Public education should be a privilege, not a right. Then maybe more so-called "students" would appreciate it, and student success rates would be better.
Ehhh... You lost me right about here. This is definitely non sequiter. While I agree with your statement about making sure that school officials are not harrassed, you jump far too quickly to the conclusion that public education should not be a right.
Funding public education is one of the few things that makes competition fair between both rich and poor students. You believe that poor behavior of other students shouldn't detract from your child's education, and rightly so. What I can't believe is that in the same breath you talk about the right to take away someone else's child's opportunity to be educated. How selfish and greedy can you get? The sad part is that I bet you're proud of this misguided attitude toward your fellow man. I hope your child has the wisdom to see past your bigotry.
Riight. Because intelligence is the only factor in determining how a person will do in university. You're the kind of guy that causes the knee-jerk anti-intellectual response because you can't see the value in other human traits.
A person who is sociable, works well in a group and has a number of contacts from whom they can get help from is equally likely to succeed, and in fact this student will probably be more successful in a corporate environment as this sort of group work and dependence on your co-workers is the norm.
Yes, there are those who truly do have learning disabilities which would prevent them from gaining any benefit from higher education. But to simply look at a bell-curve distribution of intelligence and then claim that 50% of the population don't have what it takes to make it in university is absurd.
Kudos to Stanford for making information free. That's a big step from a big name in higher education.
actually, it's probably more accurate to say I hit rock bottom before I started gaming.
Getting a divorce is rock-bottom? I bet you didn't spend any time on the street. Hint: don't try to empathize with depressed gamers, at least not if your message is "I'm better now that I'm out";=P
Eventually a team of officers followed Diotte to a local bar where they hoped to trap the journalist and accuse him of driving under the influence of alcohol
To give some context, Alberta is like a testing ground for American fascism in Canada. Diotte is a lucky one, able to prove that legal persecution is happening. Most people who suffer this abuse of law are unable to prove it.
Don't normally respond to AC's, but I did think that the 70% access to high speed Internet seemed rather high for the United States. So not only is the study flawed, but it has a hidden bias as well.
This "study" is about as worthless as they get. They ask a bunch of questions to both parents and teens and attempt to create a correlation to the questions they stuck in there. The parents are asked about their community involvement, and knowledge of current events. Teens are asked if they think communication is a good thing (paraphrased).
There's three numbers of any interest to me: ~70% of teens have high speed Internet at home. ~60% of them use the Internet daily. Finally, ~60% of parents think that their teen's gaming has no positive or negative effect on them.Overall, the study certainly doesn't make any quantifiable findings about the effect of video games on kids.
It does, however, show that kids today have a lot better access to the Internet than 10 years ago (surprise!) and that many of them use it on a regular basis (again, surprise!). I'd say that this study shows a stronger correlation between using the Internet regularly and civic involvement than anything to do with video games. In the end, however, it's still just correlation.
Re:Presentation versus inside guts
on
Tech Vs. Business?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap
I tend to distrust sales people because they badly oversell the product. Without proper knowledge of the extent of the technical problem, they will often tell a potential client that a required feature will takes days/weeks when the developer has already told them it's more like weeks/months.
I've seen this problem for the past 8 years, and this animosity between techies and marketroids won't go away until the latter are reigned in. I think I estimate my projects better than the sales people, but the salesperson is only interested in their commission, which is usually paid prior to any support or maintenance contracts.
The net result is that salespeople get paid without any accountability for the actual project. All problems from this point forward are viewed as a deficiency in technical resources rather than a poorly planned sales pitch. I'm not fond of being the scapegoat when I've very carefully explained why the project will take longer than the sales guy thinks it will.
Agreed, it's back to the Inquisition in many ways. While your public trial may ultimately vindicate you, the amount of grief it's possible to inflict just by laying charges has become substantial. The legal system is supposed to prevent its use as a tool of persecution, but it is used as just that more and more often. Just another example of the two-tiered justice system I criticized in my journal.
Somehow, someone who has no understanding of economics managed to convince themselves that facebook.com was worth hundreds of millions for investment. It's not. It never will be. It's a free website that has some cool widgets and lets you keep up with your friends. It's not like they have a patent on social networking.
