Glorious, wonderful Sealand! A high-tech hub, just coming to life. Featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, Sealand's only industry is its data haven!
Just think... it has laissez-faire intellectual property laws, brisk sea air, and freer business laws than the Cayman Islands. What other country can say that it's never lost a life (or took a life) in its war for independence?
Sure, the night-life might be a little boring. And without any stores on the sea fort, Sealand Dollars aren't all that useful. But, hey, just remember...
In short, people choose their encryption based on what they know. Or what they think they know.
Encryption is hard to understand. You can't judge how strong an encryption is by its keyspace: a newspaper-style cryptogram has a larger keyspace than DES. The only way to find out how good an encryption system really is, is by trying to break it.
Therefore, we go by what experts in the field say. Or people that sound like experts. (I know one very charismatic person who has been making over $200K/year, calling himself an encryption expert, who has done little more than read Schneier's book. But he has the charisma and the high self-confidence to pull it off.)
As programmers, what should we do? It sounds like you're doing the right thing: researching. I recommend that you search not only the Internet, but also your local college library for magazines such as "Cryptologia" and "The Journal of Cryptology". (If you want information on-line, I recommend DMoz's site for links to more information.)
I'm not saying that I eat their grease-filled foods (well, not often, anyway), or that I like their decor.
I appreciate them because they provide an absolute baseline, below which any restaurant, to survive, must exceed.
I eat out a lot, but almost always at independently-owned restaurants. Because every home-owned restaurant knows that people could have spent their money on McDonald's, they all have to beat Mickie D's in some way.
Today's lunch was at a sit-down 'pho' restaurant whose goal is to be faster, cheaper, and better than McDonald's. Know what? They succeed beautifully. I left with a stomach full of rice, veggies, and a little meat for $5.
Corporatism at its worst will define a 'bottom line', below which no company can survive. Take operating systems: Microsoft's monopoly gives us a bottom line, below which any operating system cannot fall. In order for a competing operating system to survive, it must exceed Microsoft in some way, either in stability (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) or in ease of use (Macintosh).
There's absolutely no need to go through every possible position in chess to find the perfect game.
For example, according to the number of possible positions that would have to be searched, a newspaper-style cryptogram (A=Z, B=Y, etc.) has 26! = 403291461126605635584000000, or about 4 * 10^26 possible states. DES has 2^56 = 72057594037927936, or about 7.2 * 10^16 possible states.
By examing the number of possible states, you'd tell banks to encrypt their financial data with a code that is -very- easily crackable.
The trick isn't trying to find all of the possible states, then finding the best one. The trick is cutting off branches of the problem until it can be reasonably solved by a cluster of computers.
I went to RPI from '93-'97, at the end of the time of the Drop Squad. What makes the Drop Squad legendary was not their "prank" -- dropping things from high places is old -- but their stupidity.
The building where they dropped their burgers, Christmas Trees, and the like from, was the Center for Industrial Innovation, RPI's tallest building. The Drop Squad, in a fit of drunken stupidity, not only dropped material from the top of the building, but they also videotaped themselves doing so.
When one person (who is called the F**k on the dropsquad.com web site) turned himself in, he also turned over the video tape. The video tape had the pictures of all of the drop squad members. The campus police had no problems finding the members of the drop squad, and at least one member was kicked out of RPI.
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something illegal, don't let anyone videotape you.
Back in 1991 or 1992, text-based MUCKs already had programming languages. One enterprising programmer wrote a virus that attached itself to a person's description.
Whenever someone would look at an infected person, they would also be infected.
I forget what the 'payoff' of the virus was, but the 'antivirus' command even now exists in places like Furrymuck.
Of course, different people will have different comments... and we are very likely to disagree with each other. Here's my take.
To me, your objective is rather wide, and very technology-based, rather than ends- based. Most businesspeople think about the ends, not the means to get there.
Your objective seems to say that you don't care whether you're developing childrens' software or new means of delivering serin gas -- so long as it's done in Java or C/Unix.
(FYI: I don't put an objective in my resume.)
To me, the employment looks fairly good, though very FoxPro-centric. I'd be very curious why, when most of your experience seems to be with FoxPro for Windows, that you have a goal which seems to be very different than your experience.
