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Comment: Awful (Score 4, Interesting) 237

by jgotts (#46488117) Attached to: Why San Francisco Is the New Renaissance Florence

Why should I have to make over $125,000/year to live comfortably when I can make under half elsewhere in the country and be equally content? Why should I be forced to rent unless I can afford a million dollars for a house? How am I supposed to lay down roots? Why should any home short of a mansion cost a million dollars in the first place? Silicon Valley is pretty close to my idea of hell. The only thing I like about it is the City of Berkeley and the surrounding mountains and national parks where you can get away from the people living there on the weekends. San Francisco is bleak, dirty. There's nothing I like about it. It was good in the 60's but that was 50 years ago. Why would I want to surround myself with 99% ghetto rich (making a lot of money but having to spend it all on rent and expenses) men mostly struggling, thinking that their website will be the next Facebook.

For the 1% of people living there, I bet it's great. Those same people would be happy anywhere, because they're very wealthy.

Comment: Prioritize (Score 1) 959

by jgotts (#46463413) Attached to: How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?

Most data that people have on their hard drives can be readily re-obtained via BitTorrent or in other ways. The simple and probably best strategy is to figure out the 500 GB or less that is actually irreplaceable, and make several copies of that. I have three or more copies of my most important data.

Or, looking at the problem another way, 4 TB hard drives are selling for $160 right now including shipping. A complete insurance policy would cost $800 plus your time. What I would have done if I just had to save everything would be to simply copy all of the data in 4 TB hunks, and put each hard drive one by one into a fireproof safe, or in a safe-deposit box at the bank. A second RAID would be complete overkill, unless time to recovery is of the essence or the data churn rate is high. More than 90% of my data simply accretes over the years, and I'm sure that is true for most people.

$800 is a small price to pay for your data. I seem to recall that it cost a company I worked for over $1,000 to recover a 9 GB IBM hard drive that failed about 15 years ago.

According to this article, Seagate is promising 20 TB hard drives by 2020:


Comment: Comcast and DNS problems (Score 1) 349

by jgotts (#46456985) Attached to: Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast

We frequently seem to have problems with Comcast's business-class DNS, but the sample size for this experiment is one tiny business in China. Not exactly comprehensive.

China has more Internet users than the United States, and their service is pretty good. I'm a heavy user of the Chinese Internet, and I rarely have problems traversing their networks. But at the same time, malware is common there due to software piracy. Careful, temporary, targeted blocks of Chinese malware hosts can and do happen. Perhaps this one entity was swept up unfairly [or fairly].

Comment: 15 years? Try 200. (Score 1) 294

by jgotts (#46432173) Attached to: Why Robots Will Not Be Smarter Than Humans By 2029

We have no idea how the human brain works. We throw random chemicals at people's brains after incorrectly assessing an illness and hope people function better afterwords. We apply electric shocks to the brain as medicine. Brain medicine is in the stone ages, technologically speaking.

Humans depends upon millions of non-human species inside and on the surface of our bodies, and we can't culture most of them, and we don't have a clear understanding of how they work together but we have a vague idea that they affect our thinking process. They hold the key to advancing brain medicine out of the stone ages.

Once we understand the basic chemistry of the brain, which I feel is generations away, then we will begin to see what intelligence actually is. When we can stably program the brain's neural networks, which is well beyond that point, then will have good ideas about how to do the same with robots.

Comment: Simply solution (Score 0) 193

by jgotts (#46404007) Attached to: F-Secure: Android Accounted For 97% of All Mobile Malware In 2013

By default most Android phones (which today means made by Samsung) will not install anything from outside the Google Play store, and in the case of only Samsung phones outside the Google Play store and the Samsung store. Most users do not adjust this setting, so virtually nobody is susceptible to this malware. F-Secure is making mountains out of molehills.

If you don't use a Samsung Android phone, I commend your spirit of adventure. It's not worth the hassle for me. There's where you start becoming susceptible to this type of malware, among other problems.

