Drop the attitude. Whatever path you have taken in life isn't the only 'good' path. There are plenty of other ways to reach your goals without doing exactly what you have done (sounds like you went to college, got your expensive piece of paper, and now you resent people who are doing as well as you w/o a formal education).
Look, you made a list of stuff that you didn't do, so it must be wrong. You were never a PC tech? Good, it doesn't count as 'real work'. Tell that to the technicians I work with, who are smart, capable people who help users and support their families through that work.
Programming is easy next to math? What does this have to do with the question? What does this have to do with anything? Programming is easy compared to brain surgery, too.. why didn't you go point that out too? Oh, you're not a brain surgeon, right.
Programming is not a 'brute force' solution, and math often has nothing to do with solving a programming problem.
Last,
6. Whether you like it or not, most companies will NEVER consider you and most professionals won't respect you if you don't have a degree. You will keep losing arguments even though you're right.
Just plain wrong. Maybe YOUR company won't consider you if you don't have a BS. There are plenty of companies who will give you a chance, however. A college degree is better of course, but you're really wrong about needing one. As you move along in your career a degree matters less and less however. If you are 30 and have proven yourself with a bunch of good years of experience behind you, 95% of 'professionals' will actually respect you, whether or not you got that piece of paper 10 years ago.
BTW, who are these professionals you speak of, who won't respect you if you don't have a degree? Do they ask? Personally, when I meet a new business contact, college usually doesn't come up in conversation. And I've never had the experience of meeting a new client, only to have them disrespect me because I didn't finish college.
Some universities have programs where you can get credit for life experience. Typically you have to submit a proposal, write papers describing how you learned from life experience, and that sort of thing. You can't get a full degree that way, but will take some semesters off of your education.
I'm in the same boat as you are, right now.. I have 3 semesters to go towards a CS degree, but I'm working right now at a consulting firm. A degree is good to have, and I'm sure I've done some things that will count towards life experience.. my current job, past internships, etc.
I can't stress enough how much the core CS classes have helped me. I have a much better understanding of data structures, algorithms, software engineering, etc. than I would have if I'd taught myself those subjects reading books. You may be a different type of learner - I'm just going from personal experience, but I wouldn't skip too much of the core CS. Intro to programming courses don't matter, but don't cheat yourself out of a solid CS theory foundation.
Also, depending what school you go to and what you are planning to do after you graduate, you should think about physics/math requirements. My feeling is that they are outdated and shouldn't be required - some CS programs are still taught as if every grad is going straight into academic research, where these things are of course necessary. In many other careers CS could lead to, you won't ever touch that calc book again.
Try, 20 years in the making.. if you asked a 'pundit' or a 'visionary' in the early 80s, whether we'd have HDTV yet in 2001, they'd laugh that you were being so generous with your estimate. HDTV has been a 'couple years' down the road, for the last 10 years.
Anyway, it's not rushed but I'm not buying the damn thing until cable/satellite providers adopt it.
Posting virus code to my home page, whether academic or not, isn't and shouldn't be illegal. Possession definitely shouldn't be. Compiling that virus and sending it to other people, with malicious intent probably should be illegal.. those are my standards for culpability.
Note I'm not saying anything about your provider's TOS, or any community effort to silence you (as is the case with spamware). I fully support RBL's inclusion of spamware vendors on the list, however much they may cry "but free speech! free speech!" Your provider is also within their rights to boot you for posting viruses.
Fully, totally, 100% agreed. Please re-read my post. As soon as I step foot in your system, I'm doing something wrong. I still don't think that the act of writing malicious software, even if it is used by someone else to do damage, could be considered illegal or negligent somehow.
If I used spray paint to put my political views on the side of one's car to make a point - I'd get tried for vandalism and no free speech argument would protect me. For the virus, you've taken over someone's computer and temporarily vandalized it.
This doesn't go against my philosophy - your act of vandalism has broken the law, irregardless of whatever message you've spray-painted. My act of infecting a university's servers with a destructive worm would be theft of service, regardless of which worm I used, or who wrote the worm. The act of writing the worm, by whoever did it, may or may not have been with malicious intent. Really, there's no objective way to tell or prove one way or another. Is it malicious of OS writers to make an OS with raw socket access? I don't think it's malicious to create a computer with open hardware standards, that can be programmed to do evil at the lowest level. At what point in the tool does the responsibility end?
