plug in your electric car
If you are the owner of the car in the picture then you are not likely to be paying anything. This is a pseudo public space but I’m certain that the property owner was not expecting to have to burden the cost of charging every electric car out there. And I’m certain that homeowners are not interested in replacing all of their receptacles with secure alternatives.
In a conversation with my father in-law this morning…
(a) there was a time when your social security number was truly secret. Now everyone from the cable company, ISP, newspaper boy, lawn service, High School, University, hospital and doctor wants your SSN and we give it freely and without challenge. Who really knows why a doctor or newspaper delivery service needs my SSN. Are they going to sue me into and after I’m buried? In Sweden the SSN is sacred; I’m just not sure how they get around the problems we have. (could be functional and/or legal)
(b) There is no privacy on the internet. Whether your using any of the big name browsers, you never login, you always use other people’s computers or cyber cafes. The challenge is that between the ISP, browser manufacturers, super/affiliate advertisers, search engines; they where where you have been and where you are going. Not even the like of TOR is going to save you. Same goes for the anonymous breadcrumbs you thing you are dropping. They will always lead “them” back to you.
In a side note. If you’ve ever seen or purchased from one of those “as seen on tv” infomercials. The deals are great. Essentially you pay for shipping which costs them much either, however, it does offset their costs somewhat. The “play” for these companies is to get you to buy something. Anything. This way they capture you personal information which they will resell at a profit. This is how all of these marketing machines work. One interesting thing… I have never experienced an increase in the amount of spam I receive. Hmmm.
Another side note. Over the last 18 to 36 months there have been some data breaches amounting to tens or hundreds of millions of credit card numbers and personal information. So why haven’t more people been complaining about credit card fraud? Why haven’t news programs done additional reporting? I wonder if we’re being marketed to because the credit card infrastructure is just not that sophisticated.
You’ve got to be kidding me!!! I’m not even certain this is a real thing or if it’s some hoax. But for the moment let’s just say it’s real. My first inclination is/was “where do I send my check?” But as I started to think about Canonical I started to reconsider. What is it that these guys actually do and where is there revenue stream currently? They hire loads of people and have several pay-for products… In fact the general public does most of the real heavy lifting anyway. Including the testing.
However, there is one thing that I have to remind myself of. “Trusted Source”. With that recent Russian malware scare I can only imagine that the internet scale is going to slow and that sandboxing and trusted source are going to be required. For that matter I have already started to adjust to a Microsoft desktop at work and in my VMWare at home.
And of course if it’s a hoax … then I wish a thousand papercuts on the perpetrator.
PS: I’d rather be using OpenBSD!!!
(1) what do Microsoft, Apple, and Java (in the form of Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ) hope to gain by having such complicated IDEs with so many dependent artifacts?
(2) if all apps were moved to the web, irrespective of the “cloud” attributes will ever be free of the desktop app tools?
(3) most *nix desktop apps appear juvenile or even retro compared to modern Windows and OSX apps; and even some java apps. Will they ever look modern and can they do it without all the cruft required by Microsoft and Apple?
The answers seem obvious to me, however, I’d prefer to hear your response before I give you mine. I thought about giving a hint but that would be too easy.
I’ve been running iStatMenus and Little Snitch for quite a while. When I first started using these tools I wanted to know what my computer and the installed software was doing. That included everything from Apple as well as the commercial and open source software I had installed. In a way Little Snitch was a dual authentication for outbound connections and iStat gave me useful indication of the resources currently in play.
Now that I have installed Mountain Lion and Little Snitch 3 (beta) I’m starting to watch my system more closely again. The first thing that caught my attention is that Google Chrome, Google Drive and DropBox are chatty. Yes, I have a few extensions installed on my browser like Google Voice, goo.gl, Mail Notify, GTalk, Google Calendar, Google Task. What the hell are they doing?
If silence were golden then network silence should be platinum.
When I quit Chrome, Drive and DropBox there are still examples of apps that are talking to the network. But Why? I just wrote an article this morning where I talk about installing non-commercial applications in userspace or adminspace and the possible side effects. So what are the lessons learned here?
(a) if you’re using a cloud application then you are going to consume bandwidth and probably more than you want. So while that MacBook Air would ideal in the cloud the battery will not likely last, network costs because the apps do not know when you are on battery or using mobile tethering minutes.
(b) we, as consumers, have no idea what is actually being passed back and forth. It is not unreasonable to consider that Google could be using some sort of bittorrent-like system to seed future chome downloads and that’s why I see such high usage.
(c) while my wifi bandwidth is still much higher than the ISP bandwidth it still seems that I’m saturated someplace. Even copying files from one system to the next on the same subnet seems constrained.
(d) What does not make any sense at all is the number of servers that Chrome connects to. It’s not like it’s one or two but is seems that there might be several dozen. What the heck are they doing? Some of it might be the different apps, but why? (that was rhetorical).
