This line of reasoning is a fallacy; computation power can't increase forever.
After a very reachable number of bits, you end up needing more power then exists in the universe, or a computer bigger then the universe, to crack the encryption, barring physics and engineering we'd currently consider magical.
It is possible, assuming the algorithms stay strong, to encrypt something that can not be feasibly brute-forced.
(And of course, as the number of bits used exceeds the number of bits in the message, you can't even brute force it, but that's another consideration.... you hit these "fundamental limits" long before that for any reasonably sized message.)
"Progress will continue exponentially forever" is a fallacy. Just because it's been true for the past 50+ years does not mean it can work forever.
"Qualitative" and "quantitative" are well established words not of my choosing. They are often portrayed as opposites but they are not.
In my case, while I confess to using a stereotype it turns out to not affect my point;-), so I'm glad you clarified the history. (Often, when the details don't matter to me I don't go look them up, since they have no affect on my point.)
You're reinforcing my point; I'm not sure if you know that and are posting to amplify my point or trying to disagree with it. Sorry.
A soundtrack is very, very different from a live musical performance. The idea that all revolutions are superior to all old methods is quite wrong; probably the clearest comes out of science fiction and the idea that all technologies are totally superior to old ones, but this is just a specific instance of the general misconception. That soundtracks are a revolution doesn't mean that it invalidated all old ways of doing things, just that it opened brand new vistas that could not be understood with an understanding of live performance.
(Whereas truthfully, it's probably pretty easy to understand what a live performance can do based on soundtrack experiences. You may underestimate the personal connection live performances can engender, but that's about all you might miss.)
And a nit...
It's different, not just a change in quality.
On the "qualitative/quantitative" scale, "quality" pretty much means "fundamental difference", whereas "quantity" means that it's not a fundamental difference. I think you meant "It's a qualitative change, not just a quantitative change", which was my whole point.
(This is the source of my confusion at the beginning of this post; you seem to just be posting re-inforcements and clarifications but this last sentence leads me to believe you think you are disagreeing with me, when you really aren't.)
"Quality" and "quantity" are two points on a continuum, not binary absolutes.
A sufficient change in quantity becomes a change in quality.
Having a generalized sound track is so different from having "a human voice not of your choosing and a piano" that the two are hardly comparable, even if technically both are sources of sound.
The litmus test is, "Will my understanding of one contribute significantly to my understanding of the other?" In this case, the answer is no; understanding what is possible with "a guy and a piano" will only give you the barest hint of what is possible with a full soundtrack.
I'd say it justifies "revolutionary" as a term.
(That said, at this point the only true "revolution" left for gaming is significantly more physical interaction, or direct neural connections giving the impression of more direct physical interaction. "(Distributed) Multiplayer", massive and otherwise, was the last "revolution" in gaming and I doubt there will be any more for a while.
("But you can't predict the future! Maybe something awesome will happen!" No, but I can make a structural argument: We've tapped all the senses that can reasonably be tapped (taste and smell are irrelevant, touch in non-trivial modes is essentially what my "physical interaction" point is about and is very hard), and we've tapped human interaction via multiplayer. There's nowhere for a true "revolution" to come from anymore, just a whole lot of incremental evolution that may add up in totality to a revolution, but with no one true "revolution" point.)
OK, this rambled a bit, but hey, this is Slashdot, right?
Try at least as far back as Astrosmash, an 1981 Intellivision game.
It keys the difficulty to the number of extra lives you have. At the lowest level it's almost impossible to lose, and extra lives are handed out generously.
I think it's actually good in a way they backed off from this; once you start playing this game it's hard to stop, because you almost inevitably have to leave a game in progress, either by powering off or by deliberately dying enough times to lose, which is about as easy psychologically.
This is at least a candidate for "first", though I wouldn't be surprised if someone comes up with an Atari 2600 game that used it (before 1981).
I'm also somewhat surprised the arcade games didn't do more of this; this dynamic difficulty level is much more addictive then the monotonically increasing (and always huge) difficulty employed by modern games.
You know, I tried feeding my kids equal amounts of every element on the periodic table, but they keep dying, the ungrateful bastards. They seem to do OK until I get to Beryllium.
Should I do it as equal parts by mass or by volume?
Translation: WTF is a "balanced diet"? You're defining balanced diet both as a particular diet and as the best diet "by default", but there's no particular reason to assume the two aspects are therefore connected; that's a "naming fallacy" (two things that have the same name are therefore the same thing; false logic). The fact is that a "balanced diet" may still be wrong.
Right now, nutrition is not really a science. I looked into it when I considered doing Atkins, since as a skeptic in general I don't have any interest in going against science. Just try to find the well-done as-close-to-double-blind-as-reasonably-possible studies that aren't based on self-reporting; you can almost count them on one hand. (A true study is expensive since it requires you to provide all food to all participants, and even then you can't guarentee that they won't eat something outside of the study, affecting the results.) Doesn't mean you can therefore eat what you want, of course, but it does mean that you can rationally consider alternate diets; the "balanced" diet is not scientific fact but an unscientific conjecture. At this point, we're all working off anecdotes, so you might as well work with the one anecdote that matters to your: How your body behaves.
