tom_jones's comments

A great example of the difference between academic knowledge and real world experience.

Maybe an answer would be to allow anonymity on the web but only as a legally registered pseudonym. The only way this legally registered pseudonym can be revealed is in legal action against a comment on conviction. That way people can have the right to anonymity so long as they stay within the law.

Thanks, this was an interesting read and one I can identify with.

I think developers, anyone who writes software that really matters, are particularly susceptible. I’m not talking about someone who codes a pretty website for a small company, I’m talking about people working on core systems that people RELY on for things like accessing their money, security systems, and engine control systems in their car. These are the projects that will keep you up at night worrying about whether you left any bugs in the code.

The rub is that the general public have NO idea how thin the line is that these developers walk. If they do their job properly, thoroughly, then the product costs too much and nobody buys it. Or it misses time to market and the company slips behind its competitors.

The majority of code is pushed out in barely working state. That’s why we hear of problems like cars that suddenly stop on a freeway. If developers were given more time to finish their work, higher quality of code was prized over speed of development, then a whole industry would be less stressed and society would benefit as a whole. But everyone just wants the newest gadget faster and faster, and we are not patient.

Providing broadband connectivity to rural Americans should have priority over giving 'fast lanes' to those who already enjoy broadband service.

The latest statistical analysis suggests that baseball involves more matters of chance than anyone would like to admit. Beyond home runs and strikeouts, it's mostly random. Luck and skill are all around us to varying unmeasurable degrees, including in a game of poker.

I've seen many a publication where the scientist urge restraint in interpreting results, but then the newspapers completely ignore their pleas and go instead to proclaim "Study of 10 subjects proves X could make you immortal!". It's irresponsible journalism.

I think the answer is the total guileification of the (extended) GNU operating system. We need to facilitate cross-talk between bits of the operating system, and there would be no more natural way to do this in GNU than to make all commands understand literal Scheme lists of arguments, and give back literal Scheme lists of data (including the response to '(help), which would make the entire system introspective!), so that inter-operation between sub-systems becomes natural.

Interesting but it doesn’t get past the a priori objection to the NBN having been adopted without any economic or commercial assessment to justify it as a political fix when the election promise to provide better broadband at one tenth the cost of the NBN was shown to be hopeless and an embarrassing shambles. And it doesn’t demonstrate that the a priori probability that a proven entrepreneur in the field of Internet based services would be able to do the essential job more cost effectively.

I think it is fascinating because of what it could have been had Walt Disney's vision continued. It's right there in the opening line: a place for people to find happiness and knowledge. Judging from my visit last weekend, today that line would say "a place for people to spend money and trudge through queues to experience self-contained stories with no room for imagination or learning." It's an object lesson — Walt Disney was clearly as proud of his accomplishments in business as well as his creative endeavors. He was an old school Republican, who thought that American business could make the world better. Sadly, that part of the equation was lost over the decades. And so, Disneyland is still a little model of world in microcosm: from a place where you could imagine and learn to a place where you can spend and ride a "convenience vehicle" and spend a little more to get VIP treatment.

Nice post, just goes to show the value of properly validating uploads!

The idea that competing governments, financial institutions, telecommunications and energy companies, etc use the same software – when it’s proven that there is no such thing as real security – is ludicrous. Perhaps Microsoft’s next big profit will be through developing unique software for single government and corporate entities with connectivity for general information but totally secure for trade and government secrets and personal identification.

It reads like a an unbelievable chapter from Orwell's 1984, and it occurred in the United States of America, the oft stated bastion of democracy.

At every possible opportunity resistance was stymied, with the presumption that the will to resist would eventually collapse.

They lost because they never once contemplated the possibility of you being willing to shut down your business because of your principles, something they couldn't fathom or conceive of, since such a concept is anathema to their wholly illegal and unconstitutional activities.

Along these lines, can someone ask whether net neutrality ever existed at all? Akamai and F5 have been helping big corporations like Disney circumvent internet bottlenecks for over a decade now. Those who have had the money have managed to purchase faster delivery schemes for over a decade. Could it be, then, that telecommunications companies are consolidating so that they can extort money not from the small guys, but from the big guys? Are Hulu, Netflix and others willingly submitting to the extortion because they see no other way out? To be sure, the telecommunications industry is in desperate need of regulation because providing good service at a reasonable price for a reasonable profit is not good enough for them.

I'm suspicious of this technology. While I concede that it probably has some statistical and even empirical merit, those in HR will always do everything they can to make sure that "troublemakers and journeymen" get kept out. But unfortunately, most people who have had the same job for a long time are either just trying to pay their mortgage and smiling through gritted teeth long enough to see their kids alright or have no imagination/ambition and those who switch jobs regularly are often simply tired of taking shit from people. I think you'll find that "troublemakers" usually have tried to alert their line managers to the real flaws in the company's systems and been told to shut up. Look at the businesses this data is being taken from, Law Companies, Corporate Banks etc. It is obviously yet another toy to allow rich kids to recognise their own. What has this got to do with those who do the vast majority of the actual work?

One solution. Stay out of the app store. Develop on the web in HTML 5.0. No businesses between you and the players there. Once you are a bit hit, you cut your own deal to go onto other platforms like Facebook and the app stores.

I personally prefer Scala.

It supports functional programming (combining it nicely with object oriented programming), immutability, tail recursion, lazy evaluation (you have to specify what will be evaluated lazily), collections with parallel processing support, actor based processing, pattern matching and of course a REPL.

But none of that is mandatory, for example when needed, you can also use mutable variables and collections.

It runs on the JVM, and you can mix Java code and libraries with Scala code and libraries. And the ecosystem of Java libraries is huge.

"secretly access suspected criminals’ computers in bunches, not simply one at a time."

Note the word "suspected". I really don't think its a good idea to have a legal standard granting authority to a government worker when that standard is based to one degree or another on the level of that government worker's paranoia.

Great post! Can't wait to see where .NET Native will go.

I thought this would be about the new mobile version, which unlike the prior "upgrade" is actually an upgrade. The prior mobile version ruined what was a great program. Hopefully that they're moving in the right direction with mobile will mean the desktop version will improve too.

How do these digital services compare with radio? For example, if a radio station plays your song and 1,000,000 people hear it, do they pay you more than 1,000,0000 individual Pandora plays? Those numbers on your statement are for much smaller audiences than regular radio.