When things get handed to a corporation you can only vote if your wallet is big enough
I think you will find that corporations are far more answerable to customers and even small shareholders than governments are to voters.
You "vote" every time you do business with a company - or choose not to. McDonalds and Starbucks are popular because lots of people freely choose to spend their money there. If people decide en masse not to do business with McDonalds, there's nothing they can do, they'll simply go bankrupt. If lots of people decide they don't want their government... well, ask the good "citizens" of Syria or Cuba what happens then.
You get to vote for your government every 4 years. Once they're in, 4 years is long term. Corporations, on the other hand, have to keep you happy every day, forever. Corporations, especially these days when brands are so important, are massively concerned with what people think of them, and if they're unpopular, they'll change. Governments know that no matter what they do, they'll get back into power eventually.
If you don't think corporations don't have armed forces, then you have never met an angry hord of lawyers
I've never heard of lawyers physically assaulting people and destroying their property. Governments do it all the time.
Consider the fundamentals of the problem: You're attempting to translate 4GL code into 3GL code. Think about why 4GL exists, and its relationship to 3GL. It's not hard to see that you face a fairly insurmountable problem. You might find it easier to just write a new 4GL system capable of running your old 4GL system's code. The process of churning 4GL into a generic 3GL is somewhat harder (but very similar to) the job of a 4GL compiler or interpreter.
The only thing I have seen that comes close is certain RAD/CASE tools like Oracle Designer. Designer can absorb applications written with itself, Oracle Forms, etc, and output them as Java, and to a certain extent can absorb other applications (say, VB) and convert them to Designer. It's far from perfect, but it might get you 80% of the way there. I'd wager that IBM, Sybase et al have similar tools, but he didn't say which 4GL he was using.
I'd say that the business case for doing so needs to be very carefully examined. If the 4GL is due to be discontinued and there's no-one other than the vendor who can support it (i.e. no contractors available who know it) then maybe there is a case for conversion, maybe there is a case for rewriting, particulary if it needs substantial enhancement. If it's to be buzzword-compliant, forget it, it's a waste of time and money.
The keyword here is "would." The US isn't ratifying squat, but who's surprised? Financing election campaigns is a costly business, and you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. Bush is just behaving like the good boy he promised to be.
Bush couldn't ratify Kyoto even if he wanted to, since the Senate voted against it 95-0 in 1997 (admittedly it was non-binding, but it needed 67 votes to pass). Clinton signed the treaty, but during his term, he did nothing to try to implement it.
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
I hightl doubt Mr Carmack has to buy graphics cards, I would assume that as an ISV iD get whatever they want essentially for free, since they drive hardware sales in their niche of the industry to such a degree. Hardware manufacturers would be only to eager to do anything in return for him recommending their products to his millions and millions of fans. But I suspect that as a purist, he's only swayed by superior technology and not by perks!
You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card
Sure you can. Sell it on eBay, or think of the money you aren't wasting at bars when you're at home playing:-P
lets see INTEL go up aganst a SUN on a large oracle DB then I will take notice
Actually, Intel systems do pretty well, indeed, better than Sun running Oracle with a 3000G test database. And they do a good job on transaction throughput too.
[Y]ou always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
That's just sophistry. Can you sell something that's available for free? You can maybe sell services on a time-and-materials basis, but that's not the same thing at all.
Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.
All this means is that commercial entities aren't forbidden from using free products. It's hardly worth stating.
No you don't. You pay for it with the considerable hassle and expense of being forced to upgrade your basic infrastructure software whenever some company tells you to
No one forced you to use it... presumably you are using it of your own free will because it does things that CVS (or whatever) doesn't. You are gaining a tangible benefit from it. If you object to the terms and conditions, you are free to choose not to use it. Since you are getting a value, however, it is only fair that you repay that value by offering something in return, in this case, upgrading and reporting any bugs you find. Anything else is just parasitic.
Note also that in his philosophy it is both wrong and harmful to others to release proprietary software.
You might as well say, selling food rather than giving it away is harmful to others, therefore all food should be free. But what about the farmers, and the equipment? Who pays for all that?
Stallman may be a great programmer, but he's no economist, and it shows in his business philosophy. He essentially believes that people have no ownership of intellectual property, because information products such as software can be replicated at minimal cost. He also assumes that software can be produced at no cost. To get back to the farming metaphor, food can be produced at no cost, for example you can plant an apple tree, and if you look after it, eventually you will have a free supply of apples. That works for subsistence farming, or a society largely composed of subsistence farmers. But in the modern world, only about 3% of the population work on farms - everyone else buys food, and we all enjoy the economies of scale. In software, the production of software is not the business most corporations are in - they are in the business of aerospace, or banking, or retail (for example). Writing your own software, or waiting for a piece of "free" software to come along simply is not viable in that environment, just as it is not practical these days for everyone to feed themselves from their own plot of land, or roam public spaces looking for apple trees.
I don't follow him that far, but there is a certain amount of logical consistency to his arguments.
Yes, his position is internally consistent, but outside of academia or a socialized-software-factory environment, his position is inconsistent with the laws of economics.
You know, I would be seriously pissed if some guy broke into my house, stole my rifle, used it to shoot and kill a cop, and the police arrested me for owning the murder weapon.
In 1994, a man in England apprehended two burglars on his property using a toy gun and held them until the police arrived. When they did, they arrested him for using the toy to "put someone in fear".
When is our judicial system going to get it through their heads that ISPs cannot control the actions of their users, just like I cannot control who might break into my house. I'm sure Microsoft Germany had no intention of putting nude photos on their website, just like I have no intention of killing someone with my rifle, but I cannot guarantee that it won't happen.
The point is, the law is often nothing to do with what's right. Why did they sue Microsoft and not, say, the phone company whose wires carried the signal, or the PC manufacturer who made the monitor that displayed them? Sounds ridiculous? Any more ridiculous than suing the owner of a wall for something someone spraypainted on it?
In a way, it's good that it's Microsoft this time, because they have the smartest, most aggressive lawyers in the world, and if they decide to turn around a get the law shot down with precedents, they can.
Actually, it's strange that you say that I'm ruining it for you, rather than the other way around. Let me explain. The internet is a big shit hole, but it didn't use to be that way. Then people like you arrived, with much bleeting and moo'ing, shepherded here by marketdroids and buzzwordologists. And things keep getting worse.
That's mighty fine talk coming from someone with a 6-digit User#:-P
First the encryption the military uses is way advanced of anything in PGP or the civilian sector.
I'd be very suprised if that was true. Would the military trust something that hadn't been reviewed by the academic sector, published in journals, etc? Trying to keep the algorithm secret simply doesn't stand up to modern cryptanalysis, if that algorithm isn't rock-solid to start with. You can download the source code and documentation to the new AES, which is the Federal standard for data encryption.
If the NSA are keeping anything secret, it will be that they have algorithmic attacks on popular techniques (and/or computing techniques and power to brute-force them), not new techniques of their own.
Fool: when was warfare supposed to be fun? It's all about imposing your will on somebody else, probably at the expense of pain and suffering to them, or even both of you.
Or preventing their will being imposed on you and your allies. If you can do that with minimal risk to yourself, how can that be bad?
The only problem is if it becomes risk free to launch attacks.
My boss recently hired someone here, and he was saying that while the candidates seemed eager, very few asked good questions or showed a lot of specific interest in this position. I think, like you, they wanted any job they could get. This attitude didn't really impress him.
I have a rule of thumb, that I never hire ex-contractors for permanent positions. Switching from permanent to contract employment means that someone has decided to focus on a specific role, and make as much money from that one thing in the short term as possible, or alternately that they have itchy feet and never stay anywhere for long. It means they have taken a conscious decision not to follow a "career track" into a supervisory or management role - which is fine, in and of itself, but it means they aren't interested in staying with an organization long-term. (Equally, I would be cautious about hiring a former permanent employee on their first stint as a contractor).
No matter what they say, a contractor who says he or she wants to go back to permanent really means that there are no contracts around right now and they just want something to tide them over, and they'll be gone as soon as they get a new contract. Maybe they're all not like this, but hiring is time consuming and expensive, and it's just not worth an employer taking the risk.
Same thing with data mining. Data mining does not always have to do with someone finding your data.
Exactly. I don't think the editor knows what a data miner is - probably imagines it to be the digital equivalent of paparazzi sifting through a celebrity's trash, or a sleazy private detective spying on cheating spouses or something.
Data mining is about finding patterns in vast quantities of data, looking for trends, extrapolating to support decisions. It's what data warehouses and OLAP tools are built for. Doing data mining means abstract thinking in n-dimensional cubes, graduate statistics, plus hardcore familiarity with the SQL parser of your chosen database, plus enough business savvy to not just fit curves but understand what the implications are. Data mining will always be a hot job, because it makes a big difference to corporate/governmental strategy, and very few people have the broad and deep skills to do it well.
I can definitely see future electronic activists emailing 5,000 people on the carrier U.S.S. America, telling them to stop bombing whoever it may be that we're bombing that particular day. Obviously this might annoy the military. What recourse do they have, if any? Technical solutions are obvious but not particularly effective, especially since the mailer gets infinite no-cost tries to get through. What could they do, legally?
Legally? National Security is the r00t password to the Constitution, my friend. Spreading sedition is definitely against military law, and no-one in the homeland is bad enough to stand up to the Men In Black. With the present public mood in the US, spammers would be lucky not to get lynched before the Feds could take them in!
Re:But is it better than Cryptonomicon?
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Enigma
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I just wanted to see who they would cast as America Shaftoe!
My vote is for Dina Meyer. Or Rachel Weisz.
Re:Do what you can to protect yourself.
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I regret every signing up with a headhunter.
The way people use the term "headhunter" is misleading. I have a friend who is one, and she explained to me that there are 3 species in the industry.
Type 1 are the spammers that you hate. They will get a resume by any means available, soliciting on web sites, mass emailings, downloading from personal homepages, and they will send them all to huge lists of "hr@company.com" or "recruiting@company.com" generic email imboxes. If you are lucky, they might do some keyword filtering, on very simple terms like "Java" or "Oracle". They are generally held in contempt by types 2 and 3. They work in volume; commissions they will be paid are very small, because the roles are quite junior or at cash-strapped companies, so they need to make up numbers. The people employed by these companies are very aggressive to meet their targets, and they will lie, cheat or steal to do it.
Type 2 are outsourcers who take on the recruiting function of HR to help a company cope with expansion. They will advertise in the press (think Computer Weekly or Computing in the UK) and conduct screening interviews, and handle all the administration to do with the hiring process. They aren't technical experts, but they are usually quite well briefed - they will know the difference between someone who knows VC++ and someone who knows Motif, for example. These are the people who you most want to get in contact with when you are looking for a job. They work on commission, a percentage of your starting salary, so while they want to make a sale, they are on your side.
Type 3 are the elite. They are knowledgeable about technology and about their industry. You will not be able to contact them; they will find you. They are very expensive to the companies that use them, and they are exclusively used for "rifle shot" recruiting - getting key people, poaching them if necessary. Until you reach godlike prowess as a multi-million dollar project manager, technical architect or mastery of a very obscure but vital technology, you are unlikely to encounter one - these are the only people who are truly referred to as "headhunters". They are paid on retainer whether or not the client needs anyone at the moment - they will not have your best interests at heart per se, but the risks to their client of putting forward the wrong candidate are high, so they will be disconcertingly honest with you.
Don't confuse the 3 types, and especially don't call a type 1 or a type 2 a "headhunter" in the company of a type 3, because you'll get a slap!:-)
Movies only attempt to reflect reality when convenient and/or feasible. Lets look at the X-Men. A great film. Are any of the stunts possible if you're not some kind of a mutant?
Yes, but the physics model of a fictional universe has to be internally consistent, and if it's not it's usually a symptom of the writers being lazy, and that shows up in the quality of the rest of the movie, or show. Star Trek is the classical example of this. Some piece of technology which worked one day will not the next - the transporters will always fail (or be repaired) in a situation to advance the story, sometimes the sensors will penetrate enemy shields, sometimes not. That's just sloppy writing, using a Deus Ex Machina to dig the plot out of a hole.
When writers violate the physics model - that they created in the first place, don't forget, so they could have had it any way they wanted - it stops being a story and starts being a CGI showreel, and that is why a bad movie won't be rescued by special effects (Ref: The Phantom Menace).
How do they expect to require.NET to support UNIX & Linux?
Why not? You can already get the Common Language Runtime, IL debugger, C# compiler, etc on FreeBSD. I'm sure HP could easily work with Microsoft to bring at least the CLR to HPUX, especially since Compaq and Microsoft were good friends.
If I had $40 billion in CASH, an infallibility complex, and a slowly-dawning-realization that a) I'm not going to be able to take it with me and b) everyone doesn't love me as much as I think they do I'd sure use that money for something significant.
You are confusing Bill Gates, who owns around 16% (IIRC) of Microsoft, with the company itself. I'm sure Gates and Microsoft's management intend that the company will be around long after they are all dead. There are thousands of companies in the world that outlived their founders, you know.
Ralph Nader pointed out that the money is a sort of a n "illegal tax shelter" for very rich people such as Billie Boy, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer.
Honestly, you Slashbots. One the one hand, Enron are bad because they used accounting tricks and pretended to have billions of dollars that they didn't. Microsoft, perhaps surprisingly, eschew fancy creative accounting, and have real cash money, which they invest in, among other things, T-bills, just like Grandma.
Let's put $40B into perspective. That's about a quarter of the shareholder value lost by Vodafone since it's peak. That's less than the value that Juniper or AOL/TW lost in a year. That's less than Marconi were forced to write off. It's a fraction of what Cisco or GE are worth. In other words, in an industry as volatile as high tech, it's only prudent to keep a lot of hard cash on hand - it's called "Catastrophe Hedging" for a reason.
If it were illegal, the Govt. would have busted them. The name Arthur Andersen was impeccable, far more so than Microsoft, but when the broke the rules, they were taken out in short order.
On/., Microsoft can do no right, so perhaps I should be unsurprised by this story. Rather than bashing them, why not download the CLR and C# source for FreeBSD and have a play with that?
The inner details are not just neglected; the companies intentionally keep them secret and prosecute people who leak them.
As a result, software can't be made reliable, not even in principle.
I don't see how you can get from your first point there to your second. Take the software in a typical phone switch, for example, it's proprietary and rock solid. If a phone switch goes down, it's most likely a hardware fault, in my experience. The same could be said for any amount of embedded code, when did the software in your cellphone last crash? Your VCR?
The reason commercial software has bugs is very simply because people (i.e. the market, the people spending dollars on software) have indicated by their purchasing behavior that they are willing to accept a level of unreliability in exchange for shorter version cycles. The same purchasing patterns don't apply to hardware or embedded systems. The fact that the software is proprietary or not is neither here nor there.
I will also point out that in the high-end software market, the customer will hold the proprietary source code in escrow, just in case.
If *everything* underneath your code is Open Source, then in principle you can examine it and find problems
In theory, you're right, but in practice, how many bugs have there been in sendmail or bind? Open source lulls people into a false sense of security, because everyone assumes everyone else has checked it, and no-one actually does! But again, that fact that the source code is available is irrelevant to reliability - properly designed and implemented software, whether it's open or closed source, can be made as reliable as you are willing to invest resources (time, money, people, etc) in.
The shell is a program that runs on top of UNIX and can be replaced with a different shell at the discretion of the computer's user. I don't have to use bash; I could use tcsh if I wanted to.
IE is a program that runs as an integral part of the Windows kernel and can not be replaced by a different browser. Or so the states are trying to argue.
Well, you could replace/bin/sh it's true, but you would also have to rewrite all your startup scripts and much of your systems administration utility set.
You can install another browser on Windows too; just because MSIE is there doesn't mean you have to use it.
a government attorney asked him to name an OS (other than one made by Microsoft) where the browser couldn't be removed. Madnick also faltered on several other questions.
Is Internet Explorer any less a part of Windows than the shell is a part of Unix? Where exactly do you draw the line? Discuss.
Slashdot Mirror
When things get handed to a corporation you can only vote if your wallet is big enough
I think you will find that corporations are far more answerable to customers and even small shareholders than governments are to voters.
You "vote" every time you do business with a company - or choose not to. McDonalds and Starbucks are popular because lots of people freely choose to spend their money there. If people decide en masse not to do business with McDonalds, there's nothing they can do, they'll simply go bankrupt. If lots of people decide they don't want their government... well, ask the good "citizens" of Syria or Cuba what happens then.
You get to vote for your government every 4 years. Once they're in, 4 years is long term. Corporations, on the other hand, have to keep you happy every day, forever. Corporations, especially these days when brands are so important, are massively concerned with what people think of them, and if they're unpopular, they'll change. Governments know that no matter what they do, they'll get back into power eventually.
If you don't think corporations don't have armed forces, then you have never met an angry hord of lawyers
I've never heard of lawyers physically assaulting people and destroying their property. Governments do it all the time.
Consider the fundamentals of the problem: You're attempting to translate 4GL code into 3GL code. Think about why 4GL exists, and its relationship to 3GL. It's not hard to see that you face a fairly insurmountable problem. You might find it easier to just write a new 4GL system capable of running your old 4GL system's code. The process of churning 4GL into a generic 3GL is somewhat harder (but very similar to) the job of a 4GL compiler or interpreter.
The only thing I have seen that comes close is certain RAD/CASE tools like Oracle Designer. Designer can absorb applications written with itself, Oracle Forms, etc, and output them as Java, and to a certain extent can absorb other applications (say, VB) and convert them to Designer. It's far from perfect, but it might get you 80% of the way there. I'd wager that IBM, Sybase et al have similar tools, but he didn't say which 4GL he was using.
I'd say that the business case for doing so needs to be very carefully examined. If the 4GL is due to be discontinued and there's no-one other than the vendor who can support it (i.e. no contractors available who know it) then maybe there is a case for conversion, maybe there is a case for rewriting, particulary if it needs substantial enhancement. If it's to be buzzword-compliant, forget it, it's a waste of time and money.
The keyword here is "would." The US isn't ratifying squat, but who's surprised? Financing election campaigns is a costly business, and you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. Bush is just behaving like the good boy he promised to be.
Bush couldn't ratify Kyoto even if he wanted to, since the Senate voted against it 95-0 in 1997 (admittedly it was non-binding, but it needed 67 votes to pass). Clinton signed the treaty, but during his term, he did nothing to try to implement it.
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
:-P
I hightl doubt Mr Carmack has to buy graphics cards, I would assume that as an ISV iD get whatever they want essentially for free, since they drive hardware sales in their niche of the industry to such a degree. Hardware manufacturers would be only to eager to do anything in return for him recommending their products to his millions and millions of fans. But I suspect that as a purist, he's only swayed by superior technology and not by perks!
You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card
Sure you can. Sell it on eBay, or think of the money you aren't wasting at bars when you're at home playing
lets see INTEL go up aganst a SUN on a large oracle DB then I will take notice
Actually, Intel systems do pretty well, indeed, better than Sun running Oracle with a 3000G test database. And they do a good job on transaction throughput too.
[Y]ou always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
That's just sophistry. Can you sell something that's available for free? You can maybe sell services on a time-and-materials basis, but that's not the same thing at all.
Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.
All this means is that commercial entities aren't forbidden from using free products. It's hardly worth stating.
No you don't. You pay for it with the considerable hassle and expense of being forced to upgrade your basic infrastructure software whenever some company tells you to
No one forced you to use it... presumably you are using it of your own free will because it does things that CVS (or whatever) doesn't. You are gaining a tangible benefit from it. If you object to the terms and conditions, you are free to choose not to use it. Since you are getting a value, however, it is only fair that you repay that value by offering something in return, in this case, upgrading and reporting any bugs you find. Anything else is just parasitic.
Note also that in his philosophy it is both wrong and harmful to others to release proprietary software.
You might as well say, selling food rather than giving it away is harmful to others, therefore all food should be free. But what about the farmers, and the equipment? Who pays for all that?
