I really don't understand why people insist on buying common items from sellers across the country. If you want a cell phone, a TV, or a computer, go to WalMart. If you're cheap, go to an electronics show/flea market.
You can safely buy most rare and collectible items on eBay if you know your stuff and read the descriptions carefully. I buy and sell rare vinyl classical records, and have never had a problem. In fact, I've run into many very nice and helpful people. Scammers do not often sell esoteric items that require obscure knowledge, although there was once some guy in Hungary who tried to peddle a bootleg forgery of Szegeti doing the Bach Sonatas on Continental, a set worth $3000 if real. Nobody fell for it.
Now that guy with the Japanese swords, I'll have to admit he was good. But how many crooks are there like that?
If you must buy ordinary merchandise, you can always ask for real-world references. Who are you? Do you have a real job or store? Where do you work? Where is you store? Then call the place and ask about the seller--most businesses will verify employment.
I am a one issue voter. I don't care about anything else. If you vote for or support this bill in any way, I will (1) vote against you, (2) give $xxx to your opponent, and (3) urge all my friends to vote against you.
I am a C++ programmer in a Solaris environment. When I went to college, many years ago, if you had studied computers you would have learned to use Fortran on punch cards.
Instead of doing this, I spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek and reading ancient literary and philosophical texts. I think the course where I learned the most was a seminar when we read and analyzed Plato's Phaedo. There were only three guys in the course, so when we decided to meet five times a week instead of three, no one stoppped us.
Of course, this was long before Bjarne invented C++, when there was no fork1() around, and no pthread library to play with. However, the syntax of classical Greek is about the only thing I can think of that is actually more complicated than the syntax of C++. Well, maybe if you through in all the subtleties of STL...
Many of the guys I've worked with have similar diverse backgrounds. We did what we wanted when we were young, and then settled down to earn a living. That's the meaning of school, after all; I don't have to tell you Greeklings that 'skholia' is the word for leisure.
One of the sharpest consultants I ever met, who is very well paid and always in demand, never even touched a computer until he was in his early thirties. He majored in art, drove a taxi, ran a theatre company, went to law school, etc, etc. He told me that the best way to live is to be retired during your youth, because if you wait until you're old to retire, you won't be able to do what you want.
At my giant financial institution, we currently use an E10000 partition to do our monthly departmental MIS. It has 28 CPUs and 28 gigs. Our job does trillions of calculations, creates about a billion records, and loads them into two Oracle tables (only one index, thankfully).
It currently runs about six hours, but our merger with another giant financial institution will result in the creation of even more records, and our users always have big ideas that always seem to lead to more records and more calculations. Already, were up to 60000 cost centers, with 20000 accounts over 48 months of data (plus year to date, quarterly, last year to date, quarter to date, last year quarter to date, etc, etc). There are many complaints already that our monthly run takes too long, and with all the additional processing that will be required we're looking at 10 hours without more hardware.
I should mention for all you geeks out there that our coding is about as efficient as you can get. It's custom C++, full of forking and threading, with all the data read into memory at the begining and processed there. When we run, the CPU goes close to 100% and stays there for hours. Because of hardware limitations, we have to limit it to 22 processes at a time using about two and half gigs of memory each. If we could get more parallelism, we might be able to squeeze more processing into our available window.
This is academic-speak, pretty common among educated people. It entered the English language in the 30s or 40s--all the professorial immigrants fleeing Hitler.
When we used mainframes for business applications, not so very long ago, most of the systems were mostly written by in-house programmers. Some of them were quite creative, within the limited languages that were then available, and the pay was generally considered good. Obviously, the overall efficiency was probably not as great as it would have been with centralized software creation, but the users were much more satisfied and the application worked much better. If they didn't, then you got beeped and fixed it pronto!
Many of these systems are still in use. Some of the more creative parts are quite difficult to maintain and modify, but that's all part of the game. If you use an open architecture like J2EE, you can hook up your web-based apps to these legacy systems with surprising ease, using either message queueing or Java connectors.
I think the key was that in the US, corporations kept everything under their own control, and had the staff to make it work. Obviously, these people have less computer science knowledge than the guys writing operating systems and device drivers, but they know how to get and keep this stuff working.
