The following article makes the point
that asking users to pick and memorize
cryptic passwords that they must change
every 60 days etc. is both unreasonable
and usually unnecessary. Different
types of accounts require different
levels of security (e.g. if shadow
passwords are implemented why worry
so much about password cracking -
be more concerned about keeping the
root account secure). Instead, more
effort should be expended on securing
system rather than chasing down those
users who forgot to include a digit
in their password. And face it, in
the real world
a large corporation with thousands
of users is NEVER going to get
every user to pick a totally cryptic
password.
You are going to find that company paid training/educational benefits is going to greatly vary from place to place. Generally, if you are a consultant rather than a salaried staff, don't expect any such benefits. Ultimately though keeping up your skills is YOUR responsibility, not the company's - although they may have a vested interest in training their staff for the specific skills THEY think you need to perform your job for them (remember from their perspective you could leave the job at any time). Certainly take advantage of any opportunities your company might offer (time off, tuition re-imbursement) and take advantage of any in-house training even if it isn't directly related to the technical skill training you especially want. If you can persuade your manager for specific training all the better - but be sure to later show how this training has paid off if you ever plan to ask for additional training!! Don't expect (or treat) training/education as just another benefit like vacation or health insurance.
Show initiative by investing in yourself.
And don't forget that continuing education should always include soft skills (time management, project planning, customer consulting, etc.) in addition to technical training!
While there are advantages to electronic publishing, let's not forget that the digital
age is mostly powered by dead trees (and other vegetation/biota) - coal and oil - and we get some global warming to boot (blue smog if you live in LA). Oh, and has anyone truly figured out how to displose of all those dead PCs and monitors?!
Gee, do you think that any of the current fad languages like Java, Python, etc. will be around for anywhere near as long as Fortran? Perhaps we should start laughing at them now before they quickly disappear from the repertoire of the next generation of programmers (will they be as condescending towards the former coders and their "irrelevant" languages?). Only Cobol and C seems to have anywhere near the same longevity. Fortran is still hard to beat for numerical analysis although its more recent permutations have made it a vastly more complex language. It was that original simplicity and focus on numerical computation that made Fortran so incredibly useful - it made computers much more accessible and allowed its users to focus on problem solving rather than syntax (does ANYBODY besides Stroustrup truly understand all of C++?? And now many software screw-ups can be attributed to C/C++ coding:-).
Yes, this US Census map data is probably good enough for producing detailed maps in most cases (unless you want to get down to the detail of every pothole and fire hydrant) - that was its intent (detailed street maps down to the block face for census purposes). However, there are some caveats for using this data. An important issue is that this TIGER data is certainly not updated very frequently and I suspect it reflects roadways circa 1999 when the digital map data was finalized. In urban areas such details are constantly changing. Keeping such data up-to-date is expensive. Commercial companies tend to keep on top of this (although my experience with the various on-line mapping web sites is that they don't!). This TIGER data lacks other information, such as the nature of the roads (e.g., one-way, multi-lane, nature of intersections, etc.) that would be useful in producing real-time or interactive driving maps.
Quite true! Although, in some cases the security risks requiring something like SSL are overrated. How often have you heard about someone's credit card information being stolen after being sniffed off of the network - versus being stolen after an insecure server was broken into? Way too often both the customers and the owners of the e-commerce (or whatever) servers place too much trust in the use of SSL/TLS without considering ALL of the other security issues. Most likely because the use of SSL/TLS is openly advertised and obvious - a badly configured server is not so apparent but far more critical. Issuing certificates is also a lucrative business but one with some dubious assumptions of substantial value.
Absolutely! Find a good comfortable chair (pay whatever it costs) and adjust your desk, monitor, keyboard to make things comfortable. I too had back problems and narrowed down the cause to the cheap chair I used while working on my PC at home. Don't continue working if pain appears. Oh, and do remember to get up and stretch once in a while - a few minor changes in habits like this will prevent more serious injuries down the road.
(There IS more to life than sitting in front of a CRT for hours on end...)
I don't disagree - I think that it would be great if there were open source implementations of these various interop GIS standards, an end-run around the vendors as you mention. However, this cannot be done if you don't have all of the standards:-) And it would be very helpful to understand the evolving arguements and logic that go into the various proposals and developing standards - thus my complaints that OpenGIS is not very "open". Considering that OpenGIS has been around for nearly 8 years now, it really hasn't made much of an impact - which is unfortunate (and I certainly don't blame the original organizers of OpenGIS - in my view, the commercial GIS industry has been dragging its feet, perhaps not surprising). These views about OpenGIS are hardly mine alone - there have been similar complaints published in the trade literature over the years. It would also appear that how much gets published from the various Opengis subcommittees is highly dependent upon the views of the individuals/organizations on those various subcommittees (i.e., some are more "open" than others).
Now indeed, various groups/individuals have been attempting to implement these OpenGIS standards as best they can given what is available. You might have a look at: geotools OGR Simple Feature Library
While not OpenSource, the following is an interesting implementation of an OpenGIS compatible map server:
DEMIS World Map Server
(This OGC Web Map Server spec can be found at:
00-028.pdf)
Hey - don't forget that other open source Java-based visualization system VisAD:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visad.html
This one is more raster-based (e.g. topo and satellite data) rather than vector-based. But nonetheless, quite impressive software.
The "Open" in Opengis should not be confused with the same meaning as "Open" source community or even "open" to the public. This is a closed organization (paid membership only) that works on standards behind closed doors. As a result, an "industry" bias is to be found in the specifications. "Open" only refers to be possibility of data interchange between vendor's systems (sort of like Microsoft claiming that its published APIs are "open".) Sure, they eventually publish some standards after the fact - but how many vendors are really implementing them?
Your comments are right on the mark. Too many people simply think that GIS = "visualization". GIS is not so much about visualizing geographic data (although that is important, it is also the "easy" part), as it is about collecting, organizing, managing, and analyzing spatial (geographic) data. There are all sorts of crucial issues involving spatial and temporal accuracy (too often neglected by uninformed users of such systems), not to mention issues involving the properties being measured. Creating/updating data is expensive. And don't forget the Metadata records to keep track of everything! Spatial databases can be far more complex than ordinary relational databases because of varying spatial relationships. Analyzing such data is also much more involved than most basic statistical methods allow for. It is not too far from the truth that may users of commercial GIS systems don't have much of a clue regarding many of these issues. Certainly very few open source projects deal with all of them. GRASS sort of does (it has hooks to various databases and to S-plus) but in many ways it is a software dinosaur (but hey, it works!)
Well, firstly that gawd-awful "shapefile" format was created (and since modified) solely by ESRI.
An "industry standard" perhaps - as ESRI controls 60-80% of the GIS market (depending upon what segment you look at). Secondly, a shapefile is not the standard way in which Arc/Info stores its data - these binary formats (e.g., the "e00" files) are entirely proprietary. There have been some attempts to try and reverse engineer this format - use google to look up "e00 format".
Gee, according to my dictionary to "interrupt" does mean "to stop" or "to break". I suspect what you might mean is at what point did Egghead's security actually detect and then interrupt the intrusion (e.g. before or after any credit card numbers may have been downloaded).
I do agree that having all of those credit card numbers stored and so easily accessibly is pretty stupid on Egghead's part. I have to wonder how many other on-line vendors have similar practices.
On the other hand, only 7500 instances of potentially fradulent activity among 3 million accounts is pretty low - probably in the 'to be expected' range - after all, how many people use the same credit for a variety of purchases. Theft of credit card numbers isn't restricted to just on-line vendors. But then that assumes fradulently obtained credit cards might be used right away rather than stashed away for later misuse...
Once you start adding a number of people to a project you need to start thinking about how best to create a good working environment and how to manage people. Such soft skills are just as crucial as figuring out programming standards or which software tools to standardize on. I'd highly recommend the following:
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" (2nd ed) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
"Extreme Programming Explained" by Kent Beck
You may not agree with everything in these books but nonetheless they offer a lot of ideas to consider. I would suggest that is much easier to overcome poor software tools than poor project management and leadership.
If you purchased this at Circuit City for $99.99 it must have been the cheaper APEX 500B (also listed at www.circuitcity.com). I have heard a number of complaints about this device not working well but I suppose for the price you get what you pay for. Interesting that when I was last at Circuit City I noticed the sales people actively discouraging people from buying the 500B and directing them to players in the $200 range because they said they had a lot of returns on this cheap player. The Circuit City I was at certainly was well-stocked with the 500B and AD660.
I completely agree - but did you mention that Netscape 6 is just plan buggy! I've run into web pages that don't display correctly (they worked just fine under 4.6/4.7) and printing a web page sometimes fails miserably. And all of that crappy advertising built into the browser - yuck! All-in-all AOL blew it with this "release". As far as I am concerned, Netscape 6 is still beta and I would not recommend it except maybe to test a few features not found in the earlier versions of Netscape. Increasingly I find myself using MS IE simply because it works more consistently than Netscape.
Gee, were we on the same team;-) My "new" team (a merger of several existing groups) took this M-B test (administered by consultants) about a year ago as part of a team-building effort. The results were mainly intended to illustrate that people have different personalities and associated tendencies which need to be considered when understanding the actions (and re-actions) of other team members. Certainly to some degree it simply identifies traits one could have guessed about someone else if you had been working with them for a while (most of us hadn't). The M-B test can be a useful tool, among many, for honestly understanding one's self and others but alas it can also be abused by management types who don't have a clue. I suspect that the M-B test is widely administered, especially in larger companies where "team-building" is a mantra, but probably just as widely never used effectively.
The following are two on-line example of the M-B test:
Slashdot Mirror
"Stronger Passwords Aren't"l umns_executive_view.shtml
http://www.infosecuritymag.com/articles/june01/co
And don't forget that continuing education should always include soft skills (time management, project planning, customer consulting, etc.) in addition to technical training!
While there are advantages to electronic publishing, let's not forget that the digital age is mostly powered by dead trees (and other vegetation/biota) - coal and oil - and we get some global warming to boot (blue smog if you live in LA). Oh, and has anyone truly figured out how to displose of all those dead PCs and monitors?!
Gee, do you think that any of the current fad languages like Java, Python, etc. will be around for anywhere near as long as Fortran? Perhaps we should start laughing at them now before they quickly disappear from the repertoire of the next generation of programmers (will they be as condescending towards the former coders and their "irrelevant" languages?). Only Cobol and C seems to have anywhere near the same longevity. Fortran is still hard to beat for numerical analysis although its more recent permutations have made it a vastly more complex language. It was that original simplicity and focus on numerical computation that made Fortran so incredibly useful - it made computers much more accessible and allowed its users to focus on problem solving rather than syntax (does ANYBODY besides Stroustrup truly understand all of C++?? And now many software screw-ups can be attributed to C/C++ coding :-).
National Weather Service AWIPS Map Database Catalog
http://isl715.nws.noaa.gov/mapdata/newcat/
All Sorts of U.S. ditigal map data in Shapefile format.
GOES Imagery On-line at NASA-GSFC
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/text/0readme.html
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/
http://www1.etl.noaa.gov/climsat/realtime.html
Your basic weather satellite data - get the latest imagery.
Virtual Terrain Project ...
http://vterrain.org/index.html
Another interesting open source project
DGPS corrections over the Internet
http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html
Of interest to GPS users. Neat!
Yes, this US Census map data is probably good enough for producing detailed maps in most cases (unless you want to get down to the detail of every pothole and fire hydrant) - that was its intent (detailed street maps down to the block face for census purposes). However, there are some caveats for using this data. An important issue is that this TIGER data is certainly not updated very frequently and I suspect it reflects roadways circa 1999 when the digital map data was finalized. In urban areas such details are constantly changing. Keeping such data up-to-date is expensive. Commercial companies tend to keep on top of this (although my experience with the various on-line mapping web sites is that they don't!). This TIGER data lacks other information, such as the nature of the roads (e.g., one-way, multi-lane, nature of intersections, etc.) that would be useful in producing real-time or interactive driving maps.
Quite true! Although, in some cases the security risks requiring something like SSL are overrated. How often have you heard about someone's credit card information being stolen after being sniffed off of the network - versus being stolen after an insecure server was broken into? Way too often both the customers and the owners of the e-commerce (or whatever) servers place too much trust in the use of SSL/TLS without considering ALL of the other security issues. Most likely because the use of SSL/TLS is openly advertised and obvious - a badly configured server is not so apparent but far more critical. Issuing certificates is also a lucrative business but one with some dubious assumptions of substantial value.