Stallman may be a great programmer, but he's no economist, and it shows in his business philosophy. He essentially believes that people have no ownership of intellectual property, because information products such as software can be replicated at minimal cost. He also assumes that software can be produced at no cost. To get back to the farming metaphor, food can be produced at no cost, for example you can plant an apple tree, and if you look after it, eventually you will have a free supply of apples. That works for subsistence farming, or a society largely composed of subsistence farmers. But in the modern world, only about 3% of the population work on farms - everyone else buys food, and we all enjoy the economies of scale. In software, the production of software is not the business most corporations are in - they are in the business of aerospace, or banking, or retail (for example). Writing your own software, or waiting for a piece of "free" software to come along simply is not viable in that environment, just as it is not practical these days for everyone to feed themselves from their own plot of land, or roam public spaces looking for apple trees.
I don't follow him that far, but there is a certain amount of logical consistency to his arguments.
Yes, his position is internally consistent, but outside of academia or a socialized-software-factory environment, his position is inconsistent with the laws of economics.
You know, I would be seriously pissed if some guy broke into my house, stole my rifle, used it to shoot and kill a cop, and the police arrested me for owning the murder weapon.
In 1994, a man in England apprehended two burglars on his property using a toy gun and held them until the police arrived. When they did, they arrested him for using the toy to "put someone in fear".
When is our judicial system going to get it through their heads that ISPs cannot control the actions of their users, just like I cannot control who might break into my house. I'm sure Microsoft Germany had no intention of putting nude photos on their website, just like I have no intention of killing someone with my rifle, but I cannot guarantee that it won't happen.
The point is, the law is often nothing to do with what's right. Why did they sue Microsoft and not, say, the phone company whose wires carried the signal, or the PC manufacturer who made the monitor that displayed them? Sounds ridiculous? Any more ridiculous than suing the owner of a wall for something someone spraypainted on it?
In a way, it's good that it's Microsoft this time, because they have the smartest, most aggressive lawyers in the world, and if they decide to turn around a get the law shot down with precedents, they can.
Actually, it's strange that you say that I'm ruining it for you, rather than the other way around. Let me explain. The internet is a big shit hole, but it didn't use to be that way. Then people like you arrived, with much bleeting and moo'ing, shepherded here by marketdroids and buzzwordologists. And things keep getting worse.
:-P
That's mighty fine talk coming from someone with a 6-digit User#
First the encryption the military uses is way advanced of anything in PGP or the civilian sector.
I'd be very suprised if that was true. Would the military trust something that hadn't been reviewed by the academic sector, published in journals, etc? Trying to keep the algorithm secret simply doesn't stand up to modern cryptanalysis, if that algorithm isn't rock-solid to start with. You can download the source code and documentation to the new AES, which is the Federal standard for data encryption.
If the NSA are keeping anything secret, it will be that they have algorithmic attacks on popular techniques (and/or computing techniques and power to brute-force them), not new techniques of their own.
Fool: when was warfare supposed to be fun? It's all about imposing your will on somebody else, probably at the expense of pain and suffering to them, or even both of you.
Or preventing their will being imposed on you and your allies. If you can do that with minimal risk to yourself, how can that be bad?
The only problem is if it becomes risk free to launch attacks.
the founder of "The Chained Canard",
The Chained Duck.
My boss recently hired someone here, and he was saying that while the candidates seemed eager, very few asked good questions or showed a lot of specific interest in this position. I think, like you, they wanted any job they could get. This attitude didn't really impress him.
I have a rule of thumb, that I never hire ex-contractors for permanent positions. Switching from permanent to contract employment means that someone has decided to focus on a specific role, and make as much money from that one thing in the short term as possible, or alternately that they have itchy feet and never stay anywhere for long. It means they have taken a conscious decision not to follow a "career track" into a supervisory or management role - which is fine, in and of itself, but it means they aren't interested in staying with an organization long-term. (Equally, I would be cautious about hiring a former permanent employee on their first stint as a contractor).
No matter what they say, a contractor who says he or she wants to go back to permanent really means that there are no contracts around right now and they just want something to tide them over, and they'll be gone as soon as they get a new contract. Maybe they're all not like this, but hiring is time consuming and expensive, and it's just not worth an employer taking the risk.
Same thing with data mining. Data mining does not always have to do with someone finding your data.
Exactly. I don't think the editor knows what a data miner is - probably imagines it to be the digital equivalent of paparazzi sifting through a celebrity's trash, or a sleazy private detective spying on cheating spouses or something.
Data mining is about finding patterns in vast quantities of data, looking for trends, extrapolating to support decisions. It's what data warehouses and OLAP tools are built for. Doing data mining means abstract thinking in n-dimensional cubes, graduate statistics, plus hardcore familiarity with the SQL parser of your chosen database, plus enough business savvy to not just fit curves but understand what the implications are. Data mining will always be a hot job, because it makes a big difference to corporate/governmental strategy, and very few people have the broad and deep skills to do it well.
I can definitely see future electronic activists emailing 5,000 people on the carrier U.S.S. America, telling them to stop bombing whoever it may be that we're bombing that particular day. Obviously this might annoy the military. What recourse do they have, if any? Technical solutions are obvious but not particularly effective, especially since the mailer gets infinite no-cost tries to get through. What could they do, legally?
Legally? National Security is the r00t password to the Constitution, my friend. Spreading sedition is definitely against military law, and no-one in the homeland is bad enough to stand up to the Men In Black. With the present public mood in the US, spammers would be lucky not to get lynched before the Feds could take them in!
I just wanted to see who they would cast as America Shaftoe!
My vote is for Dina Meyer. Or Rachel Weisz.
I regret every signing up with a headhunter.
:-)
The way people use the term "headhunter" is misleading. I have a friend who is one, and she explained to me that there are 3 species in the industry.
Type 1 are the spammers that you hate. They will get a resume by any means available, soliciting on web sites, mass emailings, downloading from personal homepages, and they will send them all to huge lists of "hr@company.com" or "recruiting@company.com" generic email imboxes. If you are lucky, they might do some keyword filtering, on very simple terms like "Java" or "Oracle". They are generally held in contempt by types 2 and 3. They work in volume; commissions they will be paid are very small, because the roles are quite junior or at cash-strapped companies, so they need to make up numbers. The people employed by these companies are very aggressive to meet their targets, and they will lie, cheat or steal to do it.
Type 2 are outsourcers who take on the recruiting function of HR to help a company cope with expansion. They will advertise in the press (think Computer Weekly or Computing in the UK) and conduct screening interviews, and handle all the administration to do with the hiring process. They aren't technical experts, but they are usually quite well briefed - they will know the difference between someone who knows VC++ and someone who knows Motif, for example. These are the people who you most want to get in contact with when you are looking for a job. They work on commission, a percentage of your starting salary, so while they want to make a sale, they are on your side.
Type 3 are the elite. They are knowledgeable about technology and about their industry. You will not be able to contact them; they will find you. They are very expensive to the companies that use them, and they are exclusively used for "rifle shot" recruiting - getting key people, poaching them if necessary. Until you reach godlike prowess as a multi-million dollar project manager, technical architect or mastery of a very obscure but vital technology, you are unlikely to encounter one - these are the only people who are truly referred to as "headhunters". They are paid on retainer whether or not the client needs anyone at the moment - they will not have your best interests at heart per se, but the risks to their client of putting forward the wrong candidate are high, so they will be disconcertingly honest with you.
Don't confuse the 3 types, and especially don't call a type 1 or a type 2 a "headhunter" in the company of a type 3, because you'll get a slap!
Movies only attempt to reflect reality when convenient and/or feasible. Lets look at the X-Men. A great film. Are any of the stunts possible if you're not some kind of a mutant?
Yes, but the physics model of a fictional universe has to be internally consistent, and if it's not it's usually a symptom of the writers being lazy, and that shows up in the quality of the rest of the movie, or show. Star Trek is the classical example of this. Some piece of technology which worked one day will not the next - the transporters will always fail (or be repaired) in a situation to advance the story, sometimes the sensors will penetrate enemy shields, sometimes not. That's just sloppy writing, using a Deus Ex Machina to dig the plot out of a hole.
