Between Java and their Enterprise platforms, if Oracle spent as much time listening and responding to their customers as they spent threatening them, they might be in a far better position today. Any major platform transition is going to have problems unless you're exceptionally lucky. There's just too many moving parts in Enterprise systems for humans to get everything right on the first try. Oracle won't tout all of the problems people have moving ONTO their software from a competitor, but that transition pain happens too.
Every year that goes by, it seems like Oracle is in a more tenuous position, despite their increased revenue. They've already lost the SME space -- I don't know of a single company anywhere in our client base, or within my sphere of influence, that still uses Oracle software. Organizations are bumping up against the limits of NetSuite -- the costs to integrate 3rd-party or industry-specific components, compared with other ERPs, are turning out to be more significant than expected. So we have clients and vendors migrating ERPs over time.
Oracle is becoming the Comcast of the software world. They treat everyone like crap, but were so deeply embedded that they were hard to dislodge. With every passing year, that is less true, and I think Oracle knows it. Unfortunately, they seem to be choosing to double-down on the "treat everyone like crap" strategy, rather than actually fixing the systemic problems that might eventually sink them...
That's wonderful... but just because Amazon is a dismal working environment, doesn't mean that, as a company, they're also criminally stupid. I could name dozens of companies that I'd never work for on my worst day. Which makes it even more interesting that this Guardian article tries to paint Haslet TX as some kind of isolated podunk town, where Amazon is the only employer in town and employees make 60-mile commutes for the only work they can get.
It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. There are, literally, thousands of un-skilled jobs within 25 miles of the Amazon facility. Pick one and apply. Pretending like Amazon has a warehouse full of mis-treated slaves that can't do anything else is more than slightly disingenuous.
Amazon being a terrible company doesn't mean that most of the "tragedies" in this article hold water.
Look, you can believe what you want to believe. There are certainly real cases, where real people have been hurt by actual negligence, or discriminated against with true malice. It happens, and those people deserve to be protected. There are lots of resources to help those people, and whatever the newspaper says, there are far more gov't departments that tend towards over-reacting with severe enforcement, moreso than turning a blind eye to true workplace violations.
But you have to recognize that when you credulously accept every story about injury and discrimination at face-value, you're not helping the real victims -- you're hurting all of the people who REALLY HAVE been wronged by dumping resources, attention and time on cases that distract from real problems.
There's just too many problems with this story. There are thousands of vacant jobs, requiring few or no skills, in the DFW market. A 60-mile commute in that area, for a specific job, makes too little sense because of how dense that area is. Rents are not that high -- $500/month median rent for a 1Br/1Ba, which is less than 33% of even a $10/hr job working 35-hours per week. She claims to have willingly gone back to doing an un-safe job, even assuming the employer was stupid enough to allow that to occur -- and, in terms of safety gear, that "all important" brush guard that the article hangs its hat on, isn't actually an OSHA-recognized piece of safety equipment!!
I see the horrible crud that happens to people every day, and I do count my blessings. But you do nobody any good when you get outraged and demand action based on "investigative journalism" like this crap. It has every hallmark of trying to make the "Amazon is evil" point, and too many warning flags that no sane person (or employer) would ever actually commit. If this piece is even 75% accurate, then it should be making the point of needing better mental-health counseling in TX, not one about workplace safety.
Uh uh... sorry. It's not like Haslet TX is the armpit of nowhere, and Amazon is the only employer in town. It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. As plenty of others have indicated up-thread, she could have gotten a job at Burger King, or WalMart, or very likely some nice quiet job that requires no lifting and no skills, like a page in a library, or receptionist or filing clerk in one of 10-zillion companies. We're at ~4% unemployment, in case you haven't seen the news -- there are more jobs right now than people able to fill them.
In 2008, I'd believe it. In 2018, if she's living out of her car, it's because she's holding out for a 6- or 7-figure settlement from the mega-corporation that "wronged" her.
Go find Haslet on a map. Tell me that there aren't thousands of jobs that someone, even with an injury/disability, could get, to afford the ~$500 average rent in that area. Or wait, I'll do it for you: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c... 1030+ jobs within 25 miles of Haslet, TX.
Lovely attack piece by the Guardian, but sorry... no sale.
The hysteria of frequent media smear pieces notwithstanding, it's tough to take articles like this seriously at face-value. Lots of broad generalizations and impossible-to-prove (or disprove) allegations of straight-line relationships between an alleged safety issue with an employer, and outcomes like homelessness or disabling injury.
Unfortunately, part of my job is working with EPLI (Employment Practices Liability Insurance) carriers and risk managers. For every actual issue reported, there are multiple instances of people "gaming the system", fraudulently claiming workplace injury or discrimination, or filing repeated false HR reports to attempt to build up a "history" of abuses, being terminated for their bulls**t, and then pointing to that "history" as the REASON for their termination. Maybe I'm just too used to seeing the seedy underside of the Workers' Comp business, but to take light-on-details reports like this, and draw inferences of chronically deficient, or criminal, practices on the part of the large employer, is hard.
Most employees want to do a good job, be fairly compensated, and be appreciated at work. But a small percentage view work as a scam. Those aren't just the ones that spoil the party for everyone, but they're ALSO the ones most likely to turn up in press reports, because "going loud" and getting a company to pay them to go away is part-and-parcel of the scam.
If these folks were legitimately injured and abused by dumb-ass managers at Amazon, then I feel for them. But it's equally likely that a papercut became a "permanently debilitating hand injury", if historical reports like this are any guideline. Sad, but true.
The problem that so many of these initiatives have, when it comes down to IMPLEMENTATION, is that governments have a major problem with "wealth" as distinct from "income". Because wealth can be hidden, obfuscated and invested in so many ways, most give up trying to tax it by traditional means. So they focus on Income.
And there's a HUGE problem there, because income != wealth. At least, again, the way most governments choose to define "income".
I'm a small business owner, and when I get my K-1 every year, it never ceases to amaze me about the spread between how much money I'm being taxed on, versus how much money I took home. Technically, if I were to somehow, magically, close up the company without any spin-down expenses or other costs, I could capture that money and be "rich". But, in reality, the amount of money sitting in the company for expenses, payroll, etc... that is "mine", but I will never see, touch or capitalize on, is significant. So every time you talk about taxing the "rich", you're taxing guys like me who run mid-sized businesses, and are personally allocated a share of the company's earnings, THAT WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN HOME, AND NEVER WILL.
Tax policy is a steaming pile of dung. I'm all for taxing the truly rich... likely because I pay more taxes than most of them already!! But you need to be very careful about how to define "rich", because more often than not, these "tax 'em all and let god sort 'em out later" plans end up netting and hurting small- and mid-sized business owners more than it does the truly-Wealthy.
Heh... it's not that I disagree with you, philosophically. It's just that, where the rubber meets the road, a huge proportion of the applications and systems out there are not robustly designed.
It's very common for applications to expect either success or failure. Success implies that it's behaving correctly. Failure means anything went wrong. In many ways, FTDI's previous attempt at this -- bricking the devices -- was PREFERABLE to this, as it always resulted in failure. You can be angry that they killed your device (which you may or may not have even known was counterfeit), but it pretty much would always fail.
In this case, intentionally manipulating the output could have innumerable unpredictable effects. As noted, can FTDI know that there's not an application out there looking for a value in a specific position? Now, their error message aligns the "DE" in "DEVICE" in that position... the application doesn't fail. It just starts assuming a hex value of '222' for all data runs. What impact might that have?
Look... you can apportion blame and responsibility all you want. Ideal-world politics don't work well in situations like this. The real world is a lot messier, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. I'm not predicting life-ending disaster from this change. All I'm saying is that FTDI has no way to know if it _could_ result in life-ending disaster, and are being ridiculously foolish to take the risk, when they're well aware that their end-users have no way of knowing whether they're affected.
Do you have auto updates enabled on any of the machinery that you use USB to serial converters on? If not, why not?
No, I don't... and that's because I'm not an idiot.;)
Unfortunately, 20 years in this business have taught me that a significant share of people doing this kind of work are. Furthered by the fact that a significant share of business owners/managers (even in large companies) will shave costs anywhere they think they can get away with it.
My basic point is that "non critical" links in the infrastructure can still cascade into critical failures. Many of the developers/integrators in the chain never even recognize the ways that their outputs will be used downstream. And subtle or not, it's never safe to assume that modifying the output of something low-level like a serial controller will not have un-subtle effects on the application. The way these industrial apps often work, it might assume the value is 0. Or it might line up where the "DE" in the word "device", in that error message, is interpreted as the integer 222. There is literally no way for us (or FTDI) to know.
Point is, I can foresee hundreds of ways this could go bad, in places that people don't view as "mission critical". (The desktop PC of a warehouse manager, a dumb throw-away "converter" PC that was simply stuck in a remote location to turn a serial device into a "network server", etc... People do ALL kinds of crap to engineer solutions for specific scenarios, often in small suppliers or companies too tiny to have good control processes or discipline.)
Not necessarily true. Low-level technology like this is frequently the source of "cascading failure" that can endanger people or property.
For instance, we have many USB-to-Serial devices installed in chains that capture weight readings from industrial scales. If this suddenly and inobtrusively starts causing that measurement data to be misaligned in the output, those weight readings could be transmitted to shippers who may or may not re-weigh the product based on our volume. In the worst case scenario, something like this could be done as the last check-weight for loading an aircraft -- a weight-critical application where getting it wrong can cause a tail-strike on takeoff.
Screwing with low-level data INTENTIONALLY is never a good thing. End users have no way of ever knowing that it's happening. Pushing it by Windows Update, where no devs are involved to catch the error, is a recipe for potential disaster somewhere.
There are two fundamental dichotomies that hide under this argument, and they've been going on for years, if not decades.
First, there's the disconnect between large business and small business. Second, there's the disconnect between what people have previously been paid (or their peers have), and what they are actually worth. This is coming from a guy who has hired 5 software developers so far this year, and has 2 slots still available...
A lot of developers are looking at what happens at Google and Microsoft (aside from the layoffs...), and try to use that as a standard when they apply for a position at a 50-person shop in the midwest. This creates an expectation disconnect where someone gets an offer for $65k, but won't take it because they've been convinced by the Internet, their Career Planning & Placement department, or the job postings on career boards, that their skills are worth $90k.
This is an "expectation shortage", and results when there are not enough candidates willing to take the positions that ACTUALLY EXIST. It's all well and good to say that employers are under-paying developers, and looking for cheap labor. But the market does set rates, and the fact is that most software projects away from the coasts just don't support paying developers $120k/year - at least not sustainably.
The second disconnect occurs when people misconstrue what it takes to be hired and promoted in the majority of companies, other than the mega-corporations who can have 200 people doing the same job. The sad fact is that you pretty much have to be a specialist to GET a job, and then you have to be a generalist to KEEP it. The specialists who stay in their pidgeon-hole are always the first against the wall when the next re-org comes. But the generalists who have 75% competency in an array of skill-sets rarely make the cut during interviews, but have enormous job security in their current positions -- though often feel themselves "stuck" in positions where they may not feel like they're advancing quickly enough.
This is a failure of cultivation and and expectation problem on the part of employers. It creates a market distortion where people are encouraged to specialize, and then dumped back onto the market with inflated expectations of their overall worth when that very specialization becomes a liability. (Ruby, anyone...?)
From the inside, I think it's undeniable that there is a shortage of quality, trained developers, with attitudes and ethics that will lead to long-term advancement and quality employment. That doesn't mean that there is a shortage of bodies with the raw skills necessary to do the job. But, in the end, that hardly matters... companies aren't hiring automata, even if some of them want to pay as though they were.
There are ample failures on both sides of the equation, and large companies are exacerbating those problems with their treatment of many H-1Bs and "mass hiring" of fresh graduates (at insanely inflated salaries) who then get culled 9 months later.
But candidates are also making the problem worse by viewing software development as a single, unified market, and clinging to the belief that just because Company X in Boston could afford to pay $x for a given product/project, that their skills are still worth $x when they move to Company Y in Pittsburgh, creating software for a completely different industry.
The end result is a shortage of jobs that don't require specialists to get through the door, and a shortage of employees able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the market we are in. When you meet in the middle, it's a real shortage, regardless of how it came to pass.
So while I'm not a tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist, I do note amongst the young technorati something of a double-standard. Surveillance, big data and privacy violations are bad when they're used to infringe social rights, but GOOD when they're used to attack people perceived as infringing social rights... C'est la vie.
But more to the point, single-issue activists ALWAYS misunderstand the voting habits of multi-issue voters. Particularly Republicans, who are not just straight-up conservatives as they are often portrayed, but often socially liberal _fiscal_ conservatives who choose not to vote based on social policy. Turning multi-issue swing voters into single-issue activists isn't a straight-forward process, even if you identify who they are.
Finally, this kind of effort makes the assumption that such voters are simply awaiting the right contact or motivation to write their congressperson and demand action. Whereas, in reality, while activists often view the disengaged as "against the cause", the reality is, in most instances, such voters just don't care about that cause.
Well, first, this is sadly old news. The technology was actually exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston last July. It's pretty cool, but I'm not sure it would ever be put to practical use, at least in its current form.
For one thing, it's loud! Every plasma ball makes a sizzling pop as it winks in and out of existence. Now magnify that by thousands of times as it scans out a 3D wireframe... the entire area for quite a distance surrounding fills with an ear-splitting sound of angry electric bees. There was talk of putting it on buildings to run electronic billboards in cities, but anyone within a few blocks would need ear protection to co-exist with it!
Very cool stuff, but we're a loooong way from 3D open-air advertising.
Re:A bit of history, and this is what you get.
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Questioning the New E3
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah. Sucks, but face it. The smaller companies don't have the financial ability to support a show like that -- trust me when I tell you that shows aren't cheap to produce, and "old E3" was even moreso than others. In a very pure sense, the big guys were subsidizing the event that the little guys could take advantage of. Is it any wonder that they decided it wasn't in their best interests to do so anymore? Yeah, the consumer and the market as a whole suffers, but E3 was not, and is not, a substitute for a good marketing plan. It was ALWAYS supposed to be an industry-insider event, so the fact that it grew into a public platform was probably more luck than strategy.
If it survives (and that's a serious IF), I expect costs will come down and future events will have more accessibility to smaller firms. This year was all about appeasing the big players who would have happily scuttled the show entirely, otherwise. The small firms need to band together and find a cost structure that makes sense, and they can afford, if they want this sort of forum. The rabid fan-base will find somewhere else to congregate, without doubt.
A bit of history, and this is what you get.
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Questioning the New E3
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· Score: 4, Informative
Previous posts have alluded to this, but here's a bit of history to explain what's happening. IDG didn't kill E3 to replace it with this new format. The exhibitors did... Sony, Microsoft, EA, etc. The only way trade shows succeed is if they make money by serving as a marketing tool connecting the manufacturers with the industry buyers. There's much more effective methods of reaching the gamer community than buying an expensive booth and hiring large-breasted women.
The top exhibitors at E3 banded together and vowed to not return after last year, effectively killing the show. IDG scrambled to react, and came up with this new format in an attempt to woo exhibitors back, and continue the event. This year was something of a test. If the top companies decide the new format was an effective way to reach wholesale buyers and network with other people in their creative and supply chains, it will probably continue. If they decide it was not, E3 is most likely dead for all time.
As wild an event as it used to be, there's no return on investment for companies to slug it out in front of a seething mass of gamers who wiggled their way in to grab bagfuls of booth swag and monopolize the demo units. It's supposed to be an industry event -- not a public event -- and the new format more strongly reflects that. Actual industry insiders apparently DO like the new format much better, though I think the jury is out on whether they liked it enough to continue. Especially in light of the emergence of other, more focused gaming conferences like the Sandbox Symposium coming up in August.
It's not the big flashy public event it once was... but then again, it was never supposed to be that in the first place. It had to change into this, or it would no longer exist at all.
Having started a small company with several other code-dinosaurs a couple years back, I don't necessarily know that this is a Bad Thing. While some massive software companies will certainly come and go (and outsource) to maintain massive software systems, there are at least a million distinct niche markets out there that are perfect for smaller companies. We've found two of them -- the guys down the street have a couple, etc...
We can charge less than the large companies with massive overhead. Our developers make MORE, on the whole, than developers (especially entry-level ones) at large enterprise corporations, the perks are better, the atmosphere is better. About the only thing we don't have is massive R&D budgets that allow us to go scorched-earth on a thousand different projects at once. But, when everyone sits down and finds a couple of projects we want to pursue, we've never found ourselves short of funds to pursue them.
It's like all other business -- the pendulum swings from small enterprise, to huge corporations. Eventually little "boutique" companies pop up to compete with the giants on quality and cost, the giants consolidate and/or fold, and the cycle starts anew...
Every developer I've ever talked to always has some story about: "I had this great idea, and if only I had like 4 people to work on it, we could crank this thing out and make millions!!!" Unfortunately, 3 out of 4 such stories turn out to be completely wrong, but if folks weren't so generally afraid of failure, and found other like-minded folks to start up their own small business, sooner or later they'd hit that 1 of 4 that succeeds. (Even a blind squirrel finds that occasional nut...)
It's amusing how many OSS-touting, Linux-loving code geeks out there talk-the-talk, and yet scream about the sky falling every time a huge multi-national employer starts another round of outsourcing. Find some friends, harness that creativity, and do it yourself! It can and does work, everyday.
Outsourcing is NOT all bad. It's largely bad, but people just need to learn to identify opportunities when they come knocking. I make more money now, and am far happier, than I ever was working for a giganto-corp.
In light of recently discovered developments, you may hereby consider your position terminated. Your salary will go directly to supplement my bonus, and your work will be farmed out to Abu Dabhe.
As it is only September, your final paycheck will be docked for 1/4th the value of last Christmas' company gift.
Allrighty... well, AC's comments notwithstanding, you sort of hit the nail on the head here. Those figures in the article are probably from companies who HAVE a CTO getting $1.2M.
It's called SME - Small & Medium Enterprise, and we outnumber "big business" about 1000:1. Most companies 100 employees actually value their staff, because we have no choice. If you're one programmer out of 1000, you're pretty easily replaced. If you're 1 programmer out of 10, you're a lot less replaceable, assuming you're doing your job.
Shop around... I can name 4 other companies like mine within a 10 mile radius. I guarantee they're wherever you are too.
As a partner in a small tech consulting business, I can state without reservation, "New CS Graduates don't have a clue what they're worth." The survey is almost certainly taken from a handful of large, national employers with fixed entry-level employement packages.
The truth is that most CS graduates go into smaller businesses. And when they walk in my front door, they have no clue what they should be making. I've had B-students who held a student job doing data entry for their University walk in the door and tell me they're "willing" to work for $75,000 a year, to be a code monkey after graduation. I've also had graduate students with quite a bit of experience walk in and tell me they're expecting $36-40k.
Depending on how many/. articles they read over the last 5 years, you either end up with new grads with no experience, who think they're the second coming, or experienced folks who had a bad co-op or were laid off rapidly from their first job, who walk in demoralized, and are willing to work for peanuts.
As far as I'm concerned, the question of "What's a Degree Worth" is bunk. 90% of a new grad's worth has little to do with their academic program, and everything to do with their attitude, their experiences, and their fitness for the job. There's MIT grads that I wouldn't hire if they were the last non-Indian programmers on the planet.
A degree is worth nothing. The grad's attiude and ability to produce is what sets their salary. Lacking that, they're either unemployed 6 months later, or getting bonuses and raises because the company wants to encourage loyalty and keep them around for a long time. The diploma on your wall has very little to do with that.
For the love of... I think the last paragraph of this article contains the most telling statement: "...make every effort to assist in bringing about a change in the way the Internet is managed..."
The first point is that the Internet is NOT managed, at least in the sense I believe Russ is advocating it should be. Not to go all scary-conservative here, but this is just like the discussion over banning guns -- if you get rid of all the handguns in people's closets, then only the criminals will have them. If you legislate enforceable fines for doing, effectively, nothing, then you force out the majority of people who are scared of incurring any liability, and put a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would cause trouble.
Example:
Gee, I don't like Bob. Bob gets his connection through UUNet. His Windows IIS has never been patched, so next time he goes on vacation I'm going to write a worm that exploits MS00-078. Now, I'm going to turn him in to the "Identification Authority" and hope that while he's gone, he racks up enormous fines. Meanwhile, UUNet has to block port 80 for, effectively, every customer on its network if my worm has managed to infect even one other vulnerable machine.
Suddenly, script kiddies have the ability to embargo the entire net by taking advantage of bugs that happen to listen on well-known ports. I would point out today's earlier Slashdot article. Should all of our ISPs be blocking SSH traffic now?
You can't legislate against stupidity. Nor can you make perfect software. Nor can you expect to fine neophytes into becoming security experts. Even trying would simply place incredible power in the hands of the software vendors, and then huge segments of the computing world become subject to destruction from one malformed "patch", or even worse, when someone finds a way to exploit the update mechanisms.
This is the worst possible sort of power transference. Because people can not, will not, or in some cases _should_ not independently deal with their own technology issues, you empower central entities with an enormous amount of control over individual users. Novice users will relinquish that control, or be forced to pay some ridiculous sum of money in fines. In the end, chances are you end up with even worse problems than you started with.
"Gee officer, the law doesn't say I did anything wrong. Sure, my big brother got me the pot, and then my daddy gave me the $50 hooker for my birthday, but _I_ didn't go buy it. I mean, the nice homeless guy bought me those cigarettes too! Really, what's the problem?? I was able to see all of this between the fuzzy lines on the scrambled-porn channel on cable!"
C'mon... I don't agree with this sort of legislation either, but the argument "We shouldn't legislate this because kids are going to do it anyway" wears a bit thin. If public outcry is going to stop crap like this, it sure as heck won't be through this sort of tactic.
Example:
1) If you go to http://xxx.yyy.zzz/aaa.htm, you will find a link to DeCSS code, the Terrorist's Handbook and source code to a strong-encryption algorithm. We think this is cool, and everybody should go there.
2) If you go to 123 Anytown street, you will find an abortion doctor. We think this is not cool, and would cheer a lot if something just happened to this doctor.
The second one was just declared "okay." The first one, at various points in time, has been declared illegal. It's all free speech, folks. Some folks didn't tell you to download DeCSS or MP3's or whatever (just links or addresses), but got slapped with cease-and-desists and possibly fines anyhow. So is it suddenly okay for others to walk away scott free after not suggesting it would be cool to kill an abortion doctor??
Some information is malicious. You can dance rings around the law as OJ and other cases have proven, but that doesn't change intent. The plaintiffs in this case intended, or okay, at least applauded the killing of doctors. I hope none of you run religious groups, gun shops, pornography, political lobby groups, or any other controversial business/industry, because sooner or later somebody might get it in their head to applaud your killing. "But Darlok, that can't happen to me!!" Keep telling yourself that...
I'm all about free speech, I'm all about defending what you believe in, but what they did is no better that screaming "Fire" in a crowded room. People died because of it. So, get down off your Constitutional high-horse and look at what you're defending... the framers of the Constitution are turning in their graves like little rotisseries... *sheesh*
... and my apologies. My brain somehow dumped the fact that you were using MySQL.
But still, the question is valid. MySQL has all sorts of different performance modes depending on the table type you use and the numer of connections you form to it. If you only have one connection passed around to all of your script executions, that's one thing. If you have a new connection for each script execution, that's another.
The particular language you use won't really save you there. Anyhow... My $0.02.
The question you're asking about what is the fastest CGI language is sort of a loaded one. Different languages excel at different things. Will you be accessing a relational database (which one?), will there be only one server or will it be load-balanced over several, etc etc etc? Heaven forbid you're storing something of this magnitude in on-disk flat files, but if you are, well, that needs to be considered too.
PERL is multipurpose, but won't win many road races for much of anything. PHP has ease of use, but its database support (even with pconnect) and performance in general is not the quickest unless you're hacking the Zend optimizer by hand. Python is getting closer, but it's still not the fastest. ASP isn't either.
You're identifying the right problem, but IMHO, asking the question wrong. I'd identify and measure the speed of your underlying technology first. Depending on what you're doing, the script may not even be the bottleneck! (Though it's hard to say with the amount of info provided.)
This probably makes a very important point. Since I've not seen the word-for-word definition of ISP in any of these suits, I think the Supreme Court was very wise in letting the ruling stand without comment. Tons of companies provide Internet access to their employees, apartment residents drop in broadband lines and share the costs among several block residents, etc etc etc...
Keeping the FCC out of the ISP regulation trade is great. Sure, we have to deal with mega-providers trying to arm wrestle eachother and the consumers, but it also prevents the big guys from filing bulls**t lawsuits against little guys who would technically all be subject to the same regulation.
As an aside, does anyone else see a parallel to what's going on in Telecom/Internet these days and the movie Demolition Man? --... after the franchise wars, now all ISPs are AOL...
"Attention Eagle, clearance granted to light the Queen's pants on fire."
"Hey Bob, bring a pizza back on the way to base."
There's little question that it's some kind of government transmission, but 1) even if it's decrypted, will the resulting message mean anything to the finder, and 2) how long will it take before the sender changes their crypto method? Not as if the findings, if any, won't be all over the Internet within 10 minutes of that first lucky break...
It's an Area 51... as soon as anyone gets close, it's almost certain to be changed, shut down, or better yet, have meaningless clones spewing random data set-up to really throw the crackers off. I'm sure Distributed.net can find something better to do with it's time...
Though, having 5 minutes advance notice on a US Secret Agent lighting the Queen mother's drawers on fire would be pretty cool...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Between Java and their Enterprise platforms, if Oracle spent as much time listening and responding to their customers as they spent threatening them, they might be in a far better position today. Any major platform transition is going to have problems unless you're exceptionally lucky. There's just too many moving parts in Enterprise systems for humans to get everything right on the first try. Oracle won't tout all of the problems people have moving ONTO their software from a competitor, but that transition pain happens too.
Every year that goes by, it seems like Oracle is in a more tenuous position, despite their increased revenue. They've already lost the SME space -- I don't know of a single company anywhere in our client base, or within my sphere of influence, that still uses Oracle software. Organizations are bumping up against the limits of NetSuite -- the costs to integrate 3rd-party or industry-specific components, compared with other ERPs, are turning out to be more significant than expected. So we have clients and vendors migrating ERPs over time.
Oracle is becoming the Comcast of the software world. They treat everyone like crap, but were so deeply embedded that they were hard to dislodge. With every passing year, that is less true, and I think Oracle knows it. Unfortunately, they seem to be choosing to double-down on the "treat everyone like crap" strategy, rather than actually fixing the systemic problems that might eventually sink them...
That's wonderful... but just because Amazon is a dismal working environment, doesn't mean that, as a company, they're also criminally stupid. I could name dozens of companies that I'd never work for on my worst day. Which makes it even more interesting that this Guardian article tries to paint Haslet TX as some kind of isolated podunk town, where Amazon is the only employer in town and employees make 60-mile commutes for the only work they can get.
It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. There are, literally, thousands of un-skilled jobs within 25 miles of the Amazon facility. Pick one and apply. Pretending like Amazon has a warehouse full of mis-treated slaves that can't do anything else is more than slightly disingenuous.
Amazon being a terrible company doesn't mean that most of the "tragedies" in this article hold water.
Look, you can believe what you want to believe. There are certainly real cases, where real people have been hurt by actual negligence, or discriminated against with true malice. It happens, and those people deserve to be protected. There are lots of resources to help those people, and whatever the newspaper says, there are far more gov't departments that tend towards over-reacting with severe enforcement, moreso than turning a blind eye to true workplace violations.
But you have to recognize that when you credulously accept every story about injury and discrimination at face-value, you're not helping the real victims -- you're hurting all of the people who REALLY HAVE been wronged by dumping resources, attention and time on cases that distract from real problems.
There's just too many problems with this story. There are thousands of vacant jobs, requiring few or no skills, in the DFW market. A 60-mile commute in that area, for a specific job, makes too little sense because of how dense that area is. Rents are not that high -- $500/month median rent for a 1Br/1Ba, which is less than 33% of even a $10/hr job working 35-hours per week. She claims to have willingly gone back to doing an un-safe job, even assuming the employer was stupid enough to allow that to occur -- and, in terms of safety gear, that "all important" brush guard that the article hangs its hat on, isn't actually an OSHA-recognized piece of safety equipment!!
I see the horrible crud that happens to people every day, and I do count my blessings. But you do nobody any good when you get outraged and demand action based on "investigative journalism" like this crap. It has every hallmark of trying to make the "Amazon is evil" point, and too many warning flags that no sane person (or employer) would ever actually commit. If this piece is even 75% accurate, then it should be making the point of needing better mental-health counseling in TX, not one about workplace safety.
Uh uh... sorry. It's not like Haslet TX is the armpit of nowhere, and Amazon is the only employer in town. It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. As plenty of others have indicated up-thread, she could have gotten a job at Burger King, or WalMart, or very likely some nice quiet job that requires no lifting and no skills, like a page in a library, or receptionist or filing clerk in one of 10-zillion companies. We're at ~4% unemployment, in case you haven't seen the news -- there are more jobs right now than people able to fill them.
In 2008, I'd believe it. In 2018, if she's living out of her car, it's because she's holding out for a 6- or 7-figure settlement from the mega-corporation that "wronged" her.
Go find Haslet on a map. Tell me that there aren't thousands of jobs that someone, even with an injury/disability, could get, to afford the ~$500 average rent in that area. Or wait, I'll do it for you: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c... 1030+ jobs within 25 miles of Haslet, TX.
Lovely attack piece by the Guardian, but sorry... no sale.
The hysteria of frequent media smear pieces notwithstanding, it's tough to take articles like this seriously at face-value. Lots of broad generalizations and impossible-to-prove (or disprove) allegations of straight-line relationships between an alleged safety issue with an employer, and outcomes like homelessness or disabling injury.
Unfortunately, part of my job is working with EPLI (Employment Practices Liability Insurance) carriers and risk managers. For every actual issue reported, there are multiple instances of people "gaming the system", fraudulently claiming workplace injury or discrimination, or filing repeated false HR reports to attempt to build up a "history" of abuses, being terminated for their bulls**t, and then pointing to that "history" as the REASON for their termination. Maybe I'm just too used to seeing the seedy underside of the Workers' Comp business, but to take light-on-details reports like this, and draw inferences of chronically deficient, or criminal, practices on the part of the large employer, is hard.
Most employees want to do a good job, be fairly compensated, and be appreciated at work. But a small percentage view work as a scam. Those aren't just the ones that spoil the party for everyone, but they're ALSO the ones most likely to turn up in press reports, because "going loud" and getting a company to pay them to go away is part-and-parcel of the scam.
If these folks were legitimately injured and abused by dumb-ass managers at Amazon, then I feel for them. But it's equally likely that a papercut became a "permanently debilitating hand injury", if historical reports like this are any guideline. Sad, but true.
The problem that so many of these initiatives have, when it comes down to IMPLEMENTATION, is that governments have a major problem with "wealth" as distinct from "income". Because wealth can be hidden, obfuscated and invested in so many ways, most give up trying to tax it by traditional means. So they focus on Income.
And there's a HUGE problem there, because income != wealth. At least, again, the way most governments choose to define "income".
I'm a small business owner, and when I get my K-1 every year, it never ceases to amaze me about the spread between how much money I'm being taxed on, versus how much money I took home. Technically, if I were to somehow, magically, close up the company without any spin-down expenses or other costs, I could capture that money and be "rich". But, in reality, the amount of money sitting in the company for expenses, payroll, etc... that is "mine", but I will never see, touch or capitalize on, is significant. So every time you talk about taxing the "rich", you're taxing guys like me who run mid-sized businesses, and are personally allocated a share of the company's earnings, THAT WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN HOME, AND NEVER WILL.
Tax policy is a steaming pile of dung. I'm all for taxing the truly rich... likely because I pay more taxes than most of them already!! But you need to be very careful about how to define "rich", because more often than not, these "tax 'em all and let god sort 'em out later" plans end up netting and hurting small- and mid-sized business owners more than it does the truly-Wealthy.
My $0.02...
Heh... it's not that I disagree with you, philosophically. It's just that, where the rubber meets the road, a huge proportion of the applications and systems out there are not robustly designed.
It's very common for applications to expect either success or failure. Success implies that it's behaving correctly. Failure means anything went wrong. In many ways, FTDI's previous attempt at this -- bricking the devices -- was PREFERABLE to this, as it always resulted in failure. You can be angry that they killed your device (which you may or may not have even known was counterfeit), but it pretty much would always fail.
In this case, intentionally manipulating the output could have innumerable unpredictable effects. As noted, can FTDI know that there's not an application out there looking for a value in a specific position? Now, their error message aligns the "DE" in "DEVICE" in that position... the application doesn't fail. It just starts assuming a hex value of '222' for all data runs. What impact might that have?
Look... you can apportion blame and responsibility all you want. Ideal-world politics don't work well in situations like this. The real world is a lot messier, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. I'm not predicting life-ending disaster from this change. All I'm saying is that FTDI has no way to know if it _could_ result in life-ending disaster, and are being ridiculously foolish to take the risk, when they're well aware that their end-users have no way of knowing whether they're affected.
Do you have auto updates enabled on any of the machinery that you use USB to serial converters on? If not, why not?
No, I don't... and that's because I'm not an idiot. ;)
Unfortunately, 20 years in this business have taught me that a significant share of people doing this kind of work are. Furthered by the fact that a significant share of business owners/managers (even in large companies) will shave costs anywhere they think they can get away with it.
My basic point is that "non critical" links in the infrastructure can still cascade into critical failures. Many of the developers/integrators in the chain never even recognize the ways that their outputs will be used downstream. And subtle or not, it's never safe to assume that modifying the output of something low-level like a serial controller will not have un-subtle effects on the application. The way these industrial apps often work, it might assume the value is 0. Or it might line up where the "DE" in the word "device", in that error message, is interpreted as the integer 222. There is literally no way for us (or FTDI) to know.
Point is, I can foresee hundreds of ways this could go bad, in places that people don't view as "mission critical". (The desktop PC of a warehouse manager, a dumb throw-away "converter" PC that was simply stuck in a remote location to turn a serial device into a "network server", etc... People do ALL kinds of crap to engineer solutions for specific scenarios, often in small suppliers or companies too tiny to have good control processes or discipline.)
Murphy's Law, and all...
Not necessarily true. Low-level technology like this is frequently the source of "cascading failure" that can endanger people or property.
For instance, we have many USB-to-Serial devices installed in chains that capture weight readings from industrial scales. If this suddenly and inobtrusively starts causing that measurement data to be misaligned in the output, those weight readings could be transmitted to shippers who may or may not re-weigh the product based on our volume. In the worst case scenario, something like this could be done as the last check-weight for loading an aircraft -- a weight-critical application where getting it wrong can cause a tail-strike on takeoff.
Screwing with low-level data INTENTIONALLY is never a good thing. End users have no way of ever knowing that it's happening. Pushing it by Windows Update, where no devs are involved to catch the error, is a recipe for potential disaster somewhere.
This IS Pure Crap... on the part of FTDI.
There are two fundamental dichotomies that hide under this argument, and they've been going on for years, if not decades.
First, there's the disconnect between large business and small business. Second, there's the disconnect between what people have previously been paid (or their peers have), and what they are actually worth. This is coming from a guy who has hired 5 software developers so far this year, and has 2 slots still available...
A lot of developers are looking at what happens at Google and Microsoft (aside from the layoffs...), and try to use that as a standard when they apply for a position at a 50-person shop in the midwest. This creates an expectation disconnect where someone gets an offer for $65k, but won't take it because they've been convinced by the Internet, their Career Planning & Placement department, or the job postings on career boards, that their skills are worth $90k.
This is an "expectation shortage", and results when there are not enough candidates willing to take the positions that ACTUALLY EXIST. It's all well and good to say that employers are under-paying developers, and looking for cheap labor. But the market does set rates, and the fact is that most software projects away from the coasts just don't support paying developers $120k/year - at least not sustainably.
The second disconnect occurs when people misconstrue what it takes to be hired and promoted in the majority of companies, other than the mega-corporations who can have 200 people doing the same job. The sad fact is that you pretty much have to be a specialist to GET a job, and then you have to be a generalist to KEEP it. The specialists who stay in their pidgeon-hole are always the first against the wall when the next re-org comes. But the generalists who have 75% competency in an array of skill-sets rarely make the cut during interviews, but have enormous job security in their current positions -- though often feel themselves "stuck" in positions where they may not feel like they're advancing quickly enough.
This is a failure of cultivation and and expectation problem on the part of employers. It creates a market distortion where people are encouraged to specialize, and then dumped back onto the market with inflated expectations of their overall worth when that very specialization becomes a liability. (Ruby, anyone...?)
From the inside, I think it's undeniable that there is a shortage of quality, trained developers, with attitudes and ethics that will lead to long-term advancement and quality employment. That doesn't mean that there is a shortage of bodies with the raw skills necessary to do the job. But, in the end, that hardly matters... companies aren't hiring automata, even if some of them want to pay as though they were.
There are ample failures on both sides of the equation, and large companies are exacerbating those problems with their treatment of many H-1Bs and "mass hiring" of fresh graduates (at insanely inflated salaries) who then get culled 9 months later.
But candidates are also making the problem worse by viewing software development as a single, unified market, and clinging to the belief that just because Company X in Boston could afford to pay $x for a given product/project, that their skills are still worth $x when they move to Company Y in Pittsburgh, creating software for a completely different industry.
The end result is a shortage of jobs that don't require specialists to get through the door, and a shortage of employees able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the market we are in. When you meet in the middle, it's a real shortage, regardless of how it came to pass.