Lets say I write a virus with a political message that "capitalism is evil" with a destructive payload that erases all the non-freeware programs... it is possible, and therefore, it suggests that the tool should be banned, or at least restricted in access.
You may have misunderstood my "software as speech" point. I wasn't talking about including political speech in software, or using software as a way to get attention - just that I and many others consider software code to be protected speech. This means it is afforded many protections under the constitution, including protection from being banned based on content. If I post the code to my virus onto my web site, nothing in the law should prevent me from doing that.
Your point that potentially destructive software should be banned or restricted is a dangerous view. Are you in favor of export controls on encryption? I'm assuming you're here in the US, where controls have been relaxed but not yet eliminated due to the mistaken view that banning strong encryption will somehow empower intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This is exactly what I'm talking about - encryption is considered by most to be a necessity for security, and by some to be a national security risk. But above all, an encryption algorithm should be considered protected speech.
Some tools are meant to be restricted for a reason, because when used improperly they can cause huge amounts of damage.
I suspect we disagree on gun control, too. I won't get into that, except to say that I was once strongly in favor of radical gun control. I've now realized that the more legislation, and the more "banning" there is, the less responsible people become. We need people who feel responsible for their own actions, not laws. And that is a MUCH bigger debate, which goes to the root of our corporate society.
Once I realized my hypocrisy in guns vs. encryption vs. virus/worm/spamware I came to see that it's really the same topic, and I am for the act, as opposed to the tool, being punished.
Certain biological techniques have been voluntarily banned due to their danger they could cause to humanity in general.
I don't think this is the case here. It would do more harm than good to prevent knowledge of security flaws, and demonstrations of them, from disseminating. If people feared for their freedom, they wouldn't expose security holes. As we've seen recently, when companies aren't FORCED to issue patches they tend to ignore gaping holes in their software.
Voluntarily is also the key word here. It's usually a good thing when the scientific community voluntarily decides to drop something, and we do need to see more of this. Human cloning and bio-weapon research are two areas that could use more scientists who actually thought about ethics. Is banning whole classes of scientific research the best way to progress, though? The church also banned research when it felt threatened..
Virus programs do nothing constructuve except find security holes. So it makes sense for computer security experts to use them in controlled settings, but to make them available to the public does not make sense.
However, the ONLY way to get companies to respond is exactly what you said - full disclosure is the only way to go. Security by obscurity (what you describe) keeps knowledge of flaws in the hands of the few, who have enough resources to find them (e.g. the NSA, companies, and yes, you can't rule out terrorists).
However, we can ban their use in the public when damage is caused by them
Well that is exactly what I support! Maybe we don't disagree as much as I thought..
John Dvorak and "interesting article" in the same sentence.. now there's an oxymoron for you.
It's been a long time since Dvorak could be considered a journalist. Take what he writes with a grain of salt - most of it is needlessly inflammatory, speculation. Just look at some of the absurd pieces of Linux FUD he's authored in the past.
His concept of journalism falls neatly into the 10 o'clock news scaremongering school of thought. He'd 'break the news' on Bill Gates' army of cyborg warriors if it would get his column some hits. ZDNet in general, and Dvorak (and his MS-worship pal, David Coursey) specifically cannot be trusted for decent news/commentary.
I am of the belief that there is practically no piece of software that should be illegal. This includes viruses, worms, spamware and other software with no redeeming qualities. It's one of those slippery slope problems where you're banning certain types of speech, but it could easily get murky as to what was a worm or a virus. Some security software has just as much legitimate use as it has potential for misuse.
The only rational solution, as is the case with other "banning the tool vs. banning the act" problems, is to ban the act of dissemminating virii or worms maliciously. Banning certain types of software is an ill-conceived notion, just like banning certain guns.
Those who believe that software (in the US at least) is constitutionally protected speech may want to think twice if they believe virus writers should be prosecuted. Judging software based on its purpose is probably impossible - is deCSS a tool for piracy or for interoperability? Depending on who you ask, you will get 2 different answers. Is back orifice a security tool or a hacking tool? Is it a virus? Should the writers be prosecuted?
Virus/worm software does have redeeming educational value, however little.. it's useful for exposing vulnerabilities, even if it only shows that the end user is stupid.
So even though virii, worms, spamware etc. are a pain in the ass, I do support your right to create any type of software you like. The other alternative, banning classes of software, is actually more dangerous.
Note this has nothing to do with my view on copyright. Of course if you infringe someone else's copyright in your software you are breaking the law.
Learn what an algorithm is. Better, learn lots of algorithms. Don't just grab a bunch of patterns out of a bin and slap them together.
Better yet - learn what makes a good algorithm, AND learn proper design patterns and best practices. Yes, you can think on your own while at the same time observing and learning from people who have had the same problems before you did. The authors of the book "Design Patterns" correctly observed that the same problems are being solved over and over again, and it would be helpful to come up with a list of elegant solutions.
I do admit I've seen some poor programmers falling back on design patterns, and what you get is a bloated product thats functionality has been twisted so that patterns could be used. But the problem there is with people trying to force their problem to fit within a pattern.
Plenty of people have had a programming problem similar to the one you are encountering now, and yes, some of them came up with a better solution than you did. A good programmer should be able to come up with his/her own algorithms, but recognize situations where other people have already done it better. Suppose a programmer dies today, and I have to come in and support his code. Personally I'd rather look at code that followed some established best practices, than code that was written by someone who felt he had to reinvent the wheel.
Agreed, though, design patterns are certainly not abstract. They are merely directions on how to apply a decent solution to a problem.
Now how much do you want to bet that other providers (e.g. AT&T) will completely ignore any new product GI comes out with?
"But our current DCT is working just fine.. even though RCA makes a new directv box every 6 months, it's ok to keep running our digital cable with circa-1997 technology."
Quick.. take out a bunch of subscriptions and get all the DVDs you want.. if you're lucky they fold during your free 2 week trial period - free movies!
Kind of like the reverse of what happened when Cyberrebates folded - tons or people got screwed because they ordered all this overpriced product with 100% rebates, but the company died while they were waiting for their rebate. They had a Palm m100 as I remember, for something like $1200 with a $1200 rebate.
I don't know what cable provider you work for, but let me tell you this - bitrate doesn't mean crap if your box only has composite A/V outputs. I guess you don't work for AT&T, but the digital box they are using is crap. Motorola/GI DCT series in case you're wondering.
You have (so I'm told, I've never seen it) a great quality digital signal coming into the box, which is then bastardized down to composite video and analog L/R audio. Would it be too difficult to get component video and digital audio out? You can buy a TV w/ component in, and a receiver with coax or toslink audio for under $500 total nowadays.. am I the only one who cares how my tv picture looks?
In the past week or two, we've had questions about
a. Building a house for networking from the ground up (if cat6 isn't enough for your damn HOUSE then you have problems)
b. Putting a server room in your house (hint: walk-in closet. If you have enough hardware to cause heat problems, you are beyond help.)
c. Living in a fucking HOTEL, because there's a network drop in your room?
Gimme a break! Think about living in a hotel for a second. It's ONE ROOM, first of all. No kitchen. No living room. No den, no dining room, and I'm pretty sure there's NO FUCKING SERVER ROOM. Do you want to live in a hotel room?
So what does that date think when you ask her to come over to your place for dinner, and bring her to a hotel? Are you gonna break out the foreman grill and cook up some burgers for her? Just cut straight to the streaming porn, over that 'LEET "data port" conveniently located in your PHONE. Folks there are reasons that most people don't live in hotels.
Why not use Apache with frontpage extensions? That way you get to use your PHP/mysql, and your boss gets to use Frontpage to update his pages.. everyone goes home happy.
Well, one thing's for sure - it got a lot worse after AT&T bought out M1 and raised prices while slashing quality of service. Did they think it's easy to just march into the cable game without any experience? Come on, they outsourced their telephone support to Canada I heard.
Then there was this weird obsession with your "@Home content" when @Home tanked.. they spent millions of dollars on communications, all with the purpose of telling me that my @Home content was going to be inaccessible. Does that mean my cable modem would stop working? No, it means my FUCKING PORTAL HOME PAGE at Excite was going away.
