or illegal or wrong or dastardly, and takes unfair advantage of a situation. Typical liberal whining. EVERY business takes EVERY advantage that it can. If you don't like Amazon, don't do business with them - they are not cheap on anything except books, and not always on those either. But chances are, if it's books, music, or electronics, Amazon has it. That's their big
advantage. So stop putting up whiney posts.
If the govt. is interested in you, it's going to be interested in your computers and cell phones. Makes sense, right? So if you don't want the govt. diddling your electronics, don't carry them on airplanes or across an international border. Isn't that pretty simple? The alternative is to have multiple sets of cell phones and computers:
one set with all the good stuff on it, one set with nothing important on it that goes with you on planes and across borders so the government agents will have something to amuse themselves with when they detain you.
If you want to assure your future, learn SQL,
PL/SQL, Oracle Forms, and the Oracle report
writers. And if you are so inclined become
an Oracle DBA. Best is to learn all of it.
You may not like the Microsoft products, but
there's demand for it, so pickup.NET. Forget
your anti-microsoft prejudices, they aren't helping your pocketbook one bit. Good luck.
The software houses seem to think that getting
new releases 85% right is all they need to do.
Let the users do the serious debugging in production. Once you have installed a seriously
large - and maybe critical - piece of software,
you aren't likely to change it for something else. Hell, you probably can't change it for
something else, unless you have seriously deep
pockets and infinite amounts of time. Vendors
of ERP systems and database systems seem to me to
be the worst offenders.
Alright, let's create one on Mars. Send all the
Democrats, illegal aliens, moslems, and 2/3s of the populations of China and India there and all
will be well.
I'm no mathematician, and have long grappled with the problem as stated. But I recently came to a conclusion: mathematics means what we want it to mean, regardless of where "proofs" take us.
Consider the following:.999... = 1.000
but
6.626 x 10**-34 (planck's constant) != 0
How can this be? The first number approaches 1
but never reaches it, and we declare that it is
in fact 1. But the second number is so vanishingly small and so near 0, and we declare that it is NOT 0 (because it has been useful so far). There's a large inconsistency here.
I think mathematicians and physicists are trying to have it both ways because they do not want to confront the contradictions in their math and thus in their worldview.
Imagine that. The standard model of physics could fail if traditional math fails. People might lose their grant money because their science is built on a house of cards (mathematics). Horrors.
perhaps the thing to do is to remove it and place it in/on a government (of any jurisdiction) car,
or on a garbage truck, or any place that will provide deception. Or maybe just put a sticker on it that says "FBI, Washington DC" and place it in a mail collection box. Or maybe you could remove the battery and leave it in/on your car.
There's lots of possibilities. Use your imagination.
Why is anyone surprised by this? It's the safe thing for the state to do. Just like buying IBM mainframes used to be. You never lost your job for buying IBM, you'll never lose your job for going with Micro$oft.
And don't kid yourselves. If MN wants to void that contract sometime down the road, they will find a way.
And you know bureaucrats - they don't give a fat rat's ass about saving taxpayer money. It's not real money to them anyway.
I have watched, sometimes in horror, sometimes in great amusement, as employer after employer decided that hardware and/or software "upgrades" are necessary. And why were these decisions made? Certainly not because of a lack of functionality in the existing software. No, the decision to "upgrade" was made because the existing software was "out of date", or "not written in "C" or "Java" or whatever flavor-of-the-moment programming language was current at the time.
And users and user management were never smart - or ballsy - enough to say "Whoa, we're happy with what we have - it works and fits our business model just fine" (you'd be amazed at how many businesses change their business processes to fit software).
So keep those old warhorse systems that work just fine and fit your business needs, and get rid of those people who keep saying "Well, we need new/updated/improved software". Put in new software and you'll start down the same old
bug-fix/enhancement road all over again, only this time with a system that you don't understand nearly as well as the one you replaced. Good for IT types, bad for the business.
MK
I must admit to a certain amount of ignorance about the way open source software updates are handled. If they are in fact handled in the manner that you describe, then that is good. I
still prefer proprietary software. It's USUALLY
better engineered, there is a set procedure for reporting problems, and the vendor usually is
fairly responsive to problem reports. Except in
the case of micro$oft.
