I've been reporting the Yahoo! accounts that have DomainKeys verification since those are, in theory, legitimate and not forged. And a few days after I send the abuse report (include the full headers), I get a note saying that the TOS issue has been resolved.
I would guess that in the meantime that if the account has pumped out a few million spams, then the traffic would have put up flags, but if that hasn't shut them down, perhaps my email did. Hopefully. Otherwise that DomainKeys thingie will be meaningless. If it already isn't.
The reason Windows has so much malware problems is because it's the most common operating system used...
And this is why I'm switching to OS X for desktop and (already been) Linux for server. I'm sick and tired of having to go scrounging for anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-pop-up, anti-anything. I finally bought a couple years' worth of Spybot and all it does is call everything it finds in my temp directory "db trojan". On a PostgreSQL install Spybot wiped out some files that were necessary for operation, so I had to make it disregard yet another type of threat. Sheesh.
So now all y'all just keep using Windows, y'hear? I want to be safe.
Places like NextAlarm.com do broadband alarm monitoring. They also say that they can help you modify your current alarm system to let it be monitored over broadband.
Caveat: some of their links were broken the last time I checked. Makes you wonder.
Obligatory disclaimer: I've just hit their website looking for a similar solution; not a customer (yet).
Whoa, you've described about every company that went bust back then. Except my company. The CEO was deathly afraid to release product, thinking he'd have one chance and one chance only, so he kept putting it off, still grubbing for more money (and diluting our shares). I think they still haven't released.
And random 20 minutes chunks of the movie will be repeated before major scenes so the movie will be nearly 4 hours long with only 80 minutes of storyline.
Well, we're back to this old subject. And it's the usual business-friendly administration that's complaining. So what else is new?
What's funny is that everyone wants someone with five years of experience in.Net or J2EE, and, duh, that's not what you get from someone just out of college. They'll have the basic building blocks and not specific in-depth library knowledge or CM or software engineering skills. And just like the job ads where the poster wants so many specific skills that they certainly must have someone specific in mind but they have to post the job anyway to satisfy some bogus equal access requirement, no matter what the U.S. schools churn out, there still won't either be enough skilled kids coming out of school that have what they want.
And so it will remain that the U.S. schools are not churning out enough CS grads for Microsoft to grab the top 0.5% of them to supply its own sweat shops as their talent leaves when they vest.
On another note, who would want to go into CS/IT anyway? Too-long hours working for an employer that doesn't want you to follow any sort of process because that slows down development, or at least visible development. And they'll let you know the software requirements as soon as they themselves know it, whenever that might be. Just make it work, dammit! And as soon as you hit your late 30s, if you don't have the vertical knowledge du jour or the latest sexy language skills, you'll be replaced by someone out of school that's willing to work twice as many hours as you do (since you just picked up a family) at half the cost, and you know that there's some starving guy in India or Russia that'd be more than happy to take your job.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd have gone into business where I could hire and fire IT types to make my quarterly projections.
CS/IT types are fungible, expendable, and an overhead item to get rid of as soon as things get tight. Haven't you learned yet??
What I find interesting is that, except for perhaps startups or trivial projects, nowhere except for the "projects" or "software engineering" class, which everybody hated, did school teach us what it was going to be like out in the Real World(tm). Usually in single-semester CS classes, you have several "labs" or "machine problems" (depending upon where you go to school), and usually they aren't more than, say, a couple thousand lines of code for each one. And then in the projects class, they taught it like a Waterfall lifecycle, which you can think of as somewhat of one iteration through a Tornado lifecycle.
So what you're left with is not much of an idea of what is going on outside academia other than perhaps "really large programs." That is why everybody that I interviewed with coming out of school in the 90s asked if I had taken a projects class.
If I were to design a curriculum to get people ready for how things are after school, I'd make a two semester course requirement:
The first semester I would have the students go through a survey-type class where different types of methodologies were explained, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each, with an example of representative types of applications that used each method. Perhaps a telephone switch used with a Waterfall methodology. And go on from there. This would go up to whatever the latest fad was. This would also include the prerequisites for starting a project, which hopefully are common to all projects -- you would use something like the material from
The Software Project Survival Guide. You'd also look at different maturity measurement methods, such as SEI CMMI levels. And then a dose of the real-world with mistakes that people make during software projects, such as excessive "tailoring" of the process, giving up the process during mid-iteration to code like mad, etc., and ways to get out of such software development mistakes.
