Re:Those are just the ones you hear about.
on
The BlackBerry Orphans
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If a man doesn't want to work on a Saturday to spend time with his kids then he isn't a "team player".
Well, if it is scheduled a month in advance and he gets a day in liew tp add to of his holidays or agreed overtime I agree with this 100%. Now if it is not and it is a one-off emergency I would also usually agree with that. If it is for the sole reason that the cretinous incompetent c**t that pretends to be a manager was not competent enough to plan how long it will take to get a trivial task done... Hmm... That begs questioning the idea... Now if the aforementioned c**t does that as a matter of habit and normal business practice in order to perform massive nasoanal interfacing into her superior... F*** that... As David Brent says: If you're gonna be late, then be late and not just 2 minutes - make it an hour and enjoy your breakfast.
Yes I have been denied jobs because my credit score wasn't high enough.
Ha-ha. You are also as likely to be denied a job if it is too good.
Happened to me the one of the few times when I was stupid enough to apply for a bank job. I run a very tight household - no debts besides mortgage (and even that on an accelerated repayment), no credit taken for anything else (my cars are always bought with a money transfer, same for furniture and everything else), no late payments ever, no missed payments ever. And guess what - I failed the credit portion of background check. It looked to non-standard for them and they decided that I probably have some clandestine hidden income to be able to do this (I learned that from an insider much later).
So at least some US banks actually like to see their employees comfortably deep in debt. Just in case so that they do not develop too much independence. Anyway, I have learned the lesson and stick to telecoms now where the background check is mostly limited to references.
Personally, I'd say I'm both, more satisfied with my life and more useful to society than what I would be as the sedated vegetable.
And here comes the 1000000 dollar/pound/euro question - how to ensure that your offspring does not get sedated and moulded into a 9-5 accountant on prosac. The answer to this question is also the answer to the question about the declining US/UK/etc science. Until the answer is found the science will have to be propped up by imports from Eastern Europe, Russia and other places where they do not sedate any kid that does not fit the mould. I recently heard a very good joke: What is a science department in an American University? Answer - a place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English". Sad, but generally true nowdays (and becoming true for UK as well).
Err... I will not go as far as branding schools as anti-intellectual.
In fact the situation is much better now. 15+ years ago the only way to get a scholarship for most poor kids was to convert every nerve cell into a testosterone fed muscle. The situation is not so bad now. You can get lucky and get a scholarship on sole academic merit without being an impoverished foreign student from a third world country.
Problem is elsewhere. It is exactly non-conformism as you have noted in the second part of your post. Most kids that do not think and act exactly as the mold specifies are labelled as suffering from attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
As one of my friends has noted kids no longer have childhood. They are not allowed to make mistakes, set themselves on fire, try ER on a frog they caught in the pond or do other silly things we could do 20+ years ago.
While not all "problematic" kids grow up to be original thinkers, nearly all original thinkers have had their dose of serious problems in school. The difference 20 years ago was that the people with problems in school did not get a mental disease stigma attached to them to follow for the rest of their life.
Further to this, this is bad on the "normal" kids either. They also do not see any example of non-conformist thinking and behaviour around them that does not get severely punished. As a result they end up growing up without reaching mental maturity. At best they have star wars or gung-ho patriotism style concepts of good and evil. At worst they have none. Frankly, it is surprising that there has been so few Columbines or GTA style highway shootings.
And worst of all, USA is spreading this influence outside their borders by all means possible. UK is nearly done moulding into the same mould (with some perverse british overtones to boot), other countries are close on following.
1. The law has been in force for a very long time. Ask anyone who has actually done a proper costing and the legal aspects of outsourcing to India and they will tell you this.
2. The law as such dissallows you to interface into a PBX or anything else which is also connected to the local network over there. In fact as far as the letter of law is concerned this is not that much different from telco regulations in many places around the world.
3. The law does not dissallow you to host as many VOIP phones there as you like provided that they are off your own PBX located outside India and do not interface into the local phone network by any means. So a call center whose guts are located offshore is still fully legal. On(Indian)shore is very murky and it is not something call center outsourcers care about. After all the call center chickens working 10.5 hour shifts are usually not allowed local calls anyway.
4. As far as Yahoo, Dialpad, etc are concerned they are simply required to be registered under the Indian telecoms regs to offer service. This for all practical purposes means that they or their subsidiaries will have to go under majority Indian ownerships. So much for WTO here (actually dunno if they are a member). In fact it is about time someone beat up India in terms of trade treaties and obligations on this.
So overall, this law does not change anything as far as call centers are concerned. The Idian government is not mad to kill their primary GDP source. All it does is to ensure that the near-monopoly of Idian companies on the Idian telecoms market is retained for times to come.
It is not up to pennypinching network executives. In fact every ISP I know is pondering on how to deal with the resource consumption caused by this problem (along with P2P leaching). The problem is elsewhere.
In order to actually clean up the zombie sewers the ISPs needs to design their network with this requirement in mind. They should be designed as cleanable or cleaning capability must be retrofitted into the design. This in turn requires them to use network designers who are security and service design aware. These are nearly an extinct animal now. Every single one I know does anything but network design.
The common nowday requirement for a network designer is a CCXX or JNXX where XX stands for one of the levels and that is about it. Most do not know how to do services. Most do not know how to do security. Similarly people who do services scream anathema the moment they see a routing protocol. Same for security - the moment they see a device that forwards packets unmolested they start screaming bloody murder. And none of them talks to each other at the design phase.
Essentially as a result of the ISP industry evolution the "internet professional" has diversified into separate professions and the few people who possess the knowledge to do "zombie cleaner" design have devolved into managers or have left the industry in disgust. In either case the "penny pinching" executives have noone to hire to do this type of design. There are fewer and fewer people on the market who are capable of doing that because specialisation pays better then being a generalist.
So while blaming the penny pinching executives is a cool idea the problem is elsewhere. The problem is in the extinction of the internet generalist.
Not surprised about HSBC. In fact surprising about some sense from Chase.
HSBC recently forced me to subscribe to the Verified by Visa marketing pseudosecurity garbageshiteware gimmick (the only one of cards I have that actually forced me to do so). During the subscription process I found out that the idiotic subscription interface does not maintain state with most non-mainstream browsers. In fact if you use Konqueror (or play around with your browser a bit) you can cruise through it with flying colours without it asking for verification information, passwords and the like. I was seriously tempted to go all the way and register a few cards for entertainment purposes, but end of the day decided not to.
So I tried to get the wankers which run the "HSBC Goodness Gracious Me" call center to give me a security contact and a reference to report the bugs. Guess what - they neither understood the concept of "Your credit card interface has a major security flaw", not could provide a contact. Still better then Amex though. Under similar circumstances 4 years ago when I tried to contact the Amex security dept with a similar bug they subscribed me to a mandatory 60 days of phone marketing and email marketing for good measure.
Frankly - they have no clue. Banking security at its best. Understanding is not required, BS and ISO numbers are.
AFAIK they still happily throw out 99.9%+ of all candidates tagged as potentials by their headhunters leaving only what they like. The "cannot hire" is when the candidates start to turn them down. This happened to Yahoo and their other major competitors very long ago. In fact as far as yahoo goes many people turn it down even before reading the job description to the end (for plenty of reasons).
This is yet to happen to Google. I have yet to see a person who has been selected for an interview, had an offer and turned it down. At least in Europe.
Frankly, this problem exists only in the feverish hallucinations of the media and analysts.
The idea that they need to know a "usefull" language within the first 2 years in university is a dreadfull misconception. They need to learn to think right and the language is nothing but a tool to help doing so. Dijkstra programming truths http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/e wd498.html have some good thoughts on the subject. Once a person can think right there comes a point where he/she can start using a "usefull language" in 15 minutes after reading the syntax description.
Further to this, both Ruby and Python are strictly object oriented and with built in memory management. You cannot really use them to teach students low level memory handling, pointers, internals of a hash or the like. These simply get lost in translation, though not as fully as with Java using which for teaching should be a criminal offence. The overall result is that you close whole areas of CS to students for no good reason and frankly I stop wandering why do we have biologists writing filesystems and mathematicians writing device drivers.
C, C++, Java and god forbid VB should be prohibited by law for university courses and any person teaching them during the first 2 semesters in CS should be prosecuted for child abuse. Pascal (even without the object oriented extensions) remains the best language for teaching the first years in CS. Once students are past their data structures course and know how to deal with linked lists, pointers, objects hashes and the like you can switch to C, C++ or Java with minimal fuss. Before that its outright criminal. In fact the total amount of hours spent till the point when the students can produce something that will pay their daily bread will most likely end up being less than the required when teaching directly in C/C++.
There was a very good article on the subject by Joel called The perils of Java schools and I tend to agree with it 100%. In fact I will extend its reasoning further to C and C++. Probably the most important part of teaching a data structure course is to teach it in a language that has a clear syntax and "one way to get it right" for pointers, linked lists and the like. C and C++ are insufficiently clear and unambiguous. Java simply does not allow you half of the things you need to do in that course.
Many people advocate for the usage of Java and especially VB from the perspective of "look how fast can I learn to program in these". That is irrelevant as far as university courses are concerned. What is relevant is will the student learn to produce literate, commercially viable code or not. If he has been subjected to VB - never, Java or C++ - not bloody likely, C - it may work but it will be anything but readable for the first 10 years of his career.
Funnily enough, it can on non-contentious subjects where there is a general consensus. For example if we look at the T-34, the Halifax bomber and a few other I have looked up lately, the quality of the articles and their objectiveness is quite impressive (I am familiar with the subject matter enough to catch mistakes in these).
The anarchical approach fails the moment it gets into a contentious subject or when facing with a well organised system hell bent on putting their side of the story through. Articles on some of the more corrupt US congresscritters are a good example of this. Creationism, Life/Choice and a few others are also in this category.
A mixture of anarchy and order for the contentious ones is possibly the best solution.
Neither. While apparently it is not Braile and is useless for blind which I did not know till today (mea culpa), the US printed dollar has a very characteristic feel to the touch which allows you to distinguish it from Saddam and Kim prints which were identical visually (even under UV). It is also a standard check which cashiers in countries with a large population of Saddam prints employ even today. In fact the "feel" difference even gets a Wikipedia mentioning. Overall - strange. To go through all that effort and not do braille. Just does not make sense.
In order to be able to produce shippable samples you need to buy a larger quantity in bulk. If a family business in the midwest can do it, so can others. Anyway, the materials they offer are low activity, esoteric and not really scary. There used to be other places where you could get this kind of stuff in considerably larger quantities.
I have not done mol biol for a very long time, but the large biotech suppliers like Boehringer, Amersham, Pharmacia and their Russian competitors used to have considerably more dangerous radioactive material with activities many 1000s (if not millions) of times higher than that. In the days when mol biol required C14 and radioactive phosphorus to get any work done they were selling radioactive phosphate (and later ATP) by the bucket to anyone willing to pay. The checks for eligibility (at least for Eastern Europe and 3rd world were done at the receiving customs including countries where customs would wave anything for 100$. Which practically meant that there were no checks at all.
Whoever had modded this funny really did not have a clue. This used to be true at least at some point.
It has been a while since I lived in a country where the green buck is the main black market currency so I do not know to what extent are any of these still true. In fact it has been nearly 7 years since the last time I held a green buck.
The washing trick used to be true for all denominations up to 20$ (50$ and higher had extra protection measures introduced in the 90-es). It did not get a lot of use because the washed notes were not the primary source of counterfeit money on the market and they could usually be picked out using a UV pen. The primary source of counterfeit money was Iraq monetary printing yard (in Saddam's days) closely followed by a number of printing houses operated by the North Koreans in the far east.
The only way to distinguish between the Saddam dollar, Kim dollar and the real dollar was actually exactly this - the denomination printed in braile alphabet for the blind. Only the US dollar had it. So frankly, I am quite surprised by this article. I remember having to feel every dollar note for this damn braile when handling it. Granted, these become difficult to read after a time, but they are supposed to be present on the buck.
Propping a filter is the wrong idea. IMO the best use is to feed them as a spambait for autogenerated dynamic blacklists. Unfortunately this means running your mail server so gmail is out of the question.
Essentially, the idea is that you keep a list of addresses that are no longer in use (or known to be compromised) and any host sending mail to them is set to a "DENY ALL" status for 24-48 hours. If you overlay this on top of greylisting, the efficiency of is as good as Spamhus XBL-SBL. In total these block 99.5% of incoming SPAM. Unfortunately XBL-SBL and dynamic blacklisting give only minimal further improvement when used together. The reason is that blacklisting has nearly 99% correlation with Spamhaus as far as what it would deny. This is not surprising, considering that Spamhaus uses spambaiting as the primary means to populate its database.
This is no different from sanitary controls on food. We manage to enforce sanitary controls, so we should be able to do that as well. It is a matter of will to do it (or lack of).
And at the moment the great problem of the free market is that all costs are not part of the price. The only reason we have to buy Chinese instead of European and American goods is that their goods do not have the environmental costs included. They pollute as much as they want dumping toxic chemicals into their rivers which end up in the ocean which we all use. Same for the atmosphere.
Frankly, f*** carbon. Put excise duty on environmental damage for all goods. The price of the good must include its full recycling cost and damage cost to the environment when producing it. This should be the case regardless of where it is produced. The Earth is not that big, so mercury, cadmium and lead dumped into the Yantze will end up in the tuna on our dinner table in less then 5 years.