Re:Rumors of slashdot's demise exaggerated.
on
Slashdot Back Online
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, that's what I thought, with all the $ problems at at your parent company. I expected to see a story in The Register on Monday about the Slashdot guys being paid off and told to leave the premises immediately.
The other possibility was a DDOS attack, but most of your enemies are too dumb to manage this.
Yes, you can get carried away and go nuts. You can spend all your money on audio equipment. But before you laugh at these guys, you might want to take a listen, particularly if you like music. It doesn't need to be extremely expensive if you've got a brain on your shoulders--in fact, many of my audiophile friends are pathologically cheap. There's 'budget' audiophile equipment, getting cheaper and better every year, and there's used stuff ten years old, that has another thirty years of use left.
As for playing with cables and stuff like that, it's part of the game. Some of my friends change things every week, buying used and selling used and usually making money on the deal. Or listen for free at other guys' houses and the local audio club before buying.
Constant trading up will result in a good, well-matched system at half the price of new. I've got a very nice $25,000 system on which I've spent maybe $14,000 over ten years. I do use a $1200 interconnect, but it didn't actually cost me anything.
I also 'pay myself first' and keep many times this money in financial assets. No use being a damned fool about anything...
These studies are just surveys, not experiments, and there are no controls. Computers are more likely to be found in the households of intelligent, upper income, highly educated people. Of course their children are smarter. Constant conjunction != causality.
If you don't beileve this, there was a study last month that found that the children of smokers are twice as likely to have cavities as the children of non-smokers. Does second-hand smoke make your teeth decay? No, disgusting habits are just a proxy for social class.
It would be considered immoral to conduct the experiments needed to prove anything one way or the other.
When congress passed this law, they were afraid of stepping on First Amendment issues by specifying exactly what things were supposed to be filtered. They didn't want the whole thing to be ruled unconstitutional like all the other laws they've been passing lately. So they left it deliberately vague. As long as you have some filter, which filters out something that someone might consider harmful to minors, you are in compliance with the law.
It seems to me that a situation like this leaves a lot of wiggle room. Surely some of you clever programmers out there can come up with the Slashdot filter, that will remove only those sites that WE consider harmful to minors. Not that there's exactly a consensus around here, but give it your best shot. I expect to be seeing some pretty good-looking girls, but not much of that Bill Gates fellow...
Actually, some of the offshore places do pretty good work. You just have to know which ones. At a company in which I am a private investor, we spent $20K to have our initial website developed in the US, and it wasn't very good.
After about a year, we hired a place in India, and they came up with a much-improved website for only $2K. I should point out, however, that our CEO is an Indian national who knows hundreds of IT guys in Madras--your results as a naive American customer might not be as good.
When I first joined this illustrious profession, in 1979, there was a well-known instance of this kind of thing. At Blue Cross/Blue Shield of NY, a certain consulting company had imbedded itself so deeply that they were practically running the place. Rumor had it that if you applied for a job there, you would be interview by a consultant, who reported to another consultant, etc, etc. The place was infested with them! They billed hundreds of millions of dollars over a few years, and never did manage to finish the Medical/Surgical system they were hired for. Curiously, every programmer and recruiter in the city had heard about what was going on, but BC/BS was unable to free themselves from this deadly embrace. I don't believe the company had to worry about its next contract, they raked in so much money.
I believe there are equivalent companies nowadays, although they might be a little more subtle about it. It is pretty well known that if you invite in the consulting arm of one of the big six accounting firms, you'll be paying millions to be told whatever you want to hear--and whatever you do, don't let them develop any systems.
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book for a consulting company to make a system so complex that only they can maintain it. I've heard many stories about consultants, small and large, who kept the source code and charged the customer exorbitant fees for simple fixes. Even if they let you see the code, the usual reaction is to shudder and give it back.
Stereophile's AES report covers a number of the issues that were raised by other replies. It specifically addresses whether sound in the 20-30kHz range is audible (yes!) and whether watermarking is audible (yes!). The funnest quote:
The controversy is far from resolved. It's perhaps cold
comfort to audiophiles, but the always-trenchant David
Chesky reminded all in attendance that record labels like
his, which specialize in jazz and classical recordings, are
as unlikely to use watermarking as pirates are to
mass-produce copies of such labels' recordings. As he put
it, the stuff that's going to be hammered hard with
watermarks is so nasty that "you could mark it with a
lawnmower and never hear the difference."