You would also get taught concepts such as Configuration Management (with a survey of different tools, such as CVS, Subversion, ClearCase), unit- versus integration- versus system-testing and tools to perform each.
The second semester would be the actual project where you would use the appropriate methodology for the size, number of people, and time to work on the project. You would try to make it as realistic as possible, including requirements gathering with inadequate requirements, bad business contracts, interacting with QA for getting a test plan up and running, etc. Then halfway through the project you could have additional requirements added by the customer and see how to successfully manage such changes.
Another course or portion of a projects course would be doing what most of us end up doing anyway: modifying other people's code. This would also go over the different types of code modification: new features addition, optimizing code for better speed, user interface changes, etc. It would also survey different tools, such as debuggers and profilers. It would also look at the hows and whys of refactoring.
All of these are necessary to successful real-world software development, IMHO. Unless you go to an underfunded start-up ("OMG, why aren't you coding!!!), or you work at Google.
Without this, I think a lot of people are going into software development thinking it's all fun, with this rosy picture of working on original code, and thinking that testing what you do after it all works.
You didn't see anything. Put away the tools. If your DSL or cable router gets a new IP address whenever you reconnect, reboot it. All will end in tears if you tell anyone about it. Regardless of what it is, it'll be your fault, you were purposefully hacking to rip off the place, and you're trying to extort the company.
Go outside, smell the fresh air, walk around a little, and think about how much of this you'll miss when you're thrown behind bars in PMITA prison, with no hope of release because you somehow violated the Patriot Act.
There, that's better. I guarantee that by the time you go back inside, you'll have no interest in telling anyone of any vulnerabilities. You're (still) in control of your own life. And it should stay that way,
I've since opened an account with TD Waterhouse (aka Ameritrade)...
Ameritrade/TD-W also let its email addresses out, too. My specifically-for-Ameritrade email address got vanilla (same type as my other accounts; not investing at all) spam. So I changed it. Again.
We have a culture where I work where a message from the boss is expected to be read and replied to immediately, whereas anything sent to the boss (including the aforementioned reply) you can expect to be replied to any time from a day later to the end of the Bush administration.
Teaching somebody programming in primary school is like teaching someone to be a millionaire, but when they get out to the real world, it's not like that at all (plus they don't get the million dollars). There is a lot of competition from others overseas for jobs here unless you can walk on water. I think that unless you're totally passionate about programming, and can stand that software engineering crap (yes, I know it's necessary) that takes all the fun out of programming, you'd better look elsewhere for a job, unless you're going to spend your life working on open source projects.
It sucks trying to do it for a living, when everybody is doing more with less, budget cuts, long hours due to PHB shortcomings, etc. Yes, I'm in the middle of a four-month long crunch mode due to management shortsightednsess; does it show?
People work better when they get enough sleep and aren't working extremely long hours! Furthermore, workers who are able to have a life outside of work are happier, get sick less, and are able to spend time with their families!
Um, that's almost besides the point. You neeeeeed to have a measurable metric of effort, and the only one there is, regardless of actual output, is how much time you're spending visibly working. If the product is late, there's pressure from above to increase effort. How do you measure effort? Um, work smarter? Nope. Um, cut out the unnecessary features, or do some sort of triage? Nope. How about putting in more hours? Hmmmm... yes, the bigboss will see people here working long hours, so you must be putting in more effort.
Otherwise how do they know that you know that you're serious about the situation and that you're not taking your burden lightly? After all, it's the developers' fault that the product is late. You should have known in your estimates that you would need to be more flexible and responsive to the customers' needs. You can't hide behind the agreed-to and signed-off requirements. C'mon you've been in the business long enough to know the score. Butch up, and give up your personal life for the company. Remember, there's no I in Team, and we can replace your ass by someone in India that really wants to work. Go Team Go!
It could very well be that the customer realized that they just bought something that was either totally inappropriate or that they spent more than they should, so now they're trying to get out of it by complaining so much that you'll give them their money back somehow, some way. Better to do that than to lose face and admit their idiocy.
What we have here is no accountability, no checks and balances, no responsibility for actions. Basically what we have here is a monarchy.
And either some "emergency" will be declared right before '08 elections, preventing the polls from opening and a transfer to the next president, and/or Prince Jeb will be next in line and will win courtesy of Diebold.
