no, I'm not using colorful language in the rejected reviews. The whole review system seems to be designed only for greater sales.
Really? I write positively blistering reviews on occasion, and I've never had a review rejected. There must be something about your reviews that causes problems—if not colorful language, then perhaps inaccurate facts, hyperbole, bad spelling/grammar, violation of rules about mentioning prices, call to action for a competing website....
So, is there anything which has overcome the double tassel distribution which programming has always had?
For literally decades, it's been "these people get it, these people don't" with very little in the middle.
Have we fixed this? Have we found way to teach it which prevent this? Have we even explained it?
The thing is, the same people who have trouble with programming also have trouble with other varieties of logical thinking. We need to be teaching kids the necessary reasoning skills at a young age while their brains are still flexible enough to learn them.
At a high level, programming a computer is essentially the same thing as explaining how to perform a task, albeit teaching the task to an incredibly naïve and pedantic student with a very limited vocabulary. I wonder how we could possibly mimic such an environment in the real world in such a way that young kids can learn programming skills before they have the discipline to actually write code? After all, there aren't any incredibly naïve and pedantic people with a very limited vocabulary in primary schools, are there?
I think you see where I'm going with this. Want more programmers? Start by taking two preschool classes and teaching them different tasks that involve repeating certain actions. Then pair them up so that the kids in one class have to teach the kids in the other class how to do those tasks and vice versa. Maybe even have one kid teach several kids at a time and instruct the other kids to try to find ways to misinterpret what the teacher is saying.
Over the years, make the tasks more and more complex, and require that the students write down the instructions, then give the piece of paper to someone else to perform those instructions, and let the students watch in horror as the instructions are followed to the letter, resulting in completely unexpected results. Then have them adjust those instructions and try again.
The end result will be programmers, complete with appropriate levels of disdain for clueless people.
I suspect the GP is confused by what many of us perceive as an authoritarian leaning on her part. Similar leanings tend to be more prevalent in the Republican party, but unfortunately aren't rare in the Democratic party.
I'm firmly of the opinion that we need a change in the way we interpret laws, if not a change in the laws themselves. If you sell a physical product, you must support it for a minimum of 7 years with repairs, etc. How is software any different? Game companies should be required by law to maintain their servers for a minimum of 7 years from the time that the last copy was sold.
And honestly, given that the products actually stop working en masse instantly when the company pulls the plug, rather than merely failing naturally as components fail to function, I think we need a law change that requires any company that sells software that depends on a server to make that server available as open source a minimum of one year before they shut down their own servers, and requires them to make the data available to users so that they can migrate their data to someone else's server.
Libertarians, maybe, but they bring a lot of other baggage in their politics, like a belief in a magical free market that solves everything. At least the Republicans don't pretend that their reasons for wanting less regulation of business is anything other than what it is—a belief that businesses do better when they are regulated less. In any form, such policies are, of course, roughly the opposite of fiscal conservatism; neoconservatives are neither new nor conservative.
And the Tea Party is anything but socially liberal, from what I've seen.
Center isn't necessarily critical, but California is a socially very liberal state on the whole (well, progressive I guess is a better word), and running a social conservative there is about as effective as screaming at a brick wall. California's fiscal views, however, are much more varied. If the Republican Party wants to win elections, then, it naturally follows that they must adjust their tactics to better suit the region by running socially liberal, but fiscally conservative candidates. If they did that, they'd get a lot more votes, while still retaining at least some of their core values to some extent.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
WTF? What does that have to do with Feinstein, who has been a radical Left-winger from Day 1?
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. For California to choose someone over Feinstein, that person has to be close enough to center to attract some of the left-wing vote. Otherwise, if both candidates are equally unacceptable, albeit in different ways, the left-wing voters are going to naturally choose the incumbent by default, because the other side has given them insufficient reason to choose someone else.
I really wanted to vote against Feinstein and Boxer, but to me, all of the alternatives were markedly worse (which is saying something, because I generally disagree with both of them far more often than I agree with them). If the Republicans run someone decent (read socially moderate to liberal, but fiscally conservative), I'll vote for that person in a heartbeat.
The last Senate election, the Republicans ran Carly Fiorina against Boxer. Their candidate was best known for being the person who single-handedly nearly bankrupted one of the largest high-tech companies in the world. As a result, a bunch of current and former HP employees had a website with her name that basically talked about what a disaster her leadership at HP had been. She was pretty much guaranteed to lose almost the entire Silicon Valley vote, and probably didn't do well here even among Republicans.
And the last time Feinstein was up for reelection, they ran Elizabeth Emken, whose position against marriage equality made her pretty much guaranteed to lose any election at the state level.
It is pretty clear that the Republicans aren't even trying to win in California. If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal. Anybody else is pretty much a non-starter.
It's not just views. The entire design idiom is different:
No matter how you restyle your Windows app's window, it is never going to look like an iOS app, because the entire way you design UIs for mobile devices is completely different from the way you design UIs for the desktop.
