This got sidespread coverage yesterday. A citizens activist group raised $30,000 in donations to fight the Rudd Firewall IN JUST ONE DAY. There are protests planned around Australia around December 15. I'm going.
Pro-tip: Writing to Conroy is pointless at this stage. He's quite foolishly staked his career on it, and will never back down no matter what the price for everyone else. The only way out of it is to lobby the senate and convince Rudd that this will cost him the next election. I voted for Rudd but I'm thoroughly disillusioned with him - not just for this, but but this weighs heavily on my mind. I've already decided my vote three years out.
You never ever make a major change like this before holidays, least of all Christmas Hoidays. It ensures that if something does go wrong, there's no one on hand to fix it. When lots of "working families" will be communicating by VOIP or webcam over the Internet, the time of this is sheer stupidity. I'd say Rudd and Conroy have timed it just before Christmas to make sure the story lost by the media, is buried amongst all the Yuletide Queen's Christmas Message, etc.
And a news flash for Rudd: Two of my conservative Christian Friends just admitted to me, one very sheepishly, that they look at boobies on the Internet and they're very annoyed with Rudd's filter. A lot of people are angry about this.
I predict Kevin Rudd will get a bad bukkake by the voters' at the next election.
I remember how Garriot's Ultima Series took a nose drive. Ultima 8 was bad enough; last Ultima I ever bought, but Ultima 9 was worse; just a really sloppy job. Does this sound familiar?
"The game was so poorly received that no other Ultima was ever released. Richard Garriott shortly left Origin, which was shut by parent company EA Games soon after."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_IX#Controversy
Poor NCsoft. Perhaps they should have Googled him before they hired him.;-)
> Which brings me to the OP's question. Some of the important things I listen for in interviews is how people have dealt with adversity. Name a problem you had on a project and how it was overcome. Name a time your solution was wrong and how you dealt with it. Tell me about a time you had a problem with someone on your team and how you overcame it. The technical stuff is a given -- look at their resume. I want to know how this guy will make us successful.
Great Questions.
I can remember two job interviews. One was very probing, above but also technically. They'd ask me questions about how I designed some certain module, the problem I ran into, etc. It was an extremely good interview; exhausting, but by the end of it hey could see I knew my stuff *AND EQUALLY* I could see that they knew theirs. That's just as important.
But I also remember a badly run interview when this guy would ask stupid textbook definitions that only a graduate would know; the sort of stuff you cram for an exam but forget the day after because in the real world its useless. I'd quote them back as best I could remember when the cointerviewer turned to him and said "Is that right?" he laughed he didn't know but he'd have to Google it later. Real slick...
To n00bs: Know these threads are depressing if you are a graduate, but you'll find as a programmer you improve immensely over time. I've been coding for a long time now and when I come to a new problem, I already have lots of experience and have a good idea which way to proceed and what pitfalls await me. True as you get older learning new stuff becomes harder, but you get a vast bank of experience that counts for a lot. As OP says, not just technical issues, but social too. As good as you are, you can only do so much yourself, so being able to work IN A TEAM (not just have lunch with them but still do your own thing) makes a big difference.
In all the people I've worked with, a professional attitude is by far the most important thing (you can wear old T-shirts and ripped shorts and still be a professional). Truth is, coding isn't *that* hard. Many people learn to do it. It's about choosing the people you'd want beside you when you go into battle.
> "The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given."
That's a bit rich since the movie industry itself regularly engages in fraud to rip off movie makers and actors. Did you know the author of Forrest Gump didn't make a single cent from the movie, the smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding technically made a loss (so the actors were ripped off royalties) and both Rob Schneider and Spielberg and many others have both stolen movie ideas in the past and baulked at paying the creators.
So why is camcording a movie a criminal offense publishable by jail but fraud isn't? and in the US why is fraud only ever settled in civil courts without the threat of jail?
If you do encrypt why use PGP? It costs money and its proprietary. Use Truecrypt which is free and open source, does whole disk encryption which according to this can sometimes actually *boost* performance. I use Truecrypt daily and its awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt#Performancehttp://www.truecrypt.org/
Sounds like the typical "I've done nothing wrong" diatribe of a man who refuses to admit a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=bogus+dmca
I'm not impressed, and since I'm outside of the US, I've a good mind to make a bogus DMCA complaint to Wired's Teleco and get the apologist's blog taken down.
