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Nick Bradbury: If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support
If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.
Nick Bradbury: Born to Code, Part II
It bugged me how I'd be handed a list of requirements for a specific application, yet I never got to talk with the people who would actually use the finished software - I knew my work didn't meet the needs of the people using it, which bothered the hell out of me. I decided that if I was going to be a career programmer, I should at least like my work, and I should feel that I was spending my time doing something useful.
Economics 101 - Comments - Crunchy Con
Curmudgeon Geographer
April 4, 2008 9:28 PM
I completely concur with Joe G.
Thomas Sowell's pair of books are excellent. Basic Economics originally from 2003 and revised in 2007, and Applied Economics from 2003 are stupendous.
Christopher Mohr
April 4, 2008 9:39 PM
On another note, not totally unconnected, life is now sort of imitating art - strange art. From Shirow Masamune's futuristic "Ghost in the Shell: Stand alone Complex" (episode 14): "After the Western Hemisphere became unable to ignore the rising threat of Third World nations, they sought an economic foothold in Asia by using Japan as an intermediary in a bold move to create a monetary union, thereby creating a new economic hegemony. Created by taking the first letters of each single monetary unit, the Yen, Euro, and Dollar ($), the "YE$" flag attempted to affirm the significance of the then-dwindling capitalist economies, while restoring the prestige of the formerly developed nations by establishing a gargantuan economic bloc. Of course, the "YE$" was a vivid testament to fact that major nations had lost self-confidence to such a degree that they required active affirmation of their prestige."
Something to think about as China rises.
Brad Pitt's Foundation Unveils 14 Home Designs for New Orleans | Design & Innovation | Fast Company
Brad Pitt's Foundation Unveils 14 Home Designs for New Orleans
BY Cliff KuangThu Jul 2, 2009 at 5:21 PM
Pitt's foundation, Make it Right, eventually hopes to build 150 houses in the Ninth Ward--completely remaking the blighted neighborhood.
Brad Pitt is more than just a voracious consumer of design--he is, perhaps, one of design's greatest philanthropists. The proof is his two-year long effort to build houses--designed by some of the world's best architects--to New Orleans's Katrina-decimated Ninth Ward.
Yesterday, Pitt's organization, Make it Right, released 14 new home designs. Eventually, the foundation aims to build 150 houses in the area. The 14 architects are a formidable lot: Atelier Hitoshi, Bild Design, Billes, buildingstudio, BNIM, Constructs, Elemental, Gehry Partners, GRAFT, Kappe Architects, MVRDV, Pugh + Scarpa, Waggonner & Ball Architects, and William McDonough + Partners.
An elegant design by Elemental, which looks like a dead-ringer for a modern Swiss mountain retreat (and, come to think of it, this moving house we featured):
Elemental
MVRDV produced a raised house that's very reminiscent of another work we've seen of theirs, the astonishing Balancing Barn. This one is lofted on stilts rather than cantelevered:
MVRDV
Pugh+Scarpa produced an A-frame with terrific porches--meant to be a "gathering space" for the block, with an elevated cooking pit, and bleecher-like seating out front. Inside, the house revolves around a lofty, bright living room (more images of the project at Dezeen):
Pugh+Scarpa
Pugh+Scarpa
The first two houses are expected to break ground this August. If the pace of the project really does continue, and even if MIR builds only half of the houses it intends to, it'll help bring an architectural revival to New Orleans that doesn't really have any contemporary equals that we can think of. Amazing stuff, Brad.
You can see pictures of the other projects at Architectural Record. For a longer profile of Pitt's efforts in New Orleans, read "Saint Brad" in Metropolis.
The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker
#911. stevekasian - Today 01:41
You people are pathetic, going on and on about how you've been "led around like a bunch of pigs waiting for the slaughter", etc, etc, etc.
WTF is wrong with you?? Are you all that fucking LAME that you can't even think for yourselves and get your own fucking lives? TPB crew are HUMAN, end of story. Shit happens, and they put up, FAR AND AWAY, the biggest fight of anyone in internet history against the RIAA, MPAA... and even foreign governments and the Swedish courts! WTF do you want from them? Oooh, I see... you want to be led around some more, like a fucking mindless flock of SHEEP.