(Nutrition is moving into science territory with studies that actually have good methodology. And lo, low-carb diets are holding their own or exceeding "balanced" diets... The evidence isn't enough to make a pronouncement because you still only need two hands to count the well-done studies, and there may yet be a "better" diet then anybody has even considered. But it is certainly not scientifically valid at this point to declare that the "balanced" diet is obviously superior; it's not even scientific at this point to declare that it's a net positive, it may yet prove harmful, or impractical.)
I want to try one. But $100+ for a programmable dimmer switch, sold by sites that look and sound like I'm one click away from therapeutic magnets, scares me away.
The theory sounds good, especially as I now live in a north facing apartment (in the northern hemisphere), but I'm going to want to try one of these out, or talk to people with experience with the product with no personal interest in selling, before I throw that much money down the hole.
A money-back guarentee might do it for me but I haven't found one yet. This itself is kind of suspicious...
Anyhow, I'd also be interested in comment from people who have used one of these; I'm especially interested in "Did it work even six months after you started using it?" (It's no trick to wake up easily for a day or two for me; I haven't managed to sustain it yet.)
They now have the tools, the infrastructure, and the background to do just about anything in high-tech. They just lack the direct deep experience. That merely takes time.
No, it takes time and real experience.
I'll concede I have no direct outsourcing experience, but if I were an Indian I would be deeply concerned about what I'm hearing.
By far the most common thing I hear is "They need the program spec'ed out to the n'th degree, and implement precisely what is spec'ed, no more and often a little less." The thing is, the net experience gain for such things is almost zero.
To learn one must be responsible, one must be able to experiment and learn how various outputs change on various inputs. By being handed a design and unquestionably implementing it, they learn very little about design. In fact, we use that in the early levels of computer science education; "Here's a class and some methods; implement the following highly-specified methods." Only later do they get the freedom to truly shoot themselves in the foot (usually after this first, early class).
Design is the act of getting customer requirements out of the customer and matching it to a good architecture, then implementing it. You can only (completely) off-shore one of those, and it's the one that involves the least learning. (You can outsource all of those, at least in theory, but you need local interaction, and teleconferencing still isn't good enough.)
Indians are indeed learning, but are they learning the right stuff? Are they learning how to do design, or are they learning to become better and better grunts? I can't answer this. In all likelihood the answer differs from company to company, and like I said, if I were Indian I'd want to carefully choose what lessons I'm learning. Based on the anecdotes I'm hearing over and over again, it seems likely that on average the answer is that they are learning to be better grunts.
You might be surprised. There are loan officers who seem to operate under the theory that if they own you, lock stock and barrel, they can find some way to turn a profit.
Surprise surprise, you can find a lot of them in negative economic areas.
Lesser examples include people who cash your checks for the low, low price of $50 (banks can't be said to allow you to deposit into your account "for free" but it's much cheaper then that), and those mini-loan places that 'hold a check' for you and give you the money, minus a fee. Both of these take advantage of the fact that you don't have the money, so you need the money, though I won't quite call it "preying" on those people. (It is a valid service, and you can't expect it for free.)
Isn't that better? And surprise surprise, Slashdot is pissed off. "Too few characters per line (20.1)?" Now that's a wierd metric. Still needs more. Probably hit the compression filter next... well, if you see this this got through.
Shame on you, if any of those links show up in your browser as "already visited"!
Exactly who will be willing to take personal responsibility for a security breach?
Slashdotites, esp. those of you young'uns developing a budding anti-corporate stance, this is one reason why you should consider being more nuanced in your opinions. Huge multi-nationals may be evil, but consider the flip side. Would you be willing to work somewhere where you are going to be held personally financially liable for your mistakes? Which, since you are a programmer and the first person in line to blame for multi-million/billion dollar "glitches", even if it was really "user error" elsewhere, will most likely happen to you?
"Corporations" are a good idea, as liability sheilds. Without them we'd all be too terrified to work, and that does nobody good.
This is also one of my canonical "second-order effect" arguments. Making people personally liable sounds like a great idea... until you project the second-order effects of everybody being liable for everything and they all go get a "safe" job (whatever that may be). It's not a good idea, and we mostly seem to do OK without it, except in exceptional circumstances.
I slapped MD5 into Google and looked on the first result page, which said 128-bits in the quote near the top. I knew there were other sizes, but since that matched the message I was replying to, I kept it;-)
Of course the point generalizes to all hashing or error correcting algorithms; for n bits, 2^n+1 messages are guarenteed to collide.
