Good. Believe me, there are places where the conversation goes otherwise, or at least takes *much* too long to reach a workable solution.
I'll be the first to admit that some stuff should not be on the corporate network. For a while, I ran a lab that tested drivers. Now there is a poster child for software that should not get too far out of sight. In order to make things usable, we built a dual-homed, non-backed-up file server that did no routing. It was a file transfer dock that could be seen by both networks, nothing more. That way nothing on the lab network could bring down a production segment.
Aha! Somebody that is actually taking the time to think about who should have what priveledges, and setting accounts accordingly. WinXP would not have such a bad reputation if more people did that.
I see a lot replies to your comment from fan-boys that tell you that you just haven't tried hard enough. Let's just say I think they lack perspective. In this house, I have systems in production running Linux (my workstation, the family file server), OS X (my wife's workstation), WinXP (my daughter's workstation, my work-station as dual-boot option). So I have a basis for comparison.
We home school, so I understand that a lot of eductation oriented software is Windows only. The expedient solution for me is to just create an off-net WinXP machine for that. My daughter isn't old enough to need internet regularly, so hey, an airwall is effective against malware. Not practical for most people, or for me much longer for that matter. Trying to run all that crap under Wine is just too time consuming for me. I wouldn't get any actual home schooling done if I spent all my time playing with Wine.
Windows is the expedient solution when the other OS's can't go the last mile.
In a way, the education market would be the perfect place for Linux, but there are a zillion specialized Windows aps. That isn't going to change any time soon. Getting all those aps to work under Wine would be lot easier if the fan-boys actually helped make it happen, rather than issue ideological rants. Personlly, I love Linux, but I won't let it hold my daughter's education hostage.
(Side note: No, most of her education time is not on the computer. Even more reason not to pour time into Wine-ification.)
My issue with "eveybody get's the same build, damn it!" IT departments is that they often refuse to acknowledge the need for specialized software in particular departments. Like, oh say, engineering. "No, we're not giving you a C compiler, nobody gets a C compiler." Costomer says: "Ummmm... But, we sell software, how am I supposed to develop the product that we sell?" IT: "Don't talk back. Nobody gets a C compiler. It destabilizes systems."
Honestly, I've dealt too often with IT departments that put their own need for uniformity above the need of engineering developers to do work. IT needs to get it through their God damned heads that the company exists to create products, not to provide full employment for MCSE's.
Cranky? Why, yes, I am. It comes from trying to build software validation labs with a large matrix of hardware and OS's that products are advertised to run on. And having to fight tooth and nail with an IT department that didn't want to supply "unsupported" hardware and "unsupported" software.
The fundamental mismatch in expectations is that line employees think IT should be helping them do their job, and IT staff often thinks line employees should help them do IT. HELLLLLOOOOOOOO..., where do the top-line dollars come from? It ain't IT, folks.
Maybe your IT department is one of the good ones. Thanks for giving me a post to hang a rant onto.
Right on. Although for me it's been over 20 years, and in those days the notes were not "on line" but were available for 4 cents per page at the local copy shop. Sadly, only one prof did that. Having pre-printed lecture notes allowed me to make a few scribbles in the margin, and allowed the time to think and ask challenging question. (Having had Actual Work Experience(tm), shipping products to Paying Customers(tm) I found some of the prof's ideas about the need for backward compatibility somewhere between naive and laughable. I challenged those:-) Sad to say, he didn't learn much from having me as a student. He didn't seem highly motivated. Good lecturer though, always well prepared.)
A few years back, one of the big-two makers of the electrolytic paste put out bad goop for several months. This paste found its way to several manufacturers of high quality capacitors. These caps found their way into PC mobo's, and there was a spate of in-the-field capacitor failures in certain motherboards. Some name-brand makers of high quality mother boards got bit by that one. (My then-employer included.) No flames, though. These caps were being operated entirely within spec, but were fabricated with out-of-spec paste.
Caps that are pushed beyond their ratings will go. Sometimes, their are transient voltages the designer didn't account for that cause caps to be operating beyond their rating.
I remember oh... about 25 years ago when the TI "Silent 700" thermal printing terminal with built-in acoustic modem was the Bee's Knees. No shit, we all coveted those babies. Way better than an ASR33. Anyway, I was working in the cube next door to one guy that was cranking away on a Silent 700. For some odd reason, it was a period of dead silence among the 16 code monkeys in that area. There was a loud *BANG* and then a "Woah" from the user when a fairly large 'lytic released it's magic smoke(*). A rather spectacular amount of smoke, as I recall, since it was a large cap. A memorable occasion.
