BrianLy

You can exclude certain directories from synchronizing to your laptop if you want to.

I'm not sure what you mean by communicating through "status messages". It doesn't seem like a good way to operate. Posts are not limited in the same way as Twitter messages. You can add various attachments, and create messages longer than 140 characters. In most companies email is the dominant form of communication and other tools (including discussion boards etc.) just don't get uptake because people drop back to email.

In very big companies (> 20k) there is more of a need for a tool that that can connect people in different "silos". I've seen how Yammer has helped people in this type of organisation.

They are pretty terrible, and a dead end in terms of Windows 8 support based on my experience.

There were likely considerations that fed in at different levels of the process:

1. Higher-ups who still believed that they could offer a platform that would be more valuable than the internet at large. Hailstorm always felt like an AOL for web services. 2. Lower down in the MS hierarchy various areas were under pressure. They had technologies built on COM and Win32 that had been thrown together quickly as a response to the growth of the web. eg. IIS and COM+. Both had problems in terms of scalability (and security as exploited later) and there is was no way to improve performance without jumping down to C++. Obviously there were a lot of other issues with these tools and a "rewrite" was needed.

Microsoft were really playing catch-up here and "copying" various things from the JVM ecosystem such as garbage collection was required. It is worth reviewing Brian Harry's note re: reference counting. A large number of developers were concerned with the implications of this change but it was for the better (for more people - there is still no perfect solution here). C# appears to the uninformed to be a mere copy of the Java language but Microsoft included features to attract some C++ developers, help the transition, and improve usability over Java. SOAP is an abomination, but it is still better than DCOM which came before.

I think Rotor was one of the most valuable things that Microsoft produced in the early years of .NET. Ted Neward et al wrote a book on it with O'Reilly and an unpublished 2nd version is at http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.asp.... You may not want to look at Rotor if you contribute to Mono-based projects.

> Moving on, even though I didn’t pay for my ticket since I was a speaker

I've attended PyCon a few times and found the experience to be great value. I believe their speakers have to pay their own way just like other attendees. Other events that I've attended such as TechEd appear to be a bit of a "jolly" for speakers (MVPs) who are carted around to other events throughout the year.

I think you can go further than that. To get people asking for your time as a consultant you have to demonstrate experience and get close to vendors who already support clients you are interested in. For example, targeting a niche "big data" problem with a particular tool, and then developing a relationship with the community supporting that tool. That gives you access to the people who are looking for consulting.

I miss the simplicity. For better or worse lobbyists are part of the US political system that won't go away any time soon. The "right to petition" is granted under the First Amendment. The intent was probably different from the reality, especially in regard to access to government for individuals. Lobbyists seem to be the gatekeepers, and only corporations can pay the fees.

When it comes to individual action many people are protective of things that are not necessarily in their best interests. Anything that threatens the freedom of the individual trumps everything else even if the alternative is slightly better. This happens with healthcare reform, to corporate taxation, to individual taxation (where people want to keep the status quo just in case they "get rich").

Please post more about why you feel this way. I know that Jesse Noller and some of the other organisers would be interested in feedback from first time attendees.

You'll also see them called "open spaces".

PyCon has some great ones although they were a little disappointing this year. A combination of the hotel layout and placement of the openspace proposal (sign up) board was not great.

Almost 10 years ago work sent me to TechEd 2002 EMEA in Barcelona. I remember a party with Cirque du soleil (or a similar) troupe, and a Ballmer-like break dancer. Everyone was driven over to the event at one of the former Olympic venues. There was booze and loud music but it a fairly good event even if you weren't drinking.

Do people really go to programming conferences for keynotes? My experience has been that the hallway conversations are alone worth more than keynotes.

Many keynotes sessions tend to be disappointing because there is not enough time to dive into technical details, or the presenter is not sure if they should be focusing on the movement as opposed to their technical contributions.

Is Hadoop really approachable for most businesses who don't have a some sort of large-scale need for analytics?

Last time I looked there were things like Pig (http://pig.apache.org/) but the use case was "big data". Many businesses use RDBMs exclusively and can easily use analytics tools like Business Objects. Companies may be dealing with what they consider to be a lot of data but it pales in comparison to what many web startups are dealing with.

It's based on IronPython/IronRuby/DLR. I've been to a few PyCons and the CPython-based developers never seemed all that interested in it due to library support, and the majority of work happening on UNIX platforms. At the same time .NET developers didn't know what to do with this great set of tools.

There is some more information on GPS jamming at http://www.ausairpower.net/TE-GPS-Guided-Weps.html.

> I'd imagine the screaming, flailing, flickering lights, smoke, and vibrations would do a decent job of getting people to look up from their iPhones.

That's not the point. The fact that people have items out (and are possibly blocking exit rows etc), and are not fully aware of the events leading up to the situation is likely to have some impact on the eventual outcome.

> None of those restrictions are in place to make you listen to the attendants. They are in place because takeoff/landing is generally the part of the flight that is bumpiest and with the most maneuvering. Flight attendants (legitimately) don't want to clean soda off the ceiling or get hit by a suitcase.

This is a side benefit for flight attendants and other passengers. Having people and carts moving in the cabin at these times, and in the event of a situation on board makes for a much worse situation than would otherwise be the case. The additional blockages of exit rows, and obstacle of tables being down creates additional confusion. In addition having tables down will result in injuries to seated passengers who are slammed into them.

Having a "contractor" role there is going to throw off salary. If this is a typical contractor role then it is likely to be much higher. Does anyone have an idea how many contractors Google employ?

I listened to an NPR segment on this topic and it seems like Congress has several ways around doing the things that journalists think can be forced through. I'm an immigrant to the US so this a learning exercise for me, perhaps someone else can explain in more detail.

I think I saw an old style Python class in there.

In all likelihood it was probably compromised through some other means than the software. I'm sure the software got a lot of attention in terms of security but surrounding systems were neglected.

I don't think they would install a service to start the helper program. Service and desktop interaction has been changed since Vista. IIRC this was to prevent the shatter attack that allowed Window messages to be passed between services and applications. I haven't looked but I think it could add the helper to the startup items for a user, or create a scheduled task.

You don't have to use regsvr32. Registration-free COM (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973913.aspx) has been around for a while. I wonder why this was not used, or if there is a limitation with certain types of COM objects.

Wikipedia has some coverage of the flight control modes mentioned at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes_(electroni...

I don't see how benchmarks like these are really useful to anyone other than the author. I care more about reliability than raw performance on a simple test, so I would rather see a fairly complex application of average quality being run under load.

Why not ask questions that you've solved yourself with much effort and googling? That would mean that that knowledge is captured on SO for easier access by others.

Distribute. See http://python-distribute.org/pip_distribute.png