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Very comprehensive article - I've learn't a lot, and amongst other things I think I now understand how "rainbow tables" work (although as the article points out, they are less used these days).
Amongst other things, one of the things I've taken away from this is that if you are hashing users passwords, you should pick your hash carefully, and always use salt. I think it's almost criminal that companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo aren't doing this - considering some of the high profile failures recently I would hope that all big companies have plans to audit how user password hashes are stored in their databases.
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It's that half password that's the problem! Only use whole passwords, they're twice as strong! 
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Actually, its more expenential, not linear.
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If you define a half-password as having half the characters sure. But I have conveniently not defined it, to be able to protect myself in situations such as this!
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Thanks for passing this on Terrence. Really valuable.
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The solution? Create a (mostly free) micro server on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and use it as a “poor man’s VPN” by routing all traffic from your laptop through the server and from there out onto the internet. The worked marvelously on the Boston guest wifi, and as I’m writing this it’s letting me connect to EC2 servers via SSH on a Southwest flight. This is easier than it sounds to set up, provided you have directions. So…here you go! And now there's no longer any excuse for taking any time off at all. Get back to work.
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As we've shifted from thousands to hundreds of millions of computer users, much history is lost. Few realize that the backslash character did not exist in much text usage prior to 1961, and in no computer until 1958. A paper by Eric Fischer, submitted to the Annals of the History of Computing in early 2000 (and not yet published), unearthed a backslash on the keyboard of the Teletype Wheatstone Perforator, circa 1937-1945. But this was unknown to data processing people, who were stuck even up to the FORTRAN era (beginning 1955) with the Hollerith punch card code. Here is the story for the record. You can thank IBM, Algol and STRETCH.
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There is another technological shift conspiring against many web frameworks that isn't focused on performance, but instead focused on "ease of use" - which in many cases may hit far closer to home. That shift is the reorganization of MVC.... What thousands and thousands of Rails developers discovered upon moving to backbone is that they no longer needed their fancy template views. Their backend became a system that pushed JSON over HTTP. Very clean and very simple. Is MVC going to the great pattern library in the sky?
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Hallelujah I skipped that one then and stayed stuck in outdated WebForms?
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For Brave, the team at Pixar had to deal with a hero or rather heroine, who is on screen for almost every shot, but who needed wild, yet beautiful hair. The simulation department needed to develop a technique and approach not only viable on a hand crafted trailer shot, but something that could be used almost ‘out of box’ on most shots, or the film was simply never going to make its deadline. Warning: this article contains plot spoilers.
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Automobiles are already considered "computers on wheels" by security experts. Vehicles are filled with dozens of tiny computers known as electronic control units, or ECUs, that require tens of millions of lines of computer code to manage interconnected systems including engines, brakes and navigation as well as lighting, ventilation and entertainment. Cars also use the same wireless technologies that power cell phones and Bluetooth headsets, which makes them vulnerable to remote attacks that are widely known to criminal hackers. Un5@fe at any speed.
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Cold storage is unusual because the focus needs to be singular. How can we deliver the best price per capacity now and continue to reduce it over time? The focus on price over performance, price over latency, price over bandwidth actually made the problem more interesting. With most products and services, it’s usually possible to be the best on at least some dimensions even if not on all. On cold storage, to be successful, the price per capacity target needs to be hit. On Glacier, the entire project was focused on delivering $0.01/GB/Month with high redundancy and security. I'm ready. And you're ready. It's my job. To freeze you.
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It seems every time I come across a story about the Mars Curiosity rover there will be many people commenting on the technology used starting with "Why don't they just..?" and usually pointing out things like: the processor in their smart phone is way faster than the one of Mars, or they have way more memory on their iPad, or their digital camera is way better than the one sending back pictures. These "Why don't they just..?" questions are both annoying and to be expected. Annoying because the underlying thought is "Those NASA/JPL guys are so dumb LOL" and to be expected and encouraged because we wouldn't make any progress without asking questions and, in particular, asking why. Try building one yourself and tell us how easy it is.
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Stuff used in space has always been pretty crude because it has to survive the radiation, and you are not going to normally send a repair man to fix it. Of course we did screw up with the Space Telescope. They try to be extremely conservative in part just because of the problems that kept the space telescope from operating sub par for so many years before they finally sent up a fix.
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Which space telescope do you mean?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Do I miss the days when Nvidia drivers and chipset launches could boost performance by 20-30% across a huge range of applications? Yes. But would I trade them for the data destroying sound card conflicts, substandard driver support, and days when Windows would BSOD if you crossed your eyes at it? Not really. And I like the fact that the computer I built for my parents in 2008 is still “blazing fast” with the addition of an SSD and a bit more RAM, as opposed to needing an all-new system with a new OS installation. If it ain't broke, don't replace it.
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Just wish my laptop lasted long enough for it to become Obsolescent. I also like to put in a clean OS every so often to get rid of all the cob webs that developer in a computer over time. Unfortunatly, I usually end of do this because of some problem rather than on my own terms, and maybe if I did it earlier, I would have been saved loss of data.
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My laptop has been obsolete for some time now. Did a fresh install of Windows 7 not too long ago, and last night I had some bad sectors on my hard drive screw me over. Might have to upgrade to an SSD. Though, I'm thinking of just skipping that and going straight to a MacBook Pro with Retina. One reason is that I recently upgraded my laptop to its maximum supported RAM... a mere 4GB. And because the CPU is old, I can't run VMs. And because the CPU is slow and the video card sucks, I can't play Blu-ray. Oh yes, it may be time for a new machine.
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There are a number of great version control systems out there; the most important thing is to pick one and learn to use it effectively. No matter which source control system you decide to use, there are a number of universal principles that will help you to get the most out of source control. Commit early, commit often.
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Use Branches and Tags
I'll add that creating branches can be great when there are multiple shared environments (e.g., production machines and a shared development machine). It can be pretty annoying when you make a change, toss it on dev, then a coworker does the same but does not include your change. Having a dev branch solves that. And tagging can be great if you really care about your versions (e.g., so you can apply bug fixes to an old version of your software, which would be important to support people with old licenses).
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I thought the same thing when I read the article... I was surprised it didn't mention branching when it talked about not breaking the build. 
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Keep files small and focused. Avoid the need for merging. Constant merging is a sign of a poor process.
Choose a system that was designed specifically for software (i.e. not Subversion).
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I've been using SVN successfully for quite a while now... I don't think it's bad at all. I've used Mercurial as well and I can see why people like it as well but having some source control period is better than not having any at all.
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Albert Holguin wrote: I've been using SVN successfully for quite a while now
Many people do. I've been subjected to it for the last two years, at two companies. The team I'm on now is trying to switch to TFS.
So far I've only use two version control systems. The other was a Code Management System -- it therefore has features specific to managing code, whereas Subversion does not have such features.
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