And somehow people have become convinced that Facebook == Social Networking. I guess most people are seeing a community effect from an online source for the first time and go "Whoa! Magic!" Of course, an online community differs very little from any other community, except in the potential anonymity of its members. Nothing particularly spectacular, but apparently it's very addicting. My coworker last night spent his entire shift surfing Facebook on his Blackberry. Personally, I still don't get the number of people that refuse to accept the fact that any website that requires you to sign up to see content is almost certainly a scam.
Right. The same technology professionals that cause most of the problems to begin with are going to get a job training the people who would catch them. But one can hope...
I had the opportunity once to grab a good half million credit card numbers used nationwide, and was working on an application that queried the correct parts of the database to slip one in unnoticed. But I did the math first. I actually have connections where I could unload these numbers wholesale, but I figured I'd get maybe 20 grand for it at most, while looking at a minimum of 5 years of jail time, plus a felony record if I did somehow get caught.
I suppose given a REAL opportunity to steal information of value with a method of unloading it very quickly, I might yield to tempation. But I'd certainly do the math first, and assume that I'd have to spend some time in jail. I certainly wouldn't say as much in a survey in which I'd given my real name, though;-)
zealots who would rather disrupt an business rather than lend their time to something more productive like charity
But that's how this whole mess got started in the first place. People who wrote Free Software were constantly being ripped off by businesses and so FSF and GPL were formed to protect the creations of those who volunteered their time and talent (charity, right?). It's certainly understandable that many True Believers would harbor such angry thoughts toward big software. I agree with your sentiment, though.
Zealots only become zealous when they have really good reason. Take away the reason for their beliefs, and they go away. I don't necessarily believe that all software should be Free, but there's certainly a lot of basics that should be. I'm not an ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy, but it's hard to suggest good ways of getting big companies to listen to the little guy.
Excellent. By your argument, the poor choices I make are the result of the poor parenting that society has caused. Now nothing can ever be my fault again:)
"Society" is not an entity that can be blamed for anything. You can't send it to jail, sue it, or discipline it in any way. It's simply an emergent property. While there are a number of influences in the world which can lead to poor judgement, ultimately someone will have to take responsibility. While my first statement is clearly facetious, the argument has been taken to courtrooms around the globe with some success.
I believe that humans are born with the ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil -- a moral heart. It is only by ignoring our very nature that we learn to become the amoral, uncaring individuals which now appear to be the majority here in North America. It's simply a question of values: is there anything in this world which you believe to be more important than yourself and which you'd sacrifice anything to protect? If you're a parent and answered "No", then you really are screwed up -- criminially negligent, that is. If you answered "Yes", and you still think you need this law to protect your children, then you are gullible and/or insane.
I've heard parents talk about video game ratings. My dentist, for instance, is quite willing to tell a complete stranger that it's OK for his kid to play Grand Theft Auto IV (his kid is 10 years old). I've seen parents rent M-rated games for their young children (again, about 10-12 years old). My guess is that the video game console has become the babysitter, because no one who cares about these kids would expose them to this level of graphic violence. When I was 12, I had access to the Internet and managed to find a few things my parents didn't know about. But in the end, they would simply take away my modem if I spent too much time online. Did I feel they were overprotective? At the time, sure -- they were taking away freedom from me. Now, however, I wish I'd listened to my parents more often.
I suppose if these parents are truly using the extreme content to fuel an advanced conversation about the content of the game and why such actions are horribly wrong, maybe they are raising their children right. But I highly doubt it. It's a no-brainer to realize as a parent that children need shelter. It shouldn't be much of a stretch to realize that shelter extends beyond a roof and walls. In any case, I'll offer to kick the crap out of any parent who offers me the "but my lack of parenting skills are society's fault" argument.
do you want some guy who has only read about rootkits and trying to protect your system from them, or a guy who writes rootkits
Actually, I'll take the guy who's done a bunch of reading but has the moral fibre to resist writing a rootkit. Rootkits attack known points of failure in a system architecture. Someone who has read lots of books about system architecture and a couple of articles on writing rootkits can effectively stop even the best of them cold:
Buffer overflow exploit worries? Run it on OpenBSD
Sandboxes, firewalls, DMZ, etc.
