quote"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
More details here though so far there's no explanation of how the accounts are getting hacked.
It's not hard to guess: Average people use the same password for just about everything, or simple permutations of the same password. Get access to any source that the user entered a password for, gain access to everything else.
Yeah, and do you know why? Because this guy believes that most advancements in science are cooperative efforts, and that recognizing individuals for merely putting the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle is intellectually dishonest: It devalues the work of everyone else who contributed.
Use SSL proxies. There's a huge number of them, and people scan for and compile lists for new ones all the time. It's not as slow as Tor, but if you find one that doesn't use a standard port (8080, etc) it may work well for you. I use them all the time to download stuff from "geo-locked" websites like the iPlayer/BBC.
For a few rare individuals, the world would improve if they ceased breathing.
When we indulge that kind of thinking, we devalue human life. If the RIAA CEO died, he would simply be replaced by a carbon-copy duplicate. Do you know what he looks like? Does he have a family? Do you know anything else about him, other than he's the CEO of RIAA? CEOs -- They talk, mostly. Sometimes they sign things. That's not a reason to kill.
It will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites.
Aren't you guys trying to force service providers to pick up the tab by changing the law -- you sit back and collect the profits while they pay the costs? I recently calculated that for about $33k worth of hard drives filled with infringing MP3s (average 4MB in size) I could be sued for statutory damages greater than what this country's entire economy made in 2009.
Don't cry to me that you can't pass the buck to service providers here when you've got that kind of legal power at your disposal.
Amen. Americans work longer hours, for less pay and benefits, than any other country. That's why we have such a high per capita:GDP ratio. Unfortunately, our infrastructure, labor force, and future was broken up and sold off piece by piece to chase the almighty dollar. Now the U.N. is recommending the dollar no longer be considered a stable reserve currency, and we're in an economic free-fall. Dell is just a symptom of the deeper rot.
Does anyone here care to name a PC manufacturer with a spotless record of turning out nothing but quality, or who has always been 100% up front about dealing with legitimate manufacturing problems?
I built a linux firewall out of a cardboard box, spare parts, and duct tape. The power switch was literally duct-taped to a hole I made in the side. It was pushed a grand total of three times during it's illustrious career. After configuring it and setting it to auto-update with Debian, it was left there unattended for about six years before it was finally decommissioned, still working. I wrote on the side of it "Hillbilly Deluxe Firewall".
If Dell can't make working computers using brand new equipment, an assembly line, trucks, workers, and a working budget bigger than "a can of Dew and some leftover chinese" like I did, I don't really think they have an excuse.
End of the story. No, seriously. Most companies in this industry have sunk not because their product or brand sucked, or the economy went bad, etc.; Most die because of bad management. Anyone remember Northgate computer systems? Very promising company. If it had maintained its profile it would be bigger than Dell today, but corporate mismanagement torpedoed it during the 90s -- during a period of economic growth and a huge upswing in computer sales.
I can see this science being abused. Whether your body contains a certain chemical signature or not is still circumstantial evidence, but increasingly our justice system (like many countries) are using it to give carte blanche access to a person's private information and life. Worse, if the request is later determined to have been falsified or exaggerated, the evidence gathered as a result of that request is still considered valid for the persecution of not just the original crime, but anything else uncovered as a result.
Thanks to shows like CSI and confidence in science, we want DNA samples, hair, urine, and a billion other things -- and believe that their presence somehow proves or disproves guilt. This is despite the fact that such evidence can be manufactured with ease -- the prime example being Photoshop for photographs, but virtually every technology you have around you can be used against you in some fashion or manipulated to imply or explicitly state something that is not true. Yet the courts rarely ask that samples be tested for contamination, or refuse to re-hear cases where the lab clearly and undeniably compromised the results.
It used to be that testimony was the primary vehicle in obtaining a conviction. Now we're increasingly using evidence that neither the judge, jury, defense, or even prosecution fully understands to take away other people's freedoms, sometimes under false pretext. While this particular technology is neither good nor bad, the system that will incorporate its use may be fundamentally flawed.
This, from a guy that used to post boobies and weenies links? Dude, you haven't got enough IQ points to fill a mayonnaise jar. Seriously -- there are people with letters after their names that back this stuff. What do you have? "A popular website marketed to Joe Average." Woooow... some cred there, man.
Simply put, there are some computational problems that work well with parallelization. And there are some that no matter how you try to approach it, you come back to a serial-based model. You could have a billion core machine running at 1Ghz get stomped by a single core machine running at 1.7Ghz for certain computational processes. We have yet to find a way computationally or mathematically to make intrinsically serialized problems into parallel ones. If we did, it would probably open up a whole new field of mathematics.
Yet the Russians ended up with moles in the CIA and FBI who were placed highly enough to accomplish shamefully *epic* damage to the US. Knock them for style points all you want, but dangling the $$ just plain worked. We got our @sses handed to us.
Hardly a systemic problem on our part. We've recruited quite a bit more spies than they have, quite a few for idealistic motives or dissatisfaction with their government. They come despite the low pay, dangerous extractions, etc., because frankly the US is a good place to live. We don't pay people who turn coat a lot of money, but what we offer them is a chance to start fresh, anonymously, on a big slab of rock that has the best economy and chance for personal wealth and success anywhere in the world.
In short; We usually only offer citizenship. And often, that's enough incentive all by itself.
Yeah, the Ruskis are laughable at penetrating US institutions!
Wiki quotes: "By 1985, Aldrich was heavily in debt. He owed money because of the divorce, and Maria was spending freely. After exceeding his credit limit on different credit cards, Aldrich considered robbing a bank. Realising he had no experience in performing such a caper, he instead decided to pursue the less hazardous option of selling information to the Soviets."
"Hanssen never indicated any political or ideological motive for his activities, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was the money."... Rather proves my point: They both approached the KGB, not the other way around.
"Officials said no secrets were compromised or revealed in the alleged plot, and the spy operation seems to have yielded little of value given some of the elaborate methods deployed. None of the 11 charged by US prosecutors was accused of accessing any classified or sensitive US government information."
This is typical of Russian intelligence activity. The book The Sword and the Shield: Mitrokhin Archive details most of the Soviet operations up until the mid 80s. This sounds like more of the same techniques: Attempting to attract young, impressionable, college-educated people to their cause and then trying to guide them into positions where they can gain intel. Unfortunately, the Russians still do not really understand american culture and so they find it difficult to penetrate deeply into any establishment domestically.
Historically, their most successful intelligence gathering operations were either through signals intelligence or from defectors who wanted monentary compensation. Their recruiting efforts have been laughably under-planned. This is just another example. Their resources would be better spent in open source intelligence to identify vulnerable individuals who could be blackmailed than attempting to sway them on idealistic grounds. Communism just isn't that sexy. Sadly for them, I don't think they have the resources anymore to do much more than the French -- industrial espionage is as far as they get too. But at least the French make money on their intelligence operations...
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." -- Fight Club.
Great. The future of PCs is trying to be like the mobile phone industry today. They call it "integration". I call it "service restriction." There's so many artificial barriers like this in IT right now it's seriously impeding our ability to innovate. Why do we need a dozen different platforms, fifty operating systems, and a plethora of incompatible development environments, languages, and libraries underneath that? And don't tell me it's because each fills a "special niche" -- that's only true to a point.
In the hardware world, we have cores -- dedicated chunks of silicon that each perform a specific task. They're licensed out for cheap, or in a growing number of cases, made available for free. I know programmers always have a library of their own code too because the truth is the same problems come up over and over again. But thanks to intellectual property and copyright law, there's virtually no code re-use. Nobody shares. And thanks to all of this, the operating system of 10 years ago could run on a P133 with 64MB of ram now needs 10x that just to boot.
If you'd come to me 10 years ago and said, "Hey, I'm from the future -- and look what we've done!"... I would have said "Fuck this, I'll be a doctor instead." It's complete bullshit the things we do in the name of profit. Think of what our infrastructure and society would look like today if we didn't have cell phones and basic cable sucking $200 or more out of us a month, banks finding new and better ways to fuck us over, debt collection firms getting people thrown in jail, and all this other stuff that basically say "We're fat, stupid, and need more money -- and you're gonna give it to us or else."
What the hell happened to the idea that technology was supposed to make society better?
This list looks like it only covers the United States. That's too bad.
