No, it really hasn't. In most cases the new reCAPTCHAs actually take longer to solve than the old ones.
The old variant which makes you read street numbers is pretty quick and painless - type in 3 or 4 digits and you're done. With the new one, first you have to figure out what it wants you to identify (street signs? storefronts? lakes? mountains? food?), and then scan through a bunch of small, poorly focused images. Even if you get it right, many times it asks you to complete two or three separate challenges before it lets you through.
The only time the new version is more usable is when you run into the one old variant which is virtually unsolvable.[1] I actually wonder if some of these even have solutions. There have been countless times where it's rejected an answer I was sure was correct.
I would not take a startup that is outsourcing their development seriously. All of the institutional knowledge of how a product works goes right out the door. If you cannot fix your own product if it breaks, do you really own it?
Naur's "programming as theory building" essay [1]. E.g.
> programming properly should be regarded as an activity by
> which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of
> insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This
> suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more
> common notion, that programming should be regarded as a
> production of a program and certain other texts
This suggests that it might not be a great idea to outsource
understanding. The entire essay is worth a read.
Yosefk also gave a fairly amusing characterisation of what it
is to work for a software company [2]:
> Basically the "knowledge worker's" contract is
> something like this:
>
> > We'll give you a precisely defined salary
> > and a benefits package. In return, we
> > request that you handle some problems that
> > we're told we're having. We hope that you'll
> > solve them well enough to prevent us from
> > having to know what they were in the first
> > place. Please help us maintain the feeling
> > that we own an asset similar to land or gold
> > or something. Please keep the realization
> > that we're more like the operator of a
> > flying circus than a landowner from
> > disturbing us. And certainly, never, ever
> > ask us what to do with any of the moving
> > pieces of this flying circus, because we
> > seriously have no idea.
I disagree. Many companies I know started out by outsourcing development to some sort of agency and then brought some development in-house after the product is finished. Many agencies will give you a much stronger initial product, since they're used to making good v1 products.
Usually to be successful, the non-technical team must have complementary strengths, such as great domain knowledge and industry contacts, good sales ability etc. Purely technical startups are rarely successes outside of Silicon Valley, usually the tech needs to be married to a strong non-technical team that sets up sales, distribution networks, operations, etc
Sure. However, the value of their company is really going to be the network and community they build. I believe they are planning to bring development in house as soon as they can afford it, but are trying to get the project going with the overseas team.
I agree. I mentioned a couple of times that they should learn the platform, or at least the underlying language. If not enough to code, at least enough to do quality control (code reviews).
However, they are both working apart from the startup (I believe) so it's tough for them to pick up one more thing.
That's a great point. It's one thing to be able to program it yourself, and another to understand enough to ask the right questions about the code to learn how it works.
If they had the ability to QA the outsourced team's work at a semi-granular level, I'd imagine there would be a lot less disconnect between the work done and expectations.
And one suggestion I offered was to find someone (some uninterested third party) to spend a few hours a week doing code reviews, so at least they have some insight. Of course, it'd be better if it were one of them, but some technical insight is better than next to none.
Replace 'older candidates' with 'candidates who are less likely to sacrifice their work/life balance.'
1. Candidates that demand compensation for sacrificing their work/life balance are more expensive. Tech isn't that hard to learn. You can get pretty good at a particular tech within 2 years of learning it. Why pay a candidate tons of money for them to give up their work/life balance, when you can hire one that will give it up for little?
2. Candidates that value their non-work time don't know the latest tech. They spend their evenings with their families / kids / friends / hobby whereas those who do are constantly learning the latest stacks at home to benefit their work.
3. Candidates that would rather go do something not work related after work don't pass the 'beer test' with those who's life choices are work-centric.
It's just a low power FM station with a raspberry pi in it as a controller. It would be highly illegal to use this device in most modern nations without a license.
higher power. The n900's transmitter was 15nW (1.5e-8 W), which is why it was legal. For a claimed 6km radius, I would assume this is about 3-7W output.
This seems like a bad idea. It would make targeting dissent with kinetic means very easy. It's one of the whole reasons that shortwave broadcasts are still around.
How so? What off the shelf guidance systems exist to home in on FM radio?
I'm sure there are tons of anti-SAM guidance packages which will steer something towards a SAM transmitter, but that's in an entirely different frequency band from what I remember.
Terminal guidance systems tend to be in the UHF and SHF bands, generally gigahertz and up where as FM is VHF at about 100MHz.
It'd take a fair amount of work to re-engineer a guidance package to find such a lower power FM transmitter and perform terminal guidance on it. Especially when the world is awash in FM all around there too.
It's a very interesting talk but from what I saw that's not a terminal guidance package by any means. The antennas would need to be too big to fit into a missile. Also it doesn't work very well in an urban environment as the end of the talk shows.
There's a huge difference between targeting the radar of an aircraft or a ship or a mobile SAM site and targeting a cell phone.
You don't need a complex guidance package when traditional direction finding and triangulation will produce coordinates that can be used to direct artillery, air strikes, IED, etc. Sigint targeting is quite common.