PAM options to prevent certain accounts from ever gaining root access
User education - definitely don't want a guy who talks about n00bs and lusers training the end-user (especially in security-sensitive positions)
LOGS, LOGS, LOGS
I might not keep out Kevin Mitnick, and despite correct training in those security-sensitive positions, people make mistakes, so any organization that needs to trust outsiders is inherently flawed. But, I bet I keep out this 18-year-old prodigy. Hell, I probably keep him out by virtue of the fact that I run my server apps on BSD, not Windows. And I've never written a rootkit, and I never will.
But Microsoft can act as a victim while enjoying all benefits of dumping.
Even better, they can act as a saint, while enjoying all the benefits of dumping, the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher(MAR) program. From the ThePost.ie article Old computers educate Africa:
Microsoft authorises MAR agents to refurbish donated PCs and install copies of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003. At the moment, there are eight companies in Ireland actively refurbishing computers as part of the project. These refurbishers include Rehab Recycling, Fasttrack to Information Technology and the RT Centre. The agents, like Camara, require that donated PCs be of a minimum specification. Some of them also charge small fees depending on the final destination of the computers.
Thus, market share is being gained in many places where people can't afford to buy Microsoft products. So they dump in Africa and in American ghettos, but as you astutely pointed out, they suffer none of the penalties that should be applied to this practice. Amazing how many things "charitable" donations can solve for you.
...immediately following Jim Prentice's introduction of the Canadian version of the DMCA. DMCA allows creators to censor criticism. It is an attack on Free Speech. I encourage all Canadians to Write your MP and express your concern over the erosion of freedom that Mr. Prentice is attempting to bring about. For those who want to read the fine print, here is the legalese of Bill C-61, an amendment to Canadian Copyright law.
Check my latest journal entry for more details regarding the proposed legislation.
...if they go down they can take a lot of others with them. If anyone were actually being prosecuted in the US (or anywhere for that matter) for malicious network behaviour, then sure, crucify MediaDefender. But they are certainly not the only people who "defend" their networks and Imaginary Property in this perverse manner.
Maybe a bit on the young side for "elder", but I doubt I would have done things differently -- the first time, anyway. At some point, however, the need to have food on the table and a roof over my head gets to make the decision.
Reality bites -- you say what you really think and you get burned. You keep your head down and your mouth shut and you hate yourself. If you work hard enough and keep your mouth shut long enough, you might be lucky enough to find a position where you won't get fired for saying what you think. At least, that's what I'm counting on.
And I say that with NO anger. If anything, I'm saddened that such a post was found to be insightful by anyone.
Well, I'll give you the lack of anger, which is a refreshing change from the old guard. On the other hand, claiming that these ideas of "Real World" IT can't possibly be insightful is discouraging to a young idealist. That's what IT has crushed, and you're projecting that onto Slashdot. I think many of us here have been that young idealist before and only painful experience has shown us the error of some of those ideas. But not all of them are wrong. You are clearly an exception to my general experience with older technologists.
I'm a young technologist. I started at an early age and had much more free time since I didn't have to work for a living. That's thousands of hours of experimentation and problem solving with the benefit of the infinite adaptability of a child's mind. For the few who have been working with technology since the 70s, OK, you've probably got me in terms of work experience. Still, a production environment isn't a great place to do much research. So, yes, most older technologists should fear my "skillz" or whatever you want to call it. I lack only the adaptation to corporate culture. As I gain age and wisdom, however, that becomes less of a problem.
So, yes, youthful exuberance can certainly be seen as insightful. Like it or not, there will be a changing of the guard. I hope that it is one of understanding, where young hackers and old hackers will share ideas and decide the future of their systems together, but I can certainly see that it might be far more revolutionary, where the systems get thrown out with their aged creators and administrators. What happens is almost entirely a function of how older technologists view younger ones, as controlling the teenage mind is still something entirely outside the grasp of any known technology. Thanks for showing some tolerance rather than disdain.