Uh, you need far, far less then "2^bits in the md5 hash". You only need the first 2^128 strings, plus one more, to ensure a collision, by a simple application of the pigeonhole principle. (Any 2^128+1 strings will do, so why not pick the smallest?)
You'll probably, to the point of effective certainty, need far less to find a collision.
The problem is that we created MD5 with the very goal of making it impossible to compute where those collisions will occur with anything less then brute force (which isn't to say that we've succeeded necessarily but to date nobody has produced a significantly better way), and 2^128 is a hell of a lot of strings.
It's my understanding that there are procedures for developing and testing software that is used in medical products and aviation products. Perhaps the rigor that is applied to developing software to control an airplane could be applied to the development and testing of secure software.
It's a good idea on paper, which is why people like me are well-nigh terrified when this idea comes up.
The problem is one of expectations. Yes, we could apply that rigor to all software. But,
No more garage startups... and all new technology tends to start there. Innovation, true innovation, takes a huge hit under these schemes and we lose huge advantages to any country that doesn't enforce these rules.
Expense. Those methodologies eat manpower for lunch. Are you going to pay for it? For every piece of software you use? Even "ls" or "echo"? No, and neither will anyone else. It only makes sense for certain things, and different level of rigor makes sense for different kinds of programs... even different levels of rigor for different guarentees. Good luck even figuring out which of these is right, let alone getting the government to mandate the correct levels! We are far from a consensus on what is appropriate; we're not even sure where it makes economic sense to use what we know, and we certainly don't know what we don't know.
Freedom of choice. The converse of the above; we should be able to choose how secure our software is, because it's not free. Mandating any security level, and since other people's time is always free, you can be sure the government will mandate a very high level, means that I am forced to buy these high security products. What if I don't care? My game console is free to crash, and even if it's 0wz3r3d, who cares? On the next power cycle, it'll return to normal. (At least modern architectures.)
In the real world, it is, to put it bluntly, a shitty idea.
It's not time for government mandate, it's time for the market to start demanding security. The proven method for balancing cost vs. performance is the invisible hand of the market.
The root cause here is a monopoly, training people not to be concerned about security. The correct solution is a healthy market.
Best of all, we won't find ourselves in 2015 shackled by government mandate to 2005 engineering techniques. It's an act of shocking hubris to think we've got this figured out enough yet to mandate any solution.
Better to follow the links I gave, then to make incorrect statements like potential energy is still energy, but until that energy changes phase to kinetic energy, it will not become power.
(I don't buy the original claim without more evidence; a modern battery may or not not approach the power density though I'd be very surprised, but the energy density is many, many orders of magnitude below a nuclear reactor; that's why nuclear bombs based on nuclear forces are so much more powerful then chemical bombs, and the chemical bombs are themselves based on energetic reactions that are probably at least an order of magnitude more dense then the litium batteries can use.)
I have participated in two extended telephone polls, both about computers. I participated because for computer polls, I am as interested in divining "who paid for the poll" as they are in my answers, so it worked out. I was also curious how extensive such polls were. Thus, there was a mutual interest. (However, my curiousity has been satisfied and I don't think I'd do it again.)
I was able to figure out who paid for both polls. I don't remember one of them, but the other was paid for by Microsoft to research how college students percieved the company, and the industry in general. Which frankly, from their point of view, is damned important information.;-)
However, those other polls mostly aren't. E-Mail and banner ad polls are more likely to just dump out into a marketing database, with the influence you cite as the reason for using the polls highly diffused compared to a "real" telephone poll. I'd submit they're still worth less then expressing your support for TV shows in more conventional forms, such as buying branded items (like clothing) or the DVDs of the show.
You can play the GBA-SP entirely one-handed with slower games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
In fact, this has now become a "killer feature" for me, as it means I can eat or do other tedious things with one hand while playing the game with another. I will never buy a portable platform again that does not have this feature. I didn't realize how cool this was until I actually owned one, but it rocks.
Either hand can be used, but the left hand is easier. Either way, the thumb takes everything in front, and the index finger wraps around behind the screen for the triggers.
If you hand is too small to reach the opposing trigger easily, you may have to contort a little to get there. But for one (generally rarely used in this sort of game) button, that's not a bad price.
This has the virtue of A: Having a lot of pre-existing, commercial games that can already be played with one hand, and B: requiring no potentially expensive (either $$$ or time) modifications. The downside is that you still don't get twitch gaming, but with modern twitch games propensity for using a bazillion buttons, you might be better off playing old stuff from the era when one button worked.
You know, some people manage to look for a job and keep their old job at the same time.
If you're working for SCO, and you're not looking for a new job right now, you've lost my respect. (As I'm not in a hiring position right now, that's not saying much practically, but it's indicative of an industry trend.)
I reject your false dichotomy of "searching for a job" and "having a job".
This is the realist's perspective: Mostly, what life does is die.