Some people have. This is an attempt to make a civilian application from something that has been done for military use long ago. Shkval torpedoes and their Indian and Iranian knockoffs use this technique to achieve speeds of 4-5 times of conventional torpedoes and 80% kill rate.
With SSL you have no chance of MIM if credentials are verified. This is the exact problem - you can register InsertBankNameHere-secure-banking.com, get a cert and set up a simple forwarder that will forward all requests from users to the real website and back. After a few runs (and a few simulated IIS errors) you can have the pin and all the rest. There is no defence against this because the attacker can obtain a cert from the same CA (or equally trusted). Having client side certs protects against that because the MIM is not in a possession of the private key. Even if it has successfully obtained a private key from one user it cannot use it for attacking other users sessions because the server will match the cert and the credentials and kick it out (possibly locking the user in the process just in case).
As far as malware on the user machine is concerned a smartcard/token is still an advantage. Even if the token does not have a secure PINpad the attack will be limited only to the time when the token is plugged in. If the token has a secure PINpad the attack will be limited only to the remainder of the current session. Once it is over the attacker cannot do anything until the mark logs in again.
Oracle is also the database with the longest time to fix security bugs. I will simply quote the message from BUGTRAQ which is most relevant to this thread. It about says it all:
Thor (Hammer of God) wrote:
David Litchfield is one of the most predominant security researchers in the
field, particularly in the area of database security. He and NGS have
discovered more combined security vulnerabilities in leading DBMS products
than anyone else in the world.
Given this fact, I think that not only is it appropriate for David to give
whatever opinions he chooses in his research, but that it is his opinions
that actually give the research real, tangible, applicable value. With his
indisputable status as an authority on database security and his unwavering
integrity, I have no problem whatsoever in considering Dave's opinions to be
"fact."
Actually the whole discussion on BUGTRAQ is definitely worth reading. By the way the vulnerability behind Slammer was discovered by guess who - David Litchfield.
If you are referring to Loki - the market did respond. In fact, the market did respond reasonably well and the problem was that Loki was overly optimistic about the responce forcast.
This is only a rumour, but from what I have heard they were supposed to be paying fixed royalties per year besides the per-game royalties and while their sales of Linux games were good, they were not anywhere as good as they had to be to pay for this model.
This is not surprising - they went for old titles and simply rereleased them under linux. Most of the target audience already had these titles so the interest was bound to be insufficient.
IMO they could have still been around if they released less games, but bought the rights to extend them instead (improved AI, extra character/equipment classes, add-on packs, etc). This way there would have been a value proposition to attract gamers which already have the old Windows version of the game to switch and buy the extended new linux version. With a good cross-licensing/back-porting-to-windows deal this could have succeeded.
Unfortunately for the market and for them, they chose the other way - to port as much as possible. They failed and now everyone looking at the market remembers the curse of loki first.
Yes it does, provided that the system is correctly designed and implemented. In fact it is nearly bulletproof against a MIM.
The MIM will need to have both a valid server certificate to authenticate to the client a valid client certificate to authenticate to the server. If the server correlates certificates with another credentials like a username and password (2+ factor authentication) it can immediately detect that a stolen identity is being used with the wrong smartcard.
Client side x509 certificates (if possible on smartcards or tokens) will solve 99% of phising problems once and for all. For most "secure" sites, the clients authenticate the server (which can often be circumvented by using DNS tricks). At the same time there is no SSL level client authentication. As a result stolen credentials can be reused on another system. A smartcard holding the x509 cert prevents this outright.
Unfortunately instead of using what is right there in front of them in the actual protocol spec the banks go into all kinds of technological roccocco. Not surprising actually. I tried to explain the concept of client side certificate to one of my collegues who had in the past implemented the internet banking system (and its security) for one well known UK bank and is now to implement another one. No matter how hard I tried, he could not grasp the concept.
Besides everything you mention WiMax also has a very unpleasant saturation curve. It deteriorates in a non-linear manner as the number of subscribers increase. Something like exponential. So it is good for early adopters. As a mass technology it will suck eggz unless loads of hardware (base stations) are thrown at it to keep the number of subscribers served by a single basestation as low as possible. As a result as the number of your subscribers grow you end up having to buy exponentially more equipment from the supplier and your return on investment per customer will exponentially decrease. I have seen a professionally done model and it looks as a "losing game" for the "sole WiMax" provider.
It is a technology which was designed by equipment suppliers, not providers. And they designed it so it is good for them.
Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.
China is simply undergoing the same process as the USA did 120-130 years ago. The only difference is that American "businessmen" at the time were faking European brand goods while Chinese are now faking Japanese and American.
Nothing surprising here. Once their own brands appear in quantity they will suddenly become trade mark aware. The way the USA did.
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Well, if it is scheduled a month in advance and he gets a day in liew tp add to of his holidays or agreed overtime I agree with this 100%. Now if it is not and it is a one-off emergency I would also usually agree with that. If it is for the sole reason that the cretinous incompetent c**t that pretends to be a manager was not competent enough to plan how long it will take to get a trivial task done... Hmm... That begs questioning the idea... Now if the aforementioned c**t does that as a matter of habit and normal business practice in order to perform massive nasoanal interfacing into her superior ... F*** that... As David Brent says: If you're gonna be late, then be late and not just 2 minutes - make it an hour and enjoy your breakfast.
Yes I have been denied jobs because my credit score wasn't high enough.
Ha-ha. You are also as likely to be denied a job if it is too good.
Happened to me the one of the few times when I was stupid enough to apply for a bank job. I run a very tight household - no debts besides mortgage (and even that on an accelerated repayment), no credit taken for anything else (my cars are always bought with a money transfer, same for furniture and everything else), no late payments ever, no missed payments ever. And guess what - I failed the credit portion of background check. It looked to non-standard for them and they decided that I probably have some clandestine hidden income to be able to do this (I learned that from an insider much later).
So at least some US banks actually like to see their employees comfortably deep in debt. Just in case so that they do not develop too much independence. Anyway, I have learned the lesson and stick to telecoms now where the background check is mostly limited to references.
Personally, I'd say I'm both, more satisfied with my life and more useful to society than what I would be as the sedated vegetable.
And here comes the 1000000 dollar/pound/euro question - how to ensure that your offspring does not get sedated and moulded into a 9-5 accountant on prosac. The answer to this question is also the answer to the question about the declining US/UK/etc science. Until the answer is found the science will have to be propped up by imports from Eastern Europe, Russia and other places where they do not sedate any kid that does not fit the mould. I recently heard a very good joke: What is a science department in an American University? Answer - a place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English". Sad, but generally true nowdays (and becoming true for UK as well).
Err... I will not go as far as branding schools as anti-intellectual.
In fact the situation is much better now. 15+ years ago the only way to get a scholarship for most poor kids was to convert every nerve cell into a testosterone fed muscle. The situation is not so bad now. You can get lucky and get a scholarship on sole academic merit without being an impoverished foreign student from a third world country.
Problem is elsewhere. It is exactly non-conformism as you have noted in the second part of your post. Most kids that do not think and act exactly as the mold specifies are labelled as suffering from attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
As one of my friends has noted kids no longer have childhood. They are not allowed to make mistakes, set themselves on fire, try ER on a frog they caught in the pond or do other silly things we could do 20+ years ago.
While not all "problematic" kids grow up to be original thinkers, nearly all original thinkers have had their dose of serious problems in school. The difference 20 years ago was that the people with problems in school did not get a mental disease stigma attached to them to follow for the rest of their life.
Further to this, this is bad on the "normal" kids either. They also do not see any example of non-conformist thinking and behaviour around them that does not get severely punished. As a result they end up growing up without reaching mental maturity. At best they have star wars or gung-ho patriotism style concepts of good and evil. At worst they have none. Frankly, it is surprising that there has been so few Columbines or GTA style highway shootings.
And worst of all, USA is spreading this influence outside their borders by all means possible. UK is nearly done moulding into the same mould (with some perverse british overtones to boot), other countries are close on following.
That may or may not be the case.
1. The law has been in force for a very long time. Ask anyone who has actually done a proper costing and the legal aspects of outsourcing to India and they will tell you this.
2. The law as such dissallows you to interface into a PBX or anything else which is also connected to the local network over there. In fact as far as the letter of law is concerned this is not that much different from telco regulations in many places around the world.
3. The law does not dissallow you to host as many VOIP phones there as you like provided that they are off your own PBX located outside India and do not interface into the local phone network by any means. So a call center whose guts are located offshore is still fully legal. On(Indian)shore is very murky and it is not something call center outsourcers care about. After all the call center chickens working 10.5 hour shifts are usually not allowed local calls anyway.
4. As far as Yahoo, Dialpad, etc are concerned they are simply required to be registered under the Indian telecoms regs to offer service. This for all practical purposes means that they or their subsidiaries will have to go under majority Indian ownerships. So much for WTO here (actually dunno if they are a member). In fact it is about time someone beat up India in terms of trade treaties and obligations on this.