I'm also curious about why you ordered the job in the order that you did. In my opinion, you should put the items that are most relevant to the kind of position that you want first, so that the recruiter will see them.
Your 'skills' section is excellent. Remember that most resumes, nowadays, are put into a database, and get searched by keyword.
If you want the resume to match your objective, I would put skills before your employment history. You don't want conflicting-seeming information to be right next to each other.
Your education is fine. I'm guessing that you didn't have a great GPA in college, and that you did nothing too special there. If so, best to leave it at the end of the resume.
I wish you the best of luck in searching for a job!
Finding jobs where you live might be easy or difficult... that depends on the high-tech culture of where you are. (Unfortunately, I don't know how the culture of Montreal is.)
However, as a freelance contract programmer, you have an option which isn't available to most professions: You can contract work from any company, anywhere in the world. If you want to work for a Silicon Valley pre-IPO startup, without having the Silicon Valley nightmares of traffic and the housing crunch, you can.
On the other hand, your problem might not be technical -- it might be personal. A lot of us programmers concentrate so strongly on technical issues that we forget that the rest of the world operates on social issues. You might talk with people who have hired you in the past, asking them how well they got along with you, and whether they could recommend any way to improve yourself, socially.
If you've determined that your problem really is technical (I don't consider this likely), you might sign up with a consulting or contracting firm. They take a hefty margin from what their companies pay them... but you'll get experience, and many of them provide education. If joining that kind of firm offends you, you can also get experience by volunteering your services to a non-profit.
If you post your resume here (hopefully without your address or identifying information), I'm sure that people will be glad to critique it.
I'm the 'wizard' of a fairly large, free, multi-player MUCK called Furrymuck . Although it's not necessarily the same as EverQuest, I strongly suspect that things are similar.
Let's just say that being a GM -- or a wizard of any kind -- is one of the most thankless jobs that exists. Period.
Frankly, it's extremely hard to be a 'good cop' -- trying to find out whether a person who's breaking the rules is ignorant of them, or if that person is a jerk. Sometimes, both the person accusing and the person being accused are both jerks and liars. (This happened to me today.)
It's tough to be a GM, to constantly take abuse, and to remain serene and fair above it all.
In any virtual-world situation, just as in any real-world situation, if you're being abused, don't be abusive yourself. Move it up to a higher level, if one exists. If none exist, then move to another system or store.
Centralized power vs. distributed solutions
on
The End of Unix?
·
· Score: 1
I disagree that the world is moving toward single centralized computer resources. I believe that, if anything, the world is moving toward distributed solutions.
Why? The cost of hardware power continues to drop according to Moore's law... and so do peoples' expectations of the power of their machines. What was one year your top-end server will next year be considered a reasonably good desktop unit... and the third year be left in the scrap heap.
I anticipate that any operating system which allows people to grow the power of their system by plugging in more CPUs, more drives, and the like, will gain a true market advantage. Such systems could be incredibly reliable (if one CPU goes down, the system as a whole does not), as fast as your budget allows, and extremely scalable.
In other words... I have seen the future, and it is like Beowulf.
I believe that companies will opt for many loosely-knit groups of tightly-knit Beowulf-like clusters. Each cluster would share data with the others (not necessarily a full synchronization), but will be largely autonomous of the others. This would provide for security: if one cluster were hurt (hacked into, had a denial of service attack, or whatever), the others could continue unscathed.
To bring this discussion back to its topic... I do believe that Unix is an operating system very close to that vision of the future.
Re:I already submitted this!
on
Happy Pi Day!
·
· Score: 2
It's a shame that the Exploratorium isn't throwing another pi day this year. It was wonderful last year!
Where is the dividing line between human and animal?
A pig with a few genes modified to make its, say, heart, more appropriate for xenografting (sharing between species) is, obviously, still mostly a pig.
Take the same pig, modify more genes to make the skin easily graftable. It, I suppose, is still mostly a pig.
Continue the modifications. At what point are we, literally, killing humans to harvest them for organs?
I cannot imagine that intelligence would be the dividing factor. Even if Fred couldn't make an intelligent contribution to Slashdot (;->), you don't have the right to kill Fred for his organs.
So... what -is- the dividing factor between man and animal?
I used to work for a software company that made software for Palm Pilots, Windows CE, and Newtons. I agree that the big companies are fairly likely to be able to get together, and create a internetworking standard for their common applications.
I don't see that happening, however, with the add-on softwares.
There's a few dozen 'Time and Expense Tracker" programs out there, each with their own features, for example. But because many of the smaller companies are set in the idea that interoperability with other products would mean that they lose sales, I doubt that it would ever change.
Their licensing is actually fairly specific (though it is at the end of the license.)
By installing the "Free Video Update"browser enhancement you understand and agree that the following changes will be made to your World Wide Web program: Your DEFAULT LINK to your Home page will take you to GoHip! Your SEARCH DEFAULT will take you to the GoHip! search. A BOOKMARK feature will be added to your file. This feature will add additional BOOKMARKS to your directory. Your SIGNATURE LINE on all of your outbound e-mails will be modified to promote the GoHip! Free Video Update, making your e-mail recipients eligible for free video.
Very sleazy business practice, in my opinion, but they -did- tell you. Another good reason to read through licensing agreements.
You think THAT'S easy? Try using the sabertooth tiger to shave! We hadda do that, and we LIKED it!
What's that, you say? How'd we calm down the tiger? Why, bottles of Guiness, of course! Sheesh, you get the sabertooth drunk enough, she'll try -anything- once.
'Course, half the Guinness would end up in her fur...
According to the article, it seems that this treatment would be affecting just one cell at a time: you'd need to wire each cell individually. In other words, I don't see it as a treatment any time soon, until they can wire thousands of cells at once. Of course, if they do manage to do mass-implants, an immediate first application of this technology would be in curing cancer: give each cancerous cell a poison, but not touch any of the non-cancerous cells.
_The Truth_ quite different than other novels
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 3
I've been a voracious Pratchett fan for years.
I've read as many of his novels (including
those outside the Discworld series) as I
can.
The Truth
is somewhat different than his earlier
novels. He's getting more serious, and
more pointed, in his satire. While previous
novels, like
Soul Music
and
Moving Pictures
parodied the music industry
and the motion picture industry, they did
so in a very light, almost fluffy way.
The Truth
is different. His wit has been sharpened,
and he has far more to say about modern
society in this novel than in previous
ones.
He has grown from being merely a well-
spoken humorist to a clever commentator
on modern society. His background as a
reporter for a newspaper has served him
well in this book.
Slashdot Mirror
Glorious, wonderful Sealand! A high-tech hub, just coming to life. Featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, Sealand's only industry is its data haven!
Just think... it has laissez-faire intellectual property laws, brisk sea air, and freer business laws than the Cayman Islands. What other country can say that it's never lost a life (or took a life) in its war for independence?
Sure, the night-life might be a little boring. And without any stores on the sea fort, Sealand Dollars aren't all that useful. But, hey, just remember...
Apple Computers started out in a garage, too!
In short, people choose their encryption based on what they know. Or what they think they know.
Encryption is hard to understand. You can't judge how strong an encryption is by its keyspace: a newspaper-style cryptogram has a larger keyspace than DES. The only way to find out how good an encryption system really is, is by trying to break it.
Therefore, we go by what experts in the field say. Or people that sound like experts. (I know one very charismatic person who has been making over $200K/year, calling himself an encryption expert, who has done little more than read Schneier's book. But he has the charisma and the high self-confidence to pull it off.)
As programmers, what should we do? It sounds like you're doing the right thing: researching. I recommend that you search not only the Internet, but also your local college library for magazines such as "Cryptologia" and "The Journal of Cryptology". (If you want information on-line, I recommend DMoz's site for links to more information.)
I really appreciate McDonald's.
I'm not saying that I eat their grease-filled foods (well, not often, anyway), or that I like their decor.
I appreciate them because they provide an absolute baseline, below which any restaurant, to survive, must exceed.
I eat out a lot, but almost always at independently-owned restaurants. Because every home-owned restaurant knows that people could have spent their money on McDonald's, they all have to beat Mickie D's in some way.