When writers violate the physics model - that they created in the first place, don't forget, so they could have had it any way they wanted - it stops being a story and starts being a CGI showreel, and that is why a bad movie won't be rescued by special effects (Ref: The Phantom Menace).
How do they expect to require .NET to support UNIX & Linux?
Why not? You can already get the Common Language Runtime, IL debugger, C# compiler, etc on FreeBSD. I'm sure HP could easily work with Microsoft to bring at least the CLR to HPUX, especially since Compaq and Microsoft were good friends.
If I had $40 billion in CASH, an infallibility complex, and a slowly-dawning-realization that a) I'm not going to be able to take it with me and b) everyone doesn't love me as much as I think they do I'd sure use that money for something significant.
You are confusing Bill Gates, who owns around 16% (IIRC) of Microsoft, with the company itself. I'm sure Gates and Microsoft's management intend that the company will be around long after they are all dead. There are thousands of companies in the world that outlived their founders, you know.
Ralph Nader pointed out that the money is a sort of a n "illegal tax shelter" for very rich people such as Billie Boy, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer.
/., Microsoft can do no right, so perhaps I should be unsurprised by this story. Rather than bashing them, why not download the CLR and C# source for FreeBSD and have a play with that?
Honestly, you Slashbots. One the one hand, Enron are bad because they used accounting tricks and pretended to have billions of dollars that they didn't. Microsoft, perhaps surprisingly, eschew fancy creative accounting, and have real cash money, which they invest in, among other things, T-bills, just like Grandma.
Let's put $40B into perspective. That's about a quarter of the shareholder value lost by Vodafone since it's peak. That's less than the value that Juniper or AOL/TW lost in a year. That's less than Marconi were forced to write off. It's a fraction of what Cisco or GE are worth. In other words, in an industry as volatile as high tech, it's only prudent to keep a lot of hard cash on hand - it's called "Catastrophe Hedging" for a reason.
If it were illegal, the Govt. would have busted them. The name Arthur Andersen was impeccable, far more so than Microsoft, but when the broke the rules, they were taken out in short order.
On
The inner details are not just neglected; the companies intentionally keep them secret and prosecute people who leak them.
As a result, software can't be made reliable, not even in principle.
I don't see how you can get from your first point there to your second. Take the software in a typical phone switch, for example, it's proprietary and rock solid. If a phone switch goes down, it's most likely a hardware fault, in my experience. The same could be said for any amount of embedded code, when did the software in your cellphone last crash? Your VCR?
The reason commercial software has bugs is very simply because people (i.e. the market, the people spending dollars on software) have indicated by their purchasing behavior that they are willing to accept a level of unreliability in exchange for shorter version cycles. The same purchasing patterns don't apply to hardware or embedded systems. The fact that the software is proprietary or not is neither here nor there.
I will also point out that in the high-end software market, the customer will hold the proprietary source code in escrow, just in case.
If *everything* underneath your code is Open Source, then in principle you can examine it and find problems
In theory, you're right, but in practice, how many bugs have there been in sendmail or bind? Open source lulls people into a false sense of security, because everyone assumes everyone else has checked it, and no-one actually does! But again, that fact that the source code is available is irrelevant to reliability - properly designed and implemented software, whether it's open or closed source, can be made as reliable as you are willing to invest resources (time, money, people, etc) in.
The shell is a program that runs on top of UNIX and can be replaced with a different shell at the discretion of the computer's user. I don't have to use bash; I could use tcsh if I wanted to.
/bin/sh it's true, but you would also have to rewrite all your startup scripts and much of your systems administration utility set.
IE is a program that runs as an integral part of the Windows kernel and can not be replaced by a different browser. Or so the states are trying to argue.
Well, you could replace
You can install another browser on Windows too; just because MSIE is there doesn't mean you have to use it.
a government attorney asked him to name an OS (other than one made by Microsoft) where the browser couldn't be removed. Madnick also faltered on several other questions.
Is Internet Explorer any less a part of Windows than the shell is a part of Unix? Where exactly do you draw the line? Discuss.