Missing from the list, and from the author’s comprehension, is number eleven: “Thou shalt not spout thine opinions as fact when it be plain unto the masses that thou knowest not thy cranium from thy rectal cavity.”
(Via Maura Chace)
Guess what I got to deal with today?
Best. Flickr pool. Ever.
(Via Malcolm Tredinnick)
Where’s the love?
(Via Mark Pilgrim)
Cory Maye had no criminal record and was never named as a suspect in any criminal investigation, but now he’s on death row. One night, a man broke down the door of Maye’s apartment and came charging in with a gun; Maye, trying to protect his daughter, shot and killed the man, who turned out to be a police officer conducting a drug raid.
Frightening quotes:
To convict Maye, the jury had to believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a man with no criminal record, a man who had just moved out of his parents’ home to make a life with his daughter and girlfriend, a man who had only a minuscule amount of marijuana in his apartment, looked out the window to see a team of police officers was about to enter; decided to take them on, even though he had done nothing wrong; waited for them to forcibly enter his home; fired three shots, killing just one of them; and then surrendered, leaving four bullets still in his gun. When I ask District Attorney Buddy McDonald, who prosecuted Maye, why a man would go through such a series of puzzling and contradictory acts, he replies only that “sometimes people do irrational things.”
Hope for a pardon or clemency seems dim. Aides to Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, have indicated both publicly and privately that Barbour doesn’t believe in pardons or clemency, even for people he thinks are innocent. Apparently he doesn’t even bother to read pardon petitions.
As Maye put it in a letter to one of his Internet supporters, “We as citizens sit back and say, ‘Well, this could never happen to me.’.…But it’s happened before…and if we don’t take a stand, it’s gonna continue to happen to others.”
(Via Metafilter)
It’s sad how accurate this is.
Have I mentioned that Hans takes incredible photos?
I know that you’re a kick-ass sysadmin and you really want to come to Kansas and help us build better internets, so get in touch with Jacob and make it happen.
Sacre bleu!
(Via lucsky)
Things geeks need to think about before they go to the big NOC in the sky.
Choice quote from one of the case studies:
espy was online on irc for several years after he died
(Via Erinn Clark)
Guess what we did at work today?
I’ve seen this go by a couple times and never bookmarked it. I’m remedying that now.
Ah, Andrew Orlowski. The man can’t even manage to be consistent within the same article. Compare this bit:
The survey shows consumers express a slight, but firm preference for having one device that does music on the go, with the preference being that it should be a phone. Farewell, then iPod - we’ll see you in the section today reserved for PDAs at Circuit City (ie, locked away, under the counter) fairly soon.
With this bit:
Refreshingly, a whacking 80 per cent of respondents said they didn’t need any new kind of converged gizmo at all right now, thank you. 44 per cent said they weren’t interested at all, and 36 per cent said they were fine with what they had, all the same.
So… the preference is for one device, probably a phone, to pick up multiple duties, which means the iPod should soon go on the junk heap. But the preference is also against getting one device that picks up multiple duties, and most people aren’t interested in switching out what they already have Which, judging from market share, is probably an iPod.
Hmm.
I’m not sure I buy this:
When I finally felt that I ‘got’ Erlang, never once did I miss a single OO construct. In fact, I started regarding OO as a burden. In OO languages, every class, every method, every field has so much context around it. To understand where piece of code fits into the big picture, you have to read through the documentation for all the classes and interfaces to which it belongs. Also, OO languages often encourage if not force you to wedge your types into some inhertiance chain in order to reuse code, which results in ugly inhertiance relations that are inflexible at best.
Functional languages like Erlang have the opposite philosophy. They try to minimize the context surrounding a piece of logic— a function. All you have to know is what parameters a function takes and what it returns. There is no implicit link between the function and the data it uses. With single-assignment, you don’t even have to worry about functions mangling the values of your variables. When you’re coding in Erlang as opposed to Java, you think less about the context of your functions and more about what they do and how to compose them together to solve your problem.
Specifically, I’m not sure that “a class which inherits from a class which inherits from a class which inherits from a class…” is necessarily any worse (or any better) than “a function which is called by a function which is called by a function which is called by a function…”
Context is always important. Rooting your development in one high-level abstraction instead of another high-level abstraction probably won’t yield objective gains (though, depending on your mental makeup, it may yield significant subjective gains). The only magic bullet for architectural complexity is architectural simplicity.
(Via reddit)
Security is so focused on catching people with lipstick and shampoo that they’re ignoring actual threats.