So overall, this law does not change anything as far as call centers are concerned. The Idian government is not mad to kill their primary GDP source. All it does is to ensure that the near-monopoly of Idian companies on the Idian telecoms market is retained for times to come.
It is not up to pennypinching network executives. In fact every ISP I know is pondering on how to deal with the resource consumption caused by this problem (along with P2P leaching). The problem is elsewhere.
In order to actually clean up the zombie sewers the ISPs needs to design their network with this requirement in mind. They should be designed as cleanable or cleaning capability must be retrofitted into the design. This in turn requires them to use network designers who are security and service design aware. These are nearly an extinct animal now. Every single one I know does anything but network design.
The common nowday requirement for a network designer is a CCXX or JNXX where XX stands for one of the levels and that is about it. Most do not know how to do services. Most do not know how to do security. Similarly people who do services scream anathema the moment they see a routing protocol. Same for security - the moment they see a device that forwards packets unmolested they start screaming bloody murder. And none of them talks to each other at the design phase.
Essentially as a result of the ISP industry evolution the "internet professional" has diversified into separate professions and the few people who possess the knowledge to do "zombie cleaner" design have devolved into managers or have left the industry in disgust. In either case the "penny pinching" executives have noone to hire to do this type of design. There are fewer and fewer people on the market who are capable of doing that because specialisation pays better then being a generalist.
So while blaming the penny pinching executives is a cool idea the problem is elsewhere. The problem is in the extinction of the internet generalist.
Not surprised about HSBC. In fact surprising about some sense from Chase.
HSBC recently forced me to subscribe to the Verified by Visa marketing pseudosecurity garbageshiteware gimmick (the only one of cards I have that actually forced me to do so). During the subscription process I found out that the idiotic subscription interface does not maintain state with most non-mainstream browsers. In fact if you use Konqueror (or play around with your browser a bit) you can cruise through it with flying colours without it asking for verification information, passwords and the like. I was seriously tempted to go all the way and register a few cards for entertainment purposes, but end of the day decided not to.
So I tried to get the wankers which run the "HSBC Goodness Gracious Me" call center to give me a security contact and a reference to report the bugs. Guess what - they neither understood the concept of "Your credit card interface has a major security flaw", not could provide a contact. Still better then Amex though. Under similar circumstances 4 years ago when I tried to contact the Amex security dept with a similar bug they subscribed me to a mandatory 60 days of phone marketing and email marketing for good measure.
Frankly - they have no clue. Banking security at its best. Understanding is not required, BS and ISO numbers are.
Bollocks.
AFAIK they still happily throw out 99.9%+ of all candidates tagged as potentials by their headhunters leaving only what they like. The "cannot hire" is when the candidates start to turn them down. This happened to Yahoo and their other major competitors very long ago. In fact as far as yahoo goes many people turn it down even before reading the job description to the end (for plenty of reasons).
This is yet to happen to Google. I have yet to see a person who has been selected for an interview, had an offer and turned it down. At least in Europe.
Frankly, this problem exists only in the feverish hallucinations of the media and analysts.
And here is where you are wrong.
The idea that they need to know a "usefull" language within the first 2 years in university is a dreadfull misconception. They need to learn to think right and the language is nothing but a tool to help doing so. Dijkstra programming truths http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/e wd498.html have some good thoughts on the subject. Once a person can think right there comes a point where he/she can start using a "usefull language" in 15 minutes after reading the syntax description.
Further to this, both Ruby and Python are strictly object oriented and with built in memory management. You cannot really use them to teach students low level memory handling, pointers, internals of a hash or the like. These simply get lost in translation, though not as fully as with Java using which for teaching should be a criminal offence. The overall result is that you close whole areas of CS to students for no good reason and frankly I stop wandering why do we have biologists writing filesystems and mathematicians writing device drivers.
Exactly.
C, C++, Java and god forbid VB should be prohibited by law for university courses and any person teaching them during the first 2 semesters in CS should be prosecuted for child abuse. Pascal (even without the object oriented extensions) remains the best language for teaching the first years in CS. Once students are past their data structures course and know how to deal with linked lists, pointers, objects hashes and the like you can switch to C, C++ or Java with minimal fuss. Before that its outright criminal. In fact the total amount of hours spent till the point when the students can produce something that will pay their daily bread will most likely end up being less than the required when teaching directly in C/C++.
