We almost lost our production domain. The original dummkopf who set things up registered it all under his own name and individual email instead of using a role based account. He then was fired for unrelated incompetence. Fast forward to the domain renewal coming up.. charge went to his personal CC.. he disputed the charges.. we would have lost it except by pure dumb luck I was in the middle of a DNS migration project and was auditing/cleaning up the registrar details. It was as last minute as you'd want; expiration was within 12h.
One of my pet peeves - people who register for services or get licenses tied to their individual accounts.
Pretty much any set of algos is going to be easily defeated by humans trolling and no system is going to be anything near perfect. My thoughts;
1) Create a small set of simple, concise rules that are inviolate 2) Have a system so people can mark submissions as good (no rules broken/useful) or bad(rules broken) 3) Have your referees do nothing but determine if that submission is breaking one of your rules 4) Based your user trust as a derivative as how the user voted compared to what the referee votes
The theory is any controversial submission is going to get flagged & referees attention. Their job is limited in scope to just determining if the post breaks the site rules or not, nothing to do with quality / content / opinion. If users are trying to game the system their votes are going to conflict with the referees so their user trust is going to go down, whereas if people agree their trust is going to go up.
Eventually you'll have a group of users that you can generally trust to do the right thing so you can weight their actions accordingly.
Obviously there are some weaknesses;
- Referees are pretty much god (that's why the scope of their power is extremely narrow and simple) - You can end up with hive mind (though you can combat that if enough trusted users conflict with other trusted users). I'd argue it's a way better protection than pure crowdsourcing ala reddit where the demographics crush submissions into hivemind
Just tossing that out there off the top of my head. It's not something to replace automated reputation management, just something augment it and limit some of the abuse.
Would you treat coworkers like that? In meatspace? If someone called me a fuckwad in a way that wasn't obviously jokey/ironic it would be a huge problem to me. Being nice and civil is a much better way to get things done. Like, grumpy/curmudgeonly is kinda par for the course but that's totally different.
I used to work with a really toxic dev that for whatever reason our management dept protected. He was extremely misogynistic and refused to work with any women. One time in a meeting he said something basically like "it's in the spec, you stupid bitch" (as an aside, it wasn't in the spec;p). He used to get away with yelling at people etc. Then I got sucked into the daily meetings and said basically "there is no call to raise your voice in a meeting at work. if you have a personal problem with me, we can go outside and talk about it". Never had a problem with him after that - unsurprisingly most misogynists and bullies are in reality cowards.
Does anyone believe that the NSA shared any details or scope about their hardware purchase? Or any of their vendors?
"Hi we're building out datacenters so we can do some probably illegal data snooping, can you help us?" I'm sure an agency that is cloaked in as much secrecy as possible goes around sharing that sort of information. Especially without gag orders.
Not only is she a massive tool she's obviously full of it. She needs a gag, it's an order.
The business side is why the company exists. When they add feature creep etc, it's generally because they don't really know what the customer wants and are trying to see what lands. They don't understand the cost of changing the design / refactoring. They tend to not even really understand how to tell if a time estimate is BS or not.
It comes down to trust and working relationships. The business side almost never bridges the tech side - it's up to tech folks to bridge that gap and help them understand. Often times they simply won't care.
Sucky but that's the way the industry generally works. There are a few bright spots but they're few and far between. However the attitude of "I'm going to be a lone hero and push this out!" is just setting yourself up for more frustration and failure. There's a quote - "in writing, you must kill your darlings". Same thing applies to softdev, be prepared to write elegant code you are proud of, only to have it rot away and disappear. Your options are basically;
1) stay professional, do your job, collect your paycheck 2) try to find some startup with ideals like fogcreek (when it comes to valuing individual developers) 3) simplify your lifestyle and financial requirements and write code for your own projects, do a little contracting or take a job in a different field
The 3x rent as salary thing is fairly new and common with newer buildings. I've been a renter for the last 15 years in a few different large cities; it used to be largely based on your credit score and rental history. They would work with you if you had a strong rental history but marginal credit.
In my current apartment (which is fairly upscale/new) they did the 3x rent/income, a credit check for any late payments and that's it. They didn't care about my 15 year rental history with details.
Yeah, obnoxious. People ought to browse submissions in private browsing mode or something. Then if they happen to have a sub to a paywall site they'd see the article the same way people who don't would.
1) Many hardware vendors, especially storage, will give you trouble or refuse to support their gear if you're running an OS they don't bless
2) It can make business continuity easier; you'll find more people who claim RHEL/CentOS support than Debian (though Ubuntu is pretty wide-spread these days).
The rest are pretty minor. Some C level tools want to feel like they're magically protected by vendor support.
The reality is I've pretty much always had to do my own diagnostics, RCA and come up with a resolution. If there's no patch in a RHEL blessed kernel but there is in mainline, I'd just as soon pull it in and patch it myself, which is way easier to do IMO using something like Debian, or write a patch myself if necessary.
So I'd say if you're having to deal with a lot of hardware support it might be worth it just to get less pushback but if you're mostly cloud based or just have a few machines go with whatever you think rocks (unless you suck, but you would never realize that:P)
At one shop we all wanted to use Debian but the vendor only "supported" suse/rhel etc.. so we went so far as to modify uname and whatnot to pretend we were a redhat shop;)
Cisco branded. WRT-DD works great on it, and it's fast. No problems so far.
I'd suggest just finding whatever option works for your budget and requirements that one of the open source projects works on, like wrtdd. They list what they support..
Either they're in on the theft somehow, or they're a totally unethical company trying to extort people. No trustworthy security vendor would withhold information about sites that are compromised from the site operators.
I think it's just a marketing ploy personally. "You may have already won! Contact us for details ($1.99 a minute)".
Regardless, they're on my list of companies to never do business with in any way. I
I don't have enough material in my cornea. If they mess it up, there's not much they can do for adjustments.
As long as your eyeball remains parabolic, they can correct your vision more or less indefinetly assuming there's no other issues going on. Once you get lasik, your cornea becomes flattened so they can't really correct stuff with optics so well anymore.
I'd rather be safe and be able to have my vision correctable by contacts and glasses than take a chance at having really terrible vision that is then uncorrectable.
I feel like that's something people need to be made more aware of - lasik flattens your cornea so corrective lenses won't really work as well.
That's not real security. That's the same as security through obscurity.
Linux and open source software has always had the security benefit of the code being distributed. No matter if specific components are properly audited or bugs exist for years before being discovered, it's still a powerful weapon you don't get with M$ / OSX et al.
The more people who used Linux, the more eyes would be on the code. So yeah, it'd be more of a target, but the power of open ideals would also scale.
They actually already have force burst sensors for packages, for damage liability on expensive item transport. I think some insurance companies require it so they can sue the transport company if need be.
Everyone changes their stuff around too much for me to want to deal with. So I just maintain my own desktop exactly how I want it.
Debian Testing (until the new stable is out), a custom maintained kernel (was having problems with stability on new-ish thinkpad that new kernel fixed), and windowmaker. I maintain my own versions of a few things like java and some VPN software that works with my company's old server. I also bit the bullet with wireless tools and relearned iwconfig/wpa_supplicant stuff fully so I can work in coffee shops and not need the GUI wireless config (which was actually nice and I do miss). I setup LUKS for homedir encryption and just manually mount it. My workstation isn't rebooted all that often.
Sure, it's a bit of work on occasion to keep things going the way I like it - the deal is, it's a lot of work to keep any desktop functioning the way you prefer. When things are constantly changing "for their own sake" ala Ubuntu, or win8.. and you have to fight to revert stuff how you're the most productive until it's no longer possible.. there comes a point when it's much less frustration and time to just bite the bullet and control things how you want.
I've yet to find anything I want that I can't get working. I have VirtualBox for win7 if needed for the odd work-related tool. The biggest struggle I have is consuming media I pay for ala netflix and the lack of a decent flash player in Linux. I prefer Firefox but often have to load web videos in chrome (which isn't 100% either).
It's somewhat ironic since I've come full circle; when I was younger, I enjoyed maintaining my own desktop env and custom packages.. then I just wanted stuff to work so used Ubuntu+gnome putting up with its quirks for a while.. now here I am maintaining my own setup again. Mostly because desktop UI folk can't just leave well enough alone and want everything to be designed for a tablet or smartphone.
Yeah pretty much. I doubt I'd pay much more for one, but if they're the exact same price it's pretty hard to argue. It's definitely no substitute for SSD but I can see it improving the performance for many daily tasks..
Yahoo is a large company that isn't doing so well. It's had countless acquisitions of smaller comanies which generally keep their middle management layers relatively intact. You have to figure there are hundreds of employees that are essentially dead weight or are at least vastly underperforming, which is made all the easier by being fulltime remote.
I read it more as "trying to shake things up / refocus / cut out dead weight" than "WFH is evil!!". I wouldn't be surprised at some exclusions or a change in the policy when things settle out and Yahoo is on a more sustainable path.
No classes, go someplace fun. Bring a laptop if he must and peck around at the myriad of online 'learn to program X' or something like the MIT open courseware compsci class (which uses python).
The point is - the time between highschool and college is too precious to waste on some class, he should be out traveling as much as feasible imo. After college if he sticks with tech, he'll probably have the intro level jobs that take advantage of college kids by burning tons of hours and will look fondly on his time spent on pure vacation/downtime.
I'm still waiting for my formal apology from them. Such a turd they unleashed on the world - they quit using it internally on any sort of scale because it sucked, but continued selling it and a few places are still infested with it. Including legacy code at my shop.
I still tell people it was the only "digital music service" that I really ever liked. I like to buy CDs so I can transcode them into sensible bitrates for portable devices, but have a full on flac when listening at home. It was really convenient to grab a CD, toss it in the player, then have all my mp3s available instantly without waiting to transcode.
Really a shame that service got buried by the dinosaur music industry. They're slowly learning the lesson; you either adapt to the times and technologies, or you become obsolete and the only role you have is in preventing progress trying to hold on to your fiefdom. Which can't last forever.
If your child is coddled throughout life they will be unprepared for the variety of challenges life throws. In my opinion, as a parent, your job is to provide a safety net while allowing your kid room to learn on their own. They need to be taught self reliance and understand consquences for actions which hopefully will help them make better decisions later in life.
If your kid is 3 years old though you just need to keep track of them:P
Slashdot Mirror
We almost lost our production domain. The original dummkopf who set things up registered it all under his own name and individual email instead of using a role based account. He then was fired for unrelated incompetence. Fast forward to the domain renewal coming up.. charge went to his personal CC.. he disputed the charges.. we would have lost it except by pure dumb luck I was in the middle of a DNS migration project and was auditing/cleaning up the registrar details. It was as last minute as you'd want; expiration was within 12h.
One of my pet peeves - people who register for services or get licenses tied to their individual accounts.
Pretty much any set of algos is going to be easily defeated by humans trolling and no system is going to be anything near perfect. My thoughts;
1) Create a small set of simple, concise rules that are inviolate
2) Have a system so people can mark submissions as good (no rules broken/useful) or bad(rules broken)
3) Have your referees do nothing but determine if that submission is breaking one of your rules
4) Based your user trust as a derivative as how the user voted compared to what the referee votes
The theory is any controversial submission is going to get flagged & referees attention. Their job is limited in scope to just determining if the post breaks the site rules or not, nothing to do with quality / content / opinion. If users are trying to game the system their votes are going to conflict with the referees so their user trust is going to go down, whereas if people agree their trust is going to go up.
Eventually you'll have a group of users that you can generally trust to do the right thing so you can weight their actions accordingly.
Obviously there are some weaknesses;
- Referees are pretty much god (that's why the scope of their power is extremely narrow and simple)
- You can end up with hive mind (though you can combat that if enough trusted users conflict with other trusted users). I'd argue it's a way better protection than pure crowdsourcing ala reddit where the demographics crush submissions into hivemind
Just tossing that out there off the top of my head. It's not something to replace automated reputation management, just something augment it and limit some of the abuse.
I don't loan books or money with any expectation of seeing them again.
Would you treat coworkers like that? In meatspace? If someone called me a fuckwad in a way that wasn't obviously jokey/ironic it would be a huge problem to me. Being nice and civil is a much better way to get things done. Like, grumpy/curmudgeonly is kinda par for the course but that's totally different.
I used to work with a really toxic dev that for whatever reason our management dept protected. He was extremely misogynistic and refused to work with any women. One time in a meeting he said something basically like "it's in the spec, you stupid bitch" (as an aside, it wasn't in the spec ;p). He used to get away with yelling at people etc. Then I got sucked into the daily meetings and said basically "there is no call to raise your voice in a meeting at work. if you have a personal problem with me, we can go outside and talk about it". Never had a problem with him after that - unsurprisingly most misogynists and bullies are in reality cowards.
