Actually the Novell Netware NDS server is a close cousin of LDAP. If I were hiring someone to administer an LDAP directory and I saw a resume for a bright person with NDS experience I might consider them.
But to your point, some legacy and domain-specific tools and technologies don't really transfer outside a given company. If your job consists of only that type of stuff, and no transferable skills, that a pretty crappy job and anyone who has it should recognize their career is going down a dead end. In my experience the people with those jobs are either a) not mentally capable of more demanding work, b) hung up on a dead end job for some personal reasons (no ambition, don't want to relocate, etc), or c) actively looking to get out, and if they channel that energy into self-training they will get out eventually.
Very rarely would someone in that dead-end job be getting paid too much to consider other opportunities. IMHO that's because the people in those jobs self-select themselves and so employers don't have to work hard to keep them.
Implied contract for factory worker: we train you on our factory equipment, you work for us until you die. Your resume looks like a bunch of crap, but you don't care cos you don't change jobs.
Implied contract for tech worker: you train yourself on industry-standard tools and technologies, you work for us for 3-5 years until you've self-trained yourself into a better job. Your resume benefits from all your self-training, and doesn't really benefit us.
Paid training's great if you can get it but there's a reason it's not normal in tech.
The guy did not "remove one line of code." He used a DLL injection technique (documented by Richter in Advanced Windows Programming) that allows him to replace the registered address of a function in gd132.dll. This is not beginner coding, it works fine in principle but is not easy to pull off and have be reliable.
One problem, for instance, is that if some other hacker came along and reset the function pointer with their *own* dll, we'd be back to square one (tho that requires a greater level of system access). And the DLLs themselves don't have explicit control over when they get loaded, so they can't guarantee that they are first or last.
Microsoft's patch is nothing like his. They (I'm guessing) rebuilt gdi32.dll to actually turn the function into a no-op. Adequate testing by MS would have to include ensuring that all the various WMFs dynamically generated by the OS are not adversely affected.
Did I say it is always verboten? No, I didn't. And "asking once" seems okay to me, long as any new female doesn't have to put up with a similar question from every single other guy on the team. And how would you stop that from happening?
My point was that the original poster sounded hard-up and like he was hitting pretty hard on everything with two X chromosomes. The HR manual doesn't say he shouldn't ever ask someone out, but if he is really acting like Leisure Suit Larry at work then he should be looking at what the HR department *might* say if he keeps it up.
I've got no problem with people going out at work, but I wouldn't choose to do it myself (then again I'm married). I can sympathize with the guys talking about where to meet women---I don't have that problem, I can see it would be a pain.
I worked with a guy who was married (mail order bride, I think) with a small child, but would hit on all the new women in the office---really obnoxious stuff, and persistent, and clueless. Eventually he started aggressively pursuing a very nice woman who happened to be 110% lesbian. Just goes to show, let your little friend do *all* your thinking and your whole self will be looking for work.
Point is, if you see no distinction between the workplace and a local meat market, you're going to get into trouble eventually. Guys "on the make" can act like real dorks. A little judgment can go a long way.
Formats can be a challenge for vi users, granted (and I'm sometimes one of them). But any modern editor can make those types of cosmetic issues go away with a couple of clicks to reformat.
The more difficult issues are ones of style and syntax (why did this guy use a bitfield and masks instead of an array of booleans? why does this method return a -1 for failure but that one returns 0?). Trying to drive consistency through standards is tough because if the standards are comprehensive enough to address all this stuff, then it should be possible to feed the standards into an expert programmer application and fire your staff. Nobody does that (and survives) so let's not get hung up on standards as the panacea.
Absolutely agreed on code reviews, and it brings up what I think is key---the human element. You will never make a bad developer into a good one through standards---but you have a good shot at improving their skills by talking through their code with them.
You mention "a couple of hours" for a developer to get up to speed? So what? You want to add incremental work to every trained developer's workday so that you can save a little bit of a newbie's time?
The reality is that company that treat developers as interchangeable modules that can pump out standardized units of effort get crappy results. Regression to the mean and all that. Everyone wishes the "other guys" would conform to standards, but there are real reasons that cookie cutter code is not at the top of the list of success factors for a good project.
The best thing you can do is to identify your key lead developers, keep them happy, and make sure they are doing a halfway reasonable job of spreading the knowledge around. Oh, and recognize that if they leave you will take a hit. It comes with the territory.
The alternative is to use process and standards as a club to force conformity, which will make your shop into a place that most folks with talent don't want to work.
I have a photocopied version of a fake book which I was told was copied off of the "Real book"---I assume the fully legal version. So even the real book can be fake!
Then again, when it comes to having the head to "Little Old Lady on Shady Lane" or whatever, I really don't care how real or otherwise it is.
Read "Deep C Secrets" and learn about type promotion and automatic widening of primitives---there are some strange side effects when a compiler "invisibly" stores smaller data types in the native word size of the hardware. Signed vs. unsigned is one area you can see this, but there are others.
omg will there be some sad sad slashdorks when they try to cook up some hax on the TPM stuff. Apparently we're not all aware how extensive and robust the TPM infrastructure is. A trip to Radio Shark and/or a overnight session with a disassembler/binary editor will NOT be sufficient to defeat it.
I had the a double stroke of good fortune when I learned Windows development: 1) I worked in a shop that did cross-platform development with core libraries that had to compile and run across various Unices and also Windows (95 and NT 4.0 at the time). 2) someone turned me on to Petzold as the best place to start.
Petzold's uncompromising focus on the code and away from the tools (like VS) allowed me to get used to doing things the "hard" way---rolling my own message handlers, hand-editing.rc files, etc.---instead of using VS's horrible tools like the godforsaken "ClassWizard". And while it took more time in some cases, it allowed me to carry over lessons from the Unix world. Between that and "Deep C Secrets" I was feeling good...
Unfortunately, the advent of COM/COM+/DCOM prevented this approach from working for too long. For instance, magical precompilers that generate binary files that must be linked into your project to make it "just work"---I'm looking at you, "tlb."
The parent post is making a different point. Publishers are not "sellers of books"---book distributors do that. Publishers are "marketers of books" and as such have invested large amounts of money in setting up a system for creating demand for their product.
The modern consumer is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day and publishers can't afford to have the consumer's attention divided, even if it might generate a few more bucks on old titles. Think of it like Microsoft, having trouble competing against its own installed base of Win95/98/ME/2K users. The risk is that the complex network that creates a publishing "phenomenon" might start breaking down.
Take Oprah's book club...the big publishers are actually somewhat ambivalent about it. It generates demand and the type of "phenomenon" they need in order to justify their continued existence, but they can't control what Oprah chooses. The functioning of this demand-generating system requires that these big publishers control the entire lifecycle. Hence it is highly vulnerable to disruption and they are alert to anything that might represent the first major crack in the edifice.
The reason important stuff like that is in the blue states is because the people who need to create and maintain that stuff don't want to live in the red states. Relocate those things to Kansas and you will have a hiring problem. Very few people I know want to live in a place where they put paper over the beer cooler on Sunday and the police chief is the brother-in-law of the town's most popular preacher. I sure as hell don't.
Many folks in the red states think that the almighty's grand plan is behind natural disasters, terrorism, and the like...but those things don't tend to affect Iowa.
As Jon Stewart observed, Bush's re-election in reaction to NYC getting hit was the blue staters trying to protect the red staters...apparently from themselves.
That might seem like a troll but I'm semi-serious.
A degree from a vocational institute might be comparable to a certification, and in fact many of them do offer certifications as part of their curriculum. Buyer beware.
But a BA/BS/MA/MS/etc. is not supposed to be about proving that you know a certain body of knowledge. It's supposed to prove that you know how to educate yourself and that you understand deeply the fundamental principles behind a discipline.
Otherwise CS departments wouldn't graduate such shitty coders on such a routine basis, who are so ignorant of the state of the tools and technologies in their professional field, and so ill-equipped to perform professionally that they end up getting treated like interns for the first few years in the working world.
CS generally is the worst of both worlds, though of course YMMV.
