Vic-nyc

This would be a very interesting and timely movie, since we're approaching a cycle when conglomerates are, once again, consolidating into ever-bigger entities. (think AT&T trying to buy T-mobile as a small example).

I would also recommend Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" that discusses media monopolies in the U.S. in historical perspective, from the telegraph and early telephone on to movie studios and on to the Internet nowadays. As the book explains, the Internet itself in its current open form is a historical aberration, similar to the multitude of choice in the early days of radio which was short-lived, to be soon replaced by monopolies under the government's helping hand. In fact, many technological inventions would not even have been possible when they happened (and some were delayed by decades) because of large monopolies. The origination of the Internet itself, the book explains, is a direct result of the splitting of AT&T in 1984, which allowed, for example the standard modem jack to exist (jacks and equipment were proprietary before that), and which disallowed AT&T from getting in the Internet business as an ISP. It seems that these lessons have begun to be, once again, forgotten by our modern generation. The solution to all this would be that the government properly fulfills its role of ensuring free market access and prevention of monopolies. It would also entail what's termed a "separations principle", the creation of distance between each of the major layers in the information economy.

Why just Flash though? I thought Flash was on its way out. Other than that, interesting move. Looks like there is increased interest these days toward live streaming.(Youtube live was announced recently as well)

This is what drop.io should have been all along!

I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques. To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.

That is exactly what I needed in my life...another social network! I had a feeling something was missing and now it's obvious that it's the lack of enough online 'social networks'..

Short summary of the article. The outage was caused by the introduction of new requirements by LSE for end-of-day price reporting. The data vendors were the ones who had the responsibility to adhere to these new rules, by making changes to their systems. Unfortunately, the "big bang" approach to the switch-over proved fatal.

From the article:

“I am astonished they did not run the systems in parallel,” said a source at one of the major data vendors. “At least for a few weeks or months as necessary.”

The LSE argues that it gave plenty of proper testing and preparation time, and that the vendors should have been ready. It has been working with them to resolve the issues.

Care to provide a few examples?

I have more modest needs- I would like to know a few practical reasons why I would choose to invest time in learning it vs one of the other non-mainstream & mainstream languages out there. That being said, I understand there's always value in learning something new.

I am a developer, and in the past I used to be a proponent of "agility". These days if I am interviewing for a job and I hear that the company is using "Agile practices", I generally try to avoid it like the plague.

I believe there are 3 main factors for software projects to succeed: one is the technology and the skill level of the tech team; the second, very important, are the business requirements (are we building the right thing, and with the right priorities?); the third is the level of communication between team members. Now "Agility" (Scrum/etc) really addresses only the 3rd point.

And herein lies the dogmatism that others have mentioned -- a lot of these companies who do "Agile" usually do so because they have serious problems, and they think "Agile" is a magic bullet that will solve them. This is extremely wrong and dangerous - if your problems are caused by crappy technology or (very often) by the fact that you don't understand what you're trying to build, then throwing scrum meetings at developers will alienate them even further.

What I also see in these companies that are so adamant about Scrum/etc, is management who doesn't understand technology. Therefore they use the "Agile" weapon as one of their only ways to give them a sense that they are in "control" of the situation. They neglect the other parts because they don't understand them.

Believe it or not, in this case I did not have a clone of that external library, since I am using it as a jar. I was therefore relying on GitHub for browsing the actual source code.

I had quite a scare. I was searching for this fairly popular repo and when I saw it was gone, I was afraid the author took to the hills like _why. I then thought maybe I've done something wrong when I saw that all my history and repos were completely gone. Finally, twitter revealed they are having problems.

It's been down for over an hour. For some of us who work on projects during weekends, this IS one of the busiest times.

I don't know about you but seeing mine and other people's repositories and history completely gone is unsettling, to say the least.

And regarding being able to work without it - well, I happen to need to look into the source code for some of the libraries I depend on.