The mandatory player quality degradation occurs over non-HDCP compliant *digital* (DVI/HDMI) connections. They don't deem it necessary to lower the rez for analog (Component) connections.
The main purpose of this is apparently to make it a pain in the ass to play movies, so that consumers like me will get their hidef entertainment from satellite TV and the internet, rather than their stupid discs and format-crippled players. Yay!
Re:Time to polish your tinfoil hats
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 1
Whoa there. It is NOT bullshit. In fact it is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE to recover overwritten data from a hard drive, even if it was written over several times with random or nonrandom data. Remember that magnetic media cannot really store 1 and 0. It can only store a magnetic flux using ANALOG electronic components!
The NSA today (and other people) can use Magentic Force Microscopy to extract enough detail to reconstruct what used to be on the drive. With only one or two overwrites, a sensitive oscilloscope could suffice.
"In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal. What the software does is generate an "ideal" read signal and subtract it from what was actually read, leaving as the difference the remnant of the previous signal."
Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.
Used items that are still in demand should be reused as much as possible, to reduce the demand for manufacturing these items (with all the power and waste involved in that) and the size of landfills.
We're talking 3 DVDs, essentially 8 separate documentaries on different aspects of the history of the BBS scene -- inception, ANSI art scene, hpac, and more. It's entertaining, REAL, and better for your brain than a Star Wars movie.
Furthermore, Star Wars movies are $14 a copy (not $10, at least not at Amazon) because they have the economy of scale -- they're going to sell millions of copies of each one. You can't *reasonably* expect someone creating a special interest project like this to price it as if it were going to sell millions of copies! That's just not how it's done.
I just received my pre-ordered copy and I gotta say, this is an extremely high quality documentary in terms of filming, editing and arrