This is all good thinking, but the problem persists: what happens when the customer finds out they've been sold something that recently was open source? It is very possible that the CEO will be a retard, or pretend to be one, and sue for breach of contract. We said no open source, this thing is the same code as the open source version, we want our money back.
Here's the situation I see. OP is a potential code source (for lack of a better term). Potential customer requires "no open source" as part of the platform requirements. Platform is controlled by a third party, which has (or will have if the potential customer develops for the platform) a contract with specific wording. If the wording excludes open source *licenses*, you might be allowed to re-license it. If the contract says no open-source *code* then you're screwed.
It doesn't matter whether they are right, point is they might see this as a way to recoup costs, making the bottom line grow. Especially if they search for more info and find this discussion and read my comment, in which case they might go along with the deal simply so they can sue for breach of contract and wind up with the software for free, and maybe punitive damages for you knowingly offering open source code. Just getting caught in such a lawsuit would probably ruin a person, even if you win.
Most of this discussion is centered around trying to make the open-source aspect of the code go away, or be negligible, or do some jedi hand waving and make it work. I'm putting forth the idea that this is dangerous, and we must consider the customer's contract. In fact, we can't consider it because we don't have it, and OP might not even be able to have access to it. So none of our comments are worth anything at this point. Food for thought, but it doesn't get OP any closer to resolution.
1) Hire an attorney - OP already said that's out of the question 2) Re-license - depending on the customer's contract this might not be possible 3) Walk away - probably the best course of action, knowing the attention span of a company is less than a week on any topic other than "the bottom line"
4) And my recommendation. If the potential customer wants the code, make them navigate the legal waters for you, with an advance as part of the deal so you can afford to hire a lawyer to represent you. Don't take one of their lawyers if they offer time - that's suicide (we're already paying this guy, so let him help you and it costs no one any extra money - but it's a trap designed to get our way). If they can't or won't do that, it's up to you on whether you want to make the investment in researching your options further. But not a good sign.
They want the code because it will be cheaper - and if they let you take the legal responsibilities, they are getting work for free. Look how much legal advice (good and bad) they already have turned up in a centralized, almost easy-to-read format... the amount of time you will need to read and consider these responses has already taken time away from whatever else you intended to do today, or for the next week probably.
I'd say yes, that's fair. Windows 7 and Vista and XP are all the same amount of secure because the ship date of the problematic code doesn't change. It's the same problem, same code, same ship date.
If you come across a problem in Windows 8 which exists in XP, you're going to say wait, how can an unreleased operating system be rated on its security? How can a new operating system be at the same risk level as something which has been running and exploitable all these years? Because day 0 when it's finally released, you have brand new systems running, which are vulnerable to a 9-year-old exploit. To me, that magnifies the risk in a way that offsets your claim.
Supplier reaction speed is important, but it's hard to tell when someone tells Microsoft about a bug, MS refuses to fix it because it's just a DOS, then someone turns it into an attack vector, suddenly it's a security patch and the turnaround was 1 week. In reality, they have probably been keeping the bug on the back burner, maybe already fixed it and just running through tests. When the DOS turns into a vector, they just pack it up and ship. Relying on vendor response speed is a nice idea, but I don't think we can trust everyone to give us honest data.
So definitions come into play. How long did the vendor know about a problem, which turned into a security issue? How long did the company withhold information in order to pretend they don't have problems? We'll never know most of that with many companies, unless they have a public bugzilla type environment. MS Connect is getting there, but nowhere near where it needs to be.
I spent 6 months on a "move existing code to different environment" project. Maybe 3 days of it was code changing, the rest was meetings and "engaging" other teams and getting misinformation and basically having to figure out everything myself, or interested parties like the integration people who have to deliver to clients helping figure it out.
At some point, every company moves to short-term cost reductions instead of focusing on maintaining infrastructure for when things pick up again. The first clue you're in trouble is when they fire smart people because they are too expensive. Then the remainder of the smart people see what's happening and jump ship. The few who remain struggle to keep everything afloat, only to get laid off when the company gets bought/merged.
If your potential employer already had its IPO, you're in danger. If it has ever bought another company, you're closer to danger. Short-term planning is responsible for some of the most soul-draining policies and requirements ever to offend humanity by their very existence.
You post a hosts-based solution, then it stops working. Combined with this post linked below, I'd say Tynt is trying to supress data. Or that someone is trying to make it look like they are.
Chances are if you add another round of entries, they will mysteriously stop working again. It's like Tynt knows when someone copies info from their FAQ page, or something. Eerie.
I defended the last idiotically written headline someone complained about, but I give up - these are consistently terrible. At least some quotation marks would help.
It's a high concentration of words and/or phrases having overloaded meanings. As technology develops, normal words acquire additional connotations, if not denotations. Since this is a tech-oriented news aggregator, you should select the tech connotation first, then re-parse with non-tech meanings if that fails.
'Drop' in this case can be parsed in the sense of 'vendor drop', meaning 'deliver' or 'drop a bombshell'. Not typical usage, but not uncommon. 0-days obviously refers to vulnerabilities, and conflated would refer to details of the vulnerabilities.
He's a step ahead of you. He's tried doing it the right way and gotten no results. So he's going to skip the part where he wastes his time.
If companies want responsible disclosure, they should respond in some way to the disclosure. Maybe companies will actually fix bugs instead of sitting on them, and he can go back to doing it the right way. He also warned the companies he's going to do it, so they have a chance to fix things before then.
Here's a tip for you. In the real world, sometimes you have to force the other party's hand to get them to act responsibly. He's to that point, and fortunately has leverage. By making this choice public, he shames the irresponsible software companies which allow security problems to sit around unfixed.
Hopefully they'll scramble to release some fixes, which they haven't done yet, which is a net improvement over the current situation where millions of people have unpatched vulnerabilities.
In short, I don't see a problem here. I use software, it has security problems, I expect those to be fixed. Whatever it takes to get there, I'm all for it.
This i why I like slashdot. Eventually someone will give a simple step-by-step method to do something which requires some intelligence and a bit of googling for definitions and parts. If only we had a way to mark the important remarks and stuff the jibber-jabber.
You should sign up and put a checkmark in the box labeled "knowing to change the favicon from the default". There's a separate box for knowing *how* to do that, check that one too if it applies.
Buy a 3D movie DVD, it comes with glasses. You can usually find a few cheap titles - Coraline is worth the investment just for the movie, glasses are a bonus.
however, Coraline's colors don't match the typical red/cyan anaglyph you'll find, so you'll have to decide which colors you want, and find that movie.
At that point, you can typically take side-by-side photos or whatever source and anaglyph them into the proper colors with free software.
Alternatively, go see Avatar with a friend and keep the glasses. Buy some cheap projectors and you'll probably need a grey screen to preserve the polarization, but put the left lens over the left projector, the right lens over the right one, and wear the other pair. Full color 3D. Especially with some of the pocket-sized projectors that cost a couple hundred dollars max, you can get a decent cheap effect. This experiment is currently in progress chez moi, having accomplished the first.
Next is typing the power and trigger lines of a cheap digicam to create a master/slave, giving me cheap 3D photo/video acquisition. The trick is to use fixed-focus or you'll suffer.
The suspect part intrigues me - there is a third facet to the question of whether something is genetic or environmental. Maybe a lot of studies have come back inconclusive because of these changes.
Hypothetically, a parent gets a bornavirus, the kid enrolls in a genetic study of his mental disorders, dad volunteers a sample for research, and zero correlation is found. But another study follows the kid and the kid's kid, and finds a genetic link. The two researchers fling poo at each other and new studies continue to support one side or the other.
In summary, our understanding of genetics just shifted. Even if you scientific types were ahead of the curve, this is a rather clean and simple explanation for why some studies contradict others, or fail to find anything.
If you're a program counting heads/tails results, and you know that it averages out to 50% over many tries, it might be logical to assume, despite every toss being an event independent of previous attempts, that instead of continuing to throw all 1's this one landed on its side.
I appreciated your summary, I just figured I'd help you out with a counter-example.
If we can throw something new and exciting into existing players with a firmware upgrade instead of making everyone buy new players and disks, that's a good thing, no?
Maybe I'm new-school, but that process took a lot of time and held up time to market, where people with extra money to spend can enjoy the technology and manufacturers can get feedback before starting on a standard. Electricity delivery was not standardized first, there were competing implementations. MP3 had a de-facto standard, but competing encoders and players took a while to play everything (ever had to "uncook" an MP3 because it had that sizzle to it? That's oldschool).
Look at HTML5, or W3C. IF they did standards first then implementations, we'd be in the stone age of browsers.
All I'm saying is it might have worked well in the past, but it didn't always work that way, and we move faster today. Oh, I'm also saying that standards are becoming rather complicated. Putting a physical object into a groove might seem esoteric for some of the geek crowd, but it's a fairly simple concept and easy to provide backward compatibility.
And last, Audio CDs were invented in the 60's, refined through the 70's and released in 1982 to the public. Three years later, the players would have had their bugs shaken out, as well as lots of test material. Plus they didn't have software bugs to speak of - either it would play, pause, ff, rw, skip, and stop, or it wouldn't, so it's easy to test and certification was hardly needed. BluRay is vastly more complicated. Anything we invent today is going to be vastly more complicated than in those bygone halcyon days of standardization bliss. If ISO can't even do its job, your way of doing things is screwed. Not that it should be, it just is.
Have you ever typed something in to the address bar of Firefox as a temporary way to paste, select all, and copy, which converts it to plain text formatting, so you can paste it into a Microsoft tool without having to undo hundreds of unwanted formatting changes applied automatically?
I forget that a keystroke in the 'not quite awesome but kinda neat' bar locks up the browser as it slogs through a SQLLite database of every site I've ever been to, to see if any fo them contain the single letter in the URL, title, or HTTP response keywords.
It's a nice feature, but my point is browsers are getting more convenient, and requiring more power as they do. It wouldn't make sense to use something as simple as IE 4 in this era, with our computers able to run 100 instances of it and break a sweat yet be unable to access any useful features of the web like mortgage calculators and mouseover animations written to the ECMA standard... the power is there, so we use it, someone abuses it, and more powerful computers come out.
Nah, you probably use Opera and have no idea what I'm on about. Point is, the web will continue to get more complicated, especially with HTML 5 and more legitimate uses of Flash, and Microsoft joining the SVG group. You're soon going to need that optimization just to get by.
I agree, with the caveat that gaming consoles actually hurt their bottom line. You have to buy a lot of games to make up for it. I think it was 5 Sony games, 10 third party or something when I checked last year.
I hate to admit it, but I will be upgrading to PS3 soon. As long as no one posts evidence contrary to my understanding of course cos then I'll be very irritated, and conflicted.
I do that every day. I didn't even have to ask, the answer was right there.
I have personal reasons for wanting 3D handily available, partly because it adds apparent detail. I'm not sure if I can explain it properly but, assuming 1024x768 for a starting point:
Polarized light displays let you have 1024x768 for each eye. That doesn't translate into 1024x768x2 pixels, because your brain doesn't work that way. But the 3D perception gives you more context for the existing detail. Object relationships are clearer, and the barrier between objects goes from being a straight line to a spatial separation.
In theory, 3D should give you 1024x768xInfinity, because it is supposed to represent the X and Y coordinates as well as Z (depth).
I have noticed additional detail in movies at home between 2D and 3D, even with anaglyph type separation. Coraline was the one - it didn't even have the benefit of polarized display, so both eyes had to be packed into the same space as 3D. But it seemed clearer in 3D.
As a thought experiment, anaglyph DVD at 720x480 (345600) would be split into two 360x240 images, one for each eye. So you essentially get 360x240x240, assuming the Z axis resolution cannot exceed the minimum of X and Y, or an apparent resolution of 20736000, a 60-fold increase in data. For polarized digital movies in 2k, that's 2048×1080 (2211840), which doesn't have to be split. 3D might give you 2048×1080*1080, a 1080-fold increase in data density. You can't see through objects or around them so you don't get 1080 times more data, but you do get an apparent increase assuming a static viewpoint.
I have no idea if this actually plays out, but based on my observations it would be a good subject for a Doctoral thesis: How to calculate (or quantify) the actual net information gain when using 3D vs 2D.
When I saw Avatar, I tried closing one eye and had trouble distinguishing objects - it was one big mess. With 3D, the spatial separation allowed additional context so I could easily and intuitively distinguish objects or textures. Something so alien is difficult to process, unless it is introduced slowly enough that you can make out what's attached to what, which parts are moving or not. With 3D, you can skip that part and let the perception engine in your cranium figure it out the way it does in the real world.
3D is really a trick, I think it is exaggerated compared with reality, so I put it in the special-effects pile, not one step closer to reality. Just another trick in the bag, which can be used to great effect if used smartly, and hinder where it's not needed.
You either sell me a physical tangible object I can do with as I please, or a license to enjoy the content, and when your copyright expires it better be unlocked, or you will release the technical details for unlocking it. That's what I tell everyone who advertises to me - usually on the phone if I can find a number.
Under the former, it's like a book where I can lend it to friends or take it with me to the beach or a hotel and enjoy the content. If I want to rip out the pages, or specific words, and paste them together in a different way, I can. Specifically for audio content, I am allowed to make a copy for archival purposes, format shift them into a format for my portable audio device, or allow a friend to listen. As long as I don't violate IP laws of course, so I can't just burn copies for all of my friends (although who would know? Also, that last bit is a legal grey area, I'm just saying I'm not asking for the right to violate copyright.)
If it's the latter then I have a license to listen which cannot be revoked when your DRM server goes down, and since you licensed the audio not the physical object if my CD gets scratched, you replace it. If my hard drive with your audio on it gets hit by lightning, you replace the audio file. My license to listen does not end just because I walk away from my desktop, I will losslessly format shift because you are not selling the data file.
In both of these cases, and one more, DRM you can't work around has no place.
The last case is when your copyright expires. I don't see any exception to the anti-circumvention laws for works where the copyright is expired. In infinity minus one years, we will have the ability to disseminate software to unlock the first generation of DRM (MacroVision, Windows Media, and CSS) but it would be illegal to disseminate until every work using that scheme came out of copyright. Probably you can make an argument and win a court case, but that require time and money - a big gamble for most people. They never thought of that...
From what I've read, it's more like 11 days for salaried n00bs (plus 10 holidays), those 10 days of shutdown included 2 holidays so it was only 8 days (Christmas and New Year's), and you make it sound like this one-time, unprecedented shutdown happens every year. You get an vacation day every year after that, up to 10. Then there's the 20 years of service mark, which is entirely different.
Considering there was a hiring freeze and a bunch of layoffs, there aren't many people in that boat. And the shutdown was announced in May, so it's only the n00bs hired between Jan and May (4 months) you're talking about - anyone signing on after that should have been told, or I'd question the validity of the employment contract. And if you wanted to borrow days off from next year, or just work without pay for any or all of the shutdown, that's fine too, so you have flexibility there.
If you don't work at HP, why are you commenting on their employment practices? For that matter, why am I? Oh wait, it's because I do work there. Also known as "here" to those of us who do.
HP hasn't been the easiest company to work for over the past 9 months, but it's not as bad as you say. I'm pretty sure I didn't leak any info that wouldn't be available by getting a job interview, so I don't mind clarifying.
You should ask your friends if anything I'm saying rings a bell. I was bought as an EDS employee, so I got the standard 3-week vacation from day 1. 3com employees now count as HP too, but they are still in the merging phase so they're irrelevant. Ultimately, you're talking about maximum 1000 people out of 300k plus.
The women in the study, who were all pairs of identical and non-identical twins, were asked whether they had a G-spot. If one did exist, it would be expected that both identical twins, who have the same genes, would report having one.
So this study is about whether identical twins both self-report the same data. It's possibly a badly executed study on genetics, but it certainly does not study what the headline says.
In a different study, the spot was found during physical examination, and reportedly can be increased in size through vigorous stimulation. I know, citation needed, but I remember facts better than URLs.
"This is by far the biggest study ever carried out and shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective."
No, the idea of whether you have one is subjective. Whether you actually have one should be as subjective as whether you have a femur.
Dr Petra Boynton, a sexual psychologist at University College London, said: "It's fine to go looking for the G-spot but do not worry if you don't find it. It should not be the only focus. Everyone is different."
Sounds reasonable...
Recently Italian scientists claimed they could locate the G-spot using ultrasound scans. They said they had found an area of thicker tissue among the women reporting orgasms.
Sounds like actual evidence...
But specialists warned there could be other reasons for this difference.
Any software can be figured out, but I don't expect that it happen all the time. I clearly stated that certain comments are necessary, and even when comments are missing you have everything you need to figure it out. gp's point was "the code is unmaintainable because it has no comments and needs to be rewritten." My counterpoint was to call bullcrap. Context is important in this case, especially with a long-winded response like mine.
Perhaps I wasn't clear - I've seen way too many comments from CS teachers or in language books to the effect that comments help remind you what you were thinking at the time. Usually it's the "code I haven't touched in a year and then I want to make a change but couldn't make sense of what I wrote" parable. Assembly books are the worst at this, which is funny because the only thing you lose by compiling and disassembling is variable and function/location names. Comments obviously as well, but if you wrote a function you should be able to read it.
You learn things, and your style changes, and what you did last time doesn't seem like the best way anymore. I can buy that. If you can't make sense of your own code later on, you obviously are better now at what you're doing. You're also terrible at reading code and need to get better.
"The programmer obviously has some reason for being unhappy with the code."
Yes, but the programmer may not be able to describe it for various reasons. Too complicated to explain, too large to fit in the margin, code doesn't match accepted best-practices but I had to finish in time, or "I'm sure I could do this better, just not sure how right now."
That last one is what usually happens for those "fixme" type quickies. Being unhappy with something and being able to describe it are different things entirely. Especially if you're off-shored help with a language barrier.
What's absurd is expecting that every coder has the linguistic abilities comparable to their coding prowess. Lots of coders have no idea how to communicate in writing. If you've never seen an incomprehensible comment, or one that confuses the code more than clarifies, you're lucky.
I could have rephrased a bit, but I clearly stated it was my opinion, based on the previous comment.
"comments like that are absolutely useless" was exactly my conclusion. You can't think I was serious that "I have to stop working on this so I can finish my commenting before peer review so we can meet the deadline" is a reasonable comment, it just reflects the thought behind the actual comment. Useless "fixme" comments are, in general, not ok, and if you re-read with that in mind, I think you'll see that was my intended conclusion. Sometimes, like end-of-day in-progress commits, however, you get these kinds of "notes to self." Depending on what you're paying me, when the clock says go home I go home - there's a whole world of work-life balance that companies are picking up that encourages balance - stay when it's needed, otherwise make a mental (or otherwise) note and pick up tomorrow.
It takes time and money to maintain documentation, whether it's a comment or design doc. You asked what my point is but you clearly stated it - it takes time and money. That means you have to have time in your schedule specifically allocated for documentation, or else you get whatever is present. If you don't set aside time for it, you'll get what people have time for, at most. I've never seen a schedule with time allocated for that, nor for post-deployment cleanup. Once you have a product that builds and passes testing, every coder knows it's not finished yet, but managers don't seem to get it. You need to clean up here and there, even if it's just deleting files left over when you narrowed the scope. Ensuring documentation is correct should be part of that task, especially if you limit changes to only comments, so that the binary output is identical (except for the compiler-embedded timestamp or other build-specific data). If the output is identical, and a diff can show only comments were changed, minimal re-testing needs done. Before you interrupt with "you don't test until the code is complete" - any defect found and fixed during testing might require complete re-testing anyway, so it's a good idea to have this planned for. If you don't have any re-testing to do, you're ahead of schedule.
So I can summarize by saying, to gp, as long as you dedicate time for it you can require whatever you want from your employees, but expect high turnover rates unless your interview makes clear how stubborn you will be.
External design documents are needed to indicate how everything works together - this information should not be in code comments. Especially when most languages can have usage mapped automatically. "Here's what this function does, and what the side effects are" is the type of comment that should be in place, but gp doesn't specify. It's a knee-jerk response, and probably a troll in retrospect. If you're going to be absolute in anything, you're going to be wrong in a lot of cases, and anyone with any experience should know this.
Let me rephrase in the following way, the type and level of detail of comments depends on a lot of factors:
Consider your audience when writing anything that isn't direct code (including macros or #defines or similar). Consider your conscience when writing anything that IS code. Will your code be taken over by a peer or client? Is this a temporary commit of in-progress code, or the complete document? Are you describing functionality which can be auto-generated by something like doxygen? Is the functionality you are commenting something simple, covered by first or second year CS courses? Is your manager going to fire you for simply leaving out a comment where the above suggests it is not necessary?
One of those lines is out of place, but it summarizes gp's perspective. Hint, it's the last one. The whole point of the linked article is that some people have these notions burned into their brains exactly like gp posts - comment everything or you're fired. In fact, it is so contrarian that I am surprised I didn't initially dismiss it as an outright troll instantly.
WebTV would have been right on the dot, if the networking infrastructure could have handled streaming video at the time. Everyone had dial-up, which doesn't stream well I would assume.
Of course Microsoft would have locked down the video portion so you could only do "online stuff" anyway, fearing lawsuits or making deals with some company or another. But don't they get some points for being close?
Slashdot Mirror
This is all good thinking, but the problem persists: what happens when the customer finds out they've been sold something that recently was open source? It is very possible that the CEO will be a retard, or pretend to be one, and sue for breach of contract. We said no open source, this thing is the same code as the open source version, we want our money back.
Here's the situation I see. OP is a potential code source (for lack of a better term). Potential customer requires "no open source" as part of the platform requirements. Platform is controlled by a third party, which has (or will have if the potential customer develops for the platform) a contract with specific wording. If the wording excludes open source *licenses*, you might be allowed to re-license it. If the contract says no open-source *code* then you're screwed.
It doesn't matter whether they are right, point is they might see this as a way to recoup costs, making the bottom line grow. Especially if they search for more info and find this discussion and read my comment, in which case they might go along with the deal simply so they can sue for breach of contract and wind up with the software for free, and maybe punitive damages for you knowingly offering open source code. Just getting caught in such a lawsuit would probably ruin a person, even if you win.
Most of this discussion is centered around trying to make the open-source aspect of the code go away, or be negligible, or do some jedi hand waving and make it work. I'm putting forth the idea that this is dangerous, and we must consider the customer's contract. In fact, we can't consider it because we don't have it, and OP might not even be able to have access to it. So none of our comments are worth anything at this point. Food for thought, but it doesn't get OP any closer to resolution.
1) Hire an attorney - OP already said that's out of the question
2) Re-license - depending on the customer's contract this might not be possible
3) Walk away - probably the best course of action, knowing the attention span of a company is less than a week on any topic other than "the bottom line"
4) And my recommendation. If the potential customer wants the code, make them navigate the legal waters for you, with an advance as part of the deal so you can afford to hire a lawyer to represent you. Don't take one of their lawyers if they offer time - that's suicide (we're already paying this guy, so let him help you and it costs no one any extra money - but it's a trap designed to get our way). If they can't or won't do that, it's up to you on whether you want to make the investment in researching your options further. But not a good sign.
They want the code because it will be cheaper - and if they let you take the legal responsibilities, they are getting work for free. Look how much legal advice (good and bad) they already have turned up in a centralized, almost easy-to-read format... the amount of time you will need to read and consider these responses has already taken time away from whatever else you intended to do today, or for the next week probably.
I'd say yes, that's fair. Windows 7 and Vista and XP are all the same amount of secure because the ship date of the problematic code doesn't change. It's the same problem, same code, same ship date.
If you come across a problem in Windows 8 which exists in XP, you're going to say wait, how can an unreleased operating system be rated on its security? How can a new operating system be at the same risk level as something which has been running and exploitable all these years? Because day 0 when it's finally released, you have brand new systems running, which are vulnerable to a 9-year-old exploit. To me, that magnifies the risk in a way that offsets your claim.
Supplier reaction speed is important, but it's hard to tell when someone tells Microsoft about a bug, MS refuses to fix it because it's just a DOS, then someone turns it into an attack vector, suddenly it's a security patch and the turnaround was 1 week. In reality, they have probably been keeping the bug on the back burner, maybe already fixed it and just running through tests. When the DOS turns into a vector, they just pack it up and ship. Relying on vendor response speed is a nice idea, but I don't think we can trust everyone to give us honest data.
So definitions come into play. How long did the vendor know about a problem, which turned into a security issue? How long did the company withhold information in order to pretend they don't have problems? We'll never know most of that with many companies, unless they have a public bugzilla type environment. MS Connect is getting there, but nowhere near where it needs to be.
I spent 6 months on a "move existing code to different environment" project. Maybe 3 days of it was code changing, the rest was meetings and "engaging" other teams and getting misinformation and basically having to figure out everything myself, or interested parties like the integration people who have to deliver to clients helping figure it out.
At some point, every company moves to short-term cost reductions instead of focusing on maintaining infrastructure for when things pick up again. The first clue you're in trouble is when they fire smart people because they are too expensive. Then the remainder of the smart people see what's happening and jump ship. The few who remain struggle to keep everything afloat, only to get laid off when the company gets bought/merged.
If your potential employer already had its IPO, you're in danger. If it has ever bought another company, you're closer to danger. Short-term planning is responsible for some of the most soul-draining policies and requirements ever to offend humanity by their very existence.
You post a hosts-based solution, then it stops working. Combined with this post linked below, I'd say Tynt is trying to supress data. Or that someone is trying to make it look like they are.
Chances are if you add another round of entries, they will mysteriously stop working again. It's like Tynt knows when someone copies info from their FAQ page, or something. Eerie.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1510934&cid=30768510
I defended the last idiotically written headline someone complained about, but I give up - these are consistently terrible. At least some quotation marks would help.
It's a high concentration of words and/or phrases having overloaded meanings. As technology develops, normal words acquire additional connotations, if not denotations. Since this is a tech-oriented news aggregator, you should select the tech connotation first, then re-parse with non-tech meanings if that fails.
'Drop' in this case can be parsed in the sense of 'vendor drop', meaning 'deliver' or 'drop a bombshell'. Not typical usage, but not uncommon. 0-days obviously refers to vulnerabilities, and conflated would refer to details of the vulnerabilities.
So it's valid, but potentially confusing.