The world around us is the vanishingly rare exceptions to that rule.
On the one hand, that means life is quite precious, as it's rather rare. On the other hand.... it is entirely possible that if the blades weren't culling the birds, something else would. The ecosystem generally has a capacity, and small perturbations like killing a handful of birds means there's a handful of birds in the next generation that don't starve to death. Danger only happens when the death rate exceeds the replacement rate. (Or, technically, getting close is enough to be "dangerous".)
(The true story is somewhat more complicated... but not a whole lot more so; you end up modifying how quickly the ecosystem cycles a little but that really doesn't matter in any meaningful way, lots of things modify the population cycle rate.)
As humans, it sounds horrid that "thousands of birds are dying!" But it is false logic to claim (implicitly) that if we didn't kill those thousands of birds, they'd be alive. As long as the impact is low over time (and I'd hazard a guess this is), the impact is zero; thousands of bird deaths would have occurred in some other way. Often starvation or predation.
It's sad to hear about the cute fuzzies dying. But loss and death is inevitable. If we're not contributing directly to an imbalance, does it really matter whether the bird gets predated, or hit by a blade and subsequently scavanged?
(Now, actually, I would argue that there may be some ways in which it does; I'm presenting this as a question for thought, not one that I'm demanding an unqualified "No" answer to. However, an unqualified "yes" is really not justified unless you can bring a powerful argument to bear for it. The environmentalists present this as a "default" answer, hidden deep where you can not get at it deliberately. I reject that; I analyse it and while it may not be 100% false, it's far from 100% true.)
First of all, "they" didn't. This is a reader survey, not an Award From On High. Note that Final Fantasy X-2 also showed up in third place for "What game were you most satisfied with?"... I'm gonna have to issue you a RTFA.
Second, since there is no "they", there can easily be two groups, one who likes it and one who doesn't. And given the way fanboys work, often the second group is much larger, but the first group much louder.
But it seems that every time a story like this comes up, someone gets modded +5 insightful for pointing out problems that were probably discussed in the first meeting held by whoever is or might be working on this system. It is truly ridiculous to imagine that they'd get this thing all worked up, pass a law to require it in every car, and only then consider that a system with the power to stop people's cars may potentially be abused.
You sound like you're still in school; if you aren't then you really ought to know better. This is a political discussion, not a technological discussion. Frequently, the engineers will put together a disaster scenario, or something complicated like "It will work as long as we...", and the other political side will hire engineers with just as many credentials to say that "Live would be bliss if only we had this system!" Those engineers are generally wrong or even lying, but through the wonders of cognitive dissonance and human psychology will eventually convince themselves that their rosy view is correct.
Generally, both reports are then tossed out, the politicians do whatever the hell they feel like it, and, best of all, even after the system fails catestrophically, the either
Hire the engineers who said it would be great to "fix" it
Try to sue the negative engineers for some reason ("you should have stopped us"), and whatever else happens,...
actively resist learning from the experience about which engineers should be trusted in the future
Or some combination thereof. I'm not intrinsically as cynical as this is making me sound, but you have way too much faith in politicians. They don't understand second-order arguments, they tend to have an incredibly naive view of the world ("All policemen good", etc.), and in general it is difficult or impossible to reason with them because they generally believe in their very hearts that technology can be legislated, and second-order effects aren't "real" and can also be legislated away... despite abundent evidence to the contrary available to anybody willing to just open their eyes and really look around them. "Observation" is not a politician's strong suit.
Oh, and...
A lot of people have keyless entry remotes for their car, and I've never heard of one of those being "hacked" to unlock someone's door. It wouldn't be tough to make cars only respond to commands sent along with the proper key.
That's because the remotes were created by private companies who would subsequently be sued if the cars were stolen via that route. Companies with a long, rich engineering tradition, so when somebody told them the right way how to do those keyless entries, they actually listened to the engineers, because they were used to it.
Guess which part doesn't apply to the government? Hint: All of it.
For evidence, look at DeCSS, WEP, and any number of other standards. Strong things like the remote keyless entry are by far the exception, and they only arise when there is both the motivation and the necessary expertise to do it. (WEP probably had the expertise but not the motivation (network companies obviously wanted a bullet point, not a real feature, they didn't realize how important this was to us, now we're going to get "second generation" security that should have been here since day one). DeCSS has the motivation but not the expertise.)
If, and this is a big if, they hand the design of this system over to one of those car companies (with some level of experience in these things), it might be secure. If, as history shows is much more likely, the law hands over a design specification of what everything is supposed to do, it's going to be flawed.
And even if it's done competently, the keyless entry has some advantages that make it cryptographically feasible, like the ability to change the key on every entry. This sytem will probably have some small handful of "master keys", and no feasibl
Slashdot Mirror
This line of reasoning is a fallacy; computation power can't increase forever.