MP3 = 8-track cartridge = Dolby cassette = CD = SACD = vinyl LP = 30IPS analog master tape
Now, with so many other and better choices available, would you really want to plug one of these things into the gold-plated RCA jacks of your favorite preamp?
PS. On second thought, I'm not so sure that a good Dolby cassette isn't better than CD.
You know, the ones who have done many bad things and never been caught. I'd be much more afraid of them than the ones who are always screwing up and going to jail. For all you know, this is the fellow next door who's working on your bank account or your daughter or whatever. Actually, there's something to be said for the time when everyone lived in a small village and knew everyone else there. No privacy, but not much injustice either.
There are always cases when authorities refuse to talk to the press--politicians caught doing something bad, generals conducting secret wars, police officers disregarding the law, etc, etc. They always say that there's a official regulation that prevents them from saying anything, that it would violate some privacy law or help the enemy or something.
The press has a simple way to retaliate, and they frequently use it. Just interview the enemies of these people, and print what they say as if it were the pure unadulterated truth. "Well, we asked you, but you said you had no comment!" They'll talk.
There is a skill that is antithetical to programming which is nevertheless very valuable in real life. It was taught in Greece and Rome, and was at the core of the humanistic curriculum in the Renaissance. This is the art of rhetoric, the study of the methods by which you can persuade your fellow citizens to accept your views and act on them.
You hardcore coders at Slashdot all p*** on this skill, but it is the way the world works, customs are established, and laws get enacted. It is how the ignorant multitudes are induced to vote for the system we have now. You can treat it with scorn, but you will in turn be dismissed as a kook whose ideas are of no interest.
So you can say this article is nothing new, or that everybody knows this, or that his examples are stupid, or that he never wrote a line of code in his life--but articles like this are more likely to bring about change in the law than all your whining.
Since Mr. Stroustrup has lived in Scandanavia, England, and the US, he has surely noticed a few differences. But I would like to suggest that working in a research institution like Bell Labs is not the same thing as working in real American business.
The reason I ask is because I worked on a large C++ project at a Fortune 100 corporation that lasted for several years. It incorporated virtually all the bad features of American business: fast-talking consultants, clueless managers, greedy contractors and cowering employees predicting disaster. We wrote thousands of lines of C++ code, and then threw them out and wrote more. Architecture, specifications, planning? Who needs 'em with a deadline to be met?
One of the things I noticed about US C++ programmers, particularly contracters, is that they were ruthlessly competitive. The idea of using someone else's classes was completely foreign to them. Any time anyone gets an assignemnt, the first thing to do is discard all prior concepts and classes, and write his own. This means that everyone is striving to impose his own will on the project, and incidentally billing for huge hours spent designing and writing classes that only he would use. Eventually, the money dries up and employees are left to maintain a montrous mismash. I'm sure we used every C++ technique ever heard of--we've got multiple inheritance from templatized classes, we've got objects with global scope singing and dancing before main is called, we've got our very own string class that does much more than the STL implementation--but no one would say this is good.
It would seem that the competitve American ethos is not so great when it comes to using languages that require cooperation, coordination, and subordination. Not everyone on a project can be the master class designer. But when it's every man for himself, watch out!
By the way, when the project was winding down the phoney IEEE interview was circulated. Everyone found it very funny, especially the contractors who took $25M off of us.
Yeah, there are. I could mention the Rockport Sirius and the Fossell Air Force One.
It's true this thing is old. The original owner of the idea couldn't get it to work, and sold it to some Japanese guys. They can't get it to work either. The two problems: warped records, and little pieces of dust. On a regular table, slight warps are no problem, and pieces of loose dust are simply pushed aside by the stylus.
Actually, all the superexpensive products have more problems than they're worth. Most regular guys use something in the $3000-6000 range, such as a Linn, a VPI, or a Basis. They're regular commercial products that sell in reasonable numbers, and work well.
I suppose I'm the only Slashdotter with a $3000 turntable. Oh, well...