Good thing they told me about that one, boy, I don't know what I would do if they didn't tell me how to type in "www.yahoo.com" into my browser. I am not kidding, this is the "workaround" they suggested because my "@Home content" was going away. Guys, it's a home page that nobody even used. This summer they also spent god knows how much money changing all their language to read @Home, and integrating the @Home subscriber agreement into the old Mediaone RR agreement.
I really shouldn't say this, but I don't see how it could get worse with Comcast. At least they have been in the cable biz for a little while now. If it does get any worse, well, DirecTV and DSL are looking better every day. Right now I have 3 choices in my area, DirecTV DSL, Verizon DSL (who also sucks but the DSL service is ok), and Earthlink DSL.
Yeah well, Diablo II battle.net is also overrun with koreans PK'ing, and running around saying "HUK" and "GIVE ITEM" (at least when I played). This is on the north american servers too. I'm not sure I'd want to watch a televised Korean D2 tournament given their overall behavior on battle.net.
AT&T sucks. They have managed to purchase a decent cable/broadband company and singlehandedly run it into the ground. Since AT&T's purchase of Mediaone, we've been subjected to increased downtime, crappy digital cable service, slow internet, awful customer service, all with them raising prices across the board. their digital box is the size of a VCR, has no hi-fi outputs (not that it matters, most of the channels are still analog), was designed 4 years ago, and the SLOW ASS interface is worse than my grandma's WebTV.
Crap. I just needed to rant about how much they sucked. Hopefully Comcast can improve the service a little. Personally I'll be happy if they can go for 6 months without changing their name. Since I subscribed, I had MediaOne for about 3 months, my cable was called MediaOne RoadRunner. Then it was AT&T Broadband, with AT&T RoadRunner for internet. Then the Internet was CALLED AT&T@Home, even though it was really the AT&T Broadband Internet network. Now it's called AT&TBI.
I'm only on my first coffee this morning, so I could have missed it, but I'm pretty sure that none of the articles mentioned ATTBI. I assume that the cable modem unit (whatever they are calling it this week) will come with AT&T Broadband. When you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to sell the cable TV unit without internet. The overhead associated with coordinating 2 separate companies, one to manage the physical network and cable tv service, the other to provide cable internet, is too much.
Look what happened with @Home and Road Runner to name a couple examples. @Home died and RR is confined to TWC (its parent company) areas. If ATT continued its delusion that it was competent enough to run its own ISP, it would run it into the ground.
As an ATTBB subscriber I can only hope that this means service will improve. AT&T broadband has been simply awful - awful cable TV hardware, awful customer support, awful internet speeds (not to mention after they bought mediaone they raised the internet price $6 while speeds continue to get slower). They've proven they can't run a decent biz, and I'd like them out of my home.
In further news, studies show that gasoline consumption continues to rise, while sales of typewriters declined by another 12% last year. Clearly, gasoline sales are displacing typewriter sales, unfairly hurting the book industry. Lawsuits will follow.
I have between little and no understanding of quantum anything, so forgive me if I'm off base. Would the encryption method you're describing require the use of quantum computers, or would it be possible on normal binary computers? It would seem to me that in order for this to work, your computer would have to support a bit whose value was undetermined (a qu-bit).
I don't know if many people do respond to spam. My suspicion is that a lot of spam is from first-time, single offenders. After they see they didn't get any business, and get smacked down by their ISP, you have an ex-spammer. The problem is that there are a hundred morons waiting to fill their shoes - the supply of first-time spammers is endless. The repeat offenders in the spam game are spamware vendors and spam-friendly ISPs.
History has also proven that we can't trust people to do what is best for themselves and society. If everyone did the right thing in terms of 'voting with their dollars' we wouldn't need laws against confidence games and fraud. The fact is, there are a lot of gullible people who are looking for a free lunch, who will probably be taken for some money by a scam artist. It's no different from spam - you can't count on everyone using their best judgment.
It's funny how ICQ made all these features such as WWPager and EmailExpress which are designed to make you available to people without ICQ.. then when they start getting abused by spammers, ICQ will even tell you not to accept these services. They should either support these services (which means actively preventing spam, not just telling you to filter them) or discontinue them..
Slashdot Mirror
Drop the attitude. Whatever path you have taken in life isn't the only 'good' path. There are plenty of other ways to reach your goals without doing exactly what you have done (sounds like you went to college, got your expensive piece of paper, and now you resent people who are doing as well as you w/o a formal education).
