jmix

This is obvious if you took a DB course, and if you didn't, you have no business building a DB. Sadly, all the NoSQL junkware was built by people who didn't.

The example is flawed -- if there is an exception incurred before or during the sending of the email, the operation will be erroneously marked as "cancelled" without having completed all of the cancellation flow. Namely, with the example as given, it is possible to have a cancelled order for which an email has not been sent out.

Moving the second line (the one that changes the status to "cancelled") to the end fixes this issue, though it does not implement "exactly once" semantics for the sending of the email. If "exactly once" is desirable, then additional logic is required. But in every case, the example as given is incorrect.

What a self-indulgent writeup. The article came nowhere near answering the central question: what are the devs doing other than constantly changing the name of the project and how is this thing better than gimp.

Good riddance to these tools because this technique, of relying on embedded strings in the code, is inherently insecure and unreliable. You can only really on it when you know you can trust the build, and yet they are used in cases where the build is of unknown etiology, so there's an inherent mismatch between when the tool is used and what it does.

Thanks for the clarification. On a related note do you understand where the X.509 Name Constraints effort sits? Which, if any, browsers implement it? If it's not 100%, do you know why browsers are hesitant to deploy it?

Since it takes a while to digest the report after having seen it, chances are that they were in possession of the report far earlier than T-400ms but waited until they were in a time window where they knew the regulators would not come after them.

This is how fortunes are made. By taking advantage of loopholes in the regulatory mechanism.

If a data store touted as fault-tolerant isn't fault-tolerant, it's broken.

These articles invariably end in "does not follow" fallacies.

In this case, he gets his accounts hacked, and his advice is "don't use any cloud-hosted email." Ok, but what evidence have you presented that shows that self-hosted email is any more secure? At least, a set of professionals were able to restore your account -- I doubt that would have happened if you had been hosting your own email server.

I have mixed feelings about this announcement. On the one hand, I really enjoyed Triumph of the Nerds. On the other, Cringely came off as a self-oriented, egotistical guy (I remember the scene where he threatened the TV crew with a piece of bat when his plane build project wasn't going well) with few unique insights and little depth.

Now that I think about it, these two facts are in line with his announcement. What he brought to the scene was to act as a tech interpreter for the baby boomers. The novelty has worn off and he's tapped out. This seems very similar to what happened to Dvorak, and what happens to a lot of bloggers: he exhausted his material and the world passed him by.

He does not need to be able to point to an extant, better alternative for his criticisms to be "credible."

BTW, I can't believe you're implying that his post is not credible. The practical outcome of your demand for a solution is to shut down legitimate criticism.

In what entitled universe do you live in where a guy who carefully and patiently points out problems is also obligated to solve every single one of them?

Also, do you really need someone to spell out the alternatives to MySQL? There are too many to list.

LaTeX is the geek's connection to Gutenberg and his legacy. Surely your grandma knows Gutenberg.

Yes, we all follow what you have said, but I see no guarantees offered by Wolfram, the service provider. You can pretend to be offended and avoid the question, but at the end of the day, the assurance you are trying to provide here is not legally binding and you know it. If you really believe in your last paragraph, why don't you have the Wolfram legal staff put these guarantees in writing, into the ToS and Privacy Policy?

At $600/hour for a lawyer and 30 minutes of their time to add a sentence or two, it'll cost $300 to make the changes. That's well under however much your time cost to make unbacked assurances online. And at the end of the day, your service and your users will be better off for it.