"Three Men in A Boat" is his best book. If you are a fan of British humor, you must read it--and you can even read online as a result of it being in the public domain.
It does get a bit twee at times, but if you like P.G Wodehouse, you'll like this.
Java the island has existed for a lot longer. So has java the coffee drink. They have a similar relationship to JavaScript as does Java the programming language. Meaning *none* beyond the name.
"If there were some frequency dependencies, then you would see a degradation of sound." The way insulated wires are constructed, with an inner core, a surrounding insulator, and a ground sleeve, virtually guarantees that they will present capacitance and non-infinite resistance to ground. Depending on the values and the type of signal, that's a R/C LOWPASS FILTER. Perhaps you've heard of those?
Now the reality is that most basic cables are sufficient quality, especially at shorter lengths. But I'm sorry, physics is very relevant.
You might have noticed that you get a fancy phone "for free" or a small amount when you sign up for two years of service. Hmmm, why is that? It's well known that handsets are sold at a loss and the carriers must rely on contracts to make their loss back and start making money.
Maybe the evil companies are pillaging their customers....or could it be that customers are attracted to plans like that? I can buy a cheap and good handset on ebay and buy service from some carriers. Why don't more people do that?
My theory is that people like these plans for the same reason that some people shop for car financing based on monthly payment---they never think of total cost. Companies who want those customers have to compete on those terms.
Any "non-free" government that has been in place for a significant amount of time creates a class of people who are dependent on it (military, bureaucracy) and therefore interested in keeping it around. Any forcible removal of such a government will be opposed by that class of people. And often those people have a distinct ethnic or religious identity. Iraq is far from alone in this.
The problem with dystopias like 1984 is that they don't capture how well tyranny, ethnic castes and tribalism work together.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the Novell Netware NDS server is a close cousin of LDAP. If I were hiring someone to administer an LDAP directory and I saw a resume for a bright person with NDS experience I might consider them.
But to your point, some legacy and domain-specific tools and technologies don't really transfer outside a given company. If your job consists of only that type of stuff, and no transferable skills, that a pretty crappy job and anyone who has it should recognize their career is going down a dead end. In my experience the people with those jobs are either a) not mentally capable of more demanding work, b) hung up on a dead end job for some personal reasons (no ambition, don't want to relocate, etc), or c) actively looking to get out, and if they channel that energy into self-training they will get out eventually.
Very rarely would someone in that dead-end job be getting paid too much to consider other opportunities. IMHO that's because the people in those jobs self-select themselves and so employers don't have to work hard to keep them.
Implied contract for factory worker: we train you on our factory equipment, you work for us until you die. Your resume looks like a bunch of crap, but you don't care cos you don't change jobs.
Implied contract for tech worker: you train yourself on industry-standard tools and technologies, you work for us for 3-5 years until you've self-trained yourself into a better job. Your resume benefits from all your self-training, and doesn't really benefit us.
Paid training's great if you can get it but there's a reason it's not normal in tech.
The guy did not "remove one line of code." He used a DLL injection technique (documented by Richter in Advanced Windows Programming) that allows him to replace the registered address of a function in gd132.dll. This is not beginner coding, it works fine in principle but is not easy to pull off and have be reliable.
One problem, for instance, is that if some other hacker came along and reset the function pointer with their *own* dll, we'd be back to square one (tho that requires a greater level of system access). And the DLLs themselves don't have explicit control over when they get loaded, so they can't guarantee that they are first or last.
Microsoft's patch is nothing like his. They (I'm guessing) rebuilt gdi32.dll to actually turn the function into a no-op. Adequate testing by MS would have to include ensuring that all the various WMFs dynamically generated by the OS are not adversely affected.
Did I say it is always verboten? No, I didn't. And "asking once" seems okay to me, long as any new female doesn't have to put up with a similar question from every single other guy on the team. And how would you stop that from happening?
My point was that the original poster sounded hard-up and like he was hitting pretty hard on everything with two X chromosomes. The HR manual doesn't say he shouldn't ever ask someone out, but if he is really acting like Leisure Suit Larry at work then he should be looking at what the HR department *might* say if he keeps it up.