Look, you made a list of stuff that you didn't do, so it must be wrong. You were never a PC tech? Good, it doesn't count as 'real work'. Tell that to the technicians I work with, who are smart, capable people who help users and support their families through that work.
Programming is easy next to math? What does this have to do with the question? What does this have to do with anything? Programming is easy compared to brain surgery, too.. why didn't you go point that out too? Oh, you're not a brain surgeon, right.
Programming is not a 'brute force' solution, and math often has nothing to do with solving a programming problem.
Last,
6. Whether you like it or not, most companies will NEVER consider you and most professionals won't respect you if you don't have a degree. You will keep losing arguments even though you're right.
Just plain wrong. Maybe YOUR company won't consider you if you don't have a BS. There are plenty of companies who will give you a chance, however. A college degree is better of course, but you're really wrong about needing one. As you move along in your career a degree matters less and less however. If you are 30 and have proven yourself with a bunch of good years of experience behind you, 95% of 'professionals' will actually respect you, whether or not you got that piece of paper 10 years ago.
BTW, who are these professionals you speak of, who won't respect you if you don't have a degree? Do they ask? Personally, when I meet a new business contact, college usually doesn't come up in conversation. And I've never had the experience of meeting a new client, only to have them disrespect me because I didn't finish college.
Some universities have programs where you can get credit for life experience. Typically you have to submit a proposal, write papers describing how you learned from life experience, and that sort of thing. You can't get a full degree that way, but will take some semesters off of your education.
I'm in the same boat as you are, right now.. I have 3 semesters to go towards a CS degree, but I'm working right now at a consulting firm. A degree is good to have, and I'm sure I've done some things that will count towards life experience.. my current job, past internships, etc.
I can't stress enough how much the core CS classes have helped me. I have a much better understanding of data structures, algorithms, software engineering, etc. than I would have if I'd taught myself those subjects reading books. You may be a different type of learner - I'm just going from personal experience, but I wouldn't skip too much of the core CS. Intro to programming courses don't matter, but don't cheat yourself out of a solid CS theory foundation.
Also, depending what school you go to and what you are planning to do after you graduate, you should think about physics/math requirements. My feeling is that they are outdated and shouldn't be required - some CS programs are still taught as if every grad is going straight into academic research, where these things are of course necessary. In many other careers CS could lead to, you won't ever touch that calc book again.
Try, 20 years in the making.. if you asked a 'pundit' or a 'visionary' in the early 80s, whether we'd have HDTV yet in 2001, they'd laugh that you were being so generous with your estimate. HDTV has been a 'couple years' down the road, for the last 10 years.
Anyway, it's not rushed but I'm not buying the damn thing until cable/satellite providers adopt it.
Well I don't know thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Posting virus code to my home page, whether academic or not, isn't and shouldn't be illegal. Possession definitely shouldn't be. Compiling that virus and sending it to other people, with malicious intent probably should be illegal.. those are my standards for culpability.
Note I'm not saying anything about your provider's TOS, or any community effort to silence you (as is the case with spamware). I fully support RBL's inclusion of spamware vendors on the list, however much they may cry "but free speech! free speech!" Your provider is also within their rights to boot you for posting viruses.
Fully, totally, 100% agreed. Please re-read my post. As soon as I step foot in your system, I'm doing something wrong. I still don't think that the act of writing malicious software, even if it is used by someone else to do damage, could be considered illegal or negligent somehow.
I'm going to try to respond point by point.
If I used spray paint to put my political views on the side of one's car to make a point - I'd get tried for vandalism and no free speech argument would protect me. For the virus, you've taken over someone's computer and temporarily vandalized it.
This doesn't go against my philosophy - your act of vandalism has broken the law, irregardless of whatever message you've spray-painted. My act of infecting a university's servers with a destructive worm would be theft of service, regardless of which worm I used, or who wrote the worm. The act of writing the worm, by whoever did it, may or may not have been with malicious intent. Really, there's no objective way to tell or prove one way or another. Is it malicious of OS writers to make an OS with raw socket access? I don't think it's malicious to create a computer with open hardware standards, that can be programmed to do evil at the lowest level. At what point in the tool does the responsibility end?