Now you might be able to get away with it if you're designing only for iOS and Android, but only because the design idioms are fairly similar. And even then, your users are likely to complain about the lack of animation and other advanced UI features that likely don't translate well into cross-platform APIs.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
Here's the thing: No decent UI is going to be portable anyway. Every platform out there has its own idioms that users expect an app to obey, and no cross-platform technology will realistically conform to those idioms well enough to not feel out of place.
The only good approach for writing portable code is to get people who understand the platform to write a fully native UI, and to write all the underpinnings in a portable language. Share the model, and maybe share the controller, but don't even attempt to share the view. Therein lies the path to madness.
This. Xcode 6 has generally been a disaster, with 6.2 and 6.3 being the worst of the bunch by far. I've experienced almost nonstop crashes while trying to use the debugger, some literally just seconds apart.
I ended up downgrading to 6.1 because I couldn't usefully debug any iOS or OS X code in 6.2 or 6.3. It still misbehaves in strange ways every so often (bizarre bugs that truly defy comprehension, and are probably fixed in 6.2 or 6.3), but at least I can hit the step button more than about two or three times without Xcode "unexpectedly" quitting and losing my whole debugging session.
The bigger concern is this: If Apple's IDE is in such poor shape, how much of a train wreck will iOS 9 and OS X v10.11 be as a result of all their developers being constantly hamstrung by broken tools?
You're right. I did ignore a lot of those things, though presumably you as an individual would incur most of those same costs. The point was to demonstrate the costs that you would pay, but Comcast wouldn't. I suppose I didn't quite do that as well as I had hoped. Mea culpa.
Of course, in most places, the utility companies are required to mark the lines at the landowner's request, at no charge, so that's not a cost; it's just a "to do". (Amusingly, that's probably one of the few costs that Comcast would incur that the landowner wouldn't.)
Either way, there's some profit margin built into any contracting company's fees, and a company big enough to have their own custom cable and conduit manufacturing is also probably big enough to hire their own employees, thus cutting out that portion of the cost. Whether they choose to do so or not is another question, of course.
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
Maybe so, but if so, they're playing a very dangerous game. The legal term that comes to mind here is "agency by estoppel." Briefly put, that term means that if a company authorizes you to act on their behalf, and if they allow you to look and act like an agent of a company, then the company can be held liable for your actions.
As long as Comcast's name is on those trucks, if they screw up, Comcast is almost guaranteed to be held liable in court, regardless of whether the workers are employees or independent contractors. That legal risk is the reason that most contracts these days contain clauses that forbid you from representing yourself as being a partner of or an agent of that company.
The only communication utility that has direct buried cables (no conduit) that I'm even aware of is very old installations of telephone wires. I have run into some of the older fiber optic cables that were not in conduits but they were in armored cables with flowable fill. Such cables aren't used for anything that's not very very important. Anything installed within about the last 30 years when cheap PVC conduit became cheap is now in conduits.
Admittedly, I've only seen cables being buried for cable companies in rural areas, but they were A. coax, and B. not in any sort of conduit whatsoever. That was only a few years ago, and I doubt that practice has changed much except in areas that have gone to fiber. Mind you, that practice does vary widely from place to place, so if you live in a city (or even within twenty or thirty miles of a large city), I can understand why you would not have seen it. That doesn't mean it isn't common practice in truly rural areas.
So rural is easier, but then it's about the same cost?
It's easier, but the distance is also longer. The cost is higher in rural areas, because fewer houses can be served by a single line or set of lines. However, it isn't as much higher as the distance implies, because you don't have to bore under a driveway or sidewalk every fifty feet (and/or dig up and re-build sidewalks and driveways). Building the infrastructure while you're putting in a neighborhood is much cheaper than building it later for the same reason. The less crap you have to work around, the less it costs to put lines in. That statement is amazingly straightforward, and I would challenge you do prove it wrong.
You might find this hard to believe because you don't know what you are talking about but the cost to install the cable to this one house could be a million dollars. He could be on the outer limit of the amplification limits such that it would require them to install an entire fiber hut and amplification system. He could be on the other side of a protected refuge or there could be major utilities between him and the closest connection. In fact there could hundreds of reasons that only Comcast knows about why they can't afford to service that house. There is little point is speculating about what those reasons are unless you want to pay the $5K it would cost for an engineering and locate study to check the feasibility of the installation.
I'm not speculating. The person in question did the installation. There were no boosters, no multi-million-dollar fiber huts. The person paid to have someone trench and run a cable. The cable company lit the cable. End of story. Therefore, I do know that none of those things were necessary, and none of the things you're talking about are even slightly relevant in this case. Clearly the cost was not a million dollars. In fact, it was about $3,000. It is safe to say that if it were going to cost Comcast a million bucks to light up the cable, they would not have agreed to do so in exchange for the original poster spending a mere $3k to run the cable him/herself.
The facts seem pretty clear here, and the fact is that it cost $3k for a random individual to hire a contractor, who in turn got all the necessary permits and permissions and ran the line. Therefore in the absolute worst case, it would have cost Comcast... $3k to run the line. And that's naïvely assuming that they don't get better deals from the contractors by buying in bulk (both in terms of the materials costs and the labor costs). That's also assuming that the cable company doesn't already have agreements in place that make it easier for them to access the right-of-way than a contractor working on behalf of some random landowner. And so on.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