Sun’s vision that the network is the computer is coming into vogue and it’s starting to cost us in privacy and our wallets.
Or let me word it this way. Programmers who build and support high frequency trading systems lack any discipline and quite possibly impulse control. In my estimation they are no different than day traders who are desperate to make a buck a fraction at a time. Market Makers are no different and cut from the same cloth.
I recently interviewed with 4 different Quant and Market Maker companies in CT, NY, and NJ. I took personality tests, IQ tests, math acuity tests, programming tests, multiple phone interviews, and day long onsite interviews. As for the 15 onsite face to face interviews only 2 brought written questions and only 1 actually read my resume in advance of the interview. And all of them asked fermi questions, save one.
There are an amazing number of other similarities:
(a) The number of PhDs
(b) The number of transactions
(c) The same general approach to HFT
(d) The same general org chart and functional diversification
(e) The same approach to development, testing, and deployment
(f) The same lack of production discipline
… and the list grows
For all of their brain power KCG failed to detect the problem in the first few minutes. Common sense would dictate that secondary and tertiary systems should have been monitoring transaction volume based on past performance and future expectation as part of any release so that if these systems detected something that was out of variance it should have alerted operations staff within seconds of the event and not hours. Furthermore, the system should have been able to rollback to the previous day’s configuration in order to resume normal operations. At the very least the system should have been terminated immediately. This is what I would consider block and tackle operational infrastructure. They should have taken lessons learned from the space program. Instead, my interviewers concentrated on completely non-relavent and subjective indicators.
Asking a perspective employer in NYC about their production discipline cost me an offer. Meanwhile the next day KCG crashed and burned.
PS: To the programmer who posted on reddit a number of months ago who justified his 500K salary. I hope you have made enough money to retire. You and your ilk are irresponsible and dangerous to our way of life and you should not be allowed to practice as a programmer under any circumstances.
As for the managers, directors, partners etc at the quants and market maker firms. You might be smart too but you do not know everything…. anymore.
Between my iPhone that just simply does not last 8hours while in NYC and my 1.4Ghz MacBook Air that does not last 6hours I’m just frustrated to no end. Part of the problem in NYC is that there are so many WiFi base stations in proximity at any given time that my phone is either trying to talk to or google maps is using in order to sense it’s location that I can see how and why the batteries are so bad. You’d think with the population of NYC and the concentration of iPhones that it would not be an issue for me.
As for the MBA I have no explanation. I was on a plane with wifi and bluetooth turned off. I was writing some code in a small console window and watching some video. I did not have the brightness turned all the way up either. Problematic about Apple is that they are extremely secretive about things other companies might be proactive about… like telling me my batteries need to be replaced… before the warranties run out.
I’ll say it again, as much as I like my Apple hardware I really want to try the new Vizio hardware with Linux and BSD as the Host OS. And I also want to give Android a shot too.
Admittedly I’ve been an Apple fanboy for a number of years. Thankfully the first step to correcting the problem is that there is a problem. One of those 12-step programs.
If you buy a book using the iPhone appstore then you can only read the book using the dedicated reader. It’s not like you can reload the the book in iBooks.
If you but the book using iTunes on your mac or on your iPhone then you get an ePub file that can only be read on your iPhone or iPad using iBook. There is no way to read the file on your desktop.
In the case of the O’Reilly books there is an additional premium that you have to pay in order to get the DRM removed and the PDF version. This is the double whammy.
What a waste!
It’s a long title be that did not change anything. Apple has sandboxed the OS. “We” expected that to happen but my memory says there was not going to be a workaround. Luckily: http://osxdaily.com/tag/mac-os-x-10-8/
I did not read the entire article; just the parts that interested me and my problem. Which was that OSX popped up a dialog saying that Google Drive was not downloaded from the app store or not provided by an identified developer. I suppose that last part will be corrected by Google eventually. In the meantime use the link above to install Google Drive.
I had to change the switch to allow “anything”. But once Google Drive was installed I was able to move the selection back to the middle position and it still functioned.
One more thing. The current version of google drive is: 1.3.3209.2688. This is good to know because Google does not offer any other way to ID the different google drive versions.
Am I the only person on Earth that is disturbed by the happenings over at Zynga? Clearly the SEC needs to take a look into things very closely. I cannot believe that the trades were allowed to be processed, however, it’s possible that I might be overreacting because there are rules for these types of transactions. To the point where the SEC probably has the authority to roll the transactions back if they are found to be improper.
Specializing and general purpose solutions. For all of the gorey details you should read my resume, projects, programming languages, contributions to the payment industry and blogs(detailed, general). I even have a code repository with sample code, and more code, some good and some bad; yet all with value.
Creating a library one page at a time.
Reducing the friction of writing and fixing bugs or features.
