You're telling me that SCIENTISTS, actual scientists, are turning to COMPUTERS, to do their work?

What is the world coming to?

But there is an exception : adding manpower to a late software project being managed and created by incompetants who will never be able to finish it on their own can indeed be helpful. I mean, doing web front end stuff isn't exactly my specialty so if you gave me a big web project it would eventually be quite late, and adding web developers to it would get it done quicker than leaving me alone with it.

Defmacro defines that, but, who defines defmacro?

Templates.

A - anything that you can't do by tesselating to triangles could be done with OpenCL or CUDA. You could, for example, assign OpenCL kernels where each instance rasterizes one stroke and composite the results or something similar, and exploit the paralellism of the GPU. But, it would be inconvenient to write. Especially since most PDF viewers don't even bother with effective parallelism in their software rasterizers.

B - you can do anything by tesselating to triangles.

Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.

How is the project named? Is it something reminiscent of the function (like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, Internet Explorer) or something entirely random, forcing more cognitive load on an uninformed user (Gimp, Firefox, Juice)? Does it have a newish, edgy name to give it that extra sizzle (pantyshot, upskirt [zdnet.com]).

Thankfully, nobody ever game a dumb name to a piece of technology unless it was open. And nobody ever had to download the MSVCRT redistributable libraries, or install a Java runtime separately for a piece of closed source software, because they never depend on 3rd party packages.

Nobody would argue that there isn't a heaping spoonful of shittiness available to you in the open source world. You just have to accept that there are a million closed source apps out there that taste just as nice, despite the fact that they never released the source code. It's not really an issue of closed vs. open. It's an issue of limited resources and dumb ideas. I'm posting this from Windows 8 at the moment. As much as I can find to complain about KDE (and egad, so much...) I can find just as much here in proprietary land.

I'll grant documentation tends to be worse in open source as a general rule. But, if you ever wound up depending on some obscure closed source widget with a lone developer who doesn't fully share a spoken language with you, you will see documentation just as useless. Though, getting a thriving community of good technical writers interested in the open source movement would be a good things.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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...)

The only people still using Perl are the people who know it well enough to no longer have to ask What TF is going on with it.

True, but if the car had been stationary because it just broke down and wouldn't move, it still would have been idiotic to drive into the back of it. The driver in motion was going to fast for safety. Period.

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.

However many lawyers you have, it's obviously better for them to understand the logic behind a decision, rather than just accepting the whole system as "just the way it is."