When talking about "folks on the internet", we're mostly talking about mobs and mob mentality. In this case it seems the mob was right, so we're free to cheer for its leaders and the outcome. My main concern here is with the publication of evidence. When I submit surveillance video to the police to catch a thief, I don't send a copy to the evening news. They were right on until they posted the video of the arrest online. If I were the suspect's lawyer, I'd be looking for a publication ban and get the video pulled offline. as there's no possible way he could get a fair trial otherwise. I can think of a few legal technicalities which would leave the suspect innocent (unlikely, I know) and any jury pool is going to be tainted by the publication of this video.
I don't see why this couldn't fly. Samuel King appears to be a well-established professor with solid credentials. It's based on SELinux at present, but they've designed it to work with various other resource segmenting programs (they named AppArmor).
I'd say the key to finding a market will be standards-compliance. If it supports HTML 4 and XHTML reasonably well (like anyone can do it perfectly) and has ECMAScript, then it can work with a properly-designed webapp. While they're designing plugin support, I don't think it matters much whether Flash will be supported. People who care about security don't tend to be distracted by shiny things.
Sure, it won't even come close to top of the browser list. The purpose of this browser, however, is to bring web browsers to locations that can't use them because of security concerns. As a developer, I can certainly say that my productivity is improved with web access - forums, developer documentation, bug reports. I've been at companies that won't let their developers work on the Internet at all, probably for fear of espionage. The web browser is probably the second largest target (after e-mail clients) for malware writers. Web browsers are ubiquitous now, so spending some time researching "white-hat" web techniques is a worthwhile effort regardless, and I'm sure there are some who will find this browser useful. I will continue to use Firefox, despite the security concerns associated with JavaScript and Flash. My tin-foil hat is back in the closet, and I want to keep it there.
The "counter-culture" happened because he wasn't alone in that desire and so people joined in on Linux.
For me it was because Linux was freely available on the Internet. Even on a 28.8k modem, it was easier to just download Slackware than to go to a store and spend money. Linux had better "Internet" support than Windows for a long time. I didn't intentionally join the "counter-culture". It wasn't until Microsoft declared war on Linux that I realized how polarized the debate was. Ironically, Microsoft gave Linux its initial popularity. The people who were marginalized as a result of their support for a free, community-supported OS mostly accepted their being branded "hackers" despite industry prejudice toward them. I maintain that my knowledge and experience of Intel PC architecture -- as well as some other platforms -- is a result of many thousands of hours of tinkering and support of this OS, and it would not be as deep if I'd just "converted" to the Church of Microsoft. Of course, this hasn't landed me any significant employment, but I stick to my principles.
Slashdot Mirror
Public education should be a privilege, not a right. Then maybe more so-called "students" would appreciate it, and student success rates would be better.
Ehhh... You lost me right about here. This is definitely non sequiter. While I agree with your statement about making sure that school officials are not harrassed, you jump far too quickly to the conclusion that public education should not be a right.
Funding public education is one of the few things that makes competition fair between both rich and poor students. You believe that poor behavior of other students shouldn't detract from your child's education, and rightly so. What I can't believe is that in the same breath you talk about the right to take away someone else's child's opportunity to be educated. How selfish and greedy can you get? The sad part is that I bet you're proud of this misguided attitude toward your fellow man. I hope your child has the wisdom to see past your bigotry.
Riight. Because intelligence is the only factor in determining how a person will do in university. You're the kind of guy that causes the knee-jerk anti-intellectual response because you can't see the value in other human traits.
A person who is sociable, works well in a group and has a number of contacts from whom they can get help from is equally likely to succeed, and in fact this student will probably be more successful in a corporate environment as this sort of group work and dependence on your co-workers is the norm.
Yes, there are those who truly do have learning disabilities which would prevent them from gaining any benefit from higher education. But to simply look at a bell-curve distribution of intelligence and then claim that 50% of the population don't have what it takes to make it in university is absurd.
Kudos to Stanford for making information free. That's a big step from a big name in higher education.
actually, it's probably more accurate to say I hit rock bottom before I started gaming.
