Comment Oglaf FTW (Score 1) 321
Gloriously NSFW. Hilarious.
Um, it's not just that. Me and my friends use FB for organizing social events - parties, performances, etc. The fire performance troupe I'm involved with does most of our organizing on Facebook too - we have jobs, and kids, and school, and live all over the area, so having quick discussions there makes life much easier.
Look, I go to Burning Man. I've seen more people naked than anyone short of a doctor or a nudist tour guide, and I have to say the ban on nudity on Facebook is a good thing. There are creepers out there who post pictures of people having a nude stroll. Without the subject's consent.
Being able to complain about it means that they get taken down.
Facebook is for real life, and some people (myself included) like having an area where there isn't soft-core porn all over the place. See, if I had to deal with that, I'd return fire with some of the better pictures from
Interesting - looks like they're doing a major recruiting push, since I'm in the interview process myself. I'd wanted to move to San Francisco, and saying that to the recruiter kind of surprised them. I don't live in a high-tech city, so the recruiters aren't anywhere near as vigorous, but I'm having the feeling that Google has just about tapped out the talent pool that's available in their local areas, and has sent recruiters after the less well traveled paths.
I wasn't even in the market, but when a company like Google calls, you tend to respond...
Everything from an old system running SCO OpenServer 5 to CentOS 5 and 6, Debian 4 in other legacy systems, Windows XP, Vista, and 7, iOS, Android from 2.2 to 4.0, OSX 10.6 and 10.7.
I do web development, though, as well as embedded systems, so my day job involves a lot of different machines and virtual systems.
Yep. I consciously use this in the videos I shoot. I've found that shooting people dancing with silk streamers or flowing costumes look a lot "cooler" if I crank down the shutter to 1/500 or 1/250 - it gives a hyper-real effect that makes the movement of the cloth really pop, because they're moving so fast that with a standard 1/30 or 1/24 shutter speed, it would be a blur.
People also associate that fast shutter with action sequences, and by switching to that faster shutter, you can enhance the 'dynamism' of a scene with very little additional work. It works horribly for general filming, but as an effect, used sparingly, it's definitely a good technique.
Actually, without hacking Phonegap, at least on iOS, the first time you access geolocaiton, it pops up the standard 'APP_X would like to use your location' message - we had to rework our Phonegap app to do that properly, instead of having a trainwreck of a URL in that notification.
Android had a better model for security, frankly, in how you build an app - as part of the configuration, you can indicate with a fair degree of granularity what rights you want your app to have, and our upcoming app will only have GPS and network access. We don't care about your contacts, or pictures of cats, or what porn you watch on your phone. Too busy to dig through that crap, and it's not worth anything to us anyway. A similar capabilities-based model for iOS would be great - and I'm not spending the time learning enough Objective-C to do that natively. I have 10 other projects we had to put aside to do this mobile crap, that still need to get done.
The fact is, for web shops tasked with doing a "mobile app" because it's the next f**king Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant "we're serious - we have an app and everything", being able to do a shovelware mobile app without having to learn 2 new languages is great. Our customers go away happy, we don't have to spend the time becoming experts in yet more arcane single-use dev frameworks, and we can go on to the next project.
You want it safe? Go after the OS vendors, and let those of us who write apps define the capabilities we should need, and sandbox the rest. And make it easier in the IDE to select capabilities you need, and default them to 'off', That way, the "I was a designer, but now I do teh mobile apps!" people won't inadvertently bunch a big hole in your phone's security.
I work as a programmer in the retail industry, and in previous employment have dealt with ERP integration and extending legacy systems. I can tell you with absolute confidence that certain industries do need completely custom software to work properly - grocery stores, bookstores, and clothing stores all have different needs, different workflows, and different requirements. A cash register is a cash register, yes, but everything from dealing with expiration tracking and sales by weight to street dates to clothing sizes to custom orders to EDI interfaces are handled by custom software.
We primarily work with the music industry, and I have to deal with EDI from 4 different POS / Inventory / bordering on full ERP application vendors (some of which have been heavily customized for specific clients) and 2 different distributors, and will be spinning up 3 more distributors in the next year. Our e-commerce system is off-the-shelf for our industry (we can spin up a new customer who has no need for custom EDI integration in less than a day), and we have rescued a number of smaller operations who tried to develop their own system, or adapt various open-source shopping cart applications.
Our software would be of no use whatsoever to the manufacturers and medical, real estate, and legal offices I have dealt with in previous jobs. A completely different regulatory environment, different expectations, and different reporting requirements make any one-size-fits-all useless. That's a perilously bad attitude to take - some things, like payroll and HR, are relatively common across industries, but not understanding how business workflows differ from company to company shows a lack of professionalism. You think UPS uses an off-the-shelf software package? Or Greyhound? I can speak to both of them - they both developed in-house, because there was no software that covered their needs.
My business programming teacher back in high school put it this way: You will be working with obsolete technology, writing boring code to make distinctions between states that you really don't care about or even understand all that well, and will be ignored unless you make a mistake. Your job is to disappear into the background and make the business run smoothly. If your ego can't deal with that, leave this class now, because you will not make it in programming.
Look - there were no deaths in Vietnam War protests before Kent State. There is always a first episode of massive violence, and nobody knows when that will come.
We are only in the very beginning of these protests - as the economy gets worse, more people will join them. As police forces make more blunders, they will react with more force. We are on a path that very soon now will be irreversible - of peaceful revolution or bloody ruin. The status quo will not hold - Communism is more popular than Congress these days.
Have you ever read about the few airborne nuclear propulsion tests they did? Running a small research reactor in a plane, the small amount of shielding they could put in it left the aircraft so radioactive from neutron activation that they couldn't get near it for weeks.
Plus, the plutonium for RTGs is some REALLY nasty stuff. It would be a lot safer if we could put that reactor in lunar orbit - since the RTGs are only used on deep-space missions, and we're getting pretty good at remote processing of fuels, someone will put the idea together. However, ther would never be enough to justify the huge costs associated with it...
It does tend to look that way, yes, but Perl still puts a lot of emphasis on metacharacters to imply functionality. I still keep a cheat sheet of the builtins, and I've been working in Perl for a year and a half straight...
Python, on the other hand, is very easy to just write. No weird '$@' or '$_' or '<=>' functions, or dereferencing an array ref into an array with @$arrayref...
Reboots are not necessary on many machines right now - I have to remind my boss to reboot every few weeks when something finally goes wonky in the network settings on his Mac laptop. Standby mode lasts for a very long time now... and most required reboots are from operating system updates. With modern SSDs, you don't even need to wait that long to boot. My work machine with a modern SSD takes about 7 seconds to boot Windows 7. My home machine, with less services to start, boots in about 4.
But honestly, they may be saying that, but it's not like DRAM speeds will be sitting still. And a store/load cycle that can compete with flash is an order of magnitude slower than one that can compete with modern DRAM chips. But don't let that get in the way of crystal ball gazing.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne
