No. A remotely addressable trap is much cheaper than a cable box. The problem with a remotely adressable trap is that the cable company doesn't get to charge a monthly rental fee for a box for each television.
If the dev teams of some of the other browsers didn't throw a tantrum at the mere idea of adding a feature that Microsoft included first, web developers wouldn't need to do that.
Sure, you can make a good argument that you don't need anything extra for a web page, but that overlooks the fact that many of us develop web-based applications for use on the corporate intranet. The workstations are locked down and the users have to wait weeks to get an app installed by the IT organization. There is a big demand for zero-footprint apps.
When doing an actual user interface, HTML & CSS suck. You have to provide a consistent interface. Period. To accomplish this, you end up having to do a lot of DOM scripting. You don't have the time or resources to refactor the code for each browser so you write to the corporate standard browser. When that browser has features that the others don't, and those features are part of the business requirement, you use those features.
Who do you sue if the vendor goes under? How do you sue a company that no longer exists? How do you get support/patches/etc for your proprietary software after the vendor goes under?
If the answer to these questions matters at all to your company, you either put access to the source in your contract with the vendor, develop it yourself, or use an existing open source project.
If you think web development is what you see on the public internet, you are very much mistaken. Web based applications are far more difficult to develop than a stand alone application of similar complexity.
An application we developed in house at my company basically provides a network fileshare with additional features such as file versioning, document lifecycle management, ACLs, recycle bin, etc through a web browser interface. More importantly, the user interface looks and behaves very much like windows explorer because our users are already familiar with that interface. It had to be done strictly with HTML and javascript because of restrictions on deploying ActiveX controls, plugins, or Java applets.
Yeah, I'd call that programming.
Re:Perfect Security is infinite...
on
Security Warrior
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You're very close. The part that is wrong is how you decide where the threshold should be set.
The correct answer is that the threshold should be set at the point where increasing security further incurs a greater cost than the value of the risk mitigated by the increase. In other words, you perform a risk assessment and a cost/benefit analysis before you spend a lot of time/money on elaborate security measures.
If a security measure is going to cost $50k to mitigate $5k of risk, it isn't worth it.
Individual situations will continue to push the envelope of what is considered "reasonable". Over time the protection will be eroded. Therefore it is better to avoid clauses that require subjective judgement as to what consititutes reasonable.
The "XBox Only" games are the only reason I even think about buying an XBox at the current price. The problem for Microsoft is that there aren't enough killer games in that category. I have a PS2 and a GameCube. Almost every game that I want to play is available on one or both of those systems. For the few that aren't, it boils down to whether I spend $250+ to play that one game.
If KotOR hadn't also been released for the PC, I might have gone ahead and gotten an XBox. As it stands, they'd have to drop the price $99 and throw in the DVD kit, second controller, and a game I'm actually interested in playing before I'd actually break down and buy one.
I have an original launch day PS2 that works fine. I had to open it up and clean the lens last year, but dust can be a problem with any optical system. My son has another one that hasn't even needed that much.
If you've had so many problems with your PS2, maybe you need to take better care of your gear.
The point is that you probably wouldn't do that, and your angry that Indian workers can live comfortably getting paid 10 times less you. If you're really serious about this you could probably find ways to cut your living expenses to the point where it would be feasable to produce code for a very low cost.
Clearly you have no conception of the cost of living in America. Lets take pretty much the best case. A one bedroom apartment for $500 a month. $50 a month for electric. $150 a month for food. $300 a month for car payment, insurance and gas. $50 a month for clothes. $50 a month washing the clothes at a laundromat. $25 a month for telephone service.
Let's use the salary figure of $22k mentioned in the article. That should be about $1200 per month after taxes. The expenses listed above add up to $1125. That's quite a bit on the low side for most areas. In any case that leaves $75 per month for miscellaneous things like buying birthday and christmas presents for family members, routine auto maintenance, and so forth.
In short, it's anything but a comfortable existence. Notice that I didn't include any entertainment. No DVD's. No cable TV. No taking your date to the movies. No internet. No alcohol or tobacco. You just can't afford those things on 22k when you're supporting yourself.
You overlooked the part about it being a civil action rather than a criminal action. In a civil case, they don't have to _prove_ anything. The evidence presented merely has to favor their side of the story.
Of course, the judge may also weigh the relative harm to the parties. So even if you brought in your backpack and demonstrated the boiling point of water for the court, the judge may still find that the company will suffer irreparable harm if you were allowed to publish those findings.
Bringing the system out so quickly would mean that 3rd-party developers would have insufficient time to get release games ready, and I think after the N64 Nintedo has learnt that a system with only 1st and 2nd party games isn't going to be a commercial success.
And what leads you to believe they learned anything from the N64? Seems to me that they repeated most of their mistakes with the Gamecube. 3rd party support for the Gamecube is still weak. How many third party games are exclusive to the Gamecube? The only ones that come to my mind are Resident Evil Zero and Crystal Chronicles and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if Sony would release the PocketStation in the US that Crystal Chronicles wouldn't be a Gamecube exclusive.
The Gamecube was out for over a year before they had enough good games for me to justify buying one. I fully expect Nintendo to repeat themselves yet again with their next console.
And so far, they haven't been killed as far as I know.
Yet. Even if they aren't physically killed, the cost of defending all the various lawsuits and/or lobbying for legislation by De Beers may just kill the companies.
Your comment betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of basic finance. You can't make it up on volume if your cost per unit not including overhead is higher than your revenue per unit. The more units you sell at a loss, the worse off you are.
VOIP on a flat rate plan is a bit more complicated. You incur a per minute connection charge from the ILECs but you're charging customers a fixed rate per month. In other words, you're betting that the average monthly usage will be low enough that the connection charges are less than your revenue. Since the population who would be most interested in this product are those with substantial long distance bills, this isn't a very safe bet.
Another lesson is: don't buy a proprietary app from a company until that company has been evaluated for stability and the company has posted a bond against non-performance.
We don't buy applications from anyone that hasn't passed a strict evaluation. Financial stability, current or pending litigation, etc. If there's any chance at all they won't be around in a couple years, we don't use their products.
The problem with your timesheet solution is that you picked the wrong database to base it on. PHP is questionable because management types tend to prefer ASP, but you may have been able to make a case for it. What screwed you was MySQL. MySQL should never have been considered.
Management in a financial institution is not going to approve storing timesheets in an RDBMS that does not have a proven track record with a financially stable vendor backing it who will fix any issues in a timely manner. I don't care how far MySQL has come or that you can buy a support contract from somebody. It isn't proven in the enterprise and there's no guarantee that a particular support vendor is going to be around in a few years. If you had gone with Oracle or SQL Server as the back-end, you might have gotten more buy-in from management.
Another consideration is that 4-5 months of a developers salary is starting to get in the same ballpark as buying a 50k application. If you had something usable in say two months, you might have sold them on it.
Developing applications for a business requires as much political savvy as programming ability. You may have the development down, but I reccomend working on your politics a bit more.
1) Our notebooks are locked down. Users aren't admin. 2) The dial up connection is configured to only access our network. 3) TCP/IP is statically configured for our network.
It has nothing to do with network environment. It has to do with the fact that the operating system and software are rarely kept in a default install configuration. Some of these patches can go south in bizarre ways when the configuration isn't what the patch expected. You simply have no idea what is going to happen when you install the patch. That may be fine in a mom and pop operation. It is clearly not acceptable for an enterprise.
In my company, a bad patch can mean 10,000 reps sitting around with nothing to do and impact hundreds of thousands of customers. Do you want to be the person who pushes the patch without testing it first? Actually, let me rephrase that. Do you want to be the person looking for new employment after the bad patch costs the company millions of dollars?
Bingo. It never ceases to amaze me through how many loops people will go, just to stay "fashionable". One of them being the retarded use of XML on an _internal_ data pipeline. Don't get me wrong. XML is great for its original purpose: a standard format for exchanging data with other programs. Programs not made by you, nor under your control.
Is it that you didn't read the article or is it that you don't understand the purpose of a message queue? Just to clarify things for you, this is a way for your program to exchange data in a standard format with other programs. Programs not made by you, nor under your control.
I thought it was bad enough to see programs where perfectly good relational data isn't just printed to the screen as such. No siree, bub. They first convert it to XML, then run through an XSLT transformation to get the same data back. _Then_ they print it.
The program doesn't have to provide its own presentation layer. Any other program can use the XML data and ignore the XSLT transform. In a client-server application, the server doesn't have to do as much work. If the data changes, you can publish a new stylesheet instead of coding/distributing a new version of the program. To sum up, it requires less development resources and it reduces utilization of your servers. These are both very desirable.
Your financial response is pointless. He already gave you the numbers to figure the cost of scaling the existing solution. He has no idea how much it will cost to develop and maintain the new solution, because he doesn't have one yet. That's why he's asking.
Since it's questionable whether it's illegal, it will likely be allowed to slide. Even if a prosecutor decided to make an example, and these guys actually get convicted, it won't matter. After paying fines and penalties and so forth, they will still have a fortune left, and if they actually spend any jail time it will be in a federal country club, not hard time.
Look at Milkin. He defrauds investors of over a billion dollars, pays some fines, does a couple years, and has couple hundred million left over after he gets out. Where can I sign up for that job? Hell, even if it was hard time, I'd just pay Bubba and his friends a few hundred thousand a year to make sure that everyone left me alone.
Programmers aren't afraid of creating UIs. They simply recognize that creating a UI is a boring and tedious timesink that they would rather avoid given a choice. Further, in large businesses, functionality often has to take a back seat to form. It doesn't matter how easy to use it is if management doesn't think it's pretty enough.
I work in small development shop inside a large financial institution. We specialize in smaller projects that IT will never prioritize because it won't bring in at least 100 million dollars of additinal revenue. These projects still have substantial value to the business so we step in and fill the gap. Since we don't have a large number of developers, if it doesn't have to be done yesterday, we usually have one developer per project.
My current project is a database driven web application. The database and stored procedures were done in less than a week. Wrapping the database calls in server side script took another day or two. The last month has been spent working on the UI. We model the UI on paper, we go through the flows, I code it, the users test it, we redo the models, etc. I would much rather have spent that month working on something challenging. Especially when some of the most time consuming changes have been strictly cosmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Fill up every other day and that $10 becomes $150 over a month.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
In addition, with OOo, your IT guys have a much higher chance of being able to solve complex problems, because they have the source.
That statement assumes that your IT guys don't have anything more important to do. If they don't, you're probably employing too many IT guys.
No. A remotely addressable trap is much cheaper than a cable box. The problem with a remotely adressable trap is that the cable company doesn't get to charge a monthly rental fee for a box for each television.
If the dev teams of some of the other browsers didn't throw a tantrum at the mere idea of adding a feature that Microsoft included first, web developers wouldn't need to do that.
Sure, you can make a good argument that you don't need anything extra for a web page, but that overlooks the fact that many of us develop web-based applications for use on the corporate intranet. The workstations are locked down and the users have to wait weeks to get an app installed by the IT organization. There is a big demand for zero-footprint apps.
When doing an actual user interface, HTML & CSS suck. You have to provide a consistent interface. Period. To accomplish this, you end up having to do a lot of DOM scripting. You don't have the time or resources to refactor the code for each browser so you write to the corporate standard browser. When that browser has features that the others don't, and those features are part of the business requirement, you use those features.
Who do you sue if the vendor goes under? How do you sue a company that no longer exists? How do you get support/patches/etc for your proprietary software after the vendor goes under?
If the answer to these questions matters at all to your company, you either put access to the source in your contract with the vendor, develop it yourself, or use an existing open source project.
If you think web development is what you see on the public internet, you are very much mistaken. Web based applications are far more difficult to develop than a stand alone application of similar complexity.
An application we developed in house at my company basically provides a network fileshare with additional features such as file versioning, document lifecycle management, ACLs, recycle bin, etc through a web browser interface. More importantly, the user interface looks and behaves very much like windows explorer because our users are already familiar with that interface. It had to be done strictly with HTML and javascript because of restrictions on deploying ActiveX controls, plugins, or Java applets.
Yeah, I'd call that programming.
You're very close. The part that is wrong is how you decide where the threshold should be set.
The correct answer is that the threshold should be set at the point where increasing security further incurs a greater cost than the value of the risk mitigated by the increase. In other words, you perform a risk assessment and a cost/benefit analysis before you spend a lot of time/money on elaborate security measures.
If a security measure is going to cost $50k to mitigate $5k of risk, it isn't worth it.
Individual situations will continue to push the envelope of what is considered "reasonable". Over time the protection will be eroded. Therefore it is better to avoid clauses that require subjective judgement as to what consititutes reasonable.
The "XBox Only" games are the only reason I even think about buying an XBox at the current price. The problem for Microsoft is that there aren't enough killer games in that category. I have a PS2 and a GameCube. Almost every game that I want to play is available on one or both of those systems. For the few that aren't, it boils down to whether I spend $250+ to play that one game.
If KotOR hadn't also been released for the PC, I might have gone ahead and gotten an XBox. As it stands, they'd have to drop the price $99 and throw in the DVD kit, second controller, and a game I'm actually interested in playing before I'd actually break down and buy one.
I have an original launch day PS2 that works fine. I had to open it up and clean the lens last year, but dust can be a problem with any optical system. My son has another one that hasn't even needed that much.
If you've had so many problems with your PS2, maybe you need to take better care of your gear.
The point is that you probably wouldn't do that, and your angry that Indian workers can live comfortably getting paid 10 times less you. If you're really serious about this you could probably find ways to cut your living expenses to the point where it would be feasable to produce code for a very low cost.
Clearly you have no conception of the cost of living in America. Lets take pretty much the best case. A one bedroom apartment for $500 a month. $50 a month for electric. $150 a month for food. $300 a month for car payment, insurance and gas. $50 a month for clothes. $50 a month washing the clothes at a laundromat. $25 a month for telephone service.
Let's use the salary figure of $22k mentioned in the article. That should be about $1200 per month after taxes. The expenses listed above add up to $1125. That's quite a bit on the low side for most areas. In any case that leaves $75 per month for miscellaneous things like buying birthday and christmas presents for family members, routine auto maintenance, and so forth.
In short, it's anything but a comfortable existence. Notice that I didn't include any entertainment. No DVD's. No cable TV. No taking your date to the movies. No internet. No alcohol or tobacco. You just can't afford those things on 22k when you're supporting yourself.
You overlooked the part about it being a civil action rather than a criminal action. In a civil case, they don't have to _prove_ anything. The evidence presented merely has to favor their side of the story.
Of course, the judge may also weigh the relative harm to the parties. So even if you brought in your backpack and demonstrated the boiling point of water for the court, the judge may still find that the company will suffer irreparable harm if you were allowed to publish those findings.
Bringing the system out so quickly would mean that 3rd-party developers would have insufficient time to get release games ready, and I think after the N64 Nintedo has learnt that a system with only 1st and 2nd party games isn't going to be a commercial success.
And what leads you to believe they learned anything from the N64? Seems to me that they repeated most of their mistakes with the Gamecube. 3rd party support for the Gamecube is still weak. How many third party games are exclusive to the Gamecube? The only ones that come to my mind are Resident Evil Zero and Crystal Chronicles and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if Sony would release the PocketStation in the US that Crystal Chronicles wouldn't be a Gamecube exclusive.
The Gamecube was out for over a year before they had enough good games for me to justify buying one. I fully expect Nintendo to repeat themselves yet again with their next console.
And so far, they haven't been killed as far as I know.
Yet. Even if they aren't physically killed, the cost of defending all the various lawsuits and/or lobbying for legislation by De Beers may just kill the companies.
Your comment betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of basic finance. You can't make it up on volume if your cost per unit not including overhead is higher than your revenue per unit. The more units you sell at a loss, the worse off you are.
VOIP on a flat rate plan is a bit more complicated. You incur a per minute connection charge from the ILECs but you're charging customers a fixed rate per month. In other words, you're betting that the average monthly usage will be low enough that the connection charges are less than your revenue. Since the population who would be most interested in this product are those with substantial long distance bills, this isn't a very safe bet.
Another lesson is: don't buy a proprietary app from a company until that company has been evaluated for stability and the company has posted a bond against non-performance.
We don't buy applications from anyone that hasn't passed a strict evaluation. Financial stability, current or pending litigation, etc. If there's any chance at all they won't be around in a couple years, we don't use their products.
They can't get to the configuration information. They could find it by trial and error but it just isn't worth the hassle.
Some constructive criticism:
The problem with your timesheet solution is that you picked the wrong database to base it on. PHP is questionable because management types tend to prefer ASP, but you may have been able to make a case for it. What screwed you was MySQL. MySQL should never have been considered.
Management in a financial institution is not going to approve storing timesheets in an RDBMS that does not have a proven track record with a financially stable vendor backing it who will fix any issues in a timely manner. I don't care how far MySQL has come or that you can buy a support contract from somebody. It isn't proven in the enterprise and there's no guarantee that a particular support vendor is going to be around in a few years. If you had gone with Oracle or SQL Server as the back-end, you might have gotten more buy-in from management.
Another consideration is that 4-5 months of a developers salary is starting to get in the same ballpark as buying a 50k application. If you had something usable in say two months, you might have sold them on it.
Developing applications for a business requires as much political savvy as programming ability. You may have the development down, but I reccomend working on your politics a bit more.
We don't have this problem.
1) Our notebooks are locked down. Users aren't admin.
2) The dial up connection is configured to only access our network.
3) TCP/IP is statically configured for our network.
It has nothing to do with network environment. It has to do with the fact that the operating system and software are rarely kept in a default install configuration. Some of these patches can go south in bizarre ways when the configuration isn't what the patch expected. You simply have no idea what is going to happen when you install the patch. That may be fine in a mom and pop operation. It is clearly not acceptable for an enterprise.
In my company, a bad patch can mean 10,000 reps sitting around with nothing to do and impact hundreds of thousands of customers. Do you want to be the person who pushes the patch without testing it first? Actually, let me rephrase that. Do you want to be the person looking for new employment after the bad patch costs the company millions of dollars?
Bingo. It never ceases to amaze me through how many loops people will go, just to stay "fashionable". One of them being the retarded use of XML on an _internal_ data pipeline. Don't get me wrong. XML is great for its original purpose: a standard format for exchanging data with other programs. Programs not made by you, nor under your control.
Is it that you didn't read the article or is it that you don't understand the purpose of a message queue? Just to clarify things for you, this is a way for your program to exchange data in a standard format with other programs. Programs not made by you, nor under your control.
I thought it was bad enough to see programs where perfectly good relational data isn't just printed to the screen as such. No siree, bub. They first convert it to XML, then run through an XSLT transformation to get the same data back. _Then_ they print it.
The program doesn't have to provide its own presentation layer. Any other program can use the XML data and ignore the XSLT transform. In a client-server application, the server doesn't have to do as much work. If the data changes, you can publish a new stylesheet instead of coding/distributing a new version of the program. To sum up, it requires less development resources and it reduces utilization of your servers. These are both very desirable.
Your financial response is pointless. He already gave you the numbers to figure the cost of scaling the existing solution. He has no idea how much it will cost to develop and maintain the new solution, because he doesn't have one yet. That's why he's asking.
Since it's questionable whether it's illegal, it will likely be allowed to slide. Even if a prosecutor decided to make an example, and these guys actually get convicted, it won't matter. After paying fines and penalties and so forth, they will still have a fortune left, and if they actually spend any jail time it will be in a federal country club, not hard time.
Look at Milkin. He defrauds investors of over a billion dollars, pays some fines, does a couple years, and has couple hundred million left over after he gets out. Where can I sign up for that job? Hell, even if it was hard time, I'd just pay Bubba and his friends a few hundred thousand a year to make sure that everyone left me alone.
Programmers aren't afraid of creating UIs. They simply recognize that creating a UI is a boring and tedious timesink that they would rather avoid given a choice. Further, in large businesses, functionality often has to take a back seat to form. It doesn't matter how easy to use it is if management doesn't think it's pretty enough.
I work in small development shop inside a large financial institution. We specialize in smaller projects that IT will never prioritize because it won't bring in at least 100 million dollars of additinal revenue. These projects still have substantial value to the business so we step in and fill the gap. Since we don't have a large number of developers, if it doesn't have to be done yesterday, we usually have one developer per project.
My current project is a database driven web application. The database and stored procedures were done in less than a week. Wrapping the database calls in server side script took another day or two. The last month has been spent working on the UI. We model the UI on paper, we go through the flows, I code it, the users test it, we redo the models, etc. I would much rather have spent that month working on something challenging. Especially when some of the most time consuming changes have been strictly cosmetic.