I've been writing Windows apps since 3.1. Microsoft couldn't write a decent API if their lives depended on it. They manage to take simple concept, and bury under layer upon layer of useless complexity. Too often their documentation doesn't give examples, and the only way to find out what something does is it sit around and experiment with it. Take the absurd DirectX: you *have* to use it, but even today it takes pages to get a window on the screen and the documentation is useless. Remember Microsoft OLE? Such a simple thing made so hard. I want to code in as few a lines as possible. I don't want to write pages of COM declarations. Worse of all is their DirectShow - put a video on the screen. It's a mess of pins and connectors. Ugh!
Although I'm a Windows programmer by training, I've been spreading my wings and it's nice to use APIs that are simpler and more elegant. I can write code to do what I want to do, instead of wasting days with my nose buried in absurdly thick reference books trying to understand what they were trying to do. It's like the people at Microsoft who spend their time writing APIs never have to actually use one.
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
Family First are a "Family Values" party that control the senate. They only got 56,000 votes last election, but due to a preferences deal with Labor (the same people doing the filter) he got a senate spot and controls the balance of power. If Labor want their other laws passed, they have to make a deal with him. Since Conroy and Rudd are both good Christian "Family Values" types, I bet they're willing to go along with this.
This is what the Opposition Broadband Minister said:
"Like anything in life it's about finding the right balance between the basic freedoms we all expect to have in a democracy like ours while at the same time wanting to protect minors from exposure to material we prefer they didn't see. We think the arrangements that we had in place when we left office struck that balance. We'll watch the government's trials of this and we are prepared to consider what comes out of those trials. But our presumption is this cannot and will not work, it's very heavy-handed."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;879301684;fp;4194304;fpid;1;pf;1
As for Conrad, I can't believe this guy. This is his testimony at a senate estimates hearing:
Senator Conroy: I trust you are not suggesting that people should have access to child p-rnography.
Senator Ludlam: No. That is why I was interested in asking about the law enforcement side of it as well.
> they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space
Or we could just pollute less? It's less risky than turning the Earth into a big science experiment.
There's another risk: That the same same people promoting "Clean Coal" (a big hello to you Australia) hop on this bandwagon as another reason not to do anything?
Software Patents make writing software in a particular country a risky proposition. There are so many things the USPTO has let be patented, that I doubt you can write a single program without violating someone's patents.
You have to wonder, if Software Patents existed in the US from the beginning, if the US Software Industry would have grown into what it is today? Easier to move to and write your software somewhere else (which now doesn't include Britain).
I've used MySQL for small record keeping web sites where it worked very well, but I also worked at a company where they used MySQL for enterprise databases. They had many, many problems due to bugs and optimization problems caused by index limitations. They were very frustrated, but they were locked in. I left concluding that MySQL will never make it into the enterprise database market. If SUN bought MySQL for the kudos of supporting a popular open source DB, cool. But if they bought it expecting to take on Oracle & friends with it, they're going to be very disappointed.
A few years ago Bob Cringely wondered the same thing, but found India won't take you.
"So I went on the web to see how easy it would be to emigrate to India. I found NOTHING. I called the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC and asked how I could emigrate to India. They didn't know what I was talking about... The idea that I'd just arrive at the Mumbai equivalent of Ellis Island looking for a job, well they found that rather amusing."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20040226_000453.html
Rest of the developed world is in an IT slump. Time for that Career B-Plan?
Here's the original rubber duck pioneers: a crate full of rubber ducks washed over the side of a container ship. The brave little ducks (and their turtle friends) sailed the world's oceans, even surviving a four year trip frozen through the arctic. http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0731/p01s04-woeu.html
We should continue this tradition by landing a rubber duck on the next spacecraft to Mars. A fitting tribute.
> NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable.