There was a very good article on the subject by Joel called The perils of Java schools and I tend to agree with it 100%. In fact I will extend its reasoning further to C and C++. Probably the most important part of teaching a data structure course is to teach it in a language that has a clear syntax and "one way to get it right" for pointers, linked lists and the like. C and C++ are insufficiently clear and unambiguous. Java simply does not allow you half of the things you need to do in that course.
Many people advocate for the usage of Java and especially VB from the perspective of "look how fast can I learn to program in these". That is irrelevant as far as university courses are concerned. What is relevant is will the student learn to produce literate, commercially viable code or not. If he has been subjected to VB - never, Java or C++ - not bloody likely, C - it may work but it will be anything but readable for the first 10 years of his career.
Funnily enough, it can on non-contentious subjects where there is a general consensus. For example if we look at the T-34, the Halifax bomber and a few other I have looked up lately, the quality of the articles and their objectiveness is quite impressive (I am familiar with the subject matter enough to catch mistakes in these).
The anarchical approach fails the moment it gets into a contentious subject or when facing with a well organised system hell bent on putting their side of the story through. Articles on some of the more corrupt US congresscritters are a good example of this. Creationism, Life/Choice and a few others are also in this category.
A mixture of anarchy and order for the contentious ones is possibly the best solution.
Neither. While apparently it is not Braile and is useless for blind which I did not know till today (mea culpa), the US printed dollar has a very characteristic feel to the touch which allows you to distinguish it from Saddam and Kim prints which were identical visually (even under UV). It is also a standard check which cashiers in countries with a large population of Saddam prints employ even today. In fact the "feel" difference even gets a Wikipedia mentioning. Overall - strange. To go through all that effort and not do braille. Just does not make sense.
In order to be able to produce shippable samples you need to buy a larger quantity in bulk. If a family business in the midwest can do it, so can others. Anyway, the materials they offer are low activity, esoteric and not really scary. There used to be other places where you could get this kind of stuff in considerably larger quantities.
I have not done mol biol for a very long time, but the large biotech suppliers like Boehringer, Amersham, Pharmacia and their Russian competitors used to have considerably more dangerous radioactive material with activities many 1000s (if not millions) of times higher than that. In the days when mol biol required C14 and radioactive phosphorus to get any work done they were selling radioactive phosphate (and later ATP) by the bucket to anyone willing to pay. The checks for eligibility (at least for Eastern Europe and 3rd world were done at the receiving customs including countries where customs would wave anything for 100$. Which practically meant that there were no checks at all.
Whoever had modded this funny really did not have a clue. This used to be true at least at some point.
It has been a while since I lived in a country where the green buck is the main black market currency so I do not know to what extent are any of these still true. In fact it has been nearly 7 years since the last time I held a green buck.
The washing trick used to be true for all denominations up to 20$ (50$ and higher had extra protection measures introduced in the 90-es). It did not get a lot of use because the washed notes were not the primary source of counterfeit money on the market and they could usually be picked out using a UV pen. The primary source of counterfeit money was Iraq monetary printing yard (in Saddam's days) closely followed by a number of printing houses operated by the North Koreans in the far east.
The only way to distinguish between the Saddam dollar, Kim dollar and the real dollar was actually exactly this - the denomination printed in braile alphabet for the blind. Only the US dollar had it. So frankly, I am quite surprised by this article. I remember having to feel every dollar note for this damn braile when handling it. Granted, these become difficult to read after a time, but they are supposed to be present on the buck.
Strange actually...
Propping a filter is the wrong idea. IMO the best use is to feed them as a spambait for autogenerated dynamic blacklists. Unfortunately this means running your mail server so gmail is out of the question.
Essentially, the idea is that you keep a list of addresses that are no longer in use (or known to be compromised) and any host sending mail to them is set to a "DENY ALL" status for 24-48 hours. If you overlay this on top of greylisting, the efficiency of is as good as Spamhus XBL-SBL. In total these block 99.5% of incoming SPAM. Unfortunately XBL-SBL and dynamic blacklisting give only minimal further improvement when used together. The reason is that blacklisting has nearly 99% correlation with Spamhaus as far as what it would deny. This is not surprising, considering that Spamhaus uses spambaiting as the primary means to populate its database.
This is no different from sanitary controls on food. We manage to enforce sanitary controls, so we should be able to do that as well. It is a matter of will to do it (or lack of).
Absolutely.
And at the moment the great problem of the free market is that all costs are not part of the price. The only reason we have to buy Chinese instead of European and American goods is that their goods do not have the environmental costs included. They pollute as much as they want dumping toxic chemicals into their rivers which end up in the ocean which we all use. Same for the atmosphere.