About 20 years ago at a startup company, we had just gotten the first prototype PC boards for the first product. The boards were the first of the design, using a brand new CAD system tool flow. The entire company (all 16 people) gathered in the lab for the power-on ceremony. Anyway, with the whole company watching, the VP of Eng flips the big red switch, and -- *BANG* -- along with lots of smoke. Now, the engineers were in their glory, fanning the smoke away with notepads and laughing like drunken sailors. The newly hired VP of Finance turned white as a sheet. The Pres. got a frozen smile on his face and mumbled something encouraging. He told me later he was thinking about how much money he could get for the furniture at liquidation. Turns out, with several brand new untried cad tools in the tool flow, the silk screen for one type of electrolytic had the polarity backwards, and so those caps had been stuffed backwards. A trival, but spectacular bug.
And then, in college, after a couple of brews my roomie and I decided to strip out the electrolytic caps from a worthless transistor radio, plug them into the end of an extension cord, and lower them out the window to the room blow, plug in the extension cord, and let them go *BANG* outside the window of the room below. Yes, sometimes caps go.
(*) The magic smoke theory of electronics: All components run on factory inserted magic smoke. This is easy to prove, as sometimes you will see a component rupture and release its magic smoke. It never works again after that. Therefore, all electronic components require magic smoke in order to operate.
One artcle is slashdotted, and the other two are short on technical details. So, I'm wondering, how are they going to make people go to the governments name servers? Will using your own cache hints file beecome a hanging offense? Will they stop routing all of ICANN's root servers?
When (not if) the Chinese government starts using their name servers as part of their censorship operations, a zillion "alternative" name servers will spring up behind the Great Firewall of China. A zillion distributed names servers, running on obscure ports, mirroring the ICANN root servers will spring up. They will be refreshed by obscure daemons running on obscure ports that penetrate the firewall.
Heck, it probably doesn't even take any programming. Just cooking up the appropriate config files for bind could get some caching name servers going that avoid easy to block ip's and ports.
And it is widely known that the cron-like functionality of launchd is badly broken. I spent a couple of days fighting launchd before learning what seems to be widely known to everyone else. lauchd will be a nice unification of several services *when* *it* *works*, but until then, cron files are *much* easier to write, and under the right circumstances, they work. launchd is not fully baked, sad to say.
As to cron, well, cron works like cron has always worked. And on OS X Server, everything is just fine, since servers never sleep. But both cron and launchd have a problem with sleep. This is understandable with cron, since it was never intended to talk to the power management processor. But launchd should talk to the power management processor. The machine needs to be woken up for cron-equivalent launchd jobs, period. In fact, Apple's log rotator scripts run afoul of this design defect. They won't run if your machine is asleep. Mac's, as they ship, will eventually fill up your disk with old log files unless you do something to correct the situtation, or unless you regularly find yourself computing at the odd hours when the log rotators are scheduled to run.
All in all, Mac OS X strikes me as a great vision, 95% implemented.
When Wayne Greene announced that he was going to start a computer magazine, I jumped right in. The first few issues of Byte were nothing like the later years... I dropped my sub after it became all about IBM compatibles. The first issues of Byte were from another world than we know today.
After saving up my money, I bought a Southwest Technical Products 6800 system. I had 3 memory boards, for a total of 12K bytes of ram. That's a lot of 1K x 1 ram chips to solder. SWT also did a "tv typewriter" kit that gave you a 40 column by 24 line terminal. Wheee! In those days, I lusted after an Teletype Corp. ASR 33 so that I would have a mass storage device... paper tape. *sigh* I think I still have the power and reset switch, and the transformer somewhere in my parts pile, salvaged when I scrapped the computer.
As an undergrad, I got to play with the early PET computers. The chicklet keyboards would make you nuts! I eventually bought an Apple II, (not IIe, not II+, an Apple II with integer basic on the mobo). Eventually, I upgraded that system to the full 48K bytes of ram. Floating point basic was a nifty addition. And I was one of the first to go out and snag a floppy. Hurray!!! No more casette tape mass storage. Got pretty good at 6502 assembler. Apple's high-end 6502 assembler could generate an external symbol dictionary, but they never made a linker. So I wrote one. It was about 4k lines of assembly code, IIRC. One of my most vivid memories of those days is the first time I saw VisiCalc. Blew me away. I said right there that program was going to sell a lot of Apples. Nobody had ever seen a spreadsheet before VisiCalc.
Remember TRS-80's but they never impressed me much.
Had the original Mac. 128K bytes of ram and a floppy -- who needs anything else? Ha. Ended up with a couple more macs as time went on. Apple lost their way shortly after that.
Got a PC compatible just about the first release of NT, a 486 system of some flavor. It, too, rusts in piece. I have 2 Pentium systems that still boot, a couple of Pentium II systems, the family file server is a P4 Celery running Linux (Slackware, I'm old school). Oh, and my daughter has a P4 Celery also. And there seems to be a Toshiba laptop graveyard out in the garage.
And I'm typing this on my wife's new Mac mini. I think Apple has found their way out of the woods, finally. If they can fix cron in the next update to Tiger, I'll be very happy.
OK, enough of this pointless navel staring. Gramps is signing off now... it's time for my medication.
...that only you users of Google advertising can answer.
Whenever I do a search to buy something, the regular search results always seem more on target than the advertising. And whenever one of the paid adverts is spot-on, the link to their store or even a deep link to the merchandise is right near the top of the first page.
So, I'm wondering, why advertise at all? Google search works better, and it doesn't cost the advertiser anything. Seems to me Google search is so good, it makes advertising on Google nearly pointless.
So, from the perspective of an actual user, how far off base is this thinking?
More and more I'm coming to think that down-moderation just doesn't work here any more. It should be eliminated. People get down-modded for their sigs, not to mention: -1 conservative, -1 mature response, -1 voice of actual experience, -1 raw data I don't like, -1 uncomfortable real life example. We should only allow up-mods. Or at least make a down-mod cost 3 mod points or similar.
The lack of critical thinking skills here is a sad commentary on modern society.
Ummm... hops is already one of the most regulated grops grown in the USA. Anybody can grow it, but you can only *sell* it if you have a "marketing order". Just like tobacco, oranges, and peanuts. "Wealthy hops grower" is already a redundancy. The hops growing lobby is just as strong as the tobacco lobby, only much more under the radar. Want to *sell* the hops you grow? Better hope you are in line to inherit the marketing order your great-grandpappy got way back when.
replace "smart" with "good basketball player"...
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The Prodigy Puzzle
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... and see how the story reads to you.
And do we really want to?"
That question encapsulates the insane attitude our society has about intellect. If we were talking about identifying and nurturing kids with talent in basketball, football, or ice hockey this would be a non-story. This country has a multi-billion dollar machine to do just that, and nobody finds it an odd use of resources.
If we were talking about musical prodigies, it would be a story, but nobody would find in controversial. It would be a publicist's press release. People expect and accept a certain percentage of kids will have profound musical talent, and people will buy their CD's. (Unless the CD installs rootkits, but that is another story...)
Yet, when it comes to the intellecutally gifted, people refuse to let these children soar. These children are often viewed as freaks. Frequently they are simply ignored on the assumption that they will take care of themselves. What is so bad about nurturing their talents the same way we coach youth basketball?
Re:As to who will change the world...
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The Prodigy Puzzle
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Well, in fact the wild assertions you pulled out of your ass are contradicted by actual data carefully collected by serious researchers. By looking at "achievers" -- not "kids who scored high on IQ tests", but people whose lives made a huge difference to the world (Nobel laureates, etc) -- it can be seen that the vast marjority were rescued from the system by their parents. Often, they were home schooled. Conformity not expected, nor even valued.
I'd give you a book reference, but unfortunately I don't have time right now -- I'll be back in town Thursday and you can ask then.
I am not sure that I would come down too hard on Sony for this...
Are you nuts? I used to manage a software product validation lab. Not for deep, white box testing, but for final "fit & finish", "user experience", and platform matrix testing. Oh, and for malware scanning to be sure we didn't ship any to our customers. (Sometimes malware would slip onto develper machines and into release candidates.) Somebody at Sony has responsibility for knowing what they are shipping, and knowing how it installs on a variety of platforms, and knowing what it leaves behind everywhere. They either have someone who does this job, in which they are willfully culpable, or the don't have anyone doing this job, in which case they are willfully negligent for not following standard software industry practice.
As someone whose job it was to stand athwart this kind of crap, I say Sony should be toasted for this.
Amazon's handling of series is lamer than that. I recently bought later books in a series, and it recommened earlier books in the series. *Helloooooo* Amazon, I bought them from you, you dorks. In theory, you make recommendations to me based on past purchases, so you must *know* what I've already bought. How about filtering those *out* of recommendations? *duh*
Whump up some flyers. Be nice, list just the verifiable facts now, or just use major news source clippings. Brush up on "peaceful assembly" law and so forth, and hand out your flyers in front of Sony retailers.
A picket sign quoting Homeland Security officials might be fun to carry around:-)
Speaking as a manager, I think there are certain minimum things the manager must be able to do:
1) Run the scripts that create the build environment on his workstation. S/He should wipe that workspace and rebuild it on a random basis, weekly or so. What??? You don't have hands-off scripts to create the build environment? -> good management question #1 has just been asked.
2) the manager should be able to kick off a nightly in the build environment he created in step 1. Are those nightly build scripts up to date?
3) The manager should be able to run the check-in requirements test script. You do have one, right?
4) The manager should be able to create a test case and check it into the testing framework. S/he should do so on a random basis. A good manager probably brings more to the testing effort than to the coding effort.
Note that none of the above require extensive up-to-date coding ability, or massive amounts of time. But they all directly get at good process and quality in a very hands-on way. It is much harder to sneak BS past any manager that can do the above 4 things.
As a manager, I have tried many times to make this same thing stick. This, in a situation where I had influence over promotions, raises, and of course also could put people on written warning and move them out of the company if need be.
But, Linus has discovered the secret of actually making it happen! Just don't pay people in the first place! Genius!
Yes. Nice summary of Microsoft's culpability here. I can't understand why more people are not upset at MSFT over this.
But, living life Windows-free, well, that is hard. But I'm trying. I'm tired of cleaning up my wife's Windows system. Today, with luck, her Mac mini gets set up. Unfortunatly, there is one ap (the geneolgy ap) that she uses that is only available for windows and probably won't emulate very well. Fortunately, running that ap on a quarantined, off-net windows box is an adequate solution.
I've never been so hungry that I would write code like that. If the ethical situation of a job makes you uncomfortable, leave it. That actually plays pretty well while interviewing for your next job. At least for any job you actually want.
Speaking as someone who has actually done quite a bit of engineering hiring, I can say that I do filter people by where they have chosen to work before. I learned that lesson by bitter experience. People joke about "resume stains", but let me tell you as a hiring manager that they are very real.
Yes, I just found out that I bought a product that, without my approval, installs software on my computer that compromises it's security. I bought it with a Visa card, I'd like my money back. Can you reverse the charges, please?
Why? Well, this is supposed to be a music CD. But without informing me and wholly without my approval it installs root kit software. This root kit software could hide a key logger that could capture the credit card number I use in online transactions. I would think that would worry Visa.
What is interesting to me is the case of Walmart. They sell both CD's and computers. Other places do to, but when a Walmart buyer talks, manufactures listen *very* intently.
So, I buy a Walmart computer. I buy a Sony CD. I play Sony CD on Walmart computer. Computer gets compromised/killed by Sony DRM. I take computer back to Walmart and say: "Your products. You fix." Imagine a Beowolf cluster of Walmart customers with the same problem. Somebody in Bentonville is going to get a clue, believe me, and will start passing that clue on. No matter what else you think about Walmart, their buyers are smart people wielding nuclear cluesticks.
Yes, but, what OS's other than Microsoft products allow surf-by and auto-mount driver installs that diddle low level file system api's? Why is no one angry at Microsft about this Sony fiasco?
I'm thinking that outside of users that habitually surf and/or listen to music as root, that Linux and OS X users should be just a wee bit safer than the casual Windows user.
Sure, Linux can be rooted. Now, your homework assignment is to go burn me a disk with music on it that will root my Linux box merely by being inserted, and won't let me listen to the music until my box has been rooted. I like classical.
That is for double-darn sure. As long as this Sony fiasco has been going on, I keep wondering why no one is pissed at MSFT for letting this kind of crap get installed. Hooking low level file system API's for $diety's sake. Silent driver installs must be stopped. Click-through to install every single driver, and OS managed uninstall of every driver is the only way to stop this crapola, and MSFT needs to do it.
I am planning to tell MSFT something slightly different than grandparent post. I am tired of cleaning spyware and other garp off of my wife's computer. Tomorrow, she gets a Mac. I will snail-mail MSFT a copy of the sales receipt, along with a letter stating exactly why MSFT lost a sale, and exactly why MSFT software is from this time forward quarantined to strictly off-net computers in this house.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. Believe me, there are places where the conversation goes otherwise, or at least takes *much* too long to reach a workable solution.
I'll be the first to admit that some stuff should not be on the corporate network. For a while, I ran a lab that tested drivers. Now there is a poster child for software that should not get too far out of sight. In order to make things usable, we built a dual-homed, non-backed-up file server that did no routing. It was a file transfer dock that could be seen by both networks, nothing more. That way nothing on the lab network could bring down a production segment.
Aha! Somebody that is actually taking the time to think about who should have what priveledges, and setting accounts accordingly. WinXP would not have such a bad reputation if more people did that.
I see a lot replies to your comment from fan-boys that tell you that you just haven't tried hard enough. Let's just say I think they lack perspective. In this house, I have systems in production running Linux (my workstation, the family file server), OS X (my wife's workstation), WinXP (my daughter's workstation, my work-station as dual-boot option). So I have a basis for comparison.
We home school, so I understand that a lot of eductation oriented software is Windows only. The expedient solution for me is to just create an off-net WinXP machine for that. My daughter isn't old enough to need internet regularly, so hey, an airwall is effective against malware. Not practical for most people, or for me much longer for that matter. Trying to run all that crap under Wine is just too time consuming for me. I wouldn't get any actual home schooling done if I spent all my time playing with Wine.
Windows is the expedient solution when the other OS's can't go the last mile.
In a way, the education market would be the perfect place for Linux, but there are a zillion specialized Windows aps. That isn't going to change any time soon. Getting all those aps to work under Wine would be lot easier if the fan-boys actually helped make it happen, rather than issue ideological rants. Personlly, I love Linux, but I won't let it hold my daughter's education hostage.
(Side note: No, most of her education time is not on the computer. Even more reason not to pour time into Wine-ification.)
My issue with "eveybody get's the same build, damn it!" IT departments is that they often refuse to acknowledge the need for specialized software in particular departments. Like, oh say, engineering. "No, we're not giving you a C compiler, nobody gets a C compiler." Costomer says: "Ummmm... But, we sell software, how am I supposed to develop the product that we sell?" IT: "Don't talk back. Nobody gets a C compiler. It destabilizes systems."
Honestly, I've dealt too often with IT departments that put their own need for uniformity above the need of engineering developers to do work. IT needs to get it through their God damned heads that the company exists to create products, not to provide full employment for MCSE's.
Cranky? Why, yes, I am. It comes from trying to build software validation labs with a large matrix of hardware and OS's that products are advertised to run on. And having to fight tooth and nail with an IT department that didn't want to supply "unsupported" hardware and "unsupported" software.
The fundamental mismatch in expectations is that line employees think IT should be helping them do their job, and IT staff often thinks line employees should help them do IT. HELLLLLOOOOOOOO..., where do the top-line dollars come from? It ain't IT, folks.
Maybe your IT department is one of the good ones. Thanks for giving me a post to hang a rant onto.
Right on. Although for me it's been over 20 years, and in those days the notes were not "on line" but were available for 4 cents per page at the local copy shop. Sadly, only one prof did that. Having pre-printed lecture notes allowed me to make a few scribbles in the margin, and allowed the time to think and ask challenging question. (Having had Actual Work Experience(tm), shipping products to Paying Customers(tm) I found some of the prof's ideas about the need for backward compatibility somewhere between naive and laughable. I challenged those :-) Sad to say, he didn't learn much from having me as a student. He didn't seem highly motivated. Good lecturer though, always well prepared.)
Well, sometimes caps go.
A few years back, one of the big-two makers of the electrolytic paste put out bad goop for several months. This paste found its way to several manufacturers of high quality capacitors. These caps found their way into PC mobo's, and there was a spate of in-the-field capacitor failures in certain motherboards. Some name-brand makers of high quality mother boards got bit by that one. (My then-employer included.) No flames, though. These caps were being operated entirely within spec, but were fabricated with out-of-spec paste.
Caps that are pushed beyond their ratings will go. Sometimes, their are transient voltages the designer didn't account for that cause caps to be operating beyond their rating.
I remember oh... about 25 years ago when the TI "Silent 700" thermal printing terminal with built-in acoustic modem was the Bee's Knees. No shit, we all coveted those babies. Way better than an ASR33. Anyway, I was working in the cube next door to one guy that was cranking away on a Silent 700. For some odd reason, it was a period of dead silence among the 16 code monkeys in that area. There was a loud *BANG* and then a "Woah" from the user when a fairly large 'lytic released it's magic smoke(*). A rather spectacular amount of smoke, as I recall, since it was a large cap. A memorable occasion.
About 20 years ago at a startup company, we had just gotten the first prototype PC boards for the first product. The boards were the first of the design, using a brand new CAD system tool flow. The entire company (all 16 people) gathered in the lab for the power-on ceremony. Anyway, with the whole company watching, the VP of Eng flips the big red switch, and -- *BANG* -- along with lots of smoke. Now, the engineers were in their glory, fanning the smoke away with notepads and laughing like drunken sailors. The newly hired VP of Finance turned white as a sheet. The Pres. got a frozen smile on his face and mumbled something encouraging. He told me later he was thinking about how much money he could get for the furniture at liquidation. Turns out, with several brand new untried cad tools in the tool flow, the silk screen for one type of electrolytic had the polarity backwards, and so those caps had been stuffed backwards. A trival, but spectacular bug.
And then, in college, after a couple of brews my roomie and I decided to strip out the electrolytic caps from a worthless transistor radio, plug them into the end of an extension cord, and lower them out the window to the room blow, plug in the extension cord, and let them go *BANG* outside the window of the room below. Yes, sometimes caps go.
(*) The magic smoke theory of electronics: All components run on factory inserted magic smoke. This is easy to prove, as sometimes you will see a component rupture and release its magic smoke. It never works again after that. Therefore, all electronic components require magic smoke in order to operate.
One artcle is slashdotted, and the other two are short on technical details. So, I'm wondering, how are they going to make people go to the governments name servers? Will using your own cache hints file beecome a hanging offense? Will they stop routing all of ICANN's root servers?
When (not if) the Chinese government starts using their name servers as part of their censorship operations, a zillion "alternative" name servers will spring up behind the Great Firewall of China. A zillion distributed names servers, running on obscure ports, mirroring the ICANN root servers will spring up. They will be refreshed by obscure daemons running on obscure ports that penetrate the firewall.
Heck, it probably doesn't even take any programming. Just cooking up the appropriate config files for bind could get some caching name servers going that avoid easy to block ip's and ports.
And it is widely known that the cron-like functionality of launchd is badly broken. I spent a couple of days fighting launchd before learning what seems to be widely known to everyone else. lauchd will be a nice unification of several services *when* *it* *works*, but until then, cron files are *much* easier to write, and under the right circumstances, they work. launchd is not fully baked, sad to say.
As to cron, well, cron works like cron has always worked. And on OS X Server, everything is just fine, since servers never sleep. But both cron and launchd have a problem with sleep. This is understandable with cron, since it was never intended to talk to the power management processor. But launchd should talk to the power management processor. The machine needs to be woken up for cron-equivalent launchd jobs, period. In fact, Apple's log rotator scripts run afoul of this design defect. They won't run if your machine is asleep. Mac's, as they ship, will eventually fill up your disk with old log files unless you do something to correct the situtation, or unless you regularly find yourself computing at the odd hours when the log rotators are scheduled to run.
All in all, Mac OS X strikes me as a great vision, 95% implemented.
... all the ones I had.
When Wayne Greene announced that he was going to start a computer magazine, I jumped right in. The first few issues of Byte were nothing like the later years... I dropped my sub after it became all about IBM compatibles. The first issues of Byte were from another world than we know today.
After saving up my money, I bought a Southwest Technical Products 6800 system. I had 3 memory boards, for a total of 12K bytes of ram. That's a lot of 1K x 1 ram chips to solder. SWT also did a "tv typewriter" kit that gave you a 40 column by 24 line terminal. Wheee! In those days, I lusted after an Teletype Corp. ASR 33 so that I would have a mass storage device... paper tape. *sigh* I think I still have the power and reset switch, and the transformer somewhere in my parts pile, salvaged when I scrapped the computer.
As an undergrad, I got to play with the early PET computers. The chicklet keyboards would make you nuts! I eventually bought an Apple II, (not IIe, not II+, an Apple II with integer basic on the mobo). Eventually, I upgraded that system to the full 48K bytes of ram. Floating point basic was a nifty addition. And I was one of the first to go out and snag a floppy. Hurray!!! No more casette tape mass storage. Got pretty good at 6502 assembler. Apple's high-end 6502 assembler could generate an external symbol dictionary, but they never made a linker. So I wrote one. It was about 4k lines of assembly code, IIRC. One of my most vivid memories of those days is the first time I saw VisiCalc. Blew me away. I said right there that program was going to sell a lot of Apples. Nobody had ever seen a spreadsheet before VisiCalc.