So while I'm not a tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist, I do note amongst the young technorati something of a double-standard. Surveillance, big data and privacy violations are bad when they're used to infringe social rights, but GOOD when they're used to attack people perceived as infringing social rights... C'est la vie.
But more to the point, single-issue activists ALWAYS misunderstand the voting habits of multi-issue voters. Particularly Republicans, who are not just straight-up conservatives as they are often portrayed, but often socially liberal _fiscal_ conservatives who choose not to vote based on social policy. Turning multi-issue swing voters into single-issue activists isn't a straight-forward process, even if you identify who they are.
Finally, this kind of effort makes the assumption that such voters are simply awaiting the right contact or motivation to write their congressperson and demand action. Whereas, in reality, while activists often view the disengaged as "against the cause", the reality is, in most instances, such voters just don't care about that cause.
Well, first, this is sadly old news. The technology was actually exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston last July. It's pretty cool, but I'm not sure it would ever be put to practical use, at least in its current form.
For one thing, it's loud! Every plasma ball makes a sizzling pop as it winks in and out of existence. Now magnify that by thousands of times as it scans out a 3D wireframe... the entire area for quite a distance surrounding fills with an ear-splitting sound of angry electric bees. There was talk of putting it on buildings to run electronic billboards in cities, but anyone within a few blocks would need ear protection to co-exist with it!
Very cool stuff, but we're a loooong way from 3D open-air advertising.
Yeah. Sucks, but face it. The smaller companies don't have the financial ability to support a show like that -- trust me when I tell you that shows aren't cheap to produce, and "old E3" was even moreso than others. In a very pure sense, the big guys were subsidizing the event that the little guys could take advantage of. Is it any wonder that they decided it wasn't in their best interests to do so anymore? Yeah, the consumer and the market as a whole suffers, but E3 was not, and is not, a substitute for a good marketing plan. It was ALWAYS supposed to be an industry-insider event, so the fact that it grew into a public platform was probably more luck than strategy.
If it survives (and that's a serious IF), I expect costs will come down and future events will have more accessibility to smaller firms. This year was all about appeasing the big players who would have happily scuttled the show entirely, otherwise. The small firms need to band together and find a cost structure that makes sense, and they can afford, if they want this sort of forum. The rabid fan-base will find somewhere else to congregate, without doubt.
Previous posts have alluded to this, but here's a bit of history to explain what's happening. IDG didn't kill E3 to replace it with this new format. The exhibitors did... Sony, Microsoft, EA, etc. The only way trade shows succeed is if they make money by serving as a marketing tool connecting the manufacturers with the industry buyers. There's much more effective methods of reaching the gamer community than buying an expensive booth and hiring large-breasted women.
The top exhibitors at E3 banded together and vowed to not return after last year, effectively killing the show. IDG scrambled to react, and came up with this new format in an attempt to woo exhibitors back, and continue the event. This year was something of a test. If the top companies decide the new format was an effective way to reach wholesale buyers and network with other people in their creative and supply chains, it will probably continue. If they decide it was not, E3 is most likely dead for all time.
As wild an event as it used to be, there's no return on investment for companies to slug it out in front of a seething mass of gamers who wiggled their way in to grab bagfuls of booth swag and monopolize the demo units. It's supposed to be an industry event -- not a public event -- and the new format more strongly reflects that. Actual industry insiders apparently DO like the new format much better, though I think the jury is out on whether they liked it enough to continue. Especially in light of the emergence of other, more focused gaming conferences like the Sandbox Symposium coming up in August.
It's not the big flashy public event it once was... but then again, it was never supposed to be that in the first place. It had to change into this, or it would no longer exist at all.
Having started a small company with several other code-dinosaurs a couple years back, I don't necessarily know that this is a Bad Thing. While some massive software companies will certainly come and go (and outsource) to maintain massive software systems, there are at least a million distinct niche markets out there that are perfect for smaller companies. We've found two of them -- the guys down the street have a couple, etc...
We can charge less than the large companies with massive overhead. Our developers make MORE, on the whole, than developers (especially entry-level ones) at large enterprise corporations, the perks are better, the atmosphere is better. About the only thing we don't have is massive R&D budgets that allow us to go scorched-earth on a thousand different projects at once. But, when everyone sits down and finds a couple of projects we want to pursue, we've never found ourselves short of funds to pursue them.
It's like all other business -- the pendulum swings from small enterprise, to huge corporations. Eventually little "boutique" companies pop up to compete with the giants on quality and cost, the giants consolidate and/or fold, and the cycle starts anew...
Every developer I've ever talked to always has some story about: "I had this great idea, and if only I had like 4 people to work on it, we could crank this thing out and make millions!!!" Unfortunately, 3 out of 4 such stories turn out to be completely wrong, but if folks weren't so generally afraid of failure, and found other like-minded folks to start up their own small business, sooner or later they'd hit that 1 of 4 that succeeds. (Even a blind squirrel finds that occasional nut...)
It's amusing how many OSS-touting, Linux-loving code geeks out there talk-the-talk, and yet scream about the sky falling every time a huge multi-national employer starts another round of outsourcing. Find some friends, harness that creativity, and do it yourself! It can and does work, everyday.
Outsourcing is NOT all bad. It's largely bad, but people just need to learn to identify opportunities when they come knocking. I make more money now, and am far happier, than I ever was working for a giganto-corp.
Dear cog:
In light of recently discovered developments, you may hereby consider your position terminated. Your salary will go directly to supplement my bonus, and your work will be farmed out to Abu Dabhe.
As it is only September, your final paycheck will be docked for 1/4th the value of last Christmas' company gift.
Regards,
The Mgmt.
Allrighty... well, AC's comments notwithstanding, you sort of hit the nail on the head here. Those figures in the article are probably from companies who HAVE a CTO getting $1.2M.
It's called SME - Small & Medium Enterprise, and we outnumber "big business" about 1000:1. Most companies 100 employees actually value their staff, because we have no choice. If you're one programmer out of 1000, you're pretty easily replaced. If you're 1 programmer out of 10, you're a lot less replaceable, assuming you're doing your job.
Shop around... I can name 4 other companies like mine within a 10 mile radius. I guarantee they're wherever you are too.
As a partner in a small tech consulting business, I can state without reservation, "New CS Graduates don't have a clue what they're worth." The survey is almost certainly taken from a handful of large, national employers with fixed entry-level employement packages.
/. articles they read over the last 5 years, you either end up with new grads with no experience, who think they're the second coming, or experienced folks who had a bad co-op or were laid off rapidly from their first job, who walk in demoralized, and are willing to work for peanuts.