I about died laughing seeing this come from an Anonymous Coward.
Thanks for the laugh AC
Does anyone believe that the NSA shared any details or scope about their hardware purchase? Or any of their vendors?
"Hi we're building out datacenters so we can do some probably illegal data snooping, can you help us?" I'm sure an agency that is cloaked in as much secrecy as possible goes around sharing that sort of information. Especially without gag orders.
Not only is she a massive tool she's obviously full of it. She needs a gag, it's an order.
The business side is why the company exists. When they add feature creep etc, it's generally because they don't really know what the customer wants and are trying to see what lands. They don't understand the cost of changing the design / refactoring. They tend to not even really understand how to tell if a time estimate is BS or not.
It comes down to trust and working relationships. The business side almost never bridges the tech side - it's up to tech folks to bridge that gap and help them understand. Often times they simply won't care.
Sucky but that's the way the industry generally works. There are a few bright spots but they're few and far between. However the attitude of "I'm going to be a lone hero and push this out!" is just setting yourself up for more frustration and failure. There's a quote - "in writing, you must kill your darlings". Same thing applies to softdev, be prepared to write elegant code you are proud of, only to have it rot away and disappear. Your options are basically;
1) stay professional, do your job, collect your paycheck
2) try to find some startup with ideals like fogcreek (when it comes to valuing individual developers)
3) simplify your lifestyle and financial requirements and write code for your own projects, do a little contracting or take a job in a different field
The 3x rent as salary thing is fairly new and common with newer buildings. I've been a renter for the last 15 years in a few different large cities; it used to be largely based on your credit score and rental history. They would work with you if you had a strong rental history but marginal credit.
In my current apartment (which is fairly upscale/new) they did the 3x rent/income, a credit check for any late payments and that's it. They didn't care about my 15 year rental history with details.
EQN is interesting, I have hope for it and kind of see this as a positive. SOE has always been awful for EQ* with in-game station cash etc.
If you have the urge to scratch the old EQ nostalgia itch, try project 1999 ;)
Yeah, obnoxious. People ought to browse submissions in private browsing mode or something. Then if they happen to have a sub to a paywall site they'd see the article the same way people who don't would.
1) Many hardware vendors, especially storage, will give you trouble or refuse to support their gear if you're running an OS they don't bless
2) It can make business continuity easier; you'll find more people who claim RHEL/CentOS support than Debian (though Ubuntu is pretty wide-spread these days).
The rest are pretty minor. Some C level tools want to feel like they're magically protected by vendor support.
The reality is I've pretty much always had to do my own diagnostics, RCA and come up with a resolution. If there's no patch in a RHEL blessed kernel but there is in mainline, I'd just as soon pull it in and patch it myself, which is way easier to do IMO using something like Debian, or write a patch myself if necessary.
So I'd say if you're having to deal with a lot of hardware support it might be worth it just to get less pushback but if you're mostly cloud based or just have a few machines go with whatever you think rocks (unless you suck, but you would never realize that :P)
At one shop we all wanted to use Debian but the vendor only "supported" suse/rhel etc.. so we went so far as to modify uname and whatnot to pretend we were a redhat shop ;)
Cisco branded. WRT-DD works great on it, and it's fast. No problems so far.
I'd suggest just finding whatever option works for your budget and requirements that one of the open source projects works on, like wrtdd. They list what they support..
Either they're in on the theft somehow, or they're a totally unethical company trying to extort people. No trustworthy security vendor would withhold information about sites that are compromised from the site operators.
I think it's just a marketing ploy personally. "You may have already won! Contact us for details ($1.99 a minute)".
Regardless, they're on my list of companies to never do business with in any way. I
I don't have enough material in my cornea. If they mess it up, there's not much they can do for adjustments.
As long as your eyeball remains parabolic, they can correct your vision more or less indefinetly assuming there's no other issues going on. Once you get lasik, your cornea becomes flattened so they can't really correct stuff with optics so well anymore.
I'd rather be safe and be able to have my vision correctable by contacts and glasses than take a chance at having really terrible vision that is then uncorrectable.
I feel like that's something people need to be made more aware of - lasik flattens your cornea so corrective lenses won't really work as well.