I've yet to encounter any open source OS which is
as robust, secure, and reliable as VMS or IBM's
mainframe OS.
MK
It is rather amusing for micro$oft to be attacking open source software as masking incompetence when their own software is less than, shall we say, robust. However, I remain a non-fan of open source software, simply because I do not want dozens/hundreds/thousands of programmers of unknown ability/experience/sophistication swarming over a software bug, and trying to fix it, without any supervision, especially if the software in question is crucial to my operations. I want software that is tested, secure, and reliable, and is patched or upgraded, and tested, by highly competent software engineers who are intimately familiar with the software and have worked with it for years or even decades (that's why I like VMS so much). And I'm willing to pay for such software. Unfortunately, businesses in this country seem to think that open source software is the way to go, because it's FREE! Well, guess
what people: you get what you pay for.
MK
The Feds make a botch of nearly everything. The ONLY federal agencies that I think do a consistently good job are BLM, USFS, and NPS, and I think that's because they are the only agencies that really care about what they are doing. The
Marines also do a pretty good job...
I know, this is old fashioned thinking, but people need to understand the concepts of bits, bytes, words, longwords, binary/octal/hex numbers, thinking sequentially and logically,
what an operating system actually does, what an IO system is and does, how a computer actually does math, etc., etc., etc. You know, all the stuff we learned 40 years ago. Make 'em learn a
programming language too.
MK
Well, actually, I worked for two health care companies, and ran into that problem. It makes
reasonable testing nearly impossible, as you simply cannot dummy up data that contains the range of possibilities extant in live data. But so what; that's what management wants, so that's what they get. And management knows best - right?
As a developer I can tell you that it's impossible to test programs properly and thoroughly without access to production data. However, developers should NOT be granted access to production logins/sites - production data should be copied into development work areas so
that developers have an appropriate "sandbox" in which to work/test.
As long as you have a system which is open to the outside world, it can never be secure. As long as your systems which are open to the outside world are running on insecure OSes - Unix, Linux,
anything written by Microsoft - your systems will not be secure. This is the long and short of it.
But American corporations, and most governmental
entities, are either (1) stupid, (2) incompetent,
(3) unconcerned about security, or some combination thereof. Which is good if you are a security contractor/specialist. It keeps you employed, and at good wages. Which, after all,
is the object of the game, isn't it?
In ANY industry, the bigger the company the worse is the customer service. Period, end of story. No arguing. Customer service from Microsoft or
Oracle? Surely you jest. Service from your
local pc repair guy? Almost always.
Any smart corporation will avoid Microsoft and
Oracle product for critical applications. But
most corporations are NOT smart.
I can understand the need if you run a business,
large or small. But for home use? Unless you
are downloading movies by the dozens, I don't see
how you can use that much disk space. But then,
I'm an old geezer and I don't live my life on the
web or at my computer... I like to get outside
a lot...
30 years ago, a 3tb disk drive was totally
unimaginable. I was operations manager for
a university which ran 2 mainframes and one
mini-computer, and I'm guessing we didn't have
a gb of disk storage for all three computers.
My how times change...
I worked as a contractor at one of the top 50 companies listed in the survey. I will say that I respected my boss, but
she was way over-worked and over-stressed and so far as I know her boss wasn't doing anything to alleviate that. No one
was keeping an eye on the quality of coding being done. Program and system documentation was non-existant. The fairly
new (at that time) Oracle database group was essentially non-responsive to the needs and requirements of the group I
worked in, and they were not taking responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. There was an incredible amount of
data redundancy between groups in IT, and an incredible lack of integration of different IT functions. Employees were
working a lot of OT. The production support group bordered on incompetent. Very often, people working different
projects were changing the same program, and keeping those changes straight bordered on the impossible. There were
multiple testing environments and it is was often difficult to impossible to get copies of production data to test against.
The same was true for QA environments, but the QA testers did their damndest to do a good job. Oh, and because the DOD was
a major customer, it dictated how almost everything could be done - including the fact that you could not test program
changes against copies of live data.
But this is one of the top fifty best companies to work for? I wouldn't go back there for what I was making at the time.
The stress, amound of overhead, lack of training, lack of documentation, lack of managerial support, lack of managerial
foresight, highly rigid (unchangeable) environment make it a non-enjoyable place to work.
If this company is rank between 40th and 50th on the list, I can't imagine how bad it must be lower down on the list.
Old saying: if you have a broad back,there are a
thousand people waiting to put a saddle on it.
Start job hunting yesterday. Have some interviews, get some offers, go to your boss and
tell him you will leave for a new job unless you
get a decent raise and extra resources to do your
job properly. Don't be nasty or demanding, just
matter of fact. Remember, your company has NO
loyalty to you, and you should have none to it.
Your other option, if you don't mind being unemployed for awhile, is to go to your boss,
politely tell him you want a raise and extra
resources to do your job. If your request is
denied, resign with 2 weeks notice immediately.
If your boss then decides that you deserve the
raise and resources, you could play some serious
poker by increasing your demands.
In other words, play hardball with these people.
They will play it with you, so play it with them.
Don't let them get the upper hand - ever. But
you must be prepared to be fired or to resign
and perhaps to be unemployed for a while. If
you've got the financial resources, unemployment
aint so bad!
Good luck.
Whether legal or not, if it's possible, it will
be done. Turn off your cell phone and pull the
battery if you don't want to be tracked and/or
spied upon. But everyone here knows this, don't
you?
MK
And if it's not directly available online, why is
it anywhere near where a hacker can get to it, esp. code this sensitive. I truly dumbfounded.
Heads should roll for this, and I mean heads way
up there in the hierarchy.
But otherwise, why isn't Google's password authentication software secure enough to withstand
being stolen.
VMS uses a one-way hashing routine for password
authentication. So even if you have the code in
question, it won't help you. Which, I suppose,
is yet another reason that VMS is the best OS.
Unless, as others have suggested, you have
nefarious motives. IO subsystems can be more
complex than the OS itself, if you indeed know
anyting about either. And you would be trying
to re-invent the wheel by trying to do what the
poster says he wants. And I can guarantee your
"new wheel" whould not be very round or useful.
People who write competent IO subsystems tend to
have genius level IQs.
The article states "... negative or positive information... ". Uh, people, information is
not negative or positive; the interpretation of
information is negative or positive (or maybe
neutral), depending only on the interpreter.
Ergo, we should not be surprised that different
people interpret the data data (information)
differently, depending solely on their frame
of reference.
Slashdot Mirror
or illegal or wrong or dastardly, and takes unfair advantage of a situation. Typical liberal whining. EVERY business takes EVERY advantage that it can. If you don't like Amazon, don't do business with them - they are not cheap on anything except books, and not always on those either. But chances are, if it's books, music, or electronics, Amazon has it. That's their big advantage. So stop putting up whiney posts.
If the govt. is interested in you, it's going to be interested in your computers and cell phones. Makes sense, right? So if you don't want the govt. diddling your electronics, don't carry them on airplanes or across an international border. Isn't that pretty simple? The alternative is to have multiple sets of cell phones and computers: one set with all the good stuff on it, one set with nothing important on it that goes with you on planes and across borders so the government agents will have something to amuse themselves with when they detain you.
If you want to assure your future, learn SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Forms, and the Oracle report writers. And if you are so inclined become an Oracle DBA. Best is to learn all of it. You may not like the Microsoft products, but there's demand for it, so pickup .NET. Forget
your anti-microsoft prejudices, they aren't helping your pocketbook one bit. Good luck.
The software houses seem to think that getting new releases 85% right is all they need to do. Let the users do the serious debugging in production. Once you have installed a seriously large - and maybe critical - piece of software, you aren't likely to change it for something else. Hell, you probably can't change it for something else, unless you have seriously deep pockets and infinite amounts of time. Vendors of ERP systems and database systems seem to me to be the worst offenders.
Alright, let's create one on Mars. Send all the Democrats, illegal aliens, moslems, and 2/3s of the populations of China and India there and all will be well.
I'm no mathematician, and have long grappled with the problem as stated. But I recently came to a conclusion: mathematics means what we want it to mean, regardless of where "proofs" take us. Consider the following: .999... = 1.000
but
6.626 x 10**-34 (planck's constant) != 0
How can this be? The first number approaches 1
but never reaches it, and we declare that it is
in fact 1. But the second number is so vanishingly small and so near 0, and we declare that it is NOT 0 (because it has been useful so far). There's a large inconsistency here.