Remember TRS-80's but they never impressed me much.
Had the original Mac. 128K bytes of ram and a floppy -- who needs anything else? Ha. Ended up with a couple more macs as time went on. Apple lost their way shortly after that.
Got a PC compatible just about the first release of NT, a 486 system of some flavor. It, too, rusts in piece. I have 2 Pentium systems that still boot, a couple of Pentium II systems, the family file server is a P4 Celery running Linux (Slackware, I'm old school). Oh, and my daughter has a P4 Celery also. And there seems to be a Toshiba laptop graveyard out in the garage.
And I'm typing this on my wife's new Mac mini. I think Apple has found their way out of the woods, finally. If they can fix cron in the next update to Tiger, I'll be very happy.
OK, enough of this pointless navel staring. Gramps is signing off now... it's time for my medication.
...that only you users of Google advertising can answer.
Whenever I do a search to buy something, the regular search results always seem more on target than the advertising. And whenever one of the paid adverts is spot-on, the link to their store or even a deep link to the merchandise is right near the top of the first page.
So, I'm wondering, why advertise at all? Google search works better, and it doesn't cost the advertiser anything. Seems to me Google search is so good, it makes advertising on Google nearly pointless.
So, from the perspective of an actual user, how far off base is this thinking?
I am *not* NULL!!!
(Note for humor challenged mods: I'm going for "funny" here, not "-1 cranky")
More and more I'm coming to think that down-moderation just doesn't work here any more. It should be eliminated. People get down-modded for their sigs, not to mention: -1 conservative, -1 mature response, -1 voice of actual experience, -1 raw data I don't like, -1 uncomfortable real life example. We should only allow up-mods. Or at least make a down-mod cost 3 mod points or similar.
The lack of critical thinking skills here is a sad commentary on modern society.
Ummm... hops is already one of the most regulated grops grown in the USA. Anybody can grow it, but you can only *sell* it if you have a "marketing order". Just like tobacco, oranges, and peanuts. "Wealthy hops grower" is already a redundancy. The hops growing lobby is just as strong as the tobacco lobby, only much more under the radar. Want to *sell* the hops you grow? Better hope you are in line to inherit the marketing order your great-grandpappy got way back when.
And do we really want to?"
That question encapsulates the insane attitude our society has about intellect. If we were talking about identifying and nurturing kids with talent in basketball, football, or ice hockey this would be a non-story. This country has a multi-billion dollar machine to do just that, and nobody finds it an odd use of resources.
If we were talking about musical prodigies, it would be a story, but nobody would find in controversial. It would be a publicist's press release. People expect and accept a certain percentage of kids will have profound musical talent, and people will buy their CD's. (Unless the CD installs rootkits, but that is another story...)
Yet, when it comes to the intellecutally gifted, people refuse to let these children soar. These children are often viewed as freaks. Frequently they are simply ignored on the assumption that they will take care of themselves. What is so bad about nurturing their talents the same way we coach youth basketball?
Well, in fact the wild assertions you pulled out of your ass are contradicted by actual data carefully collected by serious researchers. By looking at "achievers" -- not "kids who scored high on IQ tests", but people whose lives made a huge difference to the world (Nobel laureates, etc) -- it can be seen that the vast marjority were rescued from the system by their parents. Often, they were home schooled. Conformity not expected, nor even valued.
I'd give you a book reference, but unfortunately I don't have time right now -- I'll be back in town Thursday and you can ask then.
Are you nuts? I used to manage a software product validation lab. Not for deep, white box testing, but for final "fit & finish", "user experience", and platform matrix testing. Oh, and for malware scanning to be sure we didn't ship any to our customers. (Sometimes malware would slip onto develper machines and into release candidates.) Somebody at Sony has responsibility for knowing what they are shipping, and knowing how it installs on a variety of platforms, and knowing what it leaves behind everywhere. They either have someone who does this job, in which they are willfully culpable, or the don't have anyone doing this job, in which case they are willfully negligent for not following standard software industry practice.
As someone whose job it was to stand athwart this kind of crap, I say Sony should be toasted for this.
Amazon's handling of series is lamer than that. I recently bought later books in a series, and it recommened earlier books in the series. *Helloooooo* Amazon, I bought them from you, you dorks. In theory, you make recommendations to me based on past purchases, so you must *know* what I've already bought. How about filtering those *out* of recommendations? *duh*
Whump up some flyers. Be nice, list just the verifiable facts now, or just use major news source clippings. Brush up on "peaceful assembly" law and so forth, and hand out your flyers in front of Sony retailers.