Today's lunch was at a sit-down 'pho' restaurant whose goal is to be faster, cheaper, and better than McDonald's. Know what? They succeed beautifully. I left with a stomach full of rice, veggies, and a little meat for $5.
Corporatism at its worst will define a 'bottom line', below which no company can survive. Take operating systems: Microsoft's monopoly gives us a bottom line, below which any operating system cannot fall. In order for a competing operating system to survive, it must exceed Microsoft in some way, either in stability (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) or in ease of use (Macintosh).
There's absolutely no need to go through every possible position in chess to find the perfect game.
For example, according to the number of possible positions that would have to be searched, a newspaper-style cryptogram (A=Z, B=Y, etc.) has 26! = 403291461126605635584000000, or about 4 * 10^26 possible states. DES has 2^56 = 72057594037927936, or about 7.2 * 10^16 possible states.
By examing the number of possible states, you'd tell banks to encrypt their financial data with a code that is -very- easily crackable.
The trick isn't trying to find all of the possible states, then finding the best one. The trick is cutting off branches of the problem until it can be reasonably solved by a cluster of computers.
I went to RPI from '93-'97, at the end of the time of the Drop Squad. What makes the Drop Squad legendary was not their "prank" -- dropping things from high places is old -- but their stupidity.
The building where they dropped their burgers, Christmas Trees, and the like from, was the Center for Industrial Innovation, RPI's tallest building. The Drop Squad, in a fit of drunken stupidity, not only dropped material from the top of the building, but they also videotaped themselves doing so.
When one person (who is called the F**k on the dropsquad.com web site) turned himself in, he also turned over the video tape. The video tape had the pictures of all of the drop squad members. The campus police had no problems finding the members of the drop squad, and at least one member was kicked out of RPI.
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something illegal, don't let anyone videotape you.
It's already happened.
Back in 1991 or 1992, text-based MUCKs already had programming languages. One enterprising programmer wrote a virus that attached itself to a person's description.
Whenever someone would look at an infected person, they would also be infected.
I forget what the 'payoff' of the virus was, but the 'antivirus' command even now exists in places like Furrymuck.
Freefall had a cute series about this idea a few months ago...
Of course, different people will have different comments... and we are very likely to disagree with each other. Here's my take.
To me, your objective is rather wide, and very technology-based, rather than ends- based. Most businesspeople think about the ends, not the means to get there.
Your objective seems to say that you don't care whether you're developing childrens' software or new means of delivering serin gas -- so long as it's done in Java or C/Unix.
(FYI: I don't put an objective in my resume.)
To me, the employment looks fairly good, though very FoxPro-centric. I'd be very curious why, when most of your experience seems to be with FoxPro for Windows, that you have a goal which seems to be very different than your experience.
I'm also curious about why you ordered the job in the order that you did. In my opinion, you should put the items that are most relevant to the kind of position that you want first, so that the recruiter will see them.
Your 'skills' section is excellent. Remember that most resumes, nowadays, are put into a database, and get searched by keyword.
If you want the resume to match your objective, I would put skills before your employment history. You don't want conflicting-seeming information to be right next to each other.
I wish you the best of luck in searching for a job!
Dear Frustrated Programmer,
Finding jobs where you live might be easy or difficult... that depends on the high-tech culture of where you are. (Unfortunately, I don't know how the culture of Montreal is.)
However, as a freelance contract programmer, you have an option which isn't available to most professions: You can contract work from any company, anywhere in the world. If you want to work for a Silicon Valley pre-IPO startup, without having the Silicon Valley nightmares of traffic and the housing crunch, you can.
On the other hand, your problem might not be technical -- it might be personal. A lot of us programmers concentrate so strongly on technical issues that we forget that the rest of the world operates on social issues. You might talk with people who have hired you in the past, asking them how well they got along with you, and whether they could recommend any way to improve yourself, socially.
If you've determined that your problem really is technical (I don't consider this likely), you might sign up with a consulting or contracting firm. They take a hefty margin from what their companies pay them... but you'll get experience, and many of them provide education. If joining that kind of firm offends you, you can also get experience by volunteering your services to a non-profit.
If you post your resume here (hopefully without your address or identifying information), I'm sure that people will be glad to critique it.