After a very reachable number of bits, you end up needing more power then exists in the universe, or a computer bigger then the universe, to crack the encryption, barring physics and engineering we'd currently consider magical.
It is possible, assuming the algorithms stay strong, to encrypt something that can not be feasibly brute-forced.
(And of course, as the number of bits used exceeds the number of bits in the message, you can't even brute force it, but that's another consideration.... you hit these "fundamental limits" long before that for any reasonably sized message.)
"Progress will continue exponentially forever" is a fallacy. Just because it's been true for the past 50+ years does not mean it can work forever.
"Qualitative" and "quantitative" are well established words not of my choosing. They are often portrayed as opposites but they are not.
;-), so I'm glad you clarified the history. (Often, when the details don't matter to me I don't go look them up, since they have no affect on my point.)
In my case, while I confess to using a stereotype it turns out to not affect my point
You're reinforcing my point; I'm not sure if you know that and are posting to amplify my point or trying to disagree with it. Sorry.
A soundtrack is very, very different from a live musical performance. The idea that all revolutions are superior to all old methods is quite wrong; probably the clearest comes out of science fiction and the idea that all technologies are totally superior to old ones, but this is just a specific instance of the general misconception. That soundtracks are a revolution doesn't mean that it invalidated all old ways of doing things, just that it opened brand new vistas that could not be understood with an understanding of live performance.
(Whereas truthfully, it's probably pretty easy to understand what a live performance can do based on soundtrack experiences. You may underestimate the personal connection live performances can engender, but that's about all you might miss.)
And a nit...
It's different, not just a change in quality.
On the "qualitative/quantitative" scale, "quality" pretty much means "fundamental difference", whereas "quantity" means that it's not a fundamental difference. I think you meant "It's a qualitative change, not just a quantitative change", which was my whole point.
(This is the source of my confusion at the beginning of this post; you seem to just be posting re-inforcements and clarifications but this last sentence leads me to believe you think you are disagreeing with me, when you really aren't.)
"Quality" and "quantity" are two points on a continuum, not binary absolutes.
A sufficient change in quantity becomes a change in quality.
Having a generalized sound track is so different from having "a human voice not of your choosing and a piano" that the two are hardly comparable, even if technically both are sources of sound.
The litmus test is, "Will my understanding of one contribute significantly to my understanding of the other?" In this case, the answer is no; understanding what is possible with "a guy and a piano" will only give you the barest hint of what is possible with a full soundtrack.
I'd say it justifies "revolutionary" as a term.
(That said, at this point the only true "revolution" left for gaming is significantly more physical interaction, or direct neural connections giving the impression of more direct physical interaction. "(Distributed) Multiplayer", massive and otherwise, was the last "revolution" in gaming and I doubt there will be any more for a while.
("But you can't predict the future! Maybe something awesome will happen!" No, but I can make a structural argument: We've tapped all the senses that can reasonably be tapped (taste and smell are irrelevant, touch in non-trivial modes is essentially what my "physical interaction" point is about and is very hard), and we've tapped human interaction via multiplayer. There's nowhere for a true "revolution" to come from anymore, just a whole lot of incremental evolution that may add up in totality to a revolution, but with no one true "revolution" point.)
OK, this rambled a bit, but hey, this is Slashdot, right?
But come on, give me credit for at least not thinking that the history of video games begins with the Nintendo 64.
;-)
Consider credit given
Ha! Kids these days.
Try at least as far back as Astrosmash, an 1981 Intellivision game.
It keys the difficulty to the number of extra lives you have. At the lowest level it's almost impossible to lose, and extra lives are handed out generously.
I think it's actually good in a way they backed off from this; once you start playing this game it's hard to stop, because you almost inevitably have to leave a game in progress, either by powering off or by deliberately dying enough times to lose, which is about as easy psychologically.
This is at least a candidate for "first", though I wouldn't be surprised if someone comes up with an Atari 2600 game that used it (before 1981).
I'm also somewhat surprised the arcade games didn't do more of this; this dynamic difficulty level is much more addictive then the monotonically increasing (and always huge) difficulty employed by modern games.
You know, I tried feeding my kids equal amounts of every element on the periodic table, but they keep dying, the ungrateful bastards. They seem to do OK until I get to Beryllium.
Should I do it as equal parts by mass or by volume?
Translation: WTF is a "balanced diet"? You're defining balanced diet both as a particular diet and as the best diet "by default", but there's no particular reason to assume the two aspects are therefore connected; that's a "naming fallacy" (two things that have the same name are therefore the same thing; false logic). The fact is that a "balanced diet" may still be wrong.