I've got no problem with people going out at work, but I wouldn't choose to do it myself (then again I'm married). I can sympathize with the guys talking about where to meet women---I don't have that problem, I can see it would be a pain.
I worked with a guy who was married (mail order bride, I think) with a small child, but would hit on all the new women in the office---really obnoxious stuff, and persistent, and clueless. Eventually he started aggressively pursuing a very nice woman who happened to be 110% lesbian. Just goes to show, let your little friend do *all* your thinking and your whole self will be looking for work.
Point is, if you see no distinction between the workplace and a local meat market, you're going to get into trouble eventually. Guys "on the make" can act like real dorks. A little judgment can go a long way.
At a bar? Sure. At work? Check your HR manual, it will probably help you understand the difference.
Formats can be a challenge for vi users, granted (and I'm sometimes one of them). But any modern editor can make those types of cosmetic issues go away with a couple of clicks to reformat.
The more difficult issues are ones of style and syntax (why did this guy use a bitfield and masks instead of an array of booleans? why does this method return a -1 for failure but that one returns 0?). Trying to drive consistency through standards is tough because if the standards are comprehensive enough to address all this stuff, then it should be possible to feed the standards into an expert programmer application and fire your staff. Nobody does that (and survives) so let's not get hung up on standards as the panacea.
Absolutely agreed on code reviews, and it brings up what I think is key---the human element. You will never make a bad developer into a good one through standards---but you have a good shot at improving their skills by talking through their code with them.
You mention "a couple of hours" for a developer to get up to speed? So what? You want to add incremental work to every trained developer's workday so that you can save a little bit of a newbie's time?
The reality is that company that treat developers as interchangeable modules that can pump out standardized units of effort get crappy results. Regression to the mean and all that. Everyone wishes the "other guys" would conform to standards, but there are real reasons that cookie cutter code is not at the top of the list of success factors for a good project.
The best thing you can do is to identify your key lead developers, keep them happy, and make sure they are doing a halfway reasonable job of spreading the knowledge around. Oh, and recognize that if they leave you will take a hit. It comes with the territory.
The alternative is to use process and standards as a club to force conformity, which will make your shop into a place that most folks with talent don't want to work.
I have a photocopied version of a fake book which I was told was copied off of the "Real book"---I assume the fully legal version. So even the real book can be fake!
Then again, when it comes to having the head to "Little Old Lady on Shady Lane" or whatever, I really don't care how real or otherwise it is.
Read "Deep C Secrets" and learn about type promotion and automatic widening of primitives---there are some strange side effects when a compiler "invisibly" stores smaller data types in the native word size of the hardware. Signed vs. unsigned is one area you can see this, but there are others.
omg will there be some sad sad slashdorks when they try to cook up some hax on the TPM stuff. Apparently we're not all aware how extensive and robust the TPM infrastructure is. A trip to Radio Shark and/or a overnight session with a disassembler/binary editor will NOT be sufficient to defeat it.
I had the a double stroke of good fortune when I learned Windows development:
.rc files, etc.---instead of using VS's horrible tools like the godforsaken "ClassWizard". And while it took more time in some cases, it allowed me to carry over lessons from the Unix world. Between that and "Deep C Secrets" I was feeling good...
1) I worked in a shop that did cross-platform development with core libraries that had to compile and run across various Unices and also Windows (95 and NT 4.0 at the time).
2) someone turned me on to Petzold as the best place to start.
Petzold's uncompromising focus on the code and away from the tools (like VS) allowed me to get used to doing things the "hard" way---rolling my own message handlers, hand-editing
Unfortunately, the advent of COM/COM+/DCOM prevented this approach from working for too long. For instance, magical precompilers that generate binary files that must be linked into your project to make it "just work"---I'm looking at you, "tlb."
The parent post is making a different point. Publishers are not "sellers of books"---book distributors do that. Publishers are "marketers of books" and as such have invested large amounts of money in setting up a system for creating demand for their product.
The modern consumer is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day and publishers can't afford to have the consumer's attention divided, even if it might generate a few more bucks on old titles. Think of it like Microsoft, having trouble competing against its own installed base of Win95/98/ME/2K users. The risk is that the complex network that creates a publishing "phenomenon" might start breaking down.