I see that some of the posters have assumed the keys are contained in the filesystem, while the rest are for searching memory. Well, which is it? If it's the filesystem, the obviously you've got to be root or administrator and have some way of running your programs on the target box. Not that easy, as many have said. If the keys are in memory, even if you're a hacker with all the privileges in the world, the address space of your evil program can't see other address spaces, unless you are a very tricky assembly language wizard. Either way, this is not for script kiddies.
And if the ruthless crackers at the NSA want to find out your credit card number, they'll probably just call your bank and ask.
I am not so sure the citizenry is uninformed. I would say that most people are fully informed about matters that affect them personally. Unfortunately, the world is too big a place, and there is too much going on, for everyone to worry about all the problems. In a democracy like ours (US here), it is up to individuals to defend their own interests, not fight impartially to make the world a better place. It certainly is not realistic to expect others to care about your problems.
Ah, the wisdom of the stock market! What does this consist of? About three quarters of the men and probably half the women in the country, making bets on matters they know nothing about. Just think of all these people, and how much they know about Linux and computers, corporate finance and macro-economics. If you think this adds up to close to nothing, you may be right. For now they are all merrily marching in one direction, on the golden road to unlimited wealth. But mobs of uneducated people are not necessarily the safest bunch to fall in with. I'll stick to coding and get rich the old-fashioned way.
There's no law requiring the affluent to spend there money--just a lot of corporate consumer propoganda. My car is ten years old, and I live in a one-room apartment, but if you saw my paycheck, or my brokerage account statement, I don't think you'd call me poor.
The US government has a similar type of surveillance program, although it does require a court order. They use a Trojan called 'DIRT', which is not detected by anit-virus software (I believe they have a deal with the anti-virus companies). Rather than break through or break in, they monitor the evildoer's email, and use social engineering to get him to install their Trojan. Most targets of this program are not guys like us, but dumb criminals using Windows 98. Typically, they have a mix of encrypted and plaintext email.
This apparently works well against drug dealers and such. Encryption passwords are captured and reported back to Washington, and then they break into the encrypted email. If they can't get the target to install the Trojan, they get access to his computer somehow and pop it in. Would Netice help in a case like this? I would think you'd want to use something like ZoneAlarm. But these guys are so unsophisticated, they think the Internet is magic and they're invisible once they install PGP or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand why people insist on buying common items from sellers across the country. If you want a cell phone, a TV, or a computer, go to WalMart. If you're cheap, go to an electronics show/flea market.
You can safely buy most rare and collectible items on eBay if you know your stuff and read the descriptions carefully. I buy and sell rare vinyl classical records, and have never had a problem. In fact, I've run into many very nice and helpful people. Scammers do not often sell esoteric items that require obscure knowledge, although there was once some guy in Hungary who tried to peddle a bootleg forgery of Szegeti doing the Bach Sonatas on Continental, a set worth $3000 if real. Nobody fell for it.
Now that guy with the Japanese swords, I'll have to admit he was good. But how many crooks are there like that?
If you must buy ordinary merchandise, you can always ask for real-world references. Who are you? Do you have a real job or store? Where do you work? Where is you store? Then call the place and ask about the seller--most businesses will verify employment.
Take your lead from the gun lobby.
Dear Congressman:
I am a one issue voter. I don't care about anything else. If you vote for or support this bill in any way, I will (1) vote against you, (2) give $xxx to your opponent, and (3) urge all my friends to vote against you.
Yours,
vinyl1
I am a C++ programmer in a Solaris environment. When I went to college, many years ago, if you had studied computers you would have learned to use Fortran on punch cards.
Instead of doing this, I spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek and reading ancient literary and philosophical texts. I think the course where I learned the most was a seminar when we read and analyzed Plato's Phaedo. There were only three guys in the course, so when we decided to meet five times a week instead of three, no one stoppped us.
Of course, this was long before Bjarne invented C++, when there was no fork1() around, and no pthread library to play with. However, the syntax of classical Greek is about the only thing I can think of that is actually more complicated than the syntax of C++. Well, maybe if you through in all the subtleties of STL...
Many of the guys I've worked with have similar diverse backgrounds. We did what we wanted when we were young, and then settled down to earn a living. That's the meaning of school, after all; I don't have to tell you Greeklings that 'skholia' is the word for leisure.