If I were a betting person, I would put money on the EU not seeing one bloody red cent (or centime or whatever they call it) of money from Microsoft. Obviously the EU does not know who they're dealing with.
Since folks in Las Vegas bet on anything, I'd like to know what odds they're putting that Microsoft won't pay.
They took my mother's money, reformatted and reinstalled her OS (losing all the family photos she'd been sent), and rendered her laptop unable to dial out. They said that there was nothing else they could do.
Just as hours put into working is [not] a useful metric to determine dedication and effort, mySpace and their ilk is another way to [sometimes inaccurately] see what kind of person you're hiring. It's more information. Not the best information, but more information.
What, you want something more? Okay, only go into software development (I assume you want to do that instead of being a sysadmin -- both are IT) if you really, really enjoy it.
You still want more? Okay, if you're going to do software development, it's going to be nothing like what you learned in school unless you take a "Software Engineering" course where they do requirements, analysis, high-level design, low-level design, coding, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing, etc. That's what it's really like.
Unless you get into one of those start-ups where it's, "OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODWHYARENTYOUCODING!!!!" 24/7.
Here's something else: get a MBA right after your CS degree, and then you can be the one that outsources software development, until you figure out that it costs roughly the same, all told, once you get back your first pile of crap and then have it re-done.
Too much for you? Okay, we'll go back to the simple answer: Don't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be "behaviour", mate.
DT
I would guess that in the meantime that if the account has pumped out a few million spams, then the traffic would have put up flags, but if that hasn't shut them down, perhaps my email did. Hopefully. Otherwise that DomainKeys thingie will be meaningless. If it already isn't.
DT
And this is why I'm switching to OS X for desktop and (already been) Linux for server. I'm sick and tired of having to go scrounging for anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-pop-up, anti-anything. I finally bought a couple years' worth of Spybot and all it does is call everything it finds in my temp directory "db trojan". On a PostgreSQL install Spybot wiped out some files that were necessary for operation, so I had to make it disregard yet another type of threat. Sheesh.
So now all y'all just keep using Windows, y'hear? I want to be safe.
DT
Caveat: some of their links were broken the last time I checked. Makes you wonder.
Obligatory disclaimer: I've just hit their website looking for a similar solution; not a customer (yet).
DT
DT
Ex-Lax. That'll get you going.
You must be a fan of the History Channel.
DT
Okay, my big question is where is this "spoon" thing I keep hearing about?
DT
What's funny is that everyone wants someone with five years of experience in .Net or J2EE, and, duh, that's not what you get from someone just out of college. They'll have the basic building blocks and not specific in-depth library knowledge or CM or software engineering skills. And just like the job ads where the poster wants so many specific skills that they certainly must have someone specific in mind but they have to post the job anyway to satisfy some bogus equal access requirement, no matter what the U.S. schools churn out, there still won't either be enough skilled kids coming out of school that have what they want.
And so it will remain that the U.S. schools are not churning out enough CS grads for Microsoft to grab the top 0.5% of them to supply its own sweat shops as their talent leaves when they vest.
On another note, who would want to go into CS/IT anyway? Too-long hours working for an employer that doesn't want you to follow any sort of process because that slows down development, or at least visible development. And they'll let you know the software requirements as soon as they themselves know it, whenever that might be. Just make it work, dammit! And as soon as you hit your late 30s, if you don't have the vertical knowledge du jour or the latest sexy language skills, you'll be replaced by someone out of school that's willing to work twice as many hours as you do (since you just picked up a family) at half the cost, and you know that there's some starving guy in India or Russia that'd be more than happy to take your job.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd have gone into business where I could hire and fire IT types to make my quarterly projections.
CS/IT types are fungible, expendable, and an overhead item to get rid of as soon as things get tight. Haven't you learned yet??
DT
So what you're left with is not much of an idea of what is going on outside academia other than perhaps "really large programs." That is why everybody that I interviewed with coming out of school in the 90s asked if I had taken a projects class.
If I were to design a curriculum to get people ready for how things are after school, I'd make a two semester course requirement:
The first semester I would have the students go through a survey-type class where different types of methodologies were explained, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each, with an example of representative types of applications that used each method. Perhaps a telephone switch used with a Waterfall methodology. And go on from there. This would go up to whatever the latest fad was. This would also include the prerequisites for starting a project, which hopefully are common to all projects -- you would use something like the material from The Software Project Survival Guide. You'd also look at different maturity measurement methods, such as SEI CMMI levels. And then a dose of the real-world with mistakes that people make during software projects, such as excessive "tailoring" of the process, giving up the process during mid-iteration to code like mad, etc., and ways to get out of such software development mistakes.
