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Submission + - Questions Raised About Apple Software Quality 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”. "I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X. "With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart." I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."

Comment Re:"Thousands of bookmarks"? Why? (Score 1) 117

by SpzToid (#48849199) Attached to: With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension

No, I'm not doing it wrong. For example, I see tech-notes and answers all the time on stackoverflow.com, so I bookmark and tag them for future reference, so I CAN forget about them. Other forums too, since I am a developer. These add up and can overwhelm quickly otherwise, and become un-useable. Tag Sieve plus the native tools for sorting bookmarks in FireFox make my clippings very manageable and useful.

FWIW, Scrapbook is a FireFox extension that saves selected HTML from a web page to my local disk. These local pages can be re-ordered, or prioritized even. This is very useful when I'm concerned the page's content might disappear in the future. A useful research tool!

Comment What about faceted tag clouds for bookmarks? (Score 1) 117

by SpzToid (#48848667) Attached to: With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension

How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks? You do tag them right? Firefox's tagging facility has been able to do this for awhile, but then how does that reduce the sheer quantity, to something user-friendly? There's a decent but semi-broken extension for this also, called Tag Sieve. There's also been a feature request made to build it into FireFox native, and I hope the original developer gets the job. In the meantime, having read the user-comments, I've made the extension work, and it is wonderful. Highly recommended.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Submission + - Republican Bill Aims to Thwart The FCC's leaning towards Title II

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: U.S. congressional Republicans on Friday proposed legislation that would set "net neutrality" rules for broadband providers, aiming to head off tougher regulations backed by the Obama administration.

Republican lawmakers hope to counter the Federal Communications Commission's vote on Feb. 26 for rules that are expected to follow the legal path endorsed by President Barack Obama, which Internet service providers (ISPs) and Republicans say would unnecessarily burden the industry with regulation.

Net neutrality activists, now with Obama's backing, have advocated for regulation of ISPs under a section of communications law known as Title II, which would treat them more like public utilities.

The White House on Thursday said legislation was not necessary to settle so-called "net neutrality" rules because the Federal Communications Commission had the authority to write them.

Submission + - Facebook hiring spree hints at ambitions (reuters.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: The Internet social networking company aims to add nearly 1,200 new employees, the outgrowth of aggressive investments that executives have said will define the coming year.

Besides Oculus Rift, Facebook’s ambitious effort to build its own satellites and drones capable of delivering Internet service to remote regions of the world is another important area for hiring: the program has Facebook searching for specialists in areas such as avionics, radio frequency communications and thermal engineering.

Facebook gets more out of each employee, according to calculations using company revenue figures. Facebook’s revenue works out to roughly $384,000 per employee in the third quarter of 2014, versus $300,000 for Google and $183,000 for Microsoft.

That efficiency has helped Facebook enjoy rich profit margins. And the company's relatively small headcount provides an important talking point in the battle to attract the most talented computer programmers.

Submission + - Climate Change, the Fermi Paradox, and the Fate Of Our Planet

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Astrophysicist Adam Frank has an interesting article in the NYT postulating one answer to the Fermi paradox — that human evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis and that climate change is fate and nothing we do today matters because civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. According to Frank, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact. Some excerpts:

The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.

All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.

By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear.

As we describe in a recent paper, using what’s already known about planets and life, it is now possible to create a broad program for modeling co-evolving “trajectories” for technological species and their planets. Depending on initial conditions and choices made by the species (such as the mode of energy harvesting), some trajectories will lead to an unrecoverable sustainability crisis and eventual population collapse. Others, however, may lead to long-lived, sustainable civilizations.

Submission + - If the Programmer Won't Go To Mountain Valley, Should MV Go To the Programmer?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US," Matt Mullenweg advises in How Paul Graham Is Wrong (a rejoinder to Graham's Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In), "and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like." Microsoft and Google — which hawk the very tools to facilitate remote work that Mullenweg cites — have shuttered remote offices filled with top talent even as they cry the talent sky is falling. So, is "being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located," as Mullenweg puts it, a big part of tech's 'talent shortage' problem?