Getting a divorce is rock-bottom? I bet you didn't spend any time on the street. Hint: don't try to empathize with depressed gamers, at least not if your message is "I'm better now that I'm out" ;=P
Eventually a team of officers followed Diotte to a local bar where they hoped to trap the journalist and accuse him of driving under the influence of alcohol
To give some context, Alberta is like a testing ground for American fascism in Canada. Diotte is a lucky one, able to prove that legal persecution is happening. Most people who suffer this abuse of law are unable to prove it.
Don't normally respond to AC's, but I did think that the 70% access to high speed Internet seemed rather high for the United States. So not only is the study flawed, but it has a hidden bias as well.
This "study" is about as worthless as they get. They ask a bunch of questions to both parents and teens and attempt to create a correlation to the questions they stuck in there. The parents are asked about their community involvement, and knowledge of current events. Teens are asked if they think communication is a good thing (paraphrased).
There's three numbers of any interest to me: ~70% of teens have high speed Internet at home. ~60% of them use the Internet daily. Finally, ~60% of parents think that their teen's gaming has no positive or negative effect on them.Overall, the study certainly doesn't make any quantifiable findings about the effect of video games on kids.
It does, however, show that kids today have a lot better access to the Internet than 10 years ago (surprise!) and that many of them use it on a regular basis (again, surprise!). I'd say that this study shows a stronger correlation between using the Internet regularly and civic involvement than anything to do with video games. In the end, however, it's still just correlation.
Techies tend to distrust salemanship as too superficial, and like to instead focus on building a better mousetrap
I tend to distrust sales people because they badly oversell the product. Without proper knowledge of the extent of the technical problem, they will often tell a potential client that a required feature will takes days/weeks when the developer has already told them it's more like weeks/months.
I've seen this problem for the past 8 years, and this animosity between techies and marketroids won't go away until the latter are reigned in. I think I estimate my projects better than the sales people, but the salesperson is only interested in their commission, which is usually paid prior to any support or maintenance contracts.
The net result is that salespeople get paid without any accountability for the actual project. All problems from this point forward are viewed as a deficiency in technical resources rather than a poorly planned sales pitch. I'm not fond of being the scapegoat when I've very carefully explained why the project will take longer than the sales guy thinks it will.
Agreed, it's back to the Inquisition in many ways. While your public trial may ultimately vindicate you, the amount of grief it's possible to inflict just by laying charges has become substantial. The legal system is supposed to prevent its use as a tool of persecution, but it is used as just that more and more often. Just another example of the two-tiered justice system I criticized in my journal.
Somehow, someone who has no understanding of economics managed to convince themselves that facebook.com was worth hundreds of millions for investment. It's not. It never will be. It's a free website that has some cool widgets and lets you keep up with your friends. It's not like they have a patent on social networking.
And somehow people have become convinced that Facebook == Social Networking. I guess most people are seeing a community effect from an online source for the first time and go "Whoa! Magic!" Of course, an online community differs very little from any other community, except in the potential anonymity of its members. Nothing particularly spectacular, but apparently it's very addicting. My coworker last night spent his entire shift surfing Facebook on his Blackberry. Personally, I still don't get the number of people that refuse to accept the fact that any website that requires you to sign up to see content is almost certainly a scam.
Right. The same technology professionals that cause most of the problems to begin with are going to get a job training the people who would catch them. But one can hope...
I had the opportunity once to grab a good half million credit card numbers used nationwide, and was working on an application that queried the correct parts of the database to slip one in unnoticed. But I did the math first. I actually have connections where I could unload these numbers wholesale, but I figured I'd get maybe 20 grand for it at most, while looking at a minimum of 5 years of jail time, plus a felony record if I did somehow get caught.
I suppose given a REAL opportunity to steal information of value with a method of unloading it very quickly, I might yield to tempation. But I'd certainly do the math first, and assume that I'd have to spend some time in jail. I certainly wouldn't say as much in a survey in which I'd given my real name, though ;-)
Well that might be because you don't need to type './a' to execute your wacky code. Who puts the current directory in their Unix path? :P
zealots who would rather disrupt an business rather than lend their time to something more productive like charity
But that's how this whole mess got started in the first place. People who wrote Free Software were constantly being ripped off by businesses and so FSF and GPL were formed to protect the creations of those who volunteered their time and talent (charity, right?). It's certainly understandable that many True Believers would harbor such angry thoughts toward big software. I agree with your sentiment, though.
