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Comment Magic Builds! (Score 1) 279

Ugh, I hate magic builds. You know, the kind that only build on a single developer's workstation using code that's not pushed to the central git server. Unacceptable. The only solution is to insist that all software be buildable on a vanilla machine, but most cowboy devs don't like edicts too much.

The way to fix the cowboys is to give them a gift. A gift that takes away their goddamn high horse. That gift is an automated build tool that automatically builds and deploys their pushed changes to the dev environment. That way, their laziness can override their egos and they accept the tool, but in order to use the tool, they have to spend the extra few minutes scripting their builds properly and an extra few seconds pushing their code.

The effects at my current client have been awesome. No more, "Oh, Bob has to do a build because he's the only one who can do it." Or "only Frank has the latest changes." Or "Oh, the build script is this word doc that might be up to date, but then, it might not be." Or "Oh, the production code isn't quite committed to git yet. It's on Chuck's laptop."

Yuck.

Comment Re:Nice looking bike... (Score 4, Informative) 345

You'll find that loud pipes give you a quadrant behind the bike that's extremely noisy, noisy for a far longer distance than in other directions.

Also, due to the way sound dissipates, I'd argue that having a loud motorcycle does more to impair the motorcycle driver's hearing of his/her surroundings than it does to alert other drivers to the presence of a motorcycle.

Comment Re:You forgot the important part (Score 1) 364

They refused to agree to the revised terms which are unnegotiable, which indies are claiming to be unfavorable.

I don't really know anything about this particular dustup between the music labels and Google, but I do know one thing: the music labels have a long and storied history of abusing their stranglehold over distribution channels for their own financial benefit. With that shoe currently on the other foot, I wonder if this isn't a bit of butthurtedness on the part of the labels that Google isn't willing to kowtow to them?

Comment Re:AWS Email (Score 1) 75

Security is always a trade-off. Anyone who gives a shit about whether or not AWS has access to the plaintext will encrypt the data prior to transmitting it to AWS.

The use case where I could see SSE-C being helpful is where a customer has a lot of data to encrypt, and the security requirements are minimal. Rather than the customer using their own CPU resources to perform the encryption/decryption, the customer can offload that work to AWS's servers.

Another potential use case is one where the customer was originally going to rely on S3 permissions to secure the data. However, making a policy configuration mistake is pretty easy, and as another layer of protection, they use SSE-C so that whoever tries to retrieve the data would need to have the keys in order to do anything useful with it.

But, yeah. I wouldn't rely on it for high security needs. Encrypt the data yourself prior to transmitting to AWS if you want to be safer.

Comment You're allowed to retain the keys (Score 1) 75

If you're using AWS, your data is unencrypted on their end ANYWAY. Or at least, they have to hold the decryption keys in a way that lets them decrypt it, so its irrelevant to encrypt it unless you just enjoy wasting CPU cycles.

Not if you encrypt your data prior to sending it to AWS.

But yes, if you use AWS's encrypt/decrypt service, then they retain the keys by necessity. That buys you having your data encrypted at rest, which may have some value for certain compliance-type use cases, but other than that, it doesn't buy you much.

Comment Republican party fissure (Score 2) 422

I think that your comments describe a larger fissure within the Republican party. With respect to social conservatives and libertarian conservatives, there just isn't as much common ground as there needs to be in order to form a political party from both groups.

By way of example, is forbidding same-sex marriage a pro-individual freedom, small-government value? No, it is not. Are Second Amendment rights an Evangelical Christian value? No, they are not. But we libertarians are supposed to clam up about certain freedoms to avoid alienating the evangelicals, and you've got these church groups advocating for gun rights to appease the libertarians. It's starting to come apart at the seams, and has resulted in The Tea Party.

The Tea Party isn't really a bunch of whack jobs like the media says. They're just Republicans who have been over-promised to and under-delivered to for too long. The libertarians are disaffected because the GOP is giving us big government after having promised us small. The Evangelicals are disaffected after having been promised abortion bans, faith-based initiatives, etc. You may not agree that any of the above policy goals are laudable, but you certainly have to admit that we've gotten the opposite of all that since Bush I. Can you blame Republican voters of all stripes for being fed up with the GOP establishment?

Comment Re:Wait. Drone diy kits will be banned (Score 2) 30

They aren't going to bring the price down to $50 until the sensors are $1 each. Considering a quality GPS still costs > $50, as do a set of gyros or a set of accelerometers that are high enough quality to be useful, this is a year or two off still.

I watched the video yesterday and I'm not re-watching it, but did Danyliw's quad even have GPS? Because if not, you can already get a decent Micro Quad for about $50 that's built out of a PCB. Granted, it doesn't have GPS and can't fly autonomously, but it is a standards-compatible and hackable quad at the $50ish price point.

Comment Re:Contrived example (Score 1) 1040

You're assuming machine costs remains at $15/hr.

True. The cost of machines could increase, decrease, or remain the same. Also, the minimum wage could increase or remain the same (it doesn't tend to decrease). So that means...

Actually, what does that mean. Did you have a point there? I'm fairly certain that you did not.

Comment Re:Contrived example (Score 1) 1040

lets be real, you just got lucky

Actually, I did not get lucky, unless you count being born with dogged persistence as "lucky".

This is my 4th business, actually. The first three failed miserably. But, I just kept trying because I just can't help myself. 4th time was the charm, but I'm at a stellar 25% success rate. Or, sorry. "luck rate".

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