But don't catch me saying that Samsung phones are the best. They're just what everybody else is using and helping debug so I don't have to.

Comment: Strong disagree (Score 2) 333

by jgotts (#46338749) Attached to: How Mobile Apps Are Reinventing the Worst of the Software Industry

I strongly disagree with the poster. We are in the best period of mobile apps, not the worst. During this period programmers are learning what can be done in the mobile environment and what can not be done well. The Android and Apple mobile environments are very much an exciting, experimental playground right now. The major problem cited is that mobile apps are inefficient, and that they slow down your phone. That won't be much of an issue in a few years, as processors keep getting faster and phones start to ship with 64 GB or memory or more.

Sure there are a lot of bad apps, but that's the point. Try out the bad apps, and learn what you should and should not be using your mobile environment for. Maybe what you originally thought was a bad app turns out to be quite useful for you. On the other hand, the most obvious mobile app might not be very useful. I make under 7 phone calls a week, but spend 4-5 hours per week using the Facebook app. At first I thought Instagram was fairly useless but today I use it more than Facebook. I don't fully know all of my use cases for my phone, but already it's an indispensible tool, and I find about 20-30 apps to be quite useful. Another 100 apps are marginally useful. The rest are as much an experiment for the programmers as for me.

The issue with permissions is being worked on by the Android developers. It's a separate issue.

In 10 years mobile apps will be quite stable. We'll have maybe 50 winners, and things will be quite boring.

Comment: No (Score 4, Insightful) 627

by jgotts (#46327791) Attached to: Does Relying On an IDE Make You a Bad Programmer?

Whether or not you use an IDE ought to say very little about how good of a programmer you are.

What makes a good programmer is someone who can produce stable, maintainable code in a reasonable time frame and someone who isn't worried about getting fired in order to fight for these goals. One part of maintainability is readable code and the other part is being able to communicate what you've done through documentation, written or oral.

Over the decades I've found that it makes no difference what tools you use, or what your age or educational or cultural background is. It doesn't matter so much whether you write few or many tests. You need to be patient, stubborn, thorough, curious, a problem solver, a voracious reader, and a great communicator to be a great programmer, and you need to have been doing it for at least 10 years. But companies should not shy away from helping to give someone those 10 years, because the best programmers will still do good work early on in their careers.

If you write code that just works but is unmaintainable by anyone and you hole up to write your code and you have no ability to communicate what you have done then you are a horrible programmer and you should be fired. There is a myth among some people that these are actually great programmers. These types of programmers tend to be, but are not always, extremely well qualified in terms of their educational or other experience but they make life difficult for all the other programmers that have to maintain their fragile junk. Fortunately, this type of software is less common in the free software community because this type of programming is called out.

Comment: Re:It's personality (Score 4, Insightful) 312

by jgotts (#46241887) Attached to: Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

No, those aren't the best engineers. Those are terrible engineers, people who have done a great job memorizing their university textbooks and they probably got all A's and can tell you 100 useless computer science facts about trees.

The best software engineers were child prodigies who began programming as children, saw the forest for the trees at the university and didn't care much about their grades, people who have done hobbyist software work throughout their lives. These people can explain engineering to a child, admit when they make mistakes, and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever. These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.

Comment: Programmers (Score 1) 130

by jgotts (#46212077) Attached to: Boom Or Bust: The Lowdown On Code Academies

We need all types of programmers, as eventually all jobs, no matter how menial, will require some programming skills.

Most technological device use is what was once called programming, but is not considered programming anymore. Think about the complex things millions of people do with their telephones. In the 1980's only a select group of the world's most skilled programmers could do some of those things. Is it really so different to do something with five button presses than doing something with 500 lines of code? You're still programming, just at a higher level. That 500 lines of code has been written and it's what makes an operation feel more natural but still be programming.