Well, it was written for a US audience.
Moreover, most companies on the list don't have much business outside the U.S. Interesting.
Not really. Lots of IT outsourced to India, China, Canada, etc. Lower salary generally correlates with lower quality of life, the main reason for outsourcing. Something is keeping them geographically or economically locked into not outsourcing.
it would be interesting to know why some companies consume so much more IT labor than others, even within the same industries.
Mergers. Work duplication. Poor management. Continually patching up existing infrastructure instead of investing in new infrastructure (creeping maintenance costs). Outsourcing. Lack of interdepartmental cooperation. Consultants.
Do any of these companies' IT workers enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement, or are they "at-will" employees?
Fuck no, this is America.
IT contractors and temporary workers aren't mentioned, nor are outsourcing agreements. Are those workers excluded from the survey?
Contractors and temporary workers are difficult to count, since there's contractors, subcontractors, subsubcontractors, and layers upon layers of tax evasion going on to keep that aspect of the labor market alive. Just about anyone who's a contractor or temporary worker will tell you -- any permanent job is better than this. So there's little reason to ask how they're treated: We all know the answer.
Some (or many) of the company's IT workers may not actually work for the company, and they may be miserable, while IT employees who get paychecks directly from the company might be thrilled.
Well, yeah. Been there, done that. You know why they're thrilled? Dental. Paid vacation. A cube that isn't shared with a smelly guy who sleeps in your chair every night. The list goes on...
I worked at a company that was in the top 50 on the Fortune 500. They were renowned for their tolerance and diversity. I was fired from that place for being gay. Don't believe everything you read, folks. The best places to work won't be found through survey questions; The best place to work, is a place you can respect and that respects you.
Slashdot Mirror
quote"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Substitute recall for "policy change".
More details here though so far there's no explanation of how the accounts are getting hacked.
It's not hard to guess: Average people use the same password for just about everything, or simple permutations of the same password. Get access to any source that the user entered a password for, gain access to everything else.
Useful for:
* Corporate espionage
* Screwing with professors at school
* Pissing off Steve Jobs.
We all know which one's most likely.
He's worried about the government spying, not you.
Yeah, and do you know why? Because this guy believes that most advancements in science are cooperative efforts, and that recognizing individuals for merely putting the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle is intellectually dishonest: It devalues the work of everyone else who contributed.
Use SSL proxies. There's a huge number of them, and people scan for and compile lists for new ones all the time. It's not as slow as Tor, but if you find one that doesn't use a standard port (8080, etc) it may work well for you. I use them all the time to download stuff from "geo-locked" websites like the iPlayer/BBC.
Lets hope the washing machine doesn't leak because water is a great moderator. I am sure neither of us wants your mother-in-laws house to go sky high.
Well, on the upside, at least she'd know it was leaking when she saw the blue flash.
For a few rare individuals, the world would improve if they ceased breathing.
When we indulge that kind of thinking, we devalue human life. If the RIAA CEO died, he would simply be replaced by a carbon-copy duplicate. Do you know what he looks like? Does he have a family? Do you know anything else about him, other than he's the CEO of RIAA? CEOs -- They talk, mostly. Sometimes they sign things. That's not a reason to kill.
It will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites.
Aren't you guys trying to force service providers to pick up the tab by changing the law -- you sit back and collect the profits while they pay the costs? I recently calculated that for about $33k worth of hard drives filled with infringing MP3s (average 4MB in size) I could be sued for statutory damages greater than what this country's entire economy made in 2009.
Don't cry to me that you can't pass the buck to service providers here when you've got that kind of legal power at your disposal.
You can't outsource ethics.
Amen. Americans work longer hours, for less pay and benefits, than any other country. That's why we have such a high per capita:GDP ratio. Unfortunately, our infrastructure, labor force, and future was broken up and sold off piece by piece to chase the almighty dollar. Now the U.N. is recommending the dollar no longer be considered a stable reserve currency, and we're in an economic free-fall. Dell is just a symptom of the deeper rot.
Does anyone here care to name a PC manufacturer with a spotless record of turning out nothing but quality, or who has always been 100% up front about dealing with legitimate manufacturing problems?
I built a linux firewall out of a cardboard box, spare parts, and duct tape. The power switch was literally duct-taped to a hole I made in the side. It was pushed a grand total of three times during it's illustrious career. After configuring it and setting it to auto-update with Debian, it was left there unattended for about six years before it was finally decommissioned, still working. I wrote on the side of it "Hillbilly Deluxe Firewall".
If Dell can't make working computers using brand new equipment, an assembly line, trucks, workers, and a working budget bigger than "a can of Dew and some leftover chinese" like I did, I don't really think they have an excuse.
"We got greedy."
End of the story. No, seriously. Most companies in this industry have sunk not because their product or brand sucked, or the economy went bad, etc.; Most die because of bad management. Anyone remember Northgate computer systems? Very promising company. If it had maintained its profile it would be bigger than Dell today, but corporate mismanagement torpedoed it during the 90s -- during a period of economic growth and a huge upswing in computer sales.
People think solar power is renewable. What are they going to do when the Sun burns out, huh? HUH?
I can see this science being abused. Whether your body contains a certain chemical signature or not is still circumstantial evidence, but increasingly our justice system (like many countries) are using it to give carte blanche access to a person's private information and life. Worse, if the request is later determined to have been falsified or exaggerated, the evidence gathered as a result of that request is still considered valid for the persecution of not just the original crime, but anything else uncovered as a result.
Thanks to shows like CSI and confidence in science, we want DNA samples, hair, urine, and a billion other things -- and believe that their presence somehow proves or disproves guilt. This is despite the fact that such evidence can be manufactured with ease -- the prime example being Photoshop for photographs, but virtually every technology you have around you can be used against you in some fashion or manipulated to imply or explicitly state something that is not true. Yet the courts rarely ask that samples be tested for contamination, or refuse to re-hear cases where the lab clearly and undeniably compromised the results.
It used to be that testimony was the primary vehicle in obtaining a conviction. Now we're increasingly using evidence that neither the judge, jury, defense, or even prosecution fully understands to take away other people's freedoms, sometimes under false pretext. While this particular technology is neither good nor bad, the system that will incorporate its use may be fundamentally flawed.
This, from a guy that used to post boobies and weenies links? Dude, you haven't got enough IQ points to fill a mayonnaise jar. Seriously -- there are people with letters after their names that back this stuff. What do you have? "A popular website marketed to Joe Average." Woooow... some cred there, man.
Simply put, there are some computational problems that work well with parallelization. And there are some that no matter how you try to approach it, you come back to a serial-based model. You could have a billion core machine running at 1Ghz get stomped by a single core machine running at 1.7Ghz for certain computational processes. We have yet to find a way computationally or mathematically to make intrinsically serialized problems into parallel ones. If we did, it would probably open up a whole new field of mathematics.
Yet the Russians ended up with moles in the CIA and FBI who were placed highly enough to accomplish shamefully *epic* damage to the US. Knock them for style points all you want, but dangling the $$ just plain worked. We got our @sses handed to us.
Hardly a systemic problem on our part. We've recruited quite a bit more spies than they have, quite a few for idealistic motives or dissatisfaction with their government. They come despite the low pay, dangerous extractions, etc., because frankly the US is a good place to live. We don't pay people who turn coat a lot of money, but what we offer them is a chance to start fresh, anonymously, on a big slab of rock that has the best economy and chance for personal wealth and success anywhere in the world.
In short; We usually only offer citizenship. And often, that's enough incentive all by itself.
Russia is no longer a communist state.
No, it's classified loosely as a "federation", just like the United States is. That doesn't mean our cultures have much in common.
Yeah, the Ruskis are laughable at penetrating US institutions!
Wiki quotes:
"By 1985, Aldrich was heavily in debt. He owed money because of the divorce, and Maria was spending freely. After exceeding his credit limit on different credit cards, Aldrich considered robbing a bank. Realising he had no experience in performing such a caper, he instead decided to pursue the less hazardous option of selling information to the Soviets."
"Hanssen never indicated any political or ideological motive for his activities, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was the money." ... Rather proves my point: They both approached the KGB, not the other way around.
I would expect that we get some wonderful counterespionage out of Russia itself nowadays.
In Russia... no, no, I just can't do it. Russian intelligence is enough of a joke without resorting to cliches.
"Officials said no secrets were compromised or revealed in the alleged plot, and the spy operation seems to have yielded little of value given some of the elaborate methods deployed. None of the 11 charged by US prosecutors was accused of accessing any classified or sensitive US government information."
This is typical of Russian intelligence activity. The book The Sword and the Shield: Mitrokhin Archive details most of the Soviet operations up until the mid 80s. This sounds like more of the same techniques: Attempting to attract young, impressionable, college-educated people to their cause and then trying to guide them into positions where they can gain intel. Unfortunately, the Russians still do not really understand american culture and so they find it difficult to penetrate deeply into any establishment domestically.
Historically, their most successful intelligence gathering operations were either through signals intelligence or from defectors who wanted monentary compensation. Their recruiting efforts have been laughably under-planned. This is just another example. Their resources would be better spent in open source intelligence to identify vulnerable individuals who could be blackmailed than attempting to sway them on idealistic grounds. Communism just isn't that sexy. Sadly for them, I don't think they have the resources anymore to do much more than the French -- industrial espionage is as far as they get too. But at least the French make money on their intelligence operations...
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." -- Fight Club.
Great. The future of PCs is trying to be like the mobile phone industry today. They call it "integration". I call it "service restriction." There's so many artificial barriers like this in IT right now it's seriously impeding our ability to innovate. Why do we need a dozen different platforms, fifty operating systems, and a plethora of incompatible development environments, languages, and libraries underneath that? And don't tell me it's because each fills a "special niche" -- that's only true to a point.
In the hardware world, we have cores -- dedicated chunks of silicon that each perform a specific task. They're licensed out for cheap, or in a growing number of cases, made available for free. I know programmers always have a library of their own code too because the truth is the same problems come up over and over again. But thanks to intellectual property and copyright law, there's virtually no code re-use. Nobody shares. And thanks to all of this, the operating system of 10 years ago could run on a P133 with 64MB of ram now needs 10x that just to boot.
If you'd come to me 10 years ago and said, "Hey, I'm from the future -- and look what we've done!" ... I would have said "Fuck this, I'll be a doctor instead." It's complete bullshit the things we do in the name of profit. Think of what our infrastructure and society would look like today if we didn't have cell phones and basic cable sucking $200 or more out of us a month, banks finding new and better ways to fuck us over, debt collection firms getting people thrown in jail, and all this other stuff that basically say "We're fat, stupid, and need more money -- and you're gonna give it to us or else."
What the hell happened to the idea that technology was supposed to make society better?
This list looks like it only covers the United States. That's too bad.
Well, it was written for a US audience.
Moreover, most companies on the list don't have much business outside the U.S. Interesting.
Not really. Lots of IT outsourced to India, China, Canada, etc. Lower salary generally correlates with lower quality of life, the main reason for outsourcing. Something is keeping them geographically or economically locked into not outsourcing.
it would be interesting to know why some companies consume so much more IT labor than others, even within the same industries.
Mergers. Work duplication. Poor management. Continually patching up existing infrastructure instead of investing in new infrastructure (creeping maintenance costs). Outsourcing. Lack of interdepartmental cooperation. Consultants.
Do any of these companies' IT workers enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement, or are they "at-will" employees?
Fuck no, this is America.
IT contractors and temporary workers aren't mentioned, nor are outsourcing agreements. Are those workers excluded from the survey?
Contractors and temporary workers are difficult to count, since there's contractors, subcontractors, subsubcontractors, and layers upon layers of tax evasion going on to keep that aspect of the labor market alive. Just about anyone who's a contractor or temporary worker will tell you -- any permanent job is better than this. So there's little reason to ask how they're treated: We all know the answer.
Some (or many) of the company's IT workers may not actually work for the company, and they may be miserable, while IT employees who get paychecks directly from the company might be thrilled.
Well, yeah. Been there, done that. You know why they're thrilled? Dental. Paid vacation. A cube that isn't shared with a smelly guy who sleeps in your chair every night. The list goes on...
I worked at a company that was in the top 50 on the Fortune 500. They were renowned for their tolerance and diversity. I was fired from that place for being gay. Don't believe everything you read, folks. The best places to work won't be found through survey questions; The best place to work, is a place you can respect and that respects you.