Lets say I write a virus with a political message that "capitalism is evil" with a destructive payload that erases all the non-freeware programs... it is possible, and therefore, it suggests that the tool should be banned, or at least restricted in access.
You may have misunderstood my "software as speech" point. I wasn't talking about including political speech in software, or using software as a way to get attention - just that I and many others consider software code to be protected speech. This means it is afforded many protections under the constitution, including protection from being banned based on content. If I post the code to my virus onto my web site, nothing in the law should prevent me from doing that.
Your point that potentially destructive software should be banned or restricted is a dangerous view. Are you in favor of export controls on encryption? I'm assuming you're here in the US, where controls have been relaxed but not yet eliminated due to the mistaken view that banning strong encryption will somehow empower intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This is exactly what I'm talking about - encryption is considered by most to be a necessity for security, and by some to be a national security risk. But above all, an encryption algorithm should be considered protected speech.
Some tools are meant to be restricted for a reason, because when used improperly they can cause huge amounts of damage.
I suspect we disagree on gun control, too. I won't get into that, except to say that I was once strongly in favor of radical gun control. I've now realized that the more legislation, and the more "banning" there is, the less responsible people become. We need people who feel responsible for their own actions, not laws. And that is a MUCH bigger debate, which goes to the root of our corporate society.
Once I realized my hypocrisy in guns vs. encryption vs. virus/worm/spamware I came to see that it's really the same topic, and I am for the act, as opposed to the tool, being punished.
Certain biological techniques have been voluntarily banned due to their danger they could cause to humanity in general.
I don't think this is the case here. It would do more harm than good to prevent knowledge of security flaws, and demonstrations of them, from disseminating. If people feared for their freedom, they wouldn't expose security holes. As we've seen recently, when companies aren't FORCED to issue patches they tend to ignore gaping holes in their software.
Voluntarily is also the key word here. It's usually a good thing when the scientific community voluntarily decides to drop something, and we do need to see more of this. Human cloning and bio-weapon research are two areas that could use more scientists who actually thought about ethics. Is banning whole classes of scientific research the best way to progress, though? The church also banned research when it felt threatened..
Virus programs do nothing constructuve except find security holes. So it makes sense for computer security experts to use them in controlled settings, but to make them available to the public does not make sense.
However, the ONLY way to get companies to respond is exactly what you said - full disclosure is the only way to go. Security by obscurity (what you describe) keeps knowledge of flaws in the hands of the few, who have enough resources to find them (e.g. the NSA, companies, and yes, you can't rule out terrorists).
However, we can ban their use in the public when damage is caused by them
Well that is exactly what I support! Maybe we don't disagree as much as I thought..
John Dvorak and "interesting article" in the same sentence.. now there's an oxymoron for you.
It's been a long time since Dvorak could be considered a journalist. Take what he writes with a grain of salt - most of it is needlessly inflammatory, speculation. Just look at some of the absurd pieces of Linux FUD he's authored in the past.
His concept of journalism falls neatly into the 10 o'clock news scaremongering school of thought. He'd 'break the news' on Bill Gates' army of cyborg warriors if it would get his column some hits. ZDNet in general, and Dvorak (and his MS-worship pal, David Coursey) specifically cannot be trusted for decent news/commentary.
I am of the belief that there is practically no piece of software that should be illegal. This includes viruses, worms, spamware and other software with no redeeming qualities. It's one of those slippery slope problems where you're banning certain types of speech, but it could easily get murky as to what was a worm or a virus. Some security software has just as much legitimate use as it has potential for misuse.
The only rational solution, as is the case with other "banning the tool vs. banning the act" problems, is to ban the act of dissemminating virii or worms maliciously. Banning certain types of software is an ill-conceived notion, just like banning certain guns.
Those who believe that software (in the US at least) is constitutionally protected speech may want to think twice if they believe virus writers should be prosecuted. Judging software based on its purpose is probably impossible - is deCSS a tool for piracy or for interoperability? Depending on who you ask, you will get 2 different answers. Is back orifice a security tool or a hacking tool? Is it a virus? Should the writers be prosecuted?
Virus/worm software does have redeeming educational value, however little.. it's useful for exposing vulnerabilities, even if it only shows that the end user is stupid.