The third episode of Brian Greene's "Elegant Universe" documentary miniseries on PBS said that while matter is confined to the known dimensions, its possible that gravity isn't and so can move through dimensions. The example they feel is that we could possibly detect the gravity of 'something' in another Universe by its gravity, even though we could never actually touch it. Wonder if this is it? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
Employers are being very picky - they demand an exact skills match. They demand you are already familiar with the exact software package you are using. They're no longer willing to retrain even for permanent roles, or even let you read the manual. It's getting specialized, and IMHO the specialization has got ridiculous. It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems. They can afford to be that fussy. A lot of tech that was popular a few years ago has died out. Don't waste time applying for jobs unless your resume is a perfect match. Instead think about taking some time off to retrain. Java is still in demand for example. Or start your own company. Or switch to something else. IT is fun, I guess, but if you want to make money there are much more lucrative businesses.
> Consumers are for the most part too ignorant to care about dvd based DRM. However with blu-ray disks, i cannot picture the average consumer...
Had a buddy who bought a massive Plasma TV screen and a media centre PC runnning Vista. He said the DRM was a real pain, because Vista only accepts certain drivers as 'DRM secure'. I remember one night we were trying to watch a legal BluRay movie on a legal Vista distro with legal drivers on a MCPC he owned, and not being able to do it. Media Companies and Microsoft who serves them (not us) went a bridge too far on this one.
Everyone knows 'Leak' is Public-Relations-Speak for 'Released'. Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?
I get marketing research phone calls from Neilsen subsidiaries doing surveys. If I have time, I do them. Now I'll tell them *NO*. You can't have it both ways, Nielsen. I suggest other readers do the same.
They also mailed me a survey when I bought a new car. My prize was 'a chance' to win some petrol. An hour of my time for 'a chance'. They seem to have an inflated view of their own self-worth.
In this episode: A marketing research company learns about public relations.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a Russian Ruling. It carries as much weight in the real world as the Russian claim on the Arctic.
This got sidespread coverage yesterday. A citizens activist group raised $30,000 in donations to fight the Rudd Firewall IN JUST ONE DAY. There are protests planned around Australia around December 15. I'm going.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/cash-floods-in-to-fight-rudds-web-censorship/2008/12/05/1228257284512.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Pro-tip: Writing to Conroy is pointless at this stage. He's quite foolishly staked his career on it, and will never back down no matter what the price for everyone else. The only way out of it is to lobby the senate and convince Rudd that this will cost him the next election. I voted for Rudd but I'm thoroughly disillusioned with him - not just for this, but but this weighs heavily on my mind. I've already decided my vote three years out.
Now all we have to do is find him. If anyone knows where our jettsetting Prime Minister is, please send him back home because we'd like to talk to him. First place to look: anywhere in China. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/prime-ministers-600000-flying-circus/2008/12/04/1228257229282.html
You never ever make a major change like this before holidays, least of all Christmas Hoidays. It ensures that if something does go wrong, there's no one on hand to fix it. When lots of "working families" will be communicating by VOIP or webcam over the Internet, the time of this is sheer stupidity. I'd say Rudd and Conroy have timed it just before Christmas to make sure the story lost by the media, is buried amongst all the Yuletide Queen's Christmas Message, etc.
And a news flash for Rudd: Two of my conservative Christian Friends just admitted to me, one very sheepishly, that they look at boobies on the Internet and they're very annoyed with Rudd's filter. A lot of people are angry about this.
I predict Kevin Rudd will get a bad bukkake by the voters' at the next election.
I remember how Garriot's Ultima Series took a nose drive. Ultima 8 was bad enough; last Ultima I ever bought, but Ultima 9 was worse; just a really sloppy job. Does this sound familiar?
"The game was so poorly received that no other Ultima was ever released. Richard Garriott shortly left Origin, which was shut by parent company EA Games soon after." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_IX#Controversy
Poor NCsoft. Perhaps they should have Googled him before they hired him. ;-)
> Which brings me to the OP's question. Some of the important things I listen for in interviews is how people have dealt with adversity. Name a problem you had on a project and how it was overcome. Name a time your solution was wrong and how you dealt with it. Tell me about a time you had a problem with someone on your team and how you overcame it. The technical stuff is a given -- look at their resume. I want to know how this guy will make us successful.
Great Questions.
I can remember two job interviews. One was very probing, above but also technically. They'd ask me questions about how I designed some certain module, the problem I ran into, etc. It was an extremely good interview; exhausting, but by the end of it hey could see I knew my stuff *AND EQUALLY* I could see that they knew theirs. That's just as important.
