Yeah that would be like broadcasters having the right to say what you do with their signal once it was on the airwaves and coming, uninvited, into your own home.
I was talking with a neurologist about this (managing Type II Diabetes). He said that even if you control your weight and sugar so that you don't need insulin to manage the obvious symptoms the disease still progresses and still damages your health in other ways such as particular types of cell damage - this was a huge and very disappointing surprise to hear.
That isn't what I said. As to the rest of what you said I wasn't claiming that
A degree is still not be-all-end-all kind of thing, nor is curriculum.
etc. etc. I make a simple statement that can be summarized as: Management has a right to expect that programmers should have basic programming skills and not be lazy. I find rather amazing the people who are trying to come up with all sorts of things to dispute this or try and make it management's responsibility to educate someone on things that they should have learned in first year. I haven't been talking about cutting edge stuff that isn't taught in university. Dealing with the buffer overflow problem has been taught in university for at least 30 years. Yet according to the article it is still the #3 problem. #3 after 30 years of training people not to do that. That isn't "cutting edge technology" and it isn't "things not taught in the curriculum today". It is a basic, let's say that again, basic , skill taught to programmers for decades now. Anyone who hasn't got it yet is either lazy or incompetent and has no business calling themself a programmer.
And if your implementation language has protection to prevent this sort of problem it still isn't going to save you - the same guy who can't/won't deal with buffer overflow will find some way to screw up something else basic in whatever development environment is being used. Take your pick, stupid or lazy, they'll always be a problem. It is depressing that there are so many incompetent people around calling themselves programmers that they can manage to make this the #3 problem today. Almost as depressing is the number of people rushing to their defence whenever this topic comes up.
As for me I consider this all self-evident and have nothing further to say on this thread... but have the last word if you like.
Ok, sorry I thought I was being clear earlier in the thread - I'm not necessarily supporting contracts specifying particular coding requirements. It seems to me that company coding standards are sufficient and if you don't apply the known coding standards then you are penalized or fired (personally I'd fire someone who thought it was ok to write data of unknown length into a buffer but that's just me). I'm not against company training but I don't think companies should need to teach so-called programmers the kind of things they ought to have learned in their 1st year courses.
On the rest... this stuff should be taught in University (or whatever) and the employer should be able to count on the employee knowing this stuff. Of course people cheat and some schools are better than others etc. etc. But there is something wrong somewhere when someone having a university degree does not know simple things like checking buffer length and my suspicion is that what is wrong is not going to be fixed by employer training. Of course YMMV.
That's not the point. The failure to check the buffer size is the symptom not the problem. The problem is sloppy programmers who can't or won't apply the tools they have been taught to the environment in which they are operating. The same guy who fails to perform a buffer check in C will fail to do something else in another language - because he is lazy or incompetent. And I'm not talking about someone who once in 100,000 lines of code accidentally makes this type of error because of a long shift or externally imposed deadline but someone that habitually is lazy or incompetent. Unfortunately there are all too many people fitting that description who are calling themselves programmers.
I wasn't suggesting anything like that. I think it is fairly safe to say that - whether there is an "attack" or not - the general quality of software would improve if we started by firing people who can't perform simple programming tasks. That will achieve something useful and doesn't displace the accountability or create an imbalance between accountability and power.
I think it is fairly safe to say that - whether there is an "attack" or not - the general quality of software would improve if we started by firing people who can't perform simple programming tasks. That will achieve something useful and doesn't displace the accountability or create an imbalance between accountability and power.
Exactly. Why do you see that as a bad thing? Suppose instead of "contract" we say "these are the design/coding standards at this company and as an employee of this company you are required to follow them. If you don't then we will penalize you." What exactly is wrong with that?
For the last umpteen years, in all sorts of venues social and professional, I've been seeing accountability become more and more denigrated and dismissed. "Oh let's not play the blame game!" What the hell is wrong with people that they don't want accountability from others?
Software is designed by humans. It won't be perfect.
There is a big difference between "not perfect" and "damn sloppy" and buffer overflows fall into the latter category. For decades we've been teaching students to make sure a buffer has enough space for a chunk of data before writing the data to the buffer. Any so-called programmer who does this is lazy or stupid, or both, and doesn't deserve the title of programmer or a job trying to do what real programmers do for a living. Good gravy, the quality of most software I encounter (and by that I mean software that I use) is so poor it's amazing! I find myself thinking with discouraging frequency "didn't anybody at Widget Co. even try this software out before shipping?"
Just to pick up on your 1st point, it's the glossy screen that gets me. I have an HP notebook that has a touch sensitive screen that swivels around and folds down over the keyboard, turning into a tablet. If I I tell it to rotate the display then it is perfect to show an entire 8.5x11 page so I can easily read pdf's of magazines, reports etc. But the screen is glossy like most new notebooks and that just sucks. Amazingly so. Yes it is also a bit heavy and the battery only lasts about 2.5-3 hours but those are minor inconveniences to what for me would otherwise be a really great e-book reader - it is the glossy screen that is a killer (and a killer for using it as a notebook anywhere at all bright as well). And it is getting harder and harder to find reasonably priced notebooks that don't have a glossy screen. Grrrrrr
It's #4 that gets me. $10 for an e-book? $15? 90% of the cost of publishing has been eliminated (ok, I'm just guessing on that) and the price is virtually the same as the far more expensive to produce physical book? Just on principle I wouldn't buy them. Kill me a tree and give me the physical book - at least that 90% is now employing a bunch of people instead of lining the pockets of publishers.