Right now, nutrition is not really a science. I looked into it when I considered doing Atkins, since as a skeptic in general I don't have any interest in going against science. Just try to find the well-done as-close-to-double-blind-as-reasonably-possible studies that aren't based on self-reporting; you can almost count them on one hand. (A true study is expensive since it requires you to provide all food to all participants, and even then you can't guarentee that they won't eat something outside of the study, affecting the results.) Doesn't mean you can therefore eat what you want, of course, but it does mean that you can rationally consider alternate diets; the "balanced" diet is not scientific fact but an unscientific conjecture. At this point, we're all working off anecdotes, so you might as well work with the one anecdote that matters to your: How your body behaves.
(Nutrition is moving into science territory with studies that actually have good methodology. And lo, low-carb diets are holding their own or exceeding "balanced" diets... The evidence isn't enough to make a pronouncement because you still only need two hands to count the well-done studies, and there may yet be a "better" diet then anybody has even considered. But it is certainly not scientifically valid at this point to declare that the "balanced" diet is obviously superior; it's not even scientific at this point to declare that it's a net positive, it may yet prove harmful, or impractical.)
I want to try one. But $100+ for a programmable dimmer switch, sold by sites that look and sound like I'm one click away from therapeutic magnets, scares me away.
The theory sounds good, especially as I now live in a north facing apartment (in the northern hemisphere), but I'm going to want to try one of these out, or talk to people with experience with the product with no personal interest in selling, before I throw that much money down the hole.
A money-back guarentee might do it for me but I haven't found one yet. This itself is kind of suspicious...
Anyhow, I'd also be interested in comment from people who have used one of these; I'm especially interested in "Did it work even six months after you started using it?" (It's no trick to wake up easily for a day or two for me; I haven't managed to sustain it yet.)
They now have the tools, the infrastructure, and the background to do just about anything in high-tech. They just lack the direct deep experience. That merely takes time.
No, it takes time and real experience.
I'll concede I have no direct outsourcing experience, but if I were an Indian I would be deeply concerned about what I'm hearing.
By far the most common thing I hear is "They need the program spec'ed out to the n'th degree, and implement precisely what is spec'ed, no more and often a little less." The thing is, the net experience gain for such things is almost zero.
To learn one must be responsible, one must be able to experiment and learn how various outputs change on various inputs. By being handed a design and unquestionably implementing it, they learn very little about design. In fact, we use that in the early levels of computer science education; "Here's a class and some methods; implement the following highly-specified methods." Only later do they get the freedom to truly shoot themselves in the foot (usually after this first, early class).
Design is the act of getting customer requirements out of the customer and matching it to a good architecture, then implementing it. You can only (completely) off-shore one of those, and it's the one that involves the least learning. (You can outsource all of those, at least in theory, but you need local interaction, and teleconferencing still isn't good enough.)
Indians are indeed learning, but are they learning the right stuff? Are they learning how to do design, or are they learning to become better and better grunts? I can't answer this. In all likelihood the answer differs from company to company, and like I said, if I were Indian I'd want to carefully choose what lessons I'm learning. Based on the anecdotes I'm hearing over and over again, it seems likely that on average the answer is that they are learning to be better grunts.
You might be surprised. There are loan officers who seem to operate under the theory that if they own you, lock stock and barrel, they can find some way to turn a profit.
Surprise surprise, you can find a lot of them in negative economic areas.
Lesser examples include people who cash your checks for the low, low price of $50 (banks can't be said to allow you to deposit into your account "for free" but it's much cheaper then that), and those mini-loan places that 'hold a check' for you and give you the money, minus a fee. Both of these take advantage of the fact that you don't have the money, so you need the money, though I won't quite call it "preying" on those people. (It is a valid service, and you can't expect it for free.)
This is the Internet. Don't you think those should be links?
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Isn't that better? And surprise surprise, Slashdot is pissed off. "Too few characters per line (20.1)?" Now that's a wierd metric. Still needs more. Probably hit the compression filter next... well, if you see this this got through.
Shame on you, if any of those links show up in your browser as "already visited"!
Exactly who will be willing to take personal responsibility for a security breach?
Slashdotites, esp. those of you young'uns developing a budding anti-corporate stance, this is one reason why you should consider being more nuanced in your opinions. Huge multi-nationals may be evil, but consider the flip side. Would you be willing to work somewhere where you are going to be held personally financially liable for your mistakes? Which, since you are a programmer and the first person in line to blame for multi-million/billion dollar "glitches", even if it was really "user error" elsewhere, will most likely happen to you?
"Corporations" are a good idea, as liability sheilds. Without them we'd all be too terrified to work, and that does nobody good.
This is also one of my canonical "second-order effect" arguments. Making people personally liable sounds like a great idea... until you project the second-order effects of everybody being liable for everything and they all go get a "safe" job (whatever that may be). It's not a good idea, and we mostly seem to do OK without it, except in exceptional circumstances.
I slapped MD5 into Google and looked on the first result page, which said 128-bits in the quote near the top. I knew there were other sizes, but since that matched the message I was replying to, I kept it ;-)
Of course the point generalizes to all hashing or error correcting algorithms; for n bits, 2^n+1 messages are guarenteed to collide.