That's not real security. That's the same as security through obscurity.
Linux and open source software has always had the security benefit of the code being distributed. No matter if specific components are properly audited or bugs exist for years before being discovered, it's still a powerful weapon you don't get with M$ / OSX et al.
The more people who used Linux, the more eyes would be on the code. So yeah, it'd be more of a target, but the power of open ideals would also scale.
On XBOX Live they just blame each others mothers
They actually already have force burst sensors for packages, for damage liability on expensive item transport. I think some insurance companies require it so they can sue the transport company if need be.
Everyone changes their stuff around too much for me to want to deal with. So I just maintain my own desktop exactly how I want it.
Debian Testing (until the new stable is out), a custom maintained kernel (was having problems with stability on new-ish thinkpad that new kernel fixed), and windowmaker. I maintain my own versions of a few things like java and some VPN software that works with my company's old server. I also bit the bullet with wireless tools and relearned iwconfig/wpa_supplicant stuff fully so I can work in coffee shops and not need the GUI wireless config (which was actually nice and I do miss). I setup LUKS for homedir encryption and just manually mount it. My workstation isn't rebooted all that often.
Sure, it's a bit of work on occasion to keep things going the way I like it - the deal is, it's a lot of work to keep any desktop functioning the way you prefer. When things are constantly changing "for their own sake" ala Ubuntu, or win8.. and you have to fight to revert stuff how you're the most productive until it's no longer possible.. there comes a point when it's much less frustration and time to just bite the bullet and control things how you want.
I've yet to find anything I want that I can't get working. I have VirtualBox for win7 if needed for the odd work-related tool. The biggest struggle I have is consuming media I pay for ala netflix and the lack of a decent flash player in Linux. I prefer Firefox but often have to load web videos in chrome (which isn't 100% either).
It's somewhat ironic since I've come full circle; when I was younger, I enjoyed maintaining my own desktop env and custom packages.. then I just wanted stuff to work so used Ubuntu+gnome putting up with its quirks for a while.. now here I am maintaining my own setup again. Mostly because desktop UI folk can't just leave well enough alone and want everything to be designed for a tablet or smartphone.
Yeah pretty much. I doubt I'd pay much more for one, but if they're the exact same price it's pretty hard to argue. It's definitely no substitute for SSD but I can see it improving the performance for many daily tasks..
Yahoo is a large company that isn't doing so well. It's had countless acquisitions of smaller comanies which generally keep their middle management layers relatively intact. You have to figure there are hundreds of employees that are essentially dead weight or are at least vastly underperforming, which is made all the easier by being fulltime remote.
I read it more as "trying to shake things up / refocus / cut out dead weight" than "WFH is evil!!". I wouldn't be surprised at some exclusions or a change in the policy when things settle out and Yahoo is on a more sustainable path.
No classes, go someplace fun. Bring a laptop if he must and peck around at the myriad of online 'learn to program X' or something like the MIT open courseware compsci class (which uses python).
The point is - the time between highschool and college is too precious to waste on some class, he should be out traveling as much as feasible imo. After college if he sticks with tech, he'll probably have the intro level jobs that take advantage of college kids by burning tons of hours and will look fondly on his time spent on pure vacation/downtime.
I'm still waiting for my formal apology from them. Such a turd they unleashed on the world - they quit using it internally on any sort of scale because it sucked, but continued selling it and a few places are still infested with it. Including legacy code at my shop.
I still tell people it was the only "digital music service" that I really ever liked. I like to buy CDs so I can transcode them into sensible bitrates for portable devices, but have a full on flac when listening at home. It was really convenient to grab a CD, toss it in the player, then have all my mp3s available instantly without waiting to transcode.
Really a shame that service got buried by the dinosaur music industry. They're slowly learning the lesson; you either adapt to the times and technologies, or you become obsolete and the only role you have is in preventing progress trying to hold on to your fiefdom. Which can't last forever.
This is good insight.
If your child is coddled throughout life they will be unprepared for the variety of challenges life throws. In my opinion, as a parent, your job is to provide a safety net while allowing your kid room to learn on their own. They need to be taught self reliance and understand consquences for actions which hopefully will help them make better decisions later in life.
If your kid is 3 years old though you just need to keep track of them :P
We had the internet long before people like him were trying to massively profit by any means necessary, no matter how low.