Just guessing but perhaps what the GP is complaining about is the idea of "people" training the robots, i.e. an outside and consciously directed force is involved. Whereas evolution is a random process with no guiding intelligence behind it. Or maybe he meant something else.
Your first and second statement are refuted by the existence of the human members on my condo board. However the same board does stand as proof of the possibility entertained by your parenthetical remark.
While I sympathize that while it seems there are no opportunities left to get your name on something for describing a fairly trivial and straightforward method, e.g. Bresenham's algorithm for drawing a line, this is one reason why students are supposed to take an algorithms course. Not because they are likely to go out and show P==NP or the opposite but so they will recognize just how many tough problems there are in everyday stuff and how many (good) approximation algorithms there are to develop. There are lots of opportunities left to develop significant things and approximation algorithms are just one example. Think parallelism for example.
Not being yourself will be available as a future upgrade for a slight additional cost. After all escape from reality shouldn't just be free, right? Think of how that would cut into the profits of drug deale... errr drug manufacturers... and the makers of fine alcohol.
No it's just an excuse to raise the "women are being discriminated against" straw-woman. We know the workplace demands long hours. We know the workplace demands X, Y and Z. But 1) Why is sexual discrimination the first choice to suspect and 2) why is it a problem if there are more of one sex than the other in any particular profession?
This just in, there are more female babysitters than males.
More importantly there are far fewer male teachers than female teachers leaving boys with fewer role models and fewer people who actually understand them. Yet we never hear complaints about this. In fact the curious thing about feminism, which claims to be about equality between the sexes, is that there are never complaints about the situations that disadvantage men.
And a better question, when are going to stand up to such nonsense and reject the whole premise that the world should be a statistical average reflecting a cross-section of all society?
When men grow backbones and/or when they stop seeing sucking up as a way to get laid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that would be like broadcasters having the right to say what you do with their signal once it was on the airwaves and coming, uninvited, into your own home.
But it was dragging the damn extension cord up hill both ways that was the real killer.
Yup me too, on the PDP-8 in 1971. *sigh*
I was talking with a neurologist about this (managing Type II Diabetes). He said that even if you control your weight and sugar so that you don't need insulin to manage the obvious symptoms the disease still progresses and still damages your health in other ways such as particular types of cell damage - this was a huge and very disappointing surprise to hear.
That isn't what I said. As to the rest of what you said I wasn't claiming that
etc. etc. I make a simple statement that can be summarized as: Management has a right to expect that programmers should have basic programming skills and not be lazy. I find rather amazing the people who are trying to come up with all sorts of things to dispute this or try and make it management's responsibility to educate someone on things that they should have learned in first year. I haven't been talking about cutting edge stuff that isn't taught in university. Dealing with the buffer overflow problem has been taught in university for at least 30 years. Yet according to the article it is still the #3 problem. #3 after 30 years of training people not to do that. That isn't "cutting edge technology" and it isn't "things not taught in the curriculum today". It is a basic, let's say that again, basic , skill taught to programmers for decades now. Anyone who hasn't got it yet is either lazy or incompetent and has no business calling themself a programmer.
And if your implementation language has protection to prevent this sort of problem it still isn't going to save you - the same guy who can't/won't deal with buffer overflow will find some way to screw up something else basic in whatever development environment is being used. Take your pick, stupid or lazy, they'll always be a problem. It is depressing that there are so many incompetent people around calling themselves programmers that they can manage to make this the #3 problem today. Almost as depressing is the number of people rushing to their defence whenever this topic comes up.
As for me I consider this all self-evident and have nothing further to say on this thread... but have the last word if you like.
Ok, sorry I thought I was being clear earlier in the thread - I'm not necessarily supporting contracts specifying particular coding requirements. It seems to me that company coding standards are sufficient and if you don't apply the known coding standards then you are penalized or fired (personally I'd fire someone who thought it was ok to write data of unknown length into a buffer but that's just me). I'm not against company training but I don't think companies should need to teach so-called programmers the kind of things they ought to have learned in their 1st year courses.
Ok, sorry I didn't catch it as a joke... whoosh!
On the rest... this stuff should be taught in University (or whatever) and the employer should be able to count on the employee knowing this stuff. Of course people cheat and some schools are better than others etc. etc. But there is something wrong somewhere when someone having a university degree does not know simple things like checking buffer length and my suspicion is that what is wrong is not going to be fixed by employer training. Of course YMMV.
That isn't what I said. If you want to argue fine but please don't put words in my mouth.
Ummm isn't that what the degree (or whatever) is for? I mean this is pretty basic stuff....