Grow the fuck up and start taking responsibility for your own actions, and your own life for that matter. Quit looking up to celebrities and/or hackers as role models and get a fucking clue - realize that you are as important as anyone in this world, so long as your put your mind to it.
Fucking pathetic, I tell you...
To The Crew: THANK YOU FOR A REAL GOOD TIME OVER THE LAST 5 YEARS!!! GOOD LUCK WITH EVERYTHING!
China Attacks Itself | Open The Future | Fast Company
This move by China's government has all the trappings of a social auto-immune disorder.
Back in September 2007, I wrote about this metaphor for understanding unintended consequences over at Open the Future. We see, time and again, efforts undertaken to protect the social body from some kind of feared harm instead resulting in real damage to society. It struck me that there was a strong parallel to medical auto-immune disorders, where the body's own immune system goes on the attack against the body itself. A minor but familiar example of a social auto-immune disorder is the "security theater" in airports, such as having to remove shoes, dump liquids, and the like. Security experts such as Bruce Schneier see such measures as having dubious value in actually preventing a terrorist attack, while having a measurable, and significant, economic cost.
pc mall(The concept apparently has some conceptual value. Earlier this month, in a bit of parallel thinking, the Yorkshire Ranter" elaborated on the idea, building on David Kilcullen's 2009 The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.)
The problem with social auto-immune disorders is that because they're responses to perceived systemic threats, it can be very difficult for more thoughtful leadership to scale back the reaction. Any successful attack subsequent to the scaling back of an overreaction--no matter how unrelated to the attempted defense--would be seen as evidence that the initial overreaction was correct. The more thoughtful leadership would be vilified by political rivals, whether on the pages of national newspapers or in Party meetings. Thus, bad decisions, with clearly harmful results, can become institutionalized.
Web Series Tied to ‘Blade Runner’ Is In the Works - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Mr. Scott, his brother Tony and his son Luke are developing the project in conjunction with the independent studio Ag8, which is run by one of the creators of “Where are the Joneses?” a British Web sitcom that solicited storyline suggestions from the audience. Similarly, “Purefold” will harvest story input from its viewers, in conjunction with the social media site FriendFeed.
Questions for Pwn2Own hacker Charlie Miller | Zero Day | ZDNet.com
On a scale of 1-10, how impressive was the Nils’ sweep of exploiting all three main browsers?
I was surprised. For IE 8, I’d give him a 9 out of 10. For Safari, maybe a 2. It’s just too easy to pop Safari. For Firefox on Windows, I give him a 10. That was the most impressive of the three. It’s really hard to exploit Firefox on Windows.
Really? What’s the difference between what you can do on IE but can’t do on Firefox?
The technique he used works against IE but not Firefox. It allows you to place code in a specific spot in memory. Mark Dowd and Alex Sotirov talked about this at last year’s Black Hat. You can use a technique to make .net not opt into the mitigations and jump over hurdled easily. With Firefox, you can’t do that.
For all the browsers on operating systems, the hardest target is Firefox on Windows. With Firefox on Mac OS X, you can do whatever you want. There’s nothing in the Mac operating system that will stop you.
You talked earlier about the value of vulnerabilities. Was it a surprise that he (Nils) basically gave up three “high-value” bugs for $5,000 each?
It’s clear he’s incredibly talented. I was shocked when I saw someone sign up to go after IE 8. You can get paid a lot more than $5,000 for one of those bugs. I’ve talked to a lot of smart, knowledgeable people and no one knows exactly how he did it. He could easily get $50,000 for that vulnerability. I’d say $50,000 is a low-end price point.
For the amount of time he spent to do what he did on IE and Firefox, he could have found and exploited five or 10 Safari bugs. With the way they’re paying $5,000 for every verifiable bug, he could have spent that same time and resources and make $25,000 or $30,000 easily just by going after Safari on Mac.
Flickr Co-founder Unveils Her New Startup: Hunch - ReadWriteWeb
Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.
954NETWORK BLOG! - Information Technology Solutions Blog - Presented by 954Network, Inc.
Install MAC OS X on Lenovo S10 from External Hard Drive
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