One of the sharpest consultants I ever met, who is very well paid and always in demand, never even touched a computer until he was in his early thirties. He majored in art, drove a taxi, ran a theatre company, went to law school, etc, etc. He told me that the best way to live is to be retired during your youth, because if you wait until you're old to retire, you won't be able to do what you want.
At my giant financial institution, we currently use an E10000 partition to do our monthly departmental MIS. It has 28 CPUs and 28 gigs. Our job does trillions of calculations, creates about a billion records, and loads them into two Oracle tables (only one index, thankfully).
It currently runs about six hours, but our merger with another giant financial institution will result in the creation of even more records, and our users always have big ideas that always seem to lead to more records and more calculations. Already, were up to 60000 cost centers, with 20000 accounts over 48 months of data (plus year to date, quarterly, last year to date, quarter to date, last year quarter to date, etc, etc). There are many complaints already that our monthly run takes too long, and with all the additional processing that will be required we're looking at 10 hours without more hardware.
I should mention for all you geeks out there that our coding is about as efficient as you can get. It's custom C++, full of forking and threading, with all the data read into memory at the begining and processed there. When we run, the CPU goes close to 100% and stays there for hours. Because of hardware limitations, we have to limit it to 22 processes at a time using about two and half gigs of memory each. If we could get more parallelism, we might be able to squeeze more processing into our available window.
This is academic-speak, pretty common among educated people. It entered the English language in the 30s or 40s--all the professorial immigrants fleeing Hitler.
Actually, it sounds kind of archaic nowadays.
When we used mainframes for business applications, not so very long ago, most of the systems were mostly written by in-house programmers. Some of them were quite creative, within the limited languages that were then available, and the pay was generally considered good. Obviously, the overall efficiency was probably not as great as it would have been with centralized software creation, but the users were much more satisfied and the application worked much better. If they didn't, then you got beeped and fixed it pronto!
Many of these systems are still in use. Some of the more creative parts are quite difficult to maintain and modify, but that's all part of the game. If you use an open architecture like J2EE, you can hook up your web-based apps to these legacy systems with surprising ease, using either message queueing or Java connectors.
I think the key was that in the US, corporations kept everything under their own control, and had the staff to make it work. Obviously, these people have less computer science knowledge than the guys writing operating systems and device drivers, but they know how to get and keep this stuff working.
Yeah, that's what I thought, with all the $ problems at at your parent company. I expected to see a story in The Register on Monday about the Slashdot guys being paid off and told to leave the premises immediately.
The other possibility was a DDOS attack, but most of your enemies are too dumb to manage this.
Yes, you can get carried away and go nuts. You can spend all your money on audio equipment. But before you laugh at these guys, you might want to take a listen, particularly if you like music. It doesn't need to be extremely expensive if you've got a brain on your shoulders--in fact, many of my audiophile friends are pathologically cheap. There's 'budget' audiophile equipment, getting cheaper and better every year, and there's used stuff ten years old, that has another thirty years of use left.
As for playing with cables and stuff like that, it's part of the game. Some of my friends change things every week, buying used and selling used and usually making money on the deal. Or listen for free at other guys' houses and the local audio club before buying.
Constant trading up will result in a good, well-matched system at half the price of new. I've got a very nice $25,000 system on which I've spent maybe $14,000 over ten years. I do use a $1200 interconnect, but it didn't actually cost me anything.
I also 'pay myself first' and keep many times this money in financial assets. No use being a damned fool about anything...
These studies are just surveys, not experiments, and there are no controls. Computers are more likely to be found in the households of intelligent, upper income, highly educated people. Of course their children are smarter. Constant conjunction != causality.
If you don't beileve this, there was a study last month that found that the children of smokers are twice as likely to have cavities as the children of non-smokers. Does second-hand smoke make your teeth decay? No, disgusting habits are just a proxy for social class.
It would be considered immoral to conduct the experiments needed to prove anything one way or the other.
When congress passed this law, they were afraid of stepping on First Amendment issues by specifying exactly what things were supposed to be filtered. They didn't want the whole thing to be ruled unconstitutional like all the other laws they've been passing lately. So they left it deliberately vague. As long as you have some filter, which filters out something that someone might consider harmful to minors, you are in compliance with the law.