But I also remember a badly run interview when this guy would ask stupid textbook definitions that only a graduate would know; the sort of stuff you cram for an exam but forget the day after because in the real world its useless. I'd quote them back as best I could remember when the cointerviewer turned to him and said "Is that right?" he laughed he didn't know but he'd have to Google it later. Real slick...
To n00bs: Know these threads are depressing if you are a graduate, but you'll find as a programmer you improve immensely over time. I've been coding for a long time now and when I come to a new problem, I already have lots of experience and have a good idea which way to proceed and what pitfalls await me. True as you get older learning new stuff becomes harder, but you get a vast bank of experience that counts for a lot. As OP says, not just technical issues, but social too. As good as you are, you can only do so much yourself, so being able to work IN A TEAM (not just have lunch with them but still do your own thing) makes a big difference.
In all the people I've worked with, a professional attitude is by far the most important thing (you can wear old T-shirts and ripped shorts and still be a professional). Truth is, coding isn't *that* hard. Many people learn to do it. It's about choosing the people you'd want beside you when you go into battle.
That's a bit rich since the movie industry itself regularly engages in fraud to rip off movie makers and actors. Did you know the author of Forrest Gump didn't make a single cent from the movie, the smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding technically made a loss (so the actors were ripped off royalties) and both Rob Schneider and Spielberg and many others have both stolen movie ideas in the past and baulked at paying the creators. So why is camcording a movie a criminal offense publishable by jail but fraud isn't? and in the US why is fraud only ever settled in civil courts without the threat of jail?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://www.tmz.com/2007/12/11/aussies-to-adam-you-stole-our-gay-firemen-flick/
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=335127
If you do encrypt why use PGP? It costs money and its proprietary. Use Truecrypt which is free and open source, does whole disk encryption which according to this can sometimes actually *boost* performance. I use Truecrypt daily and its awesome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt#Performance http://www.truecrypt.org/
Sounds like the typical "I've done nothing wrong" diatribe of a man who refuses to admit a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=bogus+dmca
I'm not impressed, and since I'm outside of the US, I've a good mind to make a bogus DMCA complaint to Wired's Teleco and get the apologist's blog taken down.
I've been writing Windows apps since 3.1. Microsoft couldn't write a decent API if their lives depended on it. They manage to take simple concept, and bury under layer upon layer of useless complexity. Too often their documentation doesn't give examples, and the only way to find out what something does is it sit around and experiment with it. Take the absurd DirectX: you *have* to use it, but even today it takes pages to get a window on the screen and the documentation is useless. Remember Microsoft OLE? Such a simple thing made so hard. I want to code in as few a lines as possible. I don't want to write pages of COM declarations. Worse of all is their DirectShow - put a video on the screen. It's a mess of pins and connectors. Ugh!
Although I'm a Windows programmer by training, I've been spreading my wings and it's nice to use APIs that are simpler and more elegant. I can write code to do what I want to do, instead of wasting days with my nose buried in absurdly thick reference books trying to understand what they were trying to do. It's like the people at Microsoft who spend their time writing APIs never have to actually use one.
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
"Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government's plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond "illegal material"."
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/family-first-sparks-net-filter-fears/2008/10/27/1224955922160.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Family First are a "Family Values" party that control the senate. They only got 56,000 votes last election, but due to a preferences deal with Labor (the same people doing the filter) he got a senate spot and controls the balance of power. If Labor want their other laws passed, they have to make a deal with him. Since Conroy and Rudd are both good Christian "Family Values" types, I bet they're willing to go along with this.
This is what the Opposition Broadband Minister said:
"Like anything in life it's about finding the right balance between the basic freedoms we all expect to have in a democracy like ours while at the same time wanting to protect minors from exposure to material we prefer they didn't see. We think the arrangements that we had in place when we left office struck that balance. We'll watch the government's trials of this and we are prepared to consider what comes out of those trials. But our presumption is this cannot and will not work, it's very heavy-handed." http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;879301684;fp;4194304;fpid;1;pf;1
As for Conrad, I can't believe this guy. This is his testimony at a senate estimates hearing:
Senator Conroy: I trust you are not suggesting that people should have access to child p-rnography.
Senator Ludlam: No. That is why I was interested in asking about the law enforcement side of it as well.
