Why do people link to blog posts that neglect to link to the original source?

A little digging, and it seems on the surface to have similar restrictions as BackBlaze, as it's only for "for personal, non-commercial purposes".

So I can't store my ~3PB of telescope data on there, or even just the jpeg browse images.

The terms of use mention that you can share files .. but do they charge you for downloads, as with their other cloud service offerings, or is that included in the 'unlimited'?

  (I might be an old fogey, but I remember when you used to link to a blog post to set context *and* link to the original source in the summary, rather than just some shallow 'I've cherry picked the info'. At least Roland and Coondoggie linked back to their original sources, even if Coondoggies were almost exclusively regurgitation of press releases + a links back to Network World))

I've seen a few talks from Stephen Friend. I was at the Research Data Alliance meeting, and he gave one of the plenary talks the day after Apple unveiled the device, and announced Research Kit (which he's involved with).

He mentioned that less than 24hrs after its release, they already had more Parkinsons patients signed up than any published study on the disease.

If the watch can get *any* sort of medically useful data, I'm all for it, especially as so many people have been designating that their data can be used by any qualified researcher. (yes, there will still have to be IRBs to approve research at most institutions, and I assume some sort of gatekeepers from Sage Bionetworks to determine who gets access to the data). ... but the fact that we might be able to get medical data at a scale never before seen is huge. And we might get a wider slice of the population, not just college students or from a limited geographic area that might not be applicable to the larger population.

(disclaimer : I did not watch the video. I usually read the articles before commenting (I know, that's against this site's standards) ... if the person has a legitimate argument to make, post it so I can read it)

When ExtJS changed their license to GPL3, not LGPL, as you would expect for a library.

The owner of Sencha then put out a statement that if you built something that made use of ExtJS, then you had to release your software under GPL3 ... including the server components.

I have no problem with releasing the client side -- that's all javascript that people could view the source and see ... but releasing the server side? That requires security audits and a review by legal ... it's just not going to happen.

Reading the review, the reviewer seemed to have the same take on what GPL meant from the statement :

With MySQL, on the other hand, the client library is GPL, so you must pay a commercial fee to Oracle or supply the source code of your application. (Thatâ(TM)s less of an issue when using MySQL in websites; MariaDB uses the GPL 2 license but also has a less restrictive LGPL license for MySQL Client libraries.)

Now, if the issue is simply the *client* code, then you could get around it by using ODBC, or something like Perl's DBD::mysqlPP, which doesn't use the MySQL client code. Do you have to release the whole application if it's just something that makes use of a mysql database? I don't know, but with all other things being equal, and more and more people coming to this conclusion, I'd rather just stick with something that's LGPL or MIT.

Who's going to pay for the CDN? My data is growing at > 1TB/day, and I have no idea what's going to be of interest on any given day.

And as for CPU cost ... are you going to pay for the sysadmin time to migrate all of our services? Or any of the other solutions that you're proposing?

Our servers have been certified as 'low' risk for years, because we're specifically distributing data with *no* access restrictions. We've had to fight for our 'low' ... and then have to explain to the security auditors every three years that what they're testing for doesn't apply to us.

(we have one of the highest 'incident' rate for our location, because they consider every attempt at a hack to be a 'incident', even though we haven't had any successful hacks in years).

Oh ... and of our staff of 2.5 sysadmins for our department, dealing with security audits and such takes up > 0.5 FTE for about 6-9 months or so when the security plans are updated and the audits are occuring ... so it's not cheap).

No more unfunded mandates ... if this is important enough ... give us the funding and resources to do it. (which likely means hiring another sysadmin, and more hardware)

I'd go back to FTP before I went to HTTPS.

I operate government websites that serve physics data to the public.

HTTPS would require additional CPU for the SSL processing and bandwidth because it would make requests non-cacheable.

Not to mention that it would make the intrusion detection system attached to the router completely useless, so we'd lose a layer of security and it would make it more difficult to detect probing across the network and other 'slow' attacks. It would also prevent us from doing auditing after an exploit is known but before we've been able to get the mod_security rules in place or whatever other mitigation.

So yes, there are perfectly valid reasons to *not* be running HTTPs. I know you couched your message with 'virtually', but blindly appying 'best practices' or whatever other recommendations without understanding what the implications will break systems. (and I have to file paperwork every year for every one of my web servers that doesn't comply with the CIS benchmarks)

ps. 'there should be a law for that' is the absolutely worse policy, as most people in legislature aren't tech-savy, and will just screw things up. I was actually against all of the Net Neutrality bills that were proposed because they'd have outlawed agressive spam filtering (blocking 'legal' communications, and the CAN-SPAM act defined that some spam is legal). You need flexibility and speed in dealing with most issues, and laws don't do either well.

At least, I was assume it was in his biography (as I never read it). But when it came out, there were quite a few reports that Jobs said he had figured out TV interfaces:

• An Apple TV: Steve Jobs Confided Plans Before His Death
• Steve Jobs told biographer he 'cracked' the secret to a simple HDTV

It's entirely possible that because he didn't like the TVs, he had come up with a better UI ... but we haven't seen a dramatic revision of the Apple TV since he died ... so we might never know what it was that he came up with.

Shaun of the Dead was in a world where zombies were known, but most people were dismissive of it. Of course, that might've also been one of the tipping points to really get zombies into mainstream culture (2004), as many of the movies tended to be rather gruesome things that only appealed to a limited audience.