Uh, you need far, far less then "2^bits in the md5 hash". You only need the first 2^128 strings, plus one more, to ensure a collision, by a simple application of the pigeonhole principle. (Any 2^128+1 strings will do, so why not pick the smallest?)
You'll probably, to the point of effective certainty, need far less to find a collision.
The problem is that we created MD5 with the very goal of making it impossible to compute where those collisions will occur with anything less then brute force (which isn't to say that we've succeeded necessarily but to date nobody has produced a significantly better way), and 2^128 is a hell of a lot of strings.
It's a good idea on paper, which is why people like me are well-nigh terrified when this idea comes up.
The problem is one of expectations. Yes, we could apply that rigor to all software. But,
- No more garage startups... and all new technology tends to start there. Innovation, true innovation, takes a huge hit under these schemes and we lose huge advantages to any country that doesn't enforce these rules.
- Expense. Those methodologies eat manpower for lunch. Are you going to pay for it? For every piece of software you use? Even "ls" or "echo"? No, and neither will anyone else. It only makes sense for certain things, and different level of rigor makes sense for different kinds of programs... even different levels of rigor for different guarentees. Good luck even figuring out which of these is right, let alone getting the government to mandate the correct levels! We are far from a consensus on what is appropriate; we're not even sure where it makes economic sense to use what we know, and we certainly don't know what we don't know.
- Freedom of choice. The converse of the above; we should be able to choose how secure our software is, because it's not free. Mandating any security level, and since other people's time is always free, you can be sure the government will mandate a very high level, means that I am forced to buy these high security products. What if I don't care? My game console is free to crash, and even if it's 0wz3r3d, who cares? On the next power cycle, it'll return to normal. (At least modern architectures.)
In the real world, it is, to put it bluntly, a shitty idea.It's not time for government mandate, it's time for the market to start demanding security. The proven method for balancing cost vs. performance is the invisible hand of the market.
The root cause here is a monopoly, training people not to be concerned about security. The correct solution is a healthy market.
Best of all, we won't find ourselves in 2015 shackled by government mandate to 2005 engineering techniques. It's an act of shocking hubris to think we've got this figured out enough yet to mandate any solution.
Better to follow the links I gave, then to make incorrect statements like potential energy is still energy, but until that energy changes phase to kinetic energy, it will not become power.
You were doing OK until that last word.
My original message: I can eat or do other tedious things with one hand while playing the game with another.
Sexy Pant's reply: I bet it rocks your penis too!
I wouldn't say that qualifies as a "tedious thing".
What's difference between energy and power?
(I don't buy the original claim without more evidence; a modern battery may or not not approach the power density though I'd be very surprised, but the energy density is many, many orders of magnitude below a nuclear reactor; that's why nuclear bombs based on nuclear forces are so much more powerful then chemical bombs, and the chemical bombs are themselves based on energetic reactions that are probably at least an order of magnitude more dense then the litium batteries can use.)
I have participated in two extended telephone polls, both about computers. I participated because for computer polls, I am as interested in divining "who paid for the poll" as they are in my answers, so it worked out. I was also curious how extensive such polls were. Thus, there was a mutual interest. (However, my curiousity has been satisfied and I don't think I'd do it again.)
;-)
I was able to figure out who paid for both polls. I don't remember one of them, but the other was paid for by Microsoft to research how college students percieved the company, and the industry in general. Which frankly, from their point of view, is damned important information.
However, those other polls mostly aren't. E-Mail and banner ad polls are more likely to just dump out into a marketing database, with the influence you cite as the reason for using the polls highly diffused compared to a "real" telephone poll. I'd submit they're still worth less then expressing your support for TV shows in more conventional forms, such as buying branded items (like clothing) or the DVDs of the show.
You can play the GBA-SP entirely one-handed with slower games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
In fact, this has now become a "killer feature" for me, as it means I can eat or do other tedious things with one hand while playing the game with another. I will never buy a portable platform again that does not have this feature. I didn't realize how cool this was until I actually owned one, but it rocks.
Either hand can be used, but the left hand is easier. Either way, the thumb takes everything in front, and the index finger wraps around behind the screen for the triggers.
If you hand is too small to reach the opposing trigger easily, you may have to contort a little to get there. But for one (generally rarely used in this sort of game) button, that's not a bad price.
This has the virtue of A: Having a lot of pre-existing, commercial games that can already be played with one hand, and B: requiring no potentially expensive (either $$$ or time) modifications. The downside is that you still don't get twitch gaming, but with modern twitch games propensity for using a bazillion buttons, you might be better off playing old stuff from the era when one button worked.
You know, some people manage to look for a job and keep their old job at the same time.
If you're working for SCO, and you're not looking for a new job right now, you've lost my respect. (As I'm not in a hiring position right now, that's not saying much practically, but it's indicative of an industry trend.)