The truth is that most CS graduates go into smaller businesses. And when they walk in my front door, they have no clue what they should be making. I've had B-students who held a student job doing data entry for their University walk in the door and tell me they're "willing" to work for $75,000 a year, to be a code monkey after graduation. I've also had graduate students with quite a bit of experience walk in and tell me they're expecting $36-40k.
Depending on how many
As far as I'm concerned, the question of "What's a Degree Worth" is bunk. 90% of a new grad's worth has little to do with their academic program, and everything to do with their attitude, their experiences, and their fitness for the job. There's MIT grads that I wouldn't hire if they were the last non-Indian programmers on the planet.
A degree is worth nothing. The grad's attiude and ability to produce is what sets their salary. Lacking that, they're either unemployed 6 months later, or getting bonuses and raises because the company wants to encourage loyalty and keep them around for a long time. The diploma on your wall has very little to do with that.
For the love of... I think the last paragraph of this article contains the most telling statement: "...make every effort to assist in bringing about a change in the way the Internet is managed..."
The first point is that the Internet is NOT managed, at least in the sense I believe Russ is advocating it should be. Not to go all scary-conservative here, but this is just like the discussion over banning guns -- if you get rid of all the handguns in people's closets, then only the criminals will have them. If you legislate enforceable fines for doing, effectively, nothing, then you force out the majority of people who are scared of incurring any liability, and put a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would cause trouble.
Example:
Gee, I don't like Bob. Bob gets his connection through UUNet. His Windows IIS has never been patched, so next time he goes on vacation I'm going to write a worm that exploits MS00-078. Now, I'm going to turn him in to the "Identification Authority" and hope that while he's gone, he racks up enormous fines. Meanwhile, UUNet has to block port 80 for, effectively, every customer on its network if my worm has managed to infect even one other vulnerable machine.
Suddenly, script kiddies have the ability to embargo the entire net by taking advantage of bugs that happen to listen on well-known ports. I would point out today's earlier Slashdot article. Should all of our ISPs be blocking SSH traffic now?
You can't legislate against stupidity. Nor can you make perfect software. Nor can you expect to fine neophytes into becoming security experts. Even trying would simply place incredible power in the hands of the software vendors, and then huge segments of the computing world become subject to destruction from one malformed "patch", or even worse, when someone finds a way to exploit the update mechanisms.
This is the worst possible sort of power transference. Because people can not, will not, or in some cases _should_ not independently deal with their own technology issues, you empower central entities with an enormous amount of control over individual users. Novice users will relinquish that control, or be forced to pay some ridiculous sum of money in fines. In the end, chances are you end up with even worse problems than you started with.
"Gee officer, the law doesn't say I did anything wrong. Sure, my big brother got me the pot, and then my daddy gave me the $50 hooker for my birthday, but _I_ didn't go buy it. I mean, the nice homeless guy bought me those cigarettes too! Really, what's the problem?? I was able to see all of this between the fuzzy lines on the scrambled-porn channel on cable!"
C'mon... I don't agree with this sort of legislation either, but the argument "We shouldn't legislate this because kids are going to do it anyway" wears a bit thin. If public outcry is going to stop crap like this, it sure as heck won't be through this sort of tactic.
1) If you go to http://xxx.yyy.zzz/aaa.htm, you will find a link to DeCSS code, the Terrorist's Handbook and source code to a strong-encryption algorithm. We think this is cool, and everybody should go there.
2) If you go to 123 Anytown street, you will find an abortion doctor. We think this is not cool, and would cheer a lot if something just happened to this doctor.
The second one was just declared "okay." The first one, at various points in time, has been declared illegal. It's all free speech, folks. Some folks didn't tell you to download DeCSS or MP3's or whatever (just links or addresses), but got slapped with cease-and-desists and possibly fines anyhow. So is it suddenly okay for others to walk away scott free after not suggesting it would be cool to kill an abortion doctor??
Some information is malicious. You can dance rings around the law as OJ and other cases have proven, but that doesn't change intent. The plaintiffs in this case intended, or okay, at least applauded the killing of doctors. I hope none of you run religious groups, gun shops, pornography, political lobby groups, or any other controversial business/industry, because sooner or later somebody might get it in their head to applaud your killing. "But Darlok, that can't happen to me!!" Keep telling yourself that...
I'm all about free speech, I'm all about defending what you believe in, but what they did is no better that screaming "Fire" in a crowded room. People died because of it. So, get down off your Constitutional high-horse and look at what you're defending... the framers of the Constitution are turning in their graves like little rotisseries... *sheesh*
But still, the question is valid. MySQL has all sorts of different performance modes depending on the table type you use and the numer of connections you form to it. If you only have one connection passed around to all of your script executions, that's one thing. If you have a new connection for each script execution, that's another.
The particular language you use won't really save you there. Anyhow... My $0.02.
PERL is multipurpose, but won't win many road races for much of anything. PHP has ease of use, but its database support (even with pconnect) and performance in general is not the quickest unless you're hacking the Zend optimizer by hand. Python is getting closer, but it's still not the fastest. ASP isn't either.
You're identifying the right problem, but IMHO, asking the question wrong. I'd identify and measure the speed of your underlying technology first. Depending on what you're doing, the script may not even be the bottleneck! (Though it's hard to say with the amount of info provided.)
Either way, good luck!
Keeping the FCC out of the ISP regulation trade is great. Sure, we have to deal with mega-providers trying to arm wrestle eachother and the consumers, but it also prevents the big guys from filing bulls**t lawsuits against little guys who would technically all be subject to the same regulation.
As an aside, does anyone else see a parallel to what's going on in Telecom/Internet these days and the movie Demolition Man? -- ... after the franchise wars, now all ISPs are AOL...
"Hey Bob, bring a pizza back on the way to base."
There's little question that it's some kind of government transmission, but 1) even if it's decrypted, will the resulting message mean anything to the finder, and 2) how long will it take before the sender changes their crypto method? Not as if the findings, if any, won't be all over the Internet within 10 minutes of that first lucky break...
It's an Area 51... as soon as anyone gets close, it's almost certain to be changed, shut down, or better yet, have meaningless clones spewing random data set-up to really throw the crackers off. I'm sure Distributed.net can find something better to do with it's time...
Though, having 5 minutes advance notice on a US Secret Agent lighting the Queen mother's drawers on fire would be pretty cool... ;)