That's not the point. The failure to check the buffer size is the symptom not the problem. The problem is sloppy programmers who can't or won't apply the tools they have been taught to the environment in which they are operating. The same guy who fails to perform a buffer check in C will fail to do something else in another language - because he is lazy or incompetent. And I'm not talking about someone who once in 100,000 lines of code accidentally makes this type of error because of a long shift or externally imposed deadline but someone that habitually is lazy or incompetent. Unfortunately there are all too many people fitting that description who are calling themselves programmers.
I wasn't suggesting anything like that. I think it is fairly safe to say that - whether there is an "attack" or not - the general quality of software would improve if we started by firing people who can't perform simple programming tasks. That will achieve something useful and doesn't displace the accountability or create an imbalance between accountability and power.
I think it is fairly safe to say that - whether there is an "attack" or not - the general quality of software would improve if we started by firing people who can't perform simple programming tasks. That will achieve something useful and doesn't displace the accountability or create an imbalance between accountability and power.
Exactly. Why do you see that as a bad thing? Suppose instead of "contract" we say "these are the design/coding standards at this company and as an employee of this company you are required to follow them. If you don't then we will penalize you." What exactly is wrong with that?
For the last umpteen years, in all sorts of venues social and professional, I've been seeing accountability become more and more denigrated and dismissed. "Oh let's not play the blame game!" What the hell is wrong with people that they don't want accountability from others?
There is a big difference between "not perfect" and "damn sloppy" and buffer overflows fall into the latter category. For decades we've been teaching students to make sure a buffer has enough space for a chunk of data before writing the data to the buffer. Any so-called programmer who does this is lazy or stupid, or both, and doesn't deserve the title of programmer or a job trying to do what real programmers do for a living. Good gravy, the quality of most software I encounter (and by that I mean software that I use) is so poor it's amazing! I find myself thinking with discouraging frequency "didn't anybody at Widget Co. even try this software out before shipping?"
Just to pick up on your 1st point, it's the glossy screen that gets me. I have an HP notebook that has a touch sensitive screen that swivels around and folds down over the keyboard, turning into a tablet. If I I tell it to rotate the display then it is perfect to show an entire 8.5x11 page so I can easily read pdf's of magazines, reports etc. But the screen is glossy like most new notebooks and that just sucks. Amazingly so. Yes it is also a bit heavy and the battery only lasts about 2.5-3 hours but those are minor inconveniences to what for me would otherwise be a really great e-book reader - it is the glossy screen that is a killer (and a killer for using it as a notebook anywhere at all bright as well). And it is getting harder and harder to find reasonably priced notebooks that don't have a glossy screen. Grrrrrr
It's #4 that gets me. $10 for an e-book? $15? 90% of the cost of publishing has been eliminated (ok, I'm just guessing on that) and the price is virtually the same as the far more expensive to produce physical book? Just on principle I wouldn't buy them. Kill me a tree and give me the physical book - at least that 90% is now employing a bunch of people instead of lining the pockets of publishers.
Just guessing but perhaps what the GP is complaining about is the idea of "people" training the robots, i.e. an outside and consciously directed force is involved. Whereas evolution is a random process with no guiding intelligence behind it. Or maybe he meant something else.
Your first and second statement are refuted by the existence of the human members on my condo board. However the same board does stand as proof of the possibility entertained by your parenthetical remark.
Your argument seems to be saying there is no such thing as lossless compression.
Gödel's theorems pretty much explains why the universe cannot be simulated by anything inside the universe.
That's probably why God invented QM - as a space/computation saving device.
While I sympathize that while it seems there are no opportunities left to get your name on something for describing a fairly trivial and straightforward method, e.g. Bresenham's algorithm for drawing a line, this is one reason why students are supposed to take an algorithms course. Not because they are likely to go out and show P==NP or the opposite but so they will recognize just how many tough problems there are in everyday stuff and how many (good) approximation algorithms there are to develop. There are lots of opportunities left to develop significant things and approximation algorithms are just one example. Think parallelism for example.
Not being yourself will be available as a future upgrade for a slight additional cost. After all escape from reality shouldn't just be free, right? Think of how that would cut into the profits of drug deale... errr drug manufacturers... and the makers of fine alcohol.
No it's just an excuse to raise the "women are being discriminated against" straw-woman. We know the workplace demands long hours. We know the workplace demands X, Y and Z. But 1) Why is sexual discrimination the first choice to suspect and 2) why is it a problem if there are more of one sex than the other in any particular profession?
Anything a man can do, a woman can do, with VERY few exceptions, and often enough, better.
That's a nice bit of sexism right there.
This just in, there are more female babysitters than males.
More importantly there are far fewer male teachers than female teachers leaving boys with fewer role models and fewer people who actually understand them. Yet we never hear complaints about this. In fact the curious thing about feminism, which claims to be about equality between the sexes, is that there are never complaints about the situations that disadvantage men.
And a better question, when are going to stand up to such nonsense and reject the whole premise that the world should be a statistical average reflecting a cross-section of all society?
When men grow backbones and/or when they stop seeing sucking up as a way to get laid.