I reject your false dichotomy of "searching for a job" and "having a job".
This is the realist's perspective: Mostly, what life does is die.
The world around us is the vanishingly rare exceptions to that rule.
On the one hand, that means life is quite precious, as it's rather rare. On the other hand.... it is entirely possible that if the blades weren't culling the birds, something else would. The ecosystem generally has a capacity, and small perturbations like killing a handful of birds means there's a handful of birds in the next generation that don't starve to death. Danger only happens when the death rate exceeds the replacement rate. (Or, technically, getting close is enough to be "dangerous".)
(The true story is somewhat more complicated... but not a whole lot more so; you end up modifying how quickly the ecosystem cycles a little but that really doesn't matter in any meaningful way, lots of things modify the population cycle rate.)
As humans, it sounds horrid that "thousands of birds are dying!" But it is false logic to claim (implicitly) that if we didn't kill those thousands of birds, they'd be alive. As long as the impact is low over time (and I'd hazard a guess this is), the impact is zero; thousands of bird deaths would have occurred in some other way. Often starvation or predation.
It's sad to hear about the cute fuzzies dying. But loss and death is inevitable. If we're not contributing directly to an imbalance, does it really matter whether the bird gets predated, or hit by a blade and subsequently scavanged?
(Now, actually, I would argue that there may be some ways in which it does; I'm presenting this as a question for thought, not one that I'm demanding an unqualified "No" answer to. However, an unqualified "yes" is really not justified unless you can bring a powerful argument to bear for it. The environmentalists present this as a "default" answer, hidden deep where you can not get at it deliberately. I reject that; I analyse it and while it may not be 100% false, it's far from 100% true.)
(Doing the wildly exaggerated "Captain Kirk" impression which, despite watching a lot of classic Star Trek, I've never actually seen him do.)
He actually does do it, almost exactly as parodied, in a couple of episodes. I think they're the earlier ones but I'm not sure.
I'm exactly like you; I thought people were just seriously exaggerating, but then I saw this episode and I understood.
Unfortunately, it was a long time ago and I can't tell you which one (or ones) it was. But there is at least one episode like that.
First of all, "they" didn't. This is a reader survey, not an Award From On High. Note that Final Fantasy X-2 also showed up in third place for "What game were you most satisfied with?"... I'm gonna have to issue you a RTFA.
Second, since there is no "they", there can easily be two groups, one who likes it and one who doesn't. And given the way fanboys work, often the second group is much larger, but the first group much louder.
You sound like you're still in school; if you aren't then you really ought to know better. This is a political discussion, not a technological discussion. Frequently, the engineers will put together a disaster scenario, or something complicated like "It will work as long as we...", and the other political side will hire engineers with just as many credentials to say that "Live would be bliss if only we had this system!" Those engineers are generally wrong or even lying, but through the wonders of cognitive dissonance and human psychology will eventually convince themselves that their rosy view is correct.
Generally, both reports are then tossed out, the politicians do whatever the hell they feel like it, and, best of all, even after the system fails catestrophically, the either
Or some combination thereof. I'm not intrinsically as cynical as this is making me sound, but you have way too much faith in politicians. They don't understand second-order arguments, they tend to have an incredibly naive view of the world ("All policemen good", etc.), and in general it is difficult or impossible to reason with them because they generally believe in their very hearts that technology can be legislated, and second-order effects aren't "real" and can also be legislated away... despite abundent evidence to the contrary available to anybody willing to just open their eyes and really look around them. "Observation" is not a politician's strong suit.
...
Oh, and
A lot of people have keyless entry remotes for their car, and I've never heard of one of those being "hacked" to unlock someone's door. It wouldn't be tough to make cars only respond to commands sent along with the proper key.
That's because the remotes were created by private companies who would subsequently be sued if the cars were stolen via that route. Companies with a long, rich engineering tradition, so when somebody told them the right way how to do those keyless entries, they actually listened to the engineers, because they were used to it.
Guess which part doesn't apply to the government? Hint: All of it.
For evidence, look at DeCSS, WEP, and any number of other standards. Strong things like the remote keyless entry are by far the exception, and they only arise when there is both the motivation and the necessary expertise to do it. (WEP probably had the expertise but not the motivation (network companies obviously wanted a bullet point, not a real feature, they didn't realize how important this was to us, now we're going to get "second generation" security that should have been here since day one). DeCSS has the motivation but not the expertise.)
If, and this is a big if, they hand the design of this system over to one of those car companies (with some level of experience in these things), it might be secure. If, as history shows is much more likely, the law hands over a design specification of what everything is supposed to do, it's going to be flawed.
And even if it's done competently, the keyless entry has some advantages that make it cryptographically feasible, like the ability to change the key on every entry. This sytem will probably have some small handful of "master keys", and no feasibl