zumda

There were people rallying against slave masters. Yes, back when it was still legal to own slaves. Do you say these activists had nothing to do with abolishing slavery? Do you say they were wrong to be mad at slave masters because it was the law back hen?

I'm surprised that none of them use Heroku. It seemed to be the darling of the startup community for some time.

So, in short, big companies still don't get there doesn't have to be a correlation between GPA, educational background and actual skill to work?

Today with the internet, blogs, Github and other such things, I just don't get it!

I could see a feature were the server side will just be a PaaS-like service, where only the client side code is needed anymore. Database persistence, handling of static assets and all that will be done by the platform, and most people won't know how it works or care.

For example Meteor goes into this direction, though there is still some server-side code involved, most of it is shared with the client, including database access.

Of course we still have long way to go to really abstract this out this far, but I think it will be possible in the future.

To be fair, especially the landing sequence (the only thing they couldn't really patch) was very well defined from the start. They knew exactly what the Rover had to do, when he had to do it and what steps were involved.*

Generally software just doesn't work that way. (But maybe that was that you implied with "some contexts". In that case, I agree with you)

* I'm not saying they weren't trying out things until they decided how to land the Rover, but when they wrote the software they had very clear requirements.

The bar code was actually just a code to initialize the code generation (I think it is based on that randomly generated seed and the time, so that then server and client generate the same keys). You could have also typed in the code by hand.

I'm always dumbfounded when these topics come up and a lot of people start saying how inconvenient it is, that it is all wrong. But these are probably the same people which later accuse Google that they didn't do enough to protect their accounts!

Yes, two factor authentication is a small hassle. Yes, two factor authentication requires a bit to set up. But do you realize how much actually depends on your email account being safe?

For one, how many times did you use Googles OpenID provider? Yes, that's your Gmail account! Or for how many services did you use your Gmail account as the email address? You know that password resets go to that account, right?

Don't do that? Maybe you use Google Calendar, then. So yes, there is actually a lot of sensitive data in there. If you don't believe me, try to get a hold of a friends calendar, and see what you can guess about that person just from the calendar.

Or should someone just post some slander about you on you G+ profile? Or buy some apps from the Android Market? Of course this things never happen to you...

So just take the time to, besides looking at the time or the latest message on your phone, open that stupid app and type that stupid code in! It's not THAT much work!

I see there is a lot of nostalgia in that post that I (and others like me) will probably never understand. But, I still don't see the point.

It's nice that we could buy and old machine and program something on it. But at the same time we could do it in Javascript, on the web with a very pretty interface. So why should we trade all the knowledge, the tools and the languages that we (well, people like you how tend to get all nostalgic over this topic) have built and and write something on an archaic system?

I never had such an old system, yet at the same time, I understand the constraints more or less, I now a bit of assembler, C and still question where this knowledge is really benefiting me. (Though I do find it very interesting!)

If I want to have a constraint environment, I could join a JavaScript 1k challenge and also work with artificial constraints (at the same time I could still enjoy the modern tools, environments and even graphics).

Maybe I just really don't see the point.

And to your last point, I think a better approach would be to show our children either PyGame or even modding tools for modern games. I just don't think a young child would really be that interested in the archaic inner workings of a slow machine, but could be really interested in making mods. I'm not saying there are no such children around (I'm sure there are), I'm just questioning the approach here.

The point isn't the security mechanism, but for consumer products the point is physical location. Without two factor authentication, a sweat shop in China could hack you (and thousand others) easily. With two-factor authentication they would need physical proximity to you, so they won't even try.