So even though virii, worms, spamware etc. are a pain in the ass, I do support your right to create any type of software you like. The other alternative, banning classes of software, is actually more dangerous.
Note this has nothing to do with my view on copyright. Of course if you infringe someone else's copyright in your software you are breaking the law.
Learn what an algorithm is. Better, learn lots of algorithms. Don't just grab a bunch of patterns out of a bin and slap them together.
Better yet - learn what makes a good algorithm, AND learn proper design patterns and best practices. Yes, you can think on your own while at the same time observing and learning from people who have had the same problems before you did. The authors of the book "Design Patterns" correctly observed that the same problems are being solved over and over again, and it would be helpful to come up with a list of elegant solutions.
I do admit I've seen some poor programmers falling back on design patterns, and what you get is a bloated product thats functionality has been twisted so that patterns could be used. But the problem there is with people trying to force their problem to fit within a pattern.
Plenty of people have had a programming problem similar to the one you are encountering now, and yes, some of them came up with a better solution than you did. A good programmer should be able to come up with his/her own algorithms, but recognize situations where other people have already done it better. Suppose a programmer dies today, and I have to come in and support his code. Personally I'd rather look at code that followed some established best practices, than code that was written by someone who felt he had to reinvent the wheel.
Agreed, though, design patterns are certainly not abstract. They are merely directions on how to apply a decent solution to a problem.
Now how much do you want to bet that other providers (e.g. AT&T) will completely ignore any new product GI comes out with?
"But our current DCT is working just fine.. even though RCA makes a new directv box every 6 months, it's ok to keep running our digital cable with circa-1997 technology."
Quick.. take out a bunch of subscriptions and get all the DVDs you want.. if you're lucky they fold during your free 2 week trial period - free movies!
Kind of like the reverse of what happened when Cyberrebates folded - tons or people got screwed because they ordered all this overpriced product with 100% rebates, but the company died while they were waiting for their rebate. They had a Palm m100 as I remember, for something like $1200 with a $1200 rebate.
I don't know what cable provider you work for, but let me tell you this - bitrate doesn't mean crap if your box only has composite A/V outputs. I guess you don't work for AT&T, but the digital box they are using is crap. Motorola/GI DCT series in case you're wondering.
You have (so I'm told, I've never seen it) a great quality digital signal coming into the box, which is then bastardized down to composite video and analog L/R audio. Would it be too difficult to get component video and digital audio out? You can buy a TV w/ component in, and a receiver with coax or toslink audio for under $500 total nowadays.. am I the only one who cares how my tv picture looks?
Yeah, feeding the trolls.. Maybe you're right. I guess I've been on slashdot so long I'm just descending into troll zone out of boredom.
Wow.. I would have thought with all that bulk buying power your access would be a little cheaper. Guess not.
In the past week or two, we've had questions about
a. Building a house for networking from the ground up (if cat6 isn't enough for your damn HOUSE then you have problems)
b. Putting a server room in your house (hint: walk-in closet. If you have enough hardware to cause heat problems, you are beyond help.)
c. Living in a fucking HOTEL, because there's a network drop in your room?
Gimme a break! Think about living in a hotel for a second. It's ONE ROOM, first of all. No kitchen. No living room. No den, no dining room, and I'm pretty sure there's NO FUCKING SERVER ROOM. Do you want to live in a hotel room?
So what does that date think when you ask her to come over to your place for dinner, and bring her to a hotel? Are you gonna break out the foreman grill and cook up some burgers for her? Just cut straight to the streaming porn, over that 'LEET "data port" conveniently located in your PHONE. Folks there are reasons that most people don't live in hotels.
Why not use Apache with frontpage extensions? That way you get to use your PHP/mysql, and your boss gets to use Frontpage to update his pages.. everyone goes home happy.
Well, one thing's for sure - it got a lot worse after AT&T bought out M1 and raised prices while slashing quality of service. Did they think it's easy to just march into the cable game without any experience? Come on, they outsourced their telephone support to Canada I heard.
Then there was this weird obsession with your "@Home content" when @Home tanked.. they spent millions of dollars on communications, all with the purpose of telling me that my @Home content was going to be inaccessible. Does that mean my cable modem would stop working? No, it means my FUCKING PORTAL HOME PAGE at Excite was going away.