:-)
A picket sign quoting Homeland Security officials might be fun to carry around
Unfortunately, only too true.
Speaking as a manager, I think there are certain minimum things the manager must be able to do:
1) Run the scripts that create the build environment on his workstation. S/He should wipe that workspace and rebuild it on a random basis, weekly or so. What??? You don't have hands-off scripts to create the build environment? -> good management question #1 has just been asked.
2) the manager should be able to kick off a nightly in the build environment he created in step 1. Are those nightly build scripts up to date?
3) The manager should be able to run the check-in requirements test script. You do have one, right?
4) The manager should be able to create a test case and check it into the testing framework. S/he should do so on a random basis. A good manager probably brings more to the testing effort than to the coding effort.
Note that none of the above require extensive up-to-date coding ability, or massive amounts of time. But they all directly get at good process and quality in a very hands-on way. It is much harder to sneak BS past any manager that can do the above 4 things.
As a manager, I have tried many times to make this same thing stick. This, in a situation where I had influence over promotions, raises, and of course also could put people on written warning and move them out of the company if need be.
But, Linus has discovered the secret of actually making it happen! Just don't pay people in the first place! Genius!
This is why Linux is so successfull.
Yes. Nice summary of Microsoft's culpability here. I can't understand why more people are not upset at MSFT over this.
But, living life Windows-free, well, that is hard. But I'm trying. I'm tired of cleaning up my wife's Windows system. Today, with luck, her Mac mini gets set up. Unfortunatly, there is one ap (the geneolgy ap) that she uses that is only available for windows and probably won't emulate very well. Fortunately, running that ap on a quarantined, off-net windows box is an adequate solution.
.. I'd call it professionalism.
I've never been so hungry that I would write code like that. If the ethical situation of a job makes you uncomfortable, leave it. That actually plays pretty well while interviewing for your next job. At least for any job you actually want.
Speaking as someone who has actually done quite a bit of engineering hiring, I can say that I do filter people by where they have chosen to work before. I learned that lesson by bitter experience. People joke about "resume stains", but let me tell you as a hiring manager that they are very real.
Yes, I just found out that I bought a product that, without my approval, installs software on my computer that compromises it's security. I bought it with a Visa card, I'd like my money back. Can you reverse the charges, please?
Why? Well, this is supposed to be a music CD. But without informing me and wholly without my approval it installs root kit software. This root kit software could hide a key logger that could capture the credit card number I use in online transactions. I would think that would worry Visa.
What is interesting to me is the case of Walmart. They sell both CD's and computers. Other places do to, but when a Walmart buyer talks, manufactures listen *very* intently.
So, I buy a Walmart computer. I buy a Sony CD. I play Sony CD on Walmart computer. Computer gets compromised/killed by Sony DRM. I take computer back to Walmart and say: "Your products. You fix." Imagine a Beowolf cluster of Walmart customers with the same problem. Somebody in Bentonville is going to get a clue, believe me, and will start passing that clue on. No matter what else you think about Walmart, their buyers are smart people wielding nuclear cluesticks.
Yes, but, what OS's other than Microsoft products allow surf-by and auto-mount driver installs that diddle low level file system api's? Why is no one angry at Microsft about this Sony fiasco?
I'm thinking that outside of users that habitually surf and/or listen to music as root, that Linux and OS X users should be just a wee bit safer than the casual Windows user.
Sure, Linux can be rooted. Now, your homework assignment is to go burn me a disk with music on it that will root my Linux box merely by being inserted, and won't let me listen to the music until my box has been rooted. I like classical.
That is for double-darn sure. As long as this Sony fiasco has been going on, I keep wondering why no one is pissed at MSFT for letting this kind of crap get installed. Hooking low level file system API's for $diety's sake. Silent driver installs must be stopped. Click-through to install every single driver, and OS managed uninstall of every driver is the only way to stop this crapola, and MSFT needs to do it.
I am planning to tell MSFT something slightly different than grandparent post. I am tired of cleaning spyware and other garp off of my wife's computer. Tomorrow, she gets a Mac. I will snail-mail MSFT a copy of the sales receipt, along with a letter stating exactly why MSFT lost a sale, and exactly why MSFT software is from this time forward quarantined to strictly off-net computers in this house.