Comment Re:That is not doxing (Score 2) 171

by SpzToid (#48724185) Attached to: Doxing -- Something To Expect More of In 2015

Doxing is what has just happened to Sony Pictures & Entertainment big-time. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have been reporting on email contents (as I understand the situation, but don't really know first-hand), and SPE have sent lawyers telling Variety, etc. those emails can't be published due to copyright ownership; which is another matter open to debate. We're talking emails between C-level types and million-dollar A-List Hollywood types. The Wikileaks of Hollywood if you will.

Twitter lawyers have even had to weigh in as has been reported in Slashdot (as I recall).

To make matters worse, while the Microsoft mail files were uploaded en masse to sites like Pastebin, all sytsems were wiped at SPE so all their records were lost. SPE has had to request 2nd-parties to photocopy their contracts so Sony could still retain a copy. https://www.tmz.com/2014/12/27...

Here's how bad it's gotten. Sony's files have been wiped clean, and we're told the studio is now calling agents and lawyers who represent Sony big wigs, asking them to make copies of deals and proposed contracts that they can send back.

SPE got Doxed to the maximum extent possible.

What I'd like to know is how many companies STILL want to be a Microsoft Shop(tm), given recent events?

Submission + - Pope Francis to Issue Encyclical on Global Warming 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian reports that following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, Pope Francis plans to publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds. "A papal encyclical is rare," says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences who revealed the pope's plans when he delivered Cafod’s annual Pope Paul VI lecture. "It is among the highest levels of a pope’s authority. It will be 50 to 60 pages long; it’s a big deal." The encyclical will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. Within Catholicism in recent times, an encyclical is generally used for significant issues, and is second in importance only to the highest ranking document now issued by popes, an Apostolic Constitution. “Just as humanity confronted revolutionary change in the 19th century at the time of industrialization, today we have changed the natural environment so much," says Sorondo. "If current trends continue, the century will witness unprecedented climate change and destruction of the ecosystem with tragic consequences.”

Francis’s environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate. “There will always be 5-10% of people who will take offence. They are very vocal and have political clout," says Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant. "This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality." Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, says Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be “un-biblical” and a false religion. “The pope should back off,” says Beisner. “The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.”

Submission + - Pew Survey: Tech Increases Productivity, But Also Time Spent Working (pewinternet.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A survey of American workers conducted by the Pew Research Center found that email was their most indispensable tool, topping even broad access to the internet. 46% of workers say their productivity has increased thanks to email, the internet, and cell phones, while only 7% say those technologies have caused it to decrease. While many workers say technology has created a more flexible work schedule, they also say it has increased the total amount of hours they spend working. Almost half of the surveyed employees say their employer either forbids or explicitly blocks access to certain websites at the office. How have they affected your work environment?

Submission + - FBI Monitoring Hacking Targets For Retaliation (latimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As high profile security breaches continue to hit the headlines, little is being done visibly to prevent future attacks. This is prompting some victims (and potential victims) to find creative ways to stop the hackers. The FBI is now concerned that U.S. companies and institutions are themselves breaking laws by retaliating with cyberattacks of their own. "In February 2013, U.S officials met with bank executives in New York. There, a JPMorgan official proposed that the banks hit back from offshore locations, disabling the servers from which the attacks were being launched ... Federal investigators later discovered that a third party had taken some of the servers involved in the attack offline, according to the people familiar with the situation. Based on that finding, the FBI began investigating whether any U.S. companies violated anti-hacking laws in connection with the strike on those servers, according to people familiar with the probe."

Comment Re:Expert systems (Score 1, Interesting) 219

Or we could cease the pissing contest of getting people to Mars first, ASAP, and continue with our low Earth orbiting ISS investment, and do our long-range exploration and tests using cheaper rocket engines and instruments, which are working very well, especially over time. Hopefully with less financial and environmental costs over time. I'm not anti-science, but can't these questions wait to be resolved, until like 100 years from now at least? Technology always gets cheaper and we have other priorities for the budget.

I mean really, Putin has single handedly-topped his Sochi Olympics with Cold War II. And I'm sorry to invoke a Godwin on a science budget thread, but those Islamic State monsters are on at least the level of Nazis.

Instruments seem better suited for deep space exploration and performing actual science than humans, and they can certainly do it up there longer and dare I say for less money. Doesn't the ISS do a lot of grade-school experiments for kids to keep them interested in studying science in school? We can do better with our science budget.

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