I think mathematicians and physicists are trying to have it both ways because they do not want to confront the contradictions in their math and thus in their worldview.
Imagine that. The standard model of physics could fail if traditional math fails. People might lose their grant money because their science is built on a house of cards (mathematics). Horrors.
perhaps the thing to do is to remove it and place it in/on a government (of any jurisdiction) car, or on a garbage truck, or any place that will provide deception. Or maybe just put a sticker on it that says "FBI, Washington DC" and place it in a mail collection box. Or maybe you could remove the battery and leave it in/on your car. There's lots of possibilities. Use your imagination.
Why is anyone surprised by this? It's the safe thing for the state to do. Just like buying IBM mainframes used to be. You never lost your job for buying IBM, you'll never lose your job for going with Micro$oft. And don't kid yourselves. If MN wants to void that contract sometime down the road, they will find a way. And you know bureaucrats - they don't give a fat rat's ass about saving taxpayer money. It's not real money to them anyway.
I have watched, sometimes in horror, sometimes in great amusement, as employer after employer decided that hardware and/or software "upgrades" are necessary. And why were these decisions made? Certainly not because of a lack of functionality in the existing software. No, the decision to "upgrade" was made because the existing software was "out of date", or "not written in "C" or "Java" or whatever flavor-of-the-moment programming language was current at the time. And users and user management were never smart - or ballsy - enough to say "Whoa, we're happy with what we have - it works and fits our business model just fine" (you'd be amazed at how many businesses change their business processes to fit software). So keep those old warhorse systems that work just fine and fit your business needs, and get rid of those people who keep saying "Well, we need new/updated/improved software". Put in new software and you'll start down the same old bug-fix/enhancement road all over again, only this time with a system that you don't understand nearly as well as the one you replaced. Good for IT types, bad for the business. MK
I must admit to a certain amount of ignorance about the way open source software updates are handled. If they are in fact handled in the manner that you describe, then that is good. I still prefer proprietary software. It's USUALLY better engineered, there is a set procedure for reporting problems, and the vendor usually is fairly responsive to problem reports. Except in the case of micro$oft. I've yet to encounter any open source OS which is as robust, secure, and reliable as VMS or IBM's mainframe OS. MK
It is rather amusing for micro$oft to be attacking open source software as masking incompetence when their own software is less than, shall we say, robust. However, I remain a non-fan of open source software, simply because I do not want dozens/hundreds/thousands of programmers of unknown ability/experience/sophistication swarming over a software bug, and trying to fix it, without any supervision, especially if the software in question is crucial to my operations. I want software that is tested, secure, and reliable, and is patched or upgraded, and tested, by highly competent software engineers who are intimately familiar with the software and have worked with it for years or even decades (that's why I like VMS so much). And I'm willing to pay for such software. Unfortunately, businesses in this country seem to think that open source software is the way to go, because it's FREE! Well, guess what people: you get what you pay for. MK
The Feds make a botch of nearly everything. The ONLY federal agencies that I think do a consistently good job are BLM, USFS, and NPS, and I think that's because they are the only agencies that really care about what they are doing. The Marines also do a pretty good job ...
I know, this is old fashioned thinking, but people need to understand the concepts of bits, bytes, words, longwords, binary/octal/hex numbers, thinking sequentially and logically, what an operating system actually does, what an IO system is and does, how a computer actually does math, etc., etc., etc. You know, all the stuff we learned 40 years ago. Make 'em learn a programming language too. MK
Well, actually, I worked for two health care companies, and ran into that problem. It makes reasonable testing nearly impossible, as you simply cannot dummy up data that contains the range of possibilities extant in live data. But so what; that's what management wants, so that's what they get. And management knows best - right?
As a developer I can tell you that it's impossible to test programs properly and thoroughly without access to production data. However, developers should NOT be granted access to production logins/sites - production data should be copied into development work areas so that developers have an appropriate "sandbox" in which to work/test.
Spot on, brother. But as I have said, ANY system open to the outside world will NEVER be secure.
As long as you have a system which is open to the outside world, it can never be secure. As long as your systems which are open to the outside world are running on insecure OSes - Unix, Linux, anything written by Microsoft - your systems will not be secure. This is the long and short of it. But American corporations, and most governmental entities, are either (1) stupid, (2) incompetent, (3) unconcerned about security, or some combination thereof. Which is good if you are a security contractor/specialist. It keeps you employed, and at good wages. Which, after all, is the object of the game, isn't it?