He's a step ahead of you. He's tried doing it the right way and gotten no results. So he's going to skip the part where he wastes his time.
If companies want responsible disclosure, they should respond in some way to the disclosure. Maybe companies will actually fix bugs instead of sitting on them, and he can go back to doing it the right way. He also warned the companies he's going to do it, so they have a chance to fix things before then.
Here's a tip for you. In the real world, sometimes you have to force the other party's hand to get them to act responsibly. He's to that point, and fortunately has leverage. By making this choice public, he shames the irresponsible software companies which allow security problems to sit around unfixed.
Hopefully they'll scramble to release some fixes, which they haven't done yet, which is a net improvement over the current situation where millions of people have unpatched vulnerabilities.
In short, I don't see a problem here. I use software, it has security problems, I expect those to be fixed. Whatever it takes to get there, I'm all for it.
This i why I like slashdot. Eventually someone will give a simple step-by-step method to do something which requires some intelligence and a bit of googling for definitions and parts. If only we had a way to mark the important remarks and stuff the jibber-jabber.
You should sign up and put a checkmark in the box labeled "knowing to change the favicon from the default". There's a separate box for knowing *how* to do that, check that one too if it applies.
Buy a 3D movie DVD, it comes with glasses. You can usually find a few cheap titles - Coraline is worth the investment just for the movie, glasses are a bonus.
however, Coraline's colors don't match the typical red/cyan anaglyph you'll find, so you'll have to decide which colors you want, and find that movie.
At that point, you can typically take side-by-side photos or whatever source and anaglyph them into the proper colors with free software.
Alternatively, go see Avatar with a friend and keep the glasses. Buy some cheap projectors and you'll probably need a grey screen to preserve the polarization, but put the left lens over the left projector, the right lens over the right one, and wear the other pair. Full color 3D. Especially with some of the pocket-sized projectors that cost a couple hundred dollars max, you can get a decent cheap effect. This experiment is currently in progress chez moi, having accomplished the first.
Next is typing the power and trigger lines of a cheap digicam to create a master/slave, giving me cheap 3D photo/video acquisition. The trick is to use fixed-focus or you'll suffer.
The suspect part intrigues me - there is a third facet to the question of whether something is genetic or environmental. Maybe a lot of studies have come back inconclusive because of these changes.
Hypothetically, a parent gets a bornavirus, the kid enrolls in a genetic study of his mental disorders, dad volunteers a sample for research, and zero correlation is found. But another study follows the kid and the kid's kid, and finds a genetic link. The two researchers fling poo at each other and new studies continue to support one side or the other.
In summary, our understanding of genetics just shifted. Even if you scientific types were ahead of the curve, this is a rather clean and simple explanation for why some studies contradict others, or fail to find anything.
If you're a program counting heads/tails results, and you know that it averages out to 50% over many tries, it might be logical to assume, despite every toss being an event independent of previous attempts, that instead of continuing to throw all 1's this one landed on its side.
I appreciated your summary, I just figured I'd help you out with a counter-example.
If we can throw something new and exciting into existing players with a firmware upgrade instead of making everyone buy new players and disks, that's a good thing, no?
Maybe I'm new-school, but that process took a lot of time and held up time to market, where people with extra money to spend can enjoy the technology and manufacturers can get feedback before starting on a standard. Electricity delivery was not standardized first, there were competing implementations. MP3 had a de-facto standard, but competing encoders and players took a while to play everything (ever had to "uncook" an MP3 because it had that sizzle to it? That's oldschool).
Look at HTML5, or W3C. IF they did standards first then implementations, we'd be in the stone age of browsers.
All I'm saying is it might have worked well in the past, but it didn't always work that way, and we move faster today. Oh, I'm also saying that standards are becoming rather complicated. Putting a physical object into a groove might seem esoteric for some of the geek crowd, but it's a fairly simple concept and easy to provide backward compatibility.
And last, Audio CDs were invented in the 60's, refined through the 70's and released in 1982 to the public. Three years later, the players would have had their bugs shaken out, as well as lots of test material. Plus they didn't have software bugs to speak of - either it would play, pause, ff, rw, skip, and stop, or it wouldn't, so it's easy to test and certification was hardly needed. BluRay is vastly more complicated. Anything we invent today is going to be vastly more complicated than in those bygone halcyon days of standardization bliss. If ISO can't even do its job, your way of doing things is screwed. Not that it should be, it just is.
Have you ever typed something in to the address bar of Firefox as a temporary way to paste, select all, and copy, which converts it to plain text formatting, so you can paste it into a Microsoft tool without having to undo hundreds of unwanted formatting changes applied automatically?
I forget that a keystroke in the 'not quite awesome but kinda neat' bar locks up the browser as it slogs through a SQLLite database of every site I've ever been to, to see if any fo them contain the single letter in the URL, title, or HTTP response keywords.
It's a nice feature, but my point is browsers are getting more convenient, and requiring more power as they do. It wouldn't make sense to use something as simple as IE 4 in this era, with our computers able to run 100 instances of it and break a sweat yet be unable to access any useful features of the web like mortgage calculators and mouseover animations written to the ECMA standard... the power is there, so we use it, someone abuses it, and more powerful computers come out.
Nah, you probably use Opera and have no idea what I'm on about. Point is, the web will continue to get more complicated, especially with HTML 5 and more legitimate uses of Flash, and Microsoft joining the SVG group. You're soon going to need that optimization just to get by.
