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Microsoft Security Makes "Worst Jobs" List
Stony Stevenson asks, rhetorically, "What do whale-feces researchers, hazmat divers, and employees of Microsoft's Security Response Center have in common? They all made Popular Science magazine's 2007 list of the absolute worst jobs in science." Quoting: "The MSRC ranked near the middle as the sixth-worst job in this year's list.. 'We did rate the Microsoft security researcher as less-bad than the people who prepare the carcasses for dissection in biology laboratories,' Moyer said. Moyer didn't have to think long when asked whether he'd rather have the number 10-ranked whale research job. 'Whale feces or working at Microsoft? I would probably be the whale feces researcher,' he said. 'Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?'" Here's the Popular Mechanics list all on one page.
Microsoft actually has security researchers? What do they actually do?
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
Many years ago in my former career I had to treat a guy who had been in a ditch comotose for so long he had maggots well established in every available cavity. Took a while that did.
Not, it has to be said, my fondest memory of that time. It ranks right up there with the odd fact that all tramps poo contains giant lentils.
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
Am I the only one who thinks those jobs sound fairly interesting? The NASA 0g tester would be miserably boring but it pays great, over 120k for 21 days of work. All the other jobs seem pretty interesting and don't seem to be exceedingly dangerous. Considering this is their "worst" job list, I'd love to see their "best" job list.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
From http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/Story?id=32909 63&page=4
2. Oceanographer: Oceanographers' jobs are "getting harder and harder every year," said Ward. Faced with the predictions that by 2048 seafood will no longer exist, coral reefs will vanish in the next decade and that an ever expanding mass of garbage the size of Texas in the North Pacific has caused irreparable damage to the world's water supply, these scientists are charged not only with protecting the health of the ocean, but also with turning the prognosis around.
"Oceanographers are really tasked with just analyzing sad facts on deoxygenating oceans, increased pollution, whole masses of garbage swirling in the middle of the ocean. What it really is, is a testament to how devoted and loyal a bunch of people they are.
"They're working extremely hard on a very difficult problem, but they also are very optimistic people. They believe that we can turn it around and the ocean is a very dynamic living environment and they feel that with the proper care, we can turn it around, but so far that has not been the case," said Ward.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Trouble is, that model's incompatible with Microsoft's business, and it's customers' requirements for DRM.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs.
The clearer and easier to understand MS makes it's system, the worse it is for their business model. That's why there's no way they'll do as you suggest, despite being ordered to by the DOJ and the EU.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I fully expect a 'Microsoft = Ass' article by 2010.
After reading this, I fully expect one by lunchtime tomorrow.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Every now and then my harddrive will start whirring away, when it shouldn't be, and as far as I can tell there is no easy way to tell which process is the culprit in XP. Hell, you ever get one of those "this file is being used by another program" messages and have no idea what program is responsible? I've had to boot into safe mode just to delete a file. And it was an .avi not a system file or anything.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
why would you need to? i know people who have worked for MS and they all say it's a brillant place to work. highly paid as well. i don't by that MS security is a bad place to work, in fact a lot of these are crap examples of a bad job. ones i will pay are hazmat diving for the danger factor and 0g tester for sounding like some kind of middle eastern torture method.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Oceanographers are dedicated to the study and, ideally, salvation of numerous aquatic ecosystems that are in a rapid state of collapse. It's one thing to deal with "bad news" on a regular basis. It's quite another to watch the sea dying right before your eyes. Most of us have become comfortable with our oceans' plight by ignoring it; that is a comfort not easily afforded to oceanographers.
I was also wondering since when solving your self-created problems had become science... Oh, wait, maybe they have a point ;) In any case, I would call it engineering. Or just support. It's not easy work, I wouldn't say that, but science it is not. I think the difference lies in the point that science pursues the mostly detailed understanding of something with not so much a time pressure (just think about it: can you plan scientific progress in advance? On week 4 we will discover this-and-this?), whereas the work at MS security has to be to try to find a least-effort solution, in the shortest time possible.
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