It seems to me that a situation like this leaves a lot of wiggle room. Surely some of you clever programmers out there can come up with the Slashdot filter, that will remove only those sites that WE consider harmful to minors. Not that there's exactly a consensus around here, but give it your best shot. I expect to be seeing some pretty good-looking girls, but not much of that Bill Gates fellow...
I cut and pasted your code, and got 'hello'. I'm on Solaris 2.6. It's not clear what ksh we have, but I'm pretty sure it's not ksh93.
So maybe this trick isn't so safe? Perhaps someday you'll upgrade something and your scripts will stop working.
Actually, some of the offshore places do pretty good work. You just have to know which ones. At a company in which I am a private investor, we spent $20K to have our initial website developed in the US, and it wasn't very good.
After about a year, we hired a place in India, and they came up with a much-improved website for only $2K. I should point out, however, that our CEO is an Indian national who knows hundreds of IT guys in Madras--your results as a naive American customer might not be as good.
When I first joined this illustrious profession, in 1979, there was a well-known instance of this kind of thing. At Blue Cross/Blue Shield of NY, a certain consulting company had imbedded itself so deeply that they were practically running the place. Rumor had it that if you applied for a job there, you would be interview by a consultant, who reported to another consultant, etc, etc. The place was infested with them! They billed hundreds of millions of dollars over a few years, and never did manage to finish the Medical/Surgical system they were hired for. Curiously, every programmer and recruiter in the city had heard about what was going on, but BC/BS was unable to free themselves from this deadly embrace. I don't believe the company had to worry about its next contract, they raked in so much money.
I believe there are equivalent companies nowadays, although they might be a little more subtle about it. It is pretty well known that if you invite in the consulting arm of one of the big six accounting firms, you'll be paying millions to be told whatever you want to hear--and whatever you do, don't let them develop any systems.
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book for a consulting company to make a system so complex that only they can maintain it. I've heard many stories about consultants, small and large, who kept the source code and charged the customer exorbitant fees for simple fixes. Even if they let you see the code, the usual reaction is to shudder and give it back.
The controversy is far from resolved. It's perhaps cold comfort to audiophiles, but the always-trenchant David Chesky reminded all in attendance that record labels like his, which specialize in jazz and classical recordings, are as unlikely to use watermarking as pirates are to mass-produce copies of such labels' recordings. As he put it, the stuff that's going to be hammered hard with watermarks is so nasty that "you could mark it with a lawnmower and never hear the difference."
Let me put it like this:
MP3 = 8-track cartridge = Dolby cassette = CD = SACD = vinyl LP = 30IPS analog master tape
Now, with so many other and better choices available, would you really want to plug one of these things into the gold-plated RCA jacks of your favorite preamp?
PS. On second thought, I'm not so sure that a good Dolby cassette isn't better than CD.
You know, the ones who have done many bad things and never been caught. I'd be much more afraid of them than the ones who are always screwing up and going to jail. For all you know, this is the fellow next door who's working on your bank account or your daughter or whatever. Actually, there's something to be said for the time when everyone lived in a small village and knew everyone else there. No privacy, but not much injustice either.
There are always cases when authorities refuse to talk to the press--politicians caught doing something bad, generals conducting secret wars, police officers disregarding the law, etc, etc. They always say that there's a official regulation that prevents them from saying anything, that it would violate some privacy law or help the enemy or something.
The press has a simple way to retaliate, and they frequently use it. Just interview the enemies of these people, and print what they say as if it were the pure unadulterated truth. "Well, we asked you, but you said you had no comment!" They'll talk.
There is a skill that is antithetical to programming which is nevertheless very valuable in real life. It was taught in Greece and Rome, and was at the core of the humanistic curriculum in the Renaissance. This is the art of rhetoric, the study of the methods by which you can persuade your fellow citizens to accept your views and act on them.
You hardcore coders at Slashdot all p*** on this skill, but it is the way the world works, customs are established, and laws get enacted. It is how the ignorant multitudes are induced to vote for the system we have now. You can treat it with scorn, but you will in turn be dismissed as a kook whose ideas are of no interest.