Frankly, f*** carbon. Put excise duty on environmental damage for all goods. The price of the good must include its full recycling cost and damage cost to the environment when producing it. This should be the case regardless of where it is produced. The Earth is not that big, so mercury, cadmium and lead dumped into the Yantze will end up in the tuna on our dinner table in less then 5 years.
Some people have. This is an attempt to make a civilian application from something that has been done for military use long ago. Shkval torpedoes and their Indian and Iranian knockoffs use this technique to achieve speeds of 4-5 times of conventional torpedoes and 80% kill rate.
As far as malware on the user machine is concerned a smartcard/token is still an advantage. Even if the token does not have a secure PINpad the attack will be limited only to the time when the token is plugged in. If the token has a secure PINpad the attack will be limited only to the remainder of the current session. Once it is over the attacker cannot do anything until the mark logs in again.
Oracle is also the database with the longest time to fix security bugs. I will simply quote the message from BUGTRAQ which is most relevant to this thread. It about says it all:
Thor (Hammer of God) wrote:
David Litchfield is one of the most predominant security researchers in the field, particularly in the area of database security. He and NGS have discovered more combined security vulnerabilities in leading DBMS products than anyone else in the world.
Given this fact, I think that not only is it appropriate for David to give whatever opinions he chooses in his research, but that it is his opinions that actually give the research real, tangible, applicable value. With his indisputable status as an authority on database security and his unwavering integrity, I have no problem whatsoever in considering Dave's opinions to be "fact."
Actually the whole discussion on BUGTRAQ is definitely worth reading. By the way the vulnerability behind Slammer was discovered by guess who - David Litchfield.
If you are referring to Loki - the market did respond. In fact, the market did respond reasonably well and the problem was that Loki was overly optimistic about the responce forcast.
This is only a rumour, but from what I have heard they were supposed to be paying fixed royalties per year besides the per-game royalties and while their sales of Linux games were good, they were not anywhere as good as they had to be to pay for this model.
This is not surprising - they went for old titles and simply rereleased them under linux. Most of the target audience already had these titles so the interest was bound to be insufficient.
IMO they could have still been around if they released less games, but bought the rights to extend them instead (improved AI, extra character/equipment classes, add-on packs, etc). This way there would have been a value proposition to attract gamers which already have the old Windows version of the game to switch and buy the extended new linux version. With a good cross-licensing/back-porting-to-windows deal this could have succeeded.
Unfortunately for the market and for them, they chose the other way - to port as much as possible. They failed and now everyone looking at the market remembers the curse of loki first.
Yes it does, provided that the system is correctly designed and implemented. In fact it is nearly bulletproof against a MIM.
The MIM will need to have both a valid server certificate to authenticate to the client a valid client certificate to authenticate to the server. If the server correlates certificates with another credentials like a username and password (2+ factor authentication) it can immediately detect that a stolen identity is being used with the wrong smartcard.
Ahem. Exactly.
Client side x509 certificates (if possible on smartcards or tokens) will solve 99% of phising problems once and for all. For most "secure" sites, the clients authenticate the server (which can often be circumvented by using DNS tricks). At the same time there is no SSL level client authentication. As a result stolen credentials can be reused on another system. A smartcard holding the x509 cert prevents this outright.
Unfortunately instead of using what is right there in front of them in the actual protocol spec the banks go into all kinds of technological roccocco. Not surprising actually. I tried to explain the concept of client side certificate to one of my collegues who had in the past implemented the internet banking system (and its security) for one well known UK bank and is now to implement another one. No matter how hard I tried, he could not grasp the concept.
Yes you are.
Besides everything you mention WiMax also has a very unpleasant saturation curve. It deteriorates in a non-linear manner as the number of subscribers increase. Something like exponential. So it is good for early adopters. As a mass technology it will suck eggz unless loads of hardware (base stations) are thrown at it to keep the number of subscribers served by a single basestation as low as possible. As a result as the number of your subscribers grow you end up having to buy exponentially more equipment from the supplier and your return on investment per customer will exponentially decrease. I have seen a professionally done model and it looks as a "losing game" for the "sole WiMax" provider.
It is a technology which was designed by equipment suppliers, not providers. And they designed it so it is good for them.
Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.
China is simply undergoing the same process as the USA did 120-130 years ago. The only difference is that American "businessmen" at the time were faking European brand goods while Chinese are now faking Japanese and American.
Nothing surprising here. Once their own brands appear in quantity they will suddenly become trade mark aware. The way the USA did.