I'm the 'wizard' of a fairly large, free, multi-player MUCK called Furrymuck . Although it's not necessarily the same as EverQuest, I strongly suspect that things are similar.
Let's just say that being a GM -- or a wizard of any kind -- is one of the most thankless jobs that exists. Period.
Frankly, it's extremely hard to be a 'good cop' -- trying to find out whether a person who's breaking the rules is ignorant of them, or if that person is a jerk. Sometimes, both the person accusing and the person being accused are both jerks and liars. (This happened to me today.)
It's tough to be a GM, to constantly take abuse, and to remain serene and fair above it all.
In any virtual-world situation, just as in any real-world situation, if you're being abused, don't be abusive yourself. Move it up to a higher level, if one exists. If none exist, then move to another system or store.
I disagree that the world is moving toward single centralized computer resources. I believe that, if anything, the world is moving toward distributed solutions.
Why? The cost of hardware power continues to drop according to Moore's law... and so do peoples' expectations of the power of their machines. What was one year your top-end server will next year be considered a reasonably good desktop unit... and the third year be left in the scrap heap.
I anticipate that any operating system which allows people to grow the power of their system by plugging in more CPUs, more drives, and the like, will gain a true market advantage. Such systems could be incredibly reliable (if one CPU goes down, the system as a whole does not), as fast as your budget allows, and extremely scalable.
In other words... I have seen the future, and it is like Beowulf.
I believe that companies will opt for many loosely-knit groups of tightly-knit Beowulf-like clusters. Each cluster would share data with the others (not necessarily a full synchronization), but will be largely autonomous of the others. This would provide for security: if one cluster were hurt (hacked into, had a denial of service attack, or whatever), the others could continue unscathed.
To bring this discussion back to its topic... I do believe that Unix is an operating system very close to that vision of the future.
It's a shame that the Exploratorium isn't throwing another pi day this year. It was wonderful last year!
Where is the dividing line between human and animal?
A pig with a few genes modified to make its, say, heart, more appropriate for xenografting (sharing between species) is, obviously, still mostly a pig.
Take the same pig, modify more genes to make the skin easily graftable. It, I suppose, is still mostly a pig.
Continue the modifications. At what point are we, literally, killing humans to harvest them for organs?
I cannot imagine that intelligence would be the dividing factor. Even if Fred couldn't make an intelligent contribution to Slashdot (;->), you don't have the right to kill Fred for his organs.
So... what -is- the dividing factor between man and animal?
I used to work for a software company that made software for Palm Pilots, Windows CE, and Newtons. I agree that the big companies are fairly likely to be able to get together, and create a internetworking standard for their common applications.
I don't see that happening, however, with the add-on softwares.
There's a few dozen 'Time and Expense Tracker" programs out there, each with their own features, for example. But because many of the smaller companies are set in the idea that interoperability with other products would mean that they lose sales, I doubt that it would ever change.
Anyone care to disagree?
Their licensing is actually fairly specific (though it is at the end of the license.)
Very sleazy business practice, in my opinion, but they -did- tell you. Another good reason to read through licensing agreements.
You think THAT'S easy? Try using the sabertooth tiger to shave! We hadda do that, and we LIKED it!
What's that, you say? How'd we calm down the tiger? Why, bottles of Guiness, of course! Sheesh, you get the sabertooth drunk enough, she'll try -anything- once.
'Course, half the Guinness would end up in her fur...
According to the article, it seems that this treatment would be affecting just one cell at a time: you'd need to wire each cell individually. In other words, I don't see it as a treatment any time soon, until they can wire thousands of cells at once. Of course, if they do manage to do mass-implants, an immediate first application of this technology would be in curing cancer: give each cancerous cell a poison, but not touch any of the non-cancerous cells.
The Truth is somewhat different than his earlier novels. He's getting more serious, and more pointed, in his satire. While previous novels, like Soul Music and Moving Pictures parodied the music industry and the motion picture industry, they did so in a very light, almost fluffy way.
The Truth is different. His wit has been sharpened, and he has far more to say about modern society in this novel than in previous ones.
He has grown from being merely a well- spoken humorist to a clever commentator on modern society. His background as a reporter for a newspaper has served him well in this book.
The truth shall make ye fret.