So you can say this article is nothing new, or that everybody knows this, or that his examples are stupid, or that he never wrote a line of code in his life--but articles like this are more likely to bring about change in the law than all your whining.
Since Mr. Stroustrup has lived in Scandanavia, England, and the US, he has surely noticed a few differences. But I would like to suggest that working in a research institution like Bell Labs is not the same thing as working in real American business.
The reason I ask is because I worked on a large C++ project at a Fortune 100 corporation that lasted for several years. It incorporated virtually all the bad features of American business: fast-talking consultants, clueless managers, greedy contractors and cowering employees predicting disaster. We wrote thousands of lines of C++ code, and then threw them out and wrote more. Architecture, specifications, planning? Who needs 'em with a deadline to be met?
One of the things I noticed about US C++ programmers, particularly contracters, is that they were ruthlessly competitive. The idea of using someone else's classes was completely foreign to them. Any time anyone gets an assignemnt, the first thing to do is discard all prior concepts and classes, and write his own. This means that everyone is striving to impose his own will on the project, and incidentally billing for huge hours spent designing and writing classes that only he would use. Eventually, the money dries up and employees are left to maintain a montrous mismash. I'm sure we used every C++ technique ever heard of--we've got multiple inheritance from templatized classes, we've got objects with global scope singing and dancing before main is called, we've got our very own string class that does much more than the STL implementation--but no one would say this is good.
It would seem that the competitve American ethos is not so great when it comes to using languages that require cooperation, coordination, and subordination. Not everyone on a project can be the master class designer. But when it's every man for himself, watch out!
By the way, when the project was winding down the phoney IEEE interview was circulated. Everyone found it very funny, especially the contractors who took $25M off of us.
Yeah, there are. I could mention the Rockport Sirius and the Fossell Air Force One.
It's true this thing is old. The original owner of the idea couldn't get it to work, and sold it to some Japanese guys. They can't get it to work either. The two problems: warped records, and little pieces of dust. On a regular table, slight warps are no problem, and pieces of loose dust are simply pushed aside by the stylus.
Actually, all the superexpensive products have more problems than they're worth. Most regular guys use something in the $3000-6000 range, such as a Linn, a VPI, or a Basis. They're regular commercial products that sell in reasonable numbers, and work well.
I suppose I'm the only Slashdotter with a $3000 turntable. Oh, well...
I see that some of the posters have assumed the keys are contained in the filesystem, while the rest are for searching memory. Well, which is it? If it's the filesystem, the obviously you've got to be root or administrator and have some way of running your programs on the target box. Not that easy, as many have said. If the keys are in memory, even if you're a hacker with all the privileges in the world, the address space of your evil program can't see other address spaces, unless you are a very tricky assembly language wizard. Either way, this is not for script kiddies.
And if the ruthless crackers at the NSA want to find out your credit card number, they'll probably just call your bank and ask.
I am not so sure the citizenry is uninformed. I would say that most people are fully informed about matters that affect them personally. Unfortunately, the world is too big a place, and there is too much going on, for everyone to worry about all the problems. In a democracy like ours (US here), it is up to individuals to defend their own interests, not fight impartially to make the world a better place. It certainly is not realistic to expect others to care about your problems.
Ah, the wisdom of the stock market! What does this consist of? About three quarters of the men and probably half the women in the country, making bets on matters they know nothing about. Just think of all these people, and how much they know about Linux and computers, corporate finance and macro-economics. If you think this adds up to close to nothing, you may be right. For now they are all merrily marching in one direction, on the golden road to unlimited wealth. But mobs of uneducated people are not necessarily the safest bunch to fall in with. I'll stick to coding and get rich the old-fashioned way.
There's no law requiring the affluent to spend there money--just a lot of corporate consumer propoganda. My car is ten years old, and I live in a one-room apartment, but if you saw my paycheck, or my brokerage account statement, I don't think you'd call me poor.
This apparently works well against drug dealers and such. Encryption passwords are captured and reported back to Washington, and then they break into the encrypted email. If they can't get the target to install the Trojan, they get access to his computer somehow and pop it in. Would Netice help in a case like this? I would think you'd want to use something like ZoneAlarm. But these guys are so unsophisticated, they think the Internet is magic and they're invisible once they install PGP or something.