I want to say that the (excellent) book Ex-Heroes might've had zombies as a known thing as well. Of course, that one's set in a world that also has super heroes (who are fighting against the zombie outbreak).

I can't remember if World War Z (the book, not the movie) had established that zombies were a cultural thing before the outbreak happened ... I want to say that the disease vector was different than your typical zombie movie, and they had called them Z as zombies were the closest thing that they had to relate it to.

It's a real bank:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

I've actually lost count how many megachurches have been built on farm land in Upper Marlboro, MD. I assume the land must be cheap, as we have The First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which was built just 1.2 miles from Riverdale Baptist Church. And it's not to be confused with the First Baptist Church Upper Marlboro, which is about 8 miles away as the crow flies.

All of these are non-profits, so there will likely never be any more tax revenue from them, and unless they also have a school (which Riverdale does), it sits nearly empty for most of the week.

I asked another applicant a similar question: "Suppose you wanted to send me a file with very sensitive information, how would you encrypt it in such a way that I would decrypt it?" The person started off by asking me if it was an excel file, a PDF, etc.

You should've answered the person, because then they might've told you that there's an encyption standard for PDF. I use it with my tax-preparer, so that we don't need to deal with other programs that would decrypt the file (and then potentially leave an unencrypted copy lying about).

Excel offers password protection to restrict modifications, it wouldn't surprise me if they offered encryption, too.

So in this case, it might not be that the person sucks at his job ... it might be that you are, because you had a pre-conceived notion of what the answer should be, rather than finding out how that person would handle the problem. It's entirely possible that they could come up with a better solution than yours.

And as for the the question of what proportion are bad ... you have to remember that you're hiring people. The people who really know what they're doing are likely either going to be paid well, or have an established network that they can tap when they need a job. (Rather than answer some random job posting where they don't know if it'll be worse than their past job, and/or have to jump through hoops answering poorly thought up interview questions).

If you mention to your current developers that you're hiring, and they can't manage to find people to refer, that's possibly a sign that none of them would be willing to subject their friends to come work for you. And if that's the case, you might have problems when one of their friends' companies are hiring.

I know that a few people claimed that it was a racist, but if you look at as a sci-fi Black Dynamite (parody of blaxploitation films), it was great.

And besides, all of the cameos that they managed to get ... George Takaaa, James Doohan, Natasha Henstridge, Burt Ward, Gary Coleman, Erik Estrada, etc.

I viewed as being more like the early seasons of Red Dwarf -- a sitcom set in space, rather than being your typical serious sci-fi.

You have the 'knows how to work efficiently to get the project done as quickly as possible'.

And then you have the 'knows that they'll have to maintain it, and will work to make sure to minimize shortcuts, or document every od trick they used, so that two years later they'll be able to modify it when some new requirement comes along'.

I actually enjoyed doing the first type of programming. These days I see paralized and might be over-designing things because of times that I've gotten stung by not being type #2. (both my own code and other people's)

No they don't. Masochists who like trying to figure out how to clip in the heat sink into some crapped board so that they don't blow out their ICs, solder. Or people who have lots of extra time to figure out what they burned out, desolder it, then go back to the store to get a new one solder.

Real geeks wire wrap.

Crimping meant that I could do it without digging out my soldering iron, waiting for it to heat up, etc. It also reduced the risk of a bad solder joint, or a burn. (quite possible, as I had gotten very little sleep over the past few days ... so much so that on the day of the event, I was looking so haggard that I passed out, and then was sent home).

And besides ... you can often solder *after* crimping, if you do a clean job (and use a heat sink). You can't crimp onto a solder-only connection.

I guess what it comes down to is that real geeks know when to solder, and when not to.

I needed some odd audio cables last year, so that I could patch an mp3 player into a PA system. I was thinking that I'd find crimp-on 1/8" ends, and make the cable myself.

I got to the store, and was having trouble finding what I wanted (I found solder-on, but the crimp-on slot was empty), so I thought I'd look at what cables that they had that I could cut up ... and they just happened to have a cable that was 1/8" to bare wires.

The year before, I got a bunch of various cables so that I could patch into a mixing board to record audio from a conference that I was at. I've had other times when I was outfitting a chase vehicle for a solar car race, and they had the parts that I needed to get all of our various antennas on the roof of the van.

So yes, it helps for those 'I really do need it now' situations. In some cases, Guitar Center might have it, but the closest one is more than an hour away, and they wouldn't have had the components to make the specific cable that I needed, and they sure wouldn't have had N-connectors and magnetic antenna mounts.

I hope they can turn it around ... I'd be willing to pay a membership fee just to have them around for when I really need a part.

I apologize for reading the article, but it says that ISPs complained that they didn't like the $5000 fine for not forwarding the messag ... but can they forward it and add their own message?

Something to the effect of 'you should know your rights', with the maximum penalty they could face, how they can fight against it, etc.

If they come up with a boilerplate message, and not something that needs to be customized for each letter being sent, then you're minimized the incremental costs. And I'm guessing that they had plenty of lawyers involved with reviewing the bills as proposed and the law that was finally passed.

I would think the 'we comply with the letter of the law, but not the intent' approach would cheaper & more effective than trying to deal with lobbying politicians who already have their minds made up. (provided you don't do something that might get you sued ... but getting sued and going to court might be better to establish the limits of the law than leaving it to politicians)

If the law's written in such a way as to prevent them from sending a message triggered by the requirement to forward the message, then you send it to *all* of your subscribers.