> they considered one idea: 'spreading very small reflective particles' over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space
Or we could just pollute less? It's less risky than turning the Earth into a big science experiment.
There's another risk: That the same same people promoting "Clean Coal" (a big hello to you Australia) hop on this bandwagon as another reason not to do anything?
> "Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled.
As soon as I started reading this sentence, before I was halfway through, I *KNEW* this was about Britain!
Software Patents make writing software in a particular country a risky proposition. There are so many things the USPTO has let be patented, that I doubt you can write a single program without violating someone's patents. You have to wonder, if Software Patents existed in the US from the beginning, if the US Software Industry would have grown into what it is today? Easier to move to and write your software somewhere else (which now doesn't include Britain).
I've used MySQL for small record keeping web sites where it worked very well, but I also worked at a company where they used MySQL for enterprise databases. They had many, many problems due to bugs and optimization problems caused by index limitations. They were very frustrated, but they were locked in. I left concluding that MySQL will never make it into the enterprise database market. If SUN bought MySQL for the kudos of supporting a popular open source DB, cool. But if they bought it expecting to take on Oracle & friends with it, they're going to be very disappointed.
A few years ago Bob Cringely wondered the same thing, but found India won't take you.
"So I went on the web to see how easy it would be to emigrate to India. I found NOTHING. I called the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC and asked how I could emigrate to India. They didn't know what I was talking about... The idea that I'd just arrive at the Mumbai equivalent of Ellis Island looking for a job, well they found that rather amusing." http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20040226_000453.html
Rest of the developed world is in an IT slump. Time for that Career B-Plan?
My enemy's enemy is my ... hey ... whatever happened to that Vista company?
Here's the original rubber duck pioneers: a crate full of rubber ducks washed over the side of a container ship. The brave little ducks (and their turtle friends) sailed the world's oceans, even surviving a four year trip frozen through the arctic.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0731/p01s04-woeu.html
We should continue this tradition by landing a rubber duck on the next spacecraft to Mars. A fitting tribute.
> NASA astrophysicists have discovered what they claim is something outside the observable universe exerting an effect on the observable.
The third episode of Brian Greene's "Elegant Universe" documentary miniseries on PBS said that while matter is confined to the known dimensions, its possible that gravity isn't and so can move through dimensions. The example they feel is that we could possibly detect the gravity of 'something' in another Universe by its gravity, even though we could never actually touch it. Wonder if this is it?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/
Employers are being very picky - they demand an exact skills match. They demand you are already familiar with the exact software package you are using. They're no longer willing to retrain even for permanent roles, or even let you read the manual. It's getting specialized, and IMHO the specialization has got ridiculous. It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems. They can afford to be that fussy. A lot of tech that was popular a few years ago has died out. Don't waste time applying for jobs unless your resume is a perfect match. Instead think about taking some time off to retrain. Java is still in demand for example. Or start your own company. Or switch to something else. IT is fun, I guess, but if you want to make money there are much more lucrative businesses.
> Consumers are for the most part too ignorant to care about dvd based DRM. However with blu-ray disks, i cannot picture the average consumer ...
Had a buddy who bought a massive Plasma TV screen and a media centre PC runnning Vista. He said the DRM was a real pain, because Vista only accepts certain drivers as 'DRM secure'. I remember one night we were trying to watch a legal BluRay movie on a legal Vista distro with legal drivers on a MCPC he owned, and not being able to do it. Media Companies and Microsoft who serves them (not us) went a bridge too far on this one.
Watching him I figured better to stick with DVDs.
Everyone knows 'Leak' is Public-Relations-Speak for 'Released'. Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?
"Windows 7 Beta Screenshots Released"
Fix'd!
I get marketing research phone calls from Neilsen subsidiaries doing surveys. If I have time, I do them. Now I'll tell them *NO*. You can't have it both ways, Nielsen. I suggest other readers do the same.
They also mailed me a survey when I bought a new car. My prize was 'a chance' to win some petrol. An hour of my time for 'a chance'. They seem to have an inflated view of their own self-worth.
In this episode: A marketing research company learns about public relations.
FADE IN
A Chair
VOICEOVER: Vista. Use it. Or Else.
FADE TO BLACK
Bacteria are like neighbors. If you kill off the nice quiet ones, don't complain when bad ones take their place (and ignore the eviction notice).