It would only be good or bad depending on whether you're part of the group that chooses.
I agree, with the caveat that gaming consoles actually hurt their bottom line. You have to buy a lot of games to make up for it. I think it was 5 Sony games, 10 third party or something when I checked last year.
I hate to admit it, but I will be upgrading to PS3 soon. As long as no one posts evidence contrary to my understanding of course cos then I'll be very irritated, and conflicted.
I do that every day. I didn't even have to ask, the answer was right there.
I have personal reasons for wanting 3D handily available, partly because it adds apparent detail. I'm not sure if I can explain it properly but, assuming 1024x768 for a starting point:
Polarized light displays let you have 1024x768 for each eye. That doesn't translate into 1024x768x2 pixels, because your brain doesn't work that way. But the 3D perception gives you more context for the existing detail. Object relationships are clearer, and the barrier between objects goes from being a straight line to a spatial separation.
In theory, 3D should give you 1024x768xInfinity, because it is supposed to represent the X and Y coordinates as well as Z (depth).
I have noticed additional detail in movies at home between 2D and 3D, even with anaglyph type separation. Coraline was the one - it didn't even have the benefit of polarized display, so both eyes had to be packed into the same space as 3D. But it seemed clearer in 3D.
As a thought experiment, anaglyph DVD at 720x480 (345600) would be split into two 360x240 images, one for each eye. So you essentially get 360x240x240, assuming the Z axis resolution cannot exceed the minimum of X and Y, or an apparent resolution of 20736000, a 60-fold increase in data. For polarized digital movies in 2k, that's 2048×1080 (2211840), which doesn't have to be split. 3D might give you 2048×1080*1080, a 1080-fold increase in data density. You can't see through objects or around them so you don't get 1080 times more data, but you do get an apparent increase assuming a static viewpoint.
I have no idea if this actually plays out, but based on my observations it would be a good subject for a Doctoral thesis: How to calculate (or quantify) the actual net information gain when using 3D vs 2D.
When I saw Avatar, I tried closing one eye and had trouble distinguishing objects - it was one big mess. With 3D, the spatial separation allowed additional context so I could easily and intuitively distinguish objects or textures. Something so alien is difficult to process, unless it is introduced slowly enough that you can make out what's attached to what, which parts are moving or not. With 3D, you can skip that part and let the perception engine in your cranium figure it out the way it does in the real world.
3D is really a trick, I think it is exaggerated compared with reality, so I put it in the special-effects pile, not one step closer to reality. Just another trick in the bag, which can be used to great effect if used smartly, and hinder where it's not needed.
You either sell me a physical tangible object I can do with as I please, or a license to enjoy the content, and when your copyright expires it better be unlocked, or you will release the technical details for unlocking it. That's what I tell everyone who advertises to me - usually on the phone if I can find a number.
Under the former, it's like a book where I can lend it to friends or take it with me to the beach or a hotel and enjoy the content. If I want to rip out the pages, or specific words, and paste them together in a different way, I can. Specifically for audio content, I am allowed to make a copy for archival purposes, format shift them into a format for my portable audio device, or allow a friend to listen. As long as I don't violate IP laws of course, so I can't just burn copies for all of my friends (although who would know? Also, that last bit is a legal grey area, I'm just saying I'm not asking for the right to violate copyright.)
If it's the latter then I have a license to listen which cannot be revoked when your DRM server goes down, and since you licensed the audio not the physical object if my CD gets scratched, you replace it. If my hard drive with your audio on it gets hit by lightning, you replace the audio file. My license to listen does not end just because I walk away from my desktop, I will losslessly format shift because you are not selling the data file.
In both of these cases, and one more, DRM you can't work around has no place.
The last case is when your copyright expires. I don't see any exception to the anti-circumvention laws for works where the copyright is expired. In infinity minus one years, we will have the ability to disseminate software to unlock the first generation of DRM (MacroVision, Windows Media, and CSS) but it would be illegal to disseminate until every work using that scheme came out of copyright. Probably you can make an argument and win a court case, but that require time and money - a big gamble for most people. They never thought of that...
From what I've read, it's more like 11 days for salaried n00bs (plus 10 holidays), those 10 days of shutdown included 2 holidays so it was only 8 days (Christmas and New Year's), and you make it sound like this one-time, unprecedented shutdown happens every year. You get an vacation day every year after that, up to 10. Then there's the 20 years of service mark, which is entirely different.
Considering there was a hiring freeze and a bunch of layoffs, there aren't many people in that boat. And the shutdown was announced in May, so it's only the n00bs hired between Jan and May (4 months) you're talking about - anyone signing on after that should have been told, or I'd question the validity of the employment contract. And if you wanted to borrow days off from next year, or just work without pay for any or all of the shutdown, that's fine too, so you have flexibility there.
If you don't work at HP, why are you commenting on their employment practices? For that matter, why am I? Oh wait, it's because I do work there. Also known as "here" to those of us who do.
HP hasn't been the easiest company to work for over the past 9 months, but it's not as bad as you say. I'm pretty sure I didn't leak any info that wouldn't be available by getting a job interview, so I don't mind clarifying.
You should ask your friends if anything I'm saying rings a bell. I was bought as an EDS employee, so I got the standard 3-week vacation from day 1. 3com employees now count as HP too, but they are still in the merging phase so they're irrelevant. Ultimately, you're talking about maximum 1000 people out of 300k plus.