Maybe we need classes in modern devices, and to get away from the word programming. When you play your favorite smartphone app, you're programming. Take it to the next level and write an app yourself. Not everyone has to write industrial grade banking software.

Comment: All software is buggy (Score 1) 187

by jgotts (#46162733) Attached to: Adobe Flash Remote Code Execution Flaw Exploited In the Wild

No software in common use today is mathematically proven to be correct; therefore, all software is buggy.

The most likely place for bugs is in error handling code, because no matter how many tests you write it is impossible to simulate every possible error condition.

We hope that everyone walking into a store doesn't steal something. Only a tiny minority do but a much larger number could get away with it.

The same goes for software. Any halfway decent programmer can find bugs in error handlers. If he chooses to be a whore, then he uses that skill to make money for criminal gangs or in some cases for anti-malware companies. Programmers who are not whores write actual new and useful software, and usually get paid enough that they can lead fairly happy lives. But it always helps to program defensively. Make your error handling just a bit better than the next piece of software. It will never be perfect. But as a society we count on the fact that nearly all people don't try to use whatever particular knowledge they've acquired to screw you over. Programmers are especially moral. We could bring society to its knees if we wanted to, but we prefer to make the world better.

I don't blame Adobe for the bugs. Millions of people are using this software and probably a dozen or two as I put it whores are in league with criminal gangs trying to sell you boner pills and the like. This handful of people aren't the ones finding new classes of exploits. That is a good function of security researchers. These people are instead likely just exploiting old, known, and quite ordinary bugs.

Comment: Last about five years? (Score 4, Interesting) 237

by jgotts (#46106117) Attached to: Hard Drive Reliability Study Flawed?

I've either personally owned or purchased for companies I've worked for dozens of hard drives of all (except ESDI) technologies including MFM/RLL, IDE (parallel and serial), SCSI (original, wide, ultra wide, etc.) of form factors from full height 5.25 inch to 2.5 inch, dating back to 1991, and in my experience most hard drives last until you throw them away after 10 or 15 years because they're too small.

A few hard drives die in the first 6 months, and maybe 5-10% die in 3-5 years. Saying that disk drives last about 5 years just doesn't agree with my experience at all. Hard drives essentially last an infinite amount of time, defined by me as until they're so small that their storage can be replaced for under a dollar.

I do agree with the author's other points. Certain lines of hard drives have more like a 100% failure rate after 5 years. One 250 GB hard drive I purchased was RMA replaced with a 300 GB model because the 250 GB line was essentially faulty.

I think these studies might be looking at 7200 or 10000 RPM SCSI units under extremely high use. That's not how consumers use hard drives.

Comment: b should be the first to go (Score 1) 254

by jgotts (#46094899) Attached to: Old-school Wi-Fi Is Slowing Down Networks, Cisco Says

802.11b should be the first to go, but not 802.11a. Even though it didn't get good industry support, 802.11a is great. People instead adopted 802.11g, which is not 5 GHz like 802.11a, but it had better compatibility with 802.11b.

I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that my Samsung Galaxy S III supports 802.11a. I took my 802.11a AP out of storage and returned to wireless.

At some point in the near future I'll be purchasing 802.11ac equipment and putting my a network to bed. My two 802.11a adapters are PCMCIA, and laptops don't have that anymore, so I'll be generating three pieces of fairly useless eWaste.

Comment: Correct, as usual (Score 1) 1098

by jgotts (#46062727) Attached to: FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback'

Mr. Stallman doesn't have a publicist, a speech writer, or an image consultant; therefore, the way he phrases things can hurt people's feelings. Mr. Stallman has a damned good track record of being correct, though. Sometimes it takes a decade or more for what he says to be proven correct but rarely is he ever completely off the mark.

You can either spend millions of dollars spreading a polished version of your message or be deliberately provocative and offended parties will spread your message for free. If you take a step back and think for a minute, you realize how smart of a man Mr. Stallman is.