Absolutely! Find a good comfortable chair (pay whatever it costs) and adjust your desk, monitor, keyboard to make things comfortable. I too had back problems and narrowed down the cause to the cheap chair I used while working on my PC at home. Don't continue working if pain appears. Oh, and do remember to get up and stretch once in a while - a few minor changes in habits like this will prevent more serious injuries down the road. (There IS more to life than sitting in front of a CRT for hours on end ...)
Now indeed, various groups/individuals have been attempting to implement these OpenGIS standards as best they can given what is available. You might have a look at:
geotools
OGR Simple Feature Library
While not OpenSource, the following is an interesting implementation of an OpenGIS compatible map server:
DEMIS World Map Server
(This OGC Web Map Server spec can be found at: 00-028.pdf)
Hey - don't forget that other open source Java-based visualization system VisAD: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visad.html
This one is more raster-based (e.g. topo and satellite data) rather than vector-based. But nonetheless, quite impressive software.
The "Open" in Opengis should not be confused with the same meaning as "Open" source community or even "open" to the public. This is a closed organization (paid membership only) that works on standards behind closed doors. As a result, an "industry" bias is to be found in the specifications. "Open" only refers to be possibility of data interchange between vendor's systems (sort of like Microsoft claiming that its published APIs are "open".) Sure, they eventually publish some standards after the fact - but how many vendors are really implementing them?
Your comments are right on the mark. Too many people simply think that GIS = "visualization". GIS is not so much about visualizing geographic data (although that is important, it is also the "easy" part), as it is about collecting, organizing, managing, and analyzing spatial (geographic) data. There are all sorts of crucial issues involving spatial and temporal accuracy (too often neglected by uninformed users of such systems), not to mention issues involving the properties being measured. Creating/updating data is expensive. And don't forget the Metadata records to keep track of everything! Spatial databases can be far more complex than ordinary relational databases because of varying spatial relationships. Analyzing such data is also much more involved than most basic statistical methods allow for. It is not too far from the truth that may users of commercial GIS systems don't have much of a clue regarding many of these issues. Certainly very few open source projects deal with all of them. GRASS sort of does (it has hooks to various databases and to S-plus) but in many ways it is a software dinosaur (but hey, it works!)
Well, firstly that gawd-awful "shapefile" format was created (and since modified) solely by ESRI.
An "industry standard" perhaps - as ESRI controls 60-80% of the GIS market (depending upon what segment you look at). Secondly, a shapefile is not the standard way in which Arc/Info stores its data - these binary formats (e.g., the "e00" files) are entirely proprietary. There have been some attempts to try and reverse engineer this format - use google to look up "e00 format".
I do agree that having all of those credit card numbers stored and so easily accessibly is pretty stupid on Egghead's part. I have to wonder how many other on-line vendors have similar practices. On the other hand, only 7500 instances of potentially fradulent activity among 3 million accounts is pretty low - probably in the 'to be expected' range - after all, how many people use the same credit for a variety of purchases. Theft of credit card numbers isn't restricted to just on-line vendors. But then that assumes fradulently obtained credit cards might be used right away rather than stashed away for later misuse ...
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" (2nd ed) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
"Extreme Programming Explained" by Kent Beck
You may not agree with everything in these books but nonetheless they offer a lot of ideas to consider. I would suggest that is much easier to overcome poor software tools than poor project management and leadership.
If you purchased this at Circuit City for $99.99 it must have been the cheaper APEX 500B (also listed at www.circuitcity.com). I have heard a number of complaints about this device not working well but I suppose for the price you get what you pay for. Interesting that when I was last at Circuit City I noticed the sales people actively discouraging people from buying the 500B and directing them to players in the $200 range because they said they had a lot of returns on this cheap player. The Circuit City I was at certainly was well-stocked with the 500B and AD660.
I completely agree - but did you mention that Netscape 6 is just plan buggy! I've run into web pages that don't display correctly (they worked just fine under 4.6/4.7) and printing a web page sometimes fails miserably. And all of that crappy advertising built into the browser - yuck! All-in-all AOL blew it with this "release". As far as I am concerned, Netscape 6 is still beta and I would not recommend it except maybe to test a few features not found in the earlier versions of Netscape. Increasingly I find myself using MS IE simply because it works more consistently than Netscape.
The following are two on-line example of the M-B test:
http://www.allhealth.com/onlinepsych/personality/o lpgen/0,6103,7119_127651,00.html
http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/mmdi-re/mmdi-re.ht m