San Diego (and several surrounding communities) recently discontinued it's red-light camera program, citing inflated fines to motorists with minimal payouts to the city, and and *increased* accident rate after installations of the cameras.

We also had the short-yellow problem several years ago when they were first installed, which was quicky fixed after public outcry.

Our new mayor is a jerk. But in this case, at least he is being a jerk to folks that deserve it.

I'm still waiting for Pan Am to let me know when my number comes up for the Moon First Flight Club...

amazon.org would be more appropriate.

It's parked on GoDaddy and registered to an anonymous registrant.

OK, yes, that is different. You can request an endorsement as well. That's different from the "does so-and-so know "x"" messgaes.

So, did you ask Roland Rat if he made an endorsement request?

"endorse" is a completely different, new, feature.

The endorsement messages do not come from the individuals you might endorse. Again, these are generated by LinkedIn, and the language makes that clear. Did you actually read them?

LinkedIn is asking you to validate that one of your connections "knows" some skill that they have listed.

I like the feature myself. It's meant as a bit of a BS filter, to give some credibility to people's claims. If you've got 100 connections and say you know "x", and nobody endorses you for "x", there's a good chance you're just making it up.

It's actually fun. Whenever I go on LinkedIn (which isn't very often) I'll plink-off a few, knowing that I'm helping people I've worked with validate their skills. If I worked with a person who was doing "x" when I worked with them, and I'm asked to endorse them for "x", I endorse them for "x". If I know they are BSing or simply don't know, maybe because their experience with "x" was later, then I pass it by. It's the way it's supposed to work. (There is no negative endorsement.)

Obviously, though, it will take time for the system to work, since it is a fairly new feature.

Does anybody use LinkedIn? I do. It's replaced my resume'. However, I don't follow the standard resume' advice to keep it to recent history. I've been a developer for 30+ years. Every job I've ever had is listed.

While I find the constant barrage of "do you know" messages annoying, it's pretty clear to me what they are: a message from LinkedIn (NOT the person you might or might not know) asking if you might know this person, and sugesting that you invite THEM.

Once you click through on one of these, you get the standard LinkedIn invitation request. You are asked to make a selection as to how you know this person. If you check "I don't know this person", then you need to know their email address in order to complete the invitation. AS WITH ANY Linked-In invitation.

The annoying messages are NOT invitations, though, you AREN'T automatically connected by responding to them (the other person would have to approve) and they AREN'T sent from the other person's account. It's pretty clear they are sent by LinkedIn, trying to drum-up more connections.

The PURPOSE of a trademark is to unambiguously identify the source of a product. A review referencing a trademark defacto makes proper use of the trademark. An IMPROPER use would be to use the term GoPro(tm)* to refer to some other product from a different manufacturer.

When a trademark is used, though, it's always necessary to acknoledge that it is a trademark and to mention the name of the trademark holder. I haven't seen the review, so I don't know if they did that. Nobody needs permission to use a trademark to identify a product they are discussing. It's one of the purposes of the trademark.

It may well be that GoPro (tm)* is, in fact, abusively trying to censor a negative review, but they do also have the right to insist in proper acknoledgement, which I note was not done in the blog post.

AFAIK, the DMCA doesn't address this. GoPro(tm) should file a civil suit if this is their complaint.

* GoPro (tm) is a registered trademark of Woodman Labs

Oh, great.

You pay to use stuff that most developers have stopped using.

No, hedge funds typically use derivative instruments. Since a fundamental principal of hdge funds to to make a profit regardless of the underlying market, derivatives are a popular way to do this.

They could also simply diversify into a wide range of investments that are not correlated - or at least not correlated in the same direction (say, stocks, bonds, commodities, and properties). But that obviously isn't possible in this case. There's only one bitcoin instrument.

So, one must assume that they will create/buy instruments that are derivative of bitcoin. e.g. futures contracts, option contracts, etc.

I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.

They won't. Probably not a single one. Even if he uses the most popular host providing such services, GitHub.

For the most part, there is no contribution whatsoever, unless the contributor has some stake. The most successful GitHub projects are those that have some kind of corporate sponsorship, and you have several big companies contributing one or more full-time employees to the project.

  Beyond that, you might get some contribution to the project if a lot of people are using it, and some of them modify it to suit their own needs, and either they altruisticlly contribute their modifications back(not common), or (more commonly) by contributing back they absolve themselves of having to maintain their own separate fork.

For projects with, say, 100-200 watchers (which probably means 10X that many users), it's typical to get maybe a pull request or two per year.

So, hopefully the OP has some volunteers lined-up already, or knows where to find them. They aren't going to appear out of nowhere.

I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.

"compromising the server of a popular mobile developer Web forum"

So far, all of the press reports and statements from those compromised have left off the most important bit of information: WHAT "popular mobile developer Web forum" was used?

One would imagine this would be important information to disseminate to developers...

In San Diego, the current Total Electric rate for 200% over baseline (and it's pretty hard not be be 200% over baseline...) is .29.

Rates can be deceptive, as in many areas there are separate charges for electricity generation, transport, plus various taxes and surcharges.

So, if Ryan moves to San Diego, he can expect to spend $32.18/month to keep his server running.

VPS wins, and on so many other different fronts, as well.