Take Oprah's book club...the big publishers are actually somewhat ambivalent about it. It generates demand and the type of "phenomenon" they need in order to justify their continued existence, but they can't control what Oprah chooses. The functioning of this demand-generating system requires that these big publishers control the entire lifecycle. Hence it is highly vulnerable to disruption and they are alert to anything that might represent the first major crack in the edifice.
The reason important stuff like that is in the blue states is because the people who need to create and maintain that stuff don't want to live in the red states. Relocate those things to Kansas and you will have a hiring problem. Very few people I know want to live in a place where they put paper over the beer cooler on Sunday and the police chief is the brother-in-law of the town's most popular preacher. I sure as hell don't.
Many folks in the red states think that the almighty's grand plan is behind natural disasters, terrorism, and the like...but those things don't tend to affect Iowa. As Jon Stewart observed, Bush's re-election in reaction to NYC getting hit was the blue staters trying to protect the red staters...apparently from themselves.
That might seem like a troll but I'm semi-serious.
A degree from a vocational institute might be comparable to a certification, and in fact many of them do offer certifications as part of their curriculum. Buyer beware.
But a BA/BS/MA/MS/etc. is not supposed to be about proving that you know a certain body of knowledge. It's supposed to prove that you know how to educate yourself and that you understand deeply the fundamental principles behind a discipline.
Otherwise CS departments wouldn't graduate such shitty coders on such a routine basis, who are so ignorant of the state of the tools and technologies in their professional field, and so ill-equipped to perform professionally that they end up getting treated like interns for the first few years in the working world.
CS generally is the worst of both worlds, though of course YMMV.
"Three Men in A Boat" is his best book. If you are a fan of British humor, you must read it--and you can even read online as a result of it being in the public domain.
It does get a bit twee at times, but if you like P.G Wodehouse, you'll like this.
Java the island has existed for a lot longer. So has java the coffee drink. They have a similar relationship to JavaScript as does Java the programming language. Meaning *none* beyond the name.
Not to defend Monster, but....
"If there were some frequency dependencies, then you would see a degradation of sound." The way insulated wires are constructed, with an inner core, a surrounding insulator, and a ground sleeve, virtually guarantees that they will present capacitance and non-infinite resistance to ground. Depending on the values and the type of signal, that's a R/C LOWPASS FILTER. Perhaps you've heard of those?
Now the reality is that most basic cables are sufficient quality, especially at shorter lengths. But I'm sorry, physics is very relevant.
Hardly. DNF stands for "Dackus Nauer Form", which is a third generation derivative of BNF.
::= CNF+ ::= BNF+ ...or something like that.
DNF
CNF
You might have noticed that you get a fancy phone "for free" or a small amount when you sign up for two years of service. Hmmm, why is that? It's well known that handsets are sold at a loss and the carriers must rely on contracts to make their loss back and start making money.
Maybe the evil companies are pillaging their customers....or could it be that customers are attracted to plans like that? I can buy a cheap and good handset on ebay and buy service from some carriers. Why don't more people do that?
My theory is that people like these plans for the same reason that some people shop for car financing based on monthly payment---they never think of total cost. Companies who want those customers have to compete on those terms.
Any "non-free" government that has been in place for a significant amount of time creates a class of people who are dependent on it (military, bureaucracy) and therefore interested in keeping it around. Any forcible removal of such a government will be opposed by that class of people. And often those people have a distinct ethnic or religious identity. Iraq is far from alone in this.
The problem with dystopias like 1984 is that they don't capture how well tyranny, ethnic castes and tribalism work together.
"...we only do XML. The JSON developer is on vacation."
"No, he's not, he's right here."
"That's *Jason*. The JSON developer isn't here---she's named Exemelle."
(sound of heads exploding)
Please provide the name of your town, plus make/model of your wife's car. I'll make sure to pull over and cower in the bushes if I see her coming.
"StopLookingAtMySSID"? I've seen it, no lie.
If a wierd look is all you get from eating at Arby's (*gag* *hurl*), you're a lucky person.