So this study is about whether identical twins both self-report the same data. It's possibly a badly executed study on genetics, but it certainly does not study what the headline says.
In a different study, the spot was found during physical examination, and reportedly can be increased in size through vigorous stimulation. I know, citation needed, but I remember facts better than URLs.
No, the idea of whether you have one is subjective. Whether you actually have one should be as subjective as whether you have a femur.
Sounds reasonable...
Sounds like actual evidence...
Sounds speculative.
Based on the other supporting evidence, and the content of the comment, however, I think my conclusion is justified.
Any software can be figured out, but I don't expect that it happen all the time. I clearly stated that certain comments are necessary, and even when comments are missing you have everything you need to figure it out. gp's point was "the code is unmaintainable because it has no comments and needs to be rewritten." My counterpoint was to call bullcrap. Context is important in this case, especially with a long-winded response like mine.
Perhaps I wasn't clear - I've seen way too many comments from CS teachers or in language books to the effect that comments help remind you what you were thinking at the time. Usually it's the "code I haven't touched in a year and then I want to make a change but couldn't make sense of what I wrote" parable. Assembly books are the worst at this, which is funny because the only thing you lose by compiling and disassembling is variable and function/location names. Comments obviously as well, but if you wrote a function you should be able to read it.
You learn things, and your style changes, and what you did last time doesn't seem like the best way anymore. I can buy that. If you can't make sense of your own code later on, you obviously are better now at what you're doing. You're also terrible at reading code and need to get better.
"The programmer obviously has some reason for being unhappy with the code."
Yes, but the programmer may not be able to describe it for various reasons. Too complicated to explain, too large to fit in the margin, code doesn't match accepted best-practices but I had to finish in time, or "I'm sure I could do this better, just not sure how right now."
That last one is what usually happens for those "fixme" type quickies. Being unhappy with something and being able to describe it are different things entirely. Especially if you're off-shored help with a language barrier.
What's absurd is expecting that every coder has the linguistic abilities comparable to their coding prowess. Lots of coders have no idea how to communicate in writing. If you've never seen an incomprehensible comment, or one that confuses the code more than clarifies, you're lucky.
I could have rephrased a bit, but I clearly stated it was my opinion, based on the previous comment.
"comments like that are absolutely useless" was exactly my conclusion. You can't think I was serious that "I have to stop working on this so I can finish my commenting before peer review so we can meet the deadline" is a reasonable comment, it just reflects the thought behind the actual comment. Useless "fixme" comments are, in general, not ok, and if you re-read with that in mind, I think you'll see that was my intended conclusion. Sometimes, like end-of-day in-progress commits, however, you get these kinds of "notes to self." Depending on what you're paying me, when the clock says go home I go home - there's a whole world of work-life balance that companies are picking up that encourages balance - stay when it's needed, otherwise make a mental (or otherwise) note and pick up tomorrow.
It takes time and money to maintain documentation, whether it's a comment or design doc. You asked what my point is but you clearly stated it - it takes time and money. That means you have to have time in your schedule specifically allocated for documentation, or else you get whatever is present. If you don't set aside time for it, you'll get what people have time for, at most. I've never seen a schedule with time allocated for that, nor for post-deployment cleanup. Once you have a product that builds and passes testing, every coder knows it's not finished yet, but managers don't seem to get it. You need to clean up here and there, even if it's just deleting files left over when you narrowed the scope. Ensuring documentation is correct should be part of that task, especially if you limit changes to only comments, so that the binary output is identical (except for the compiler-embedded timestamp or other build-specific data). If the output is identical, and a diff can show only comments were changed, minimal re-testing needs done. Before you interrupt with "you don't test until the code is complete" - any defect found and fixed during testing might require complete re-testing anyway, so it's a good idea to have this planned for. If you don't have any re-testing to do, you're ahead of schedule.
So I can summarize by saying, to gp, as long as you dedicate time for it you can require whatever you want from your employees, but expect high turnover rates unless your interview makes clear how stubborn you will be.
External design documents are needed to indicate how everything works together - this information should not be in code comments. Especially when most languages can have usage mapped automatically. "Here's what this function does, and what the side effects are" is the type of comment that should be in place, but gp doesn't specify. It's a knee-jerk response, and probably a troll in retrospect. If you're going to be absolute in anything, you're going to be wrong in a lot of cases, and anyone with any experience should know this.
Let me rephrase in the following way, the type and level of detail of comments depends on a lot of factors:
Consider your audience when writing anything that isn't direct code (including macros or #defines or similar).
Consider your conscience when writing anything that IS code.
Will your code be taken over by a peer or client?
Is this a temporary commit of in-progress code, or the complete document?
Are you describing functionality which can be auto-generated by something like doxygen?
Is the functionality you are commenting something simple, covered by first or second year CS courses?
Is your manager going to fire you for simply leaving out a comment where the above suggests it is not necessary?
One of those lines is out of place, but it summarizes gp's perspective. Hint, it's the last one. The whole point of the linked article is that some people have these notions burned into their brains exactly like gp posts - comment everything or you're fired. In fact, it is so contrarian that I am surprised I didn't initially dismiss it as an outright troll instantly.
WebTV would have been right on the dot, if the networking infrastructure could have handled streaming video at the time. Everyone had dial-up, which doesn't stream well I would assume.
Of course Microsoft would have locked down the video portion so you could only do "online stuff" anyway, fearing lawsuits or making deals with some company or another. But don't they get some points for being close?