- He's probably violating his ISP's TOC. Upgrading to proper service will probably cost at least as much as the electricity, doubling the cost vs. a VPS
- Crappy bandwidth, as most home service is asymetrical - low bandwidth up, high bandwidth down. He needs the opposite.
- VPSs have power backup
- VPSs typically have good disk backup options
- VPSs typically have huge burst bandwidth
- You can choose where to host your VPS. For the U.S. Texas is a good bet (central, well-connected)

Ah, takes me back to High School.

I went to a special (no jokes, please!) city-wide high school (Cass Tech, in Detroit) in the 70's, way before the trend toward this sort of thing. (Cass Tech was actually established in the 1920's, in coopertion with the auto industry.) I had 8 sememters of Electronics in high school.

One of my classes was taught by Walter Downs, also known for some reason by his students as "Wally Gator". (A popular TV cartoon character at the time.) Wally ... er, Walter... was from Baltimore, and he had an odd accent that we would make fun of. He also had a laugh or grunt that we interpreted as "Woo hoo hoo!"

His class was conducted in an electronics lab. We didn't have desks, but sat at test benches, several stations to each long bench. There are sets of test equipment, and, of course, an electrical strip running down the middle of the bench.

The electrical strips were normally turned off at the circuit breaker. The instructor would go into a closet and turn on the circuit breaker at the start of a lab session, and then turn it off again at the end.

So, a common trick was to insert a wire into an electrical outlet, briding the AC line, while the circuit breaker was off. He would go to turn on the breaker, and, of course it would pop. If we were lucky there would be some mild pyrotechnics accompanying this. This is how we learned the relationship between wire size and current-carrying capacity.

We did this because it would always elicit exactly the same respnse:

"WOO HOO HOO! You fellas be stickin conductors in the outlets! WOO HOO HOO!"

(He seemed pretty good-natured about it. Much more so than when he said "WOO HOO HOO! You fellas be keepin' noise!"

So, today, you can do this with WiFi, huh?

Variation Simulation Analysis Software.

It's a technique for simulating variations in product assemblies. Usually mechanical, but could be of other natures, as well. You model the assembly and it's manufacturing variations, and then "build" some quantity of parts. One can determine how many assemblies will likely meet specifications, the major contributors to out-of-spec assemblies, etc. etc.

The technique was developed during WWII at Willow Run Labs, where it was implemented by the classic "banks of women operating calculators", and is one of the reasons we were able to crank-out all those airplanes that actually worked.

By the 70's it was implemented in an academic setting on mainframes.

A company I worked for obtained rights to VSAS and we ported it to the IBM PC. I did the initial port to Watcom Fortran (there's another one for you!), and then designed a domain-specific language (VSL) and implemented a compiler in C and interpreter in Fortran, so that mechanical engineers didn't have to write their models in Fortran any more. The Fortran models were bulky - with line after line of function calls with zillions of parameters, passing separate X,Y,Z values in the calls. I'd imagine the engineers wore-out the parenthesis keys on their keyboard pretty fast. VSL, on the other hand, had data types for points, lines, vectors, planes, etc. Using an interpreter didn't slow things down, because most of the time was spent in geometric library routines, which were in carefully-optimized Fortran.

I insisted on their hiring a mathematician, and between the two of us, we tweaked it to run faster on the PC than it did on the mainframe. (Engineering professors don't write code that is either fast or mathematically-correct, it turned out...)

And that's when it's use took off. The company founder started as a manufacturer's rep for some Finite Element Modelliing software, so had lots of contacts in the auto industry. (And the company was located near Detroit.) They both sold the software and did also did in-house projects for the auto companies until they ramped-up their own engineers. This allowed the auto makers, for example, to start treating windshields as structural elements (because the hole for the windshield could be manufacturered to precise tolerances), and allowed them to eliminate costly alignment operations, such as when fitting hoods.

It's used by every auto and aircraft manufacturer, every hard disk manufacturer, etc. etc. etc. Basically just about any complex mechanical product you touch was touched by VSAS during design.

I'd imagine you couldn't build an iPhone at an affordable cost or with the quality level of an iPhone without VSAS (or it's equivalent). You wouldn't be able to buy a terabyte hard drive for less than $100.

There's more info on it here:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/tecnomatix/quality_mgmt/variation_analyst/

(The company was acquired by Siemens many years ago.)

Maybe not quite what this post was looking for, which I think was more consumer PC software. But it runs on a PC and has from the beginning of PCs, and has had a large but mostly-invisible influence on just about every tech product we use every day.

A 30-year run is nothing to sniff at, either.

Dunno if Sony still does this, but at one time it was not uncommon for them to have multiple teams working on the same concept without any knowledge of each other. Best one wins.

I worked on an outsourced project (insourced? From Japan to U.S.) that was similar to WebTV, though it was meant for the Japanese market. (Dig that - product for the Japanese market designed - or at least implemented - in the U.S.) This was more than 10 years ago.

Turns out there was a second team doing the same thing.

Then they licensed WebTV and canned both of the other projects.

Great fun watching Beavis and Butthead videos (Cornholio) at 2AM (on a Death March) with the "Sony spy", a junior engineer obstensively sent because he wrote the software for the front-panel processor.