You would also get taught concepts such as Configuration Management (with a survey of different tools, such as CVS, Subversion, ClearCase), unit- versus integration- versus system-testing and tools to perform each.
The second semester would be the actual project where you would use the appropriate methodology for the size, number of people, and time to work on the project. You would try to make it as realistic as possible, including requirements gathering with inadequate requirements, bad business contracts, interacting with QA for getting a test plan up and running, etc. Then halfway through the project you could have additional requirements added by the customer and see how to successfully manage such changes.
Another course or portion of a projects course would be doing what most of us end up doing anyway: modifying other people's code. This would also go over the different types of code modification: new features addition, optimizing code for better speed, user interface changes, etc. It would also survey different tools, such as debuggers and profilers. It would also look at the hows and whys of refactoring.
All of these are necessary to successful real-world software development, IMHO. Unless you go to an underfunded start-up ("OMG, why aren't you coding!!!), or you work at Google.
Without this, I think a lot of people are going into software development thinking it's all fun, with this rosy picture of working on original code, and thinking that testing what you do after it all works.
DT
Go outside, smell the fresh air, walk around a little, and think about how much of this you'll miss when you're thrown behind bars in PMITA prison, with no hope of release because you somehow violated the Patriot Act.
There, that's better. I guarantee that by the time you go back inside, you'll have no interest in telling anyone of any vulnerabilities. You're (still) in control of your own life. And it should stay that way,
DT
Ameritrade/TD-W also let its email addresses out, too. My specifically-for-Ameritrade email address got vanilla (same type as my other accounts; not investing at all) spam. So I changed it. Again.
DT
DT
It sucks trying to do it for a living, when everybody is doing more with less, budget cuts, long hours due to PHB shortcomings, etc. Yes, I'm in the middle of a four-month long crunch mode due to management shortsightednsess; does it show?
DT
Um, that's almost besides the point. You neeeeeed to have a measurable metric of effort, and the only one there is, regardless of actual output, is how much time you're spending visibly working. If the product is late, there's pressure from above to increase effort. How do you measure effort? Um, work smarter? Nope. Um, cut out the unnecessary features, or do some sort of triage? Nope. How about putting in more hours? Hmmmm... yes, the bigboss will see people here working long hours, so you must be putting in more effort.
Otherwise how do they know that you know that you're serious about the situation and that you're not taking your burden lightly? After all, it's the developers' fault that the product is late. You should have known in your estimates that you would need to be more flexible and responsive to the customers' needs. You can't hide behind the agreed-to and signed-off requirements. C'mon you've been in the business long enough to know the score. Butch up, and give up your personal life for the company. Remember, there's no I in Team, and we can replace your ass by someone in India that really wants to work. Go Team Go!
DT
Too late (if you live in the USA). We already have one.
DT
Perhaps too plain and simple an answer.
DT
And either some "emergency" will be declared right before '08 elections, preventing the polls from opening and a transfer to the next president, and/or Prince Jeb will be next in line and will win courtesy of Diebold.
DT
Since folks in Las Vegas bet on anything, I'd like to know what odds they're putting that Microsoft won't pay.
DT
And just like the game, they probably didn't write it themselves, either.
DT
So, yeah, they're good for that.
DT
Where I've been, once IT takes control of the databases, you never see them (or your data) again.
DT
And information is good.
DT
Plus, you know, the Universe revolves around the Earth. Even the Sun Herald says so.
That's why we don't need science. Especially in Kansas.
DT (with tongue firmly planted in cheek)
What, you want something more? Okay, only go into software development (I assume you want to do that instead of being a sysadmin -- both are IT) if you really, really enjoy it.
You still want more? Okay, if you're going to do software development, it's going to be nothing like what you learned in school unless you take a "Software Engineering" course where they do requirements, analysis, high-level design, low-level design, coding, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing, etc. That's what it's really like.
Unless you get into one of those start-ups where it's, "OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODWHYARENTYOUCODING!!!!" 24/7.
Here's something else: get a MBA right after your CS degree, and then you can be the one that outsources software development, until you figure out that it costs roughly the same, all told, once you get back your first pile of crap and then have it re-done.
Too much for you? Okay, we'll go back to the simple answer: Don't do it.
DT