Zealots only become zealous when they have really good reason. Take away the reason for their beliefs, and they go away. I don't necessarily believe that all software should be Free, but there's certainly a lot of basics that should be. I'm not an ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy, but it's hard to suggest good ways of getting big companies to listen to the little guy.
Excellent. By your argument, the poor choices I make are the result of the poor parenting that society has caused. Now nothing can ever be my fault again :)
"Society" is not an entity that can be blamed for anything. You can't send it to jail, sue it, or discipline it in any way. It's simply an emergent property. While there are a number of influences in the world which can lead to poor judgement, ultimately someone will have to take responsibility. While my first statement is clearly facetious, the argument has been taken to courtrooms around the globe with some success.
I believe that humans are born with the ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil -- a moral heart. It is only by ignoring our very nature that we learn to become the amoral, uncaring individuals which now appear to be the majority here in North America. It's simply a question of values: is there anything in this world which you believe to be more important than yourself and which you'd sacrifice anything to protect? If you're a parent and answered "No", then you really are screwed up -- criminially negligent, that is. If you answered "Yes", and you still think you need this law to protect your children, then you are gullible and/or insane.
I've heard parents talk about video game ratings. My dentist, for instance, is quite willing to tell a complete stranger that it's OK for his kid to play Grand Theft Auto IV (his kid is 10 years old). I've seen parents rent M-rated games for their young children (again, about 10-12 years old). My guess is that the video game console has become the babysitter, because no one who cares about these kids would expose them to this level of graphic violence. When I was 12, I had access to the Internet and managed to find a few things my parents didn't know about. But in the end, they would simply take away my modem if I spent too much time online. Did I feel they were overprotective? At the time, sure -- they were taking away freedom from me. Now, however, I wish I'd listened to my parents more often.
I suppose if these parents are truly using the extreme content to fuel an advanced conversation about the content of the game and why such actions are horribly wrong, maybe they are raising their children right. But I highly doubt it. It's a no-brainer to realize as a parent that children need shelter. It shouldn't be much of a stretch to realize that shelter extends beyond a roof and walls. In any case, I'll offer to kick the crap out of any parent who offers me the "but my lack of parenting skills are society's fault" argument.
do you want some guy who has only read about rootkits and trying to protect your system from them, or a guy who writes rootkits
Actually, I'll take the guy who's done a bunch of reading but has the moral fibre to resist writing a rootkit. Rootkits attack known points of failure in a system architecture. Someone who has read lots of books about system architecture and a couple of articles on writing rootkits can effectively stop even the best of them cold:
I might not keep out Kevin Mitnick, and despite correct training in those security-sensitive positions, people make mistakes, so any organization that needs to trust outsiders is inherently flawed. But, I bet I keep out this 18-year-old prodigy. Hell, I probably keep him out by virtue of the fact that I run my server apps on BSD, not Windows. And I've never written a rootkit, and I never will.
Even better, they can act as a saint, while enjoying all the benefits of dumping, the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher(MAR) program. From the ThePost.ie article Old computers educate Africa:
Microsoft authorises MAR agents to refurbish donated PCs and install copies of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003. At the moment, there are eight companies in Ireland actively refurbishing computers as part of the project. These refurbishers include Rehab Recycling, Fasttrack to Information Technology and the RT Centre. The agents, like Camara, require that donated PCs be of a minimum specification. Some of them also charge small fees depending on the final destination of the computers.Thus, market share is being gained in many places where people can't afford to buy Microsoft products. So they dump in Africa and in American ghettos, but as you astutely pointed out, they suffer none of the penalties that should be applied to this practice. Amazing how many things "charitable" donations can solve for you.
...immediately following Jim Prentice's introduction of the Canadian version of the DMCA. DMCA allows creators to censor criticism. It is an attack on Free Speech. I encourage all Canadians to Write your MP and express your concern over the erosion of freedom that Mr. Prentice is attempting to bring about. For those who want to read the fine print, here is the legalese of Bill C-61, an amendment to Canadian Copyright law.
Check my latest journal entry for more details regarding the proposed legislation.