Good thing they told me about that one, boy, I don't know what I would do if they didn't tell me how to type in "www.yahoo.com" into my browser. I am not kidding, this is the "workaround" they suggested because my "@Home content" was going away. Guys, it's a home page that nobody even used. This summer they also spent god knows how much money changing all their language to read @Home, and integrating the @Home subscriber agreement into the old Mediaone RR agreement.
I really shouldn't say this, but I don't see how it could get worse with Comcast. At least they have been in the cable biz for a little while now. If it does get any worse, well, DirecTV and DSL are looking better every day. Right now I have 3 choices in my area, DirecTV DSL, Verizon DSL (who also sucks but the DSL service is ok), and Earthlink DSL.
Yeah well, Diablo II battle.net is also overrun with koreans PK'ing, and running around saying "HUK" and "GIVE ITEM" (at least when I played). This is on the north american servers too. I'm not sure I'd want to watch a televised Korean D2 tournament given their overall behavior on battle.net.
AT&T sucks. They have managed to purchase a decent cable/broadband company and singlehandedly run it into the ground. Since AT&T's purchase of Mediaone, we've been subjected to increased downtime, crappy digital cable service, slow internet, awful customer service, all with them raising prices across the board. their digital box is the size of a VCR, has no hi-fi outputs (not that it matters, most of the channels are still analog), was designed 4 years ago, and the SLOW ASS interface is worse than my grandma's WebTV.
Crap. I just needed to rant about how much they sucked. Hopefully Comcast can improve the service a little. Personally I'll be happy if they can go for 6 months without changing their name. Since I subscribed, I had MediaOne for about 3 months, my cable was called MediaOne RoadRunner. Then it was AT&T Broadband, with AT&T RoadRunner for internet. Then the Internet was CALLED AT&T@Home, even though it was really the AT&T Broadband Internet network. Now it's called AT&TBI.
I'm only on my first coffee this morning, so I could have missed it, but I'm pretty sure that none of the articles mentioned ATTBI. I assume that the cable modem unit (whatever they are calling it this week) will come with AT&T Broadband. When you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to sell the cable TV unit without internet. The overhead associated with coordinating 2 separate companies, one to manage the physical network and cable tv service, the other to provide cable internet, is too much.
Look what happened with @Home and Road Runner to name a couple examples. @Home died and RR is confined to TWC (its parent company) areas. If ATT continued its delusion that it was competent enough to run its own ISP, it would run it into the ground.
As an ATTBB subscriber I can only hope that this means service will improve. AT&T broadband has been simply awful - awful cable TV hardware, awful customer support, awful internet speeds (not to mention after they bought mediaone they raised the internet price $6 while speeds continue to get slower). They've proven they can't run a decent biz, and I'd like them out of my home.
In further news, studies show that gasoline consumption continues to rise, while sales of typewriters declined by another 12% last year. Clearly, gasoline sales are displacing typewriter sales, unfairly hurting the book industry. Lawsuits will follow.
I have between little and no understanding of quantum anything, so forgive me if I'm off base. Would the encryption method you're describing require the use of quantum computers, or would it be possible on normal binary computers? It would seem to me that in order for this to work, your computer would have to support a bit whose value was undetermined (a qu-bit).
I don't know if many people do respond to spam. My suspicion is that a lot of spam is from first-time, single offenders. After they see they didn't get any business, and get smacked down by their ISP, you have an ex-spammer. The problem is that there are a hundred morons waiting to fill their shoes - the supply of first-time spammers is endless. The repeat offenders in the spam game are spamware vendors and spam-friendly ISPs.
History has also proven that we can't trust people to do what is best for themselves and society. If everyone did the right thing in terms of 'voting with their dollars' we wouldn't need laws against confidence games and fraud. The fact is, there are a lot of gullible people who are looking for a free lunch, who will probably be taken for some money by a scam artist. It's no different from spam - you can't count on everyone using their best judgment.
It's funny how ICQ made all these features such as WWPager and EmailExpress which are designed to make you available to people without ICQ.. then when they start getting abused by spammers, ICQ will even tell you not to accept these services. They should either support these services (which means actively preventing spam, not just telling you to filter them) or discontinue them..