In ANY industry, the bigger the company the worse is the customer service. Period, end of story. No arguing. Customer service from Microsoft or Oracle? Surely you jest. Service from your local pc repair guy? Almost always. Any smart corporation will avoid Microsoft and Oracle product for critical applications. But most corporations are NOT smart.
I can understand the need if you run a business, large or small. But for home use? Unless you are downloading movies by the dozens, I don't see how you can use that much disk space. But then, I'm an old geezer and I don't live my life on the web or at my computer ... I like to get outside
a lot ...
30 years ago, a 3tb disk drive was totally
unimaginable. I was operations manager for
a university which ran 2 mainframes and one
mini-computer, and I'm guessing we didn't have
a gb of disk storage for all three computers.
My how times change ...
I worked as a contractor at one of the top 50 companies listed in the survey. I will say that I respected my boss, but she was way over-worked and over-stressed and so far as I know her boss wasn't doing anything to alleviate that. No one was keeping an eye on the quality of coding being done. Program and system documentation was non-existant. The fairly new (at that time) Oracle database group was essentially non-responsive to the needs and requirements of the group I worked in, and they were not taking responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. There was an incredible amount of data redundancy between groups in IT, and an incredible lack of integration of different IT functions. Employees were working a lot of OT. The production support group bordered on incompetent. Very often, people working different projects were changing the same program, and keeping those changes straight bordered on the impossible. There were multiple testing environments and it is was often difficult to impossible to get copies of production data to test against. The same was true for QA environments, but the QA testers did their damndest to do a good job. Oh, and because the DOD was a major customer, it dictated how almost everything could be done - including the fact that you could not test program changes against copies of live data. But this is one of the top fifty best companies to work for? I wouldn't go back there for what I was making at the time. The stress, amound of overhead, lack of training, lack of documentation, lack of managerial support, lack of managerial foresight, highly rigid (unchangeable) environment make it a non-enjoyable place to work. If this company is rank between 40th and 50th on the list, I can't imagine how bad it must be lower down on the list.
Old saying: if you have a broad back,there are a thousand people waiting to put a saddle on it. Start job hunting yesterday. Have some interviews, get some offers, go to your boss and tell him you will leave for a new job unless you get a decent raise and extra resources to do your job properly. Don't be nasty or demanding, just matter of fact. Remember, your company has NO loyalty to you, and you should have none to it. Your other option, if you don't mind being unemployed for awhile, is to go to your boss, politely tell him you want a raise and extra resources to do your job. If your request is denied, resign with 2 weeks notice immediately. If your boss then decides that you deserve the raise and resources, you could play some serious poker by increasing your demands. In other words, play hardball with these people. They will play it with you, so play it with them. Don't let them get the upper hand - ever. But you must be prepared to be fired or to resign and perhaps to be unemployed for a while. If you've got the financial resources, unemployment aint so bad! Good luck.
Whether legal or not, if it's possible, it will be done. Turn off your cell phone and pull the battery if you don't want to be tracked and/or spied upon. But everyone here knows this, don't you? MK
And if it's not directly available online, why is it anywhere near where a hacker can get to it, esp. code this sensitive. I truly dumbfounded. Heads should roll for this, and I mean heads way up there in the hierarchy. But otherwise, why isn't Google's password authentication software secure enough to withstand being stolen. VMS uses a one-way hashing routine for password authentication. So even if you have the code in question, it won't help you. Which, I suppose, is yet another reason that VMS is the best OS.
Unless, as others have suggested, you have nefarious motives. IO subsystems can be more complex than the OS itself, if you indeed know anyting about either. And you would be trying to re-invent the wheel by trying to do what the poster says he wants. And I can guarantee your "new wheel" whould not be very round or useful. People who write competent IO subsystems tend to have genius level IQs.
The article states " ... negative or positive information ... ". Uh, people, information is
not negative or positive; the interpretation of
information is negative or positive (or maybe
neutral), depending only on the interpreter.
Ergo, we should not be surprised that different
people interpret the data data (information)
differently, depending solely on their frame
of reference.