...if they go down they can take a lot of others with them. If anyone were actually being prosecuted in the US (or anywhere for that matter) for malicious network behaviour, then sure, crucify MediaDefender. But they are certainly not the only people who "defend" their networks and Imaginary Property in this perverse manner.
Maybe a bit on the young side for "elder", but I doubt I would have done things differently -- the first time, anyway. At some point, however, the need to have food on the table and a roof over my head gets to make the decision.
Reality bites -- you say what you really think and you get burned. You keep your head down and your mouth shut and you hate yourself. If you work hard enough and keep your mouth shut long enough, you might be lucky enough to find a position where you won't get fired for saying what you think. At least, that's what I'm counting on.
Well, I'll give you the lack of anger, which is a refreshing change from the old guard. On the other hand, claiming that these ideas of "Real World" IT can't possibly be insightful is discouraging to a young idealist. That's what IT has crushed, and you're projecting that onto Slashdot. I think many of us here have been that young idealist before and only painful experience has shown us the error of some of those ideas. But not all of them are wrong. You are clearly an exception to my general experience with older technologists.
I'm a young technologist. I started at an early age and had much more free time since I didn't have to work for a living. That's thousands of hours of experimentation and problem solving with the benefit of the infinite adaptability of a child's mind. For the few who have been working with technology since the 70s, OK, you've probably got me in terms of work experience. Still, a production environment isn't a great place to do much research. So, yes, most older technologists should fear my "skillz" or whatever you want to call it. I lack only the adaptation to corporate culture. As I gain age and wisdom, however, that becomes less of a problem.
So, yes, youthful exuberance can certainly be seen as insightful. Like it or not, there will be a changing of the guard. I hope that it is one of understanding, where young hackers and old hackers will share ideas and decide the future of their systems together, but I can certainly see that it might be far more revolutionary, where the systems get thrown out with their aged creators and administrators. What happens is almost entirely a function of how older technologists view younger ones, as controlling the teenage mind is still something entirely outside the grasp of any known technology. Thanks for showing some tolerance rather than disdain.
I don't see why this couldn't fly. Samuel King appears to be a well-established professor with solid credentials. It's based on SELinux at present, but they've designed it to work with various other resource segmenting programs (they named AppArmor).
I'd say the key to finding a market will be standards-compliance. If it supports HTML 4 and XHTML reasonably well (like anyone can do it perfectly) and has ECMAScript, then it can work with a properly-designed webapp. While they're designing plugin support, I don't think it matters much whether Flash will be supported. People who care about security don't tend to be distracted by shiny things.
Sure, it won't even come close to top of the browser list. The purpose of this browser, however, is to bring web browsers to locations that can't use them because of security concerns. As a developer, I can certainly say that my productivity is improved with web access - forums, developer documentation, bug reports. I've been at companies that won't let their developers work on the Internet at all, probably for fear of espionage. The web browser is probably the second largest target (after e-mail clients) for malware writers. Web browsers are ubiquitous now, so spending some time researching "white-hat" web techniques is a worthwhile effort regardless, and I'm sure there are some who will find this browser useful. I will continue to use Firefox, despite the security concerns associated with JavaScript and Flash. My tin-foil hat is back in the closet, and I want to keep it there.
Sorry, but you just can't beat a rousing game of nmap Death Ping. For everything else there's WINE.
For me it was because Linux was freely available on the Internet. Even on a 28.8k modem, it was easier to just download Slackware than to go to a store and spend money. Linux had better "Internet" support than Windows for a long time. I didn't intentionally join the "counter-culture". It wasn't until Microsoft declared war on Linux that I realized how polarized the debate was. Ironically, Microsoft gave Linux its initial popularity. The people who were marginalized as a result of their support for a free, community-supported OS mostly accepted their being branded "hackers" despite industry prejudice toward them. I maintain that my knowledge and experience of Intel PC architecture -- as well as some other platforms -- is a result of many thousands of hours of tinkering and support of this OS, and it would not be as deep if I'd just "converted" to the Church of Microsoft. Of course, this hasn't landed me any significant employment, but I stick to my principles.
Meh. Who'd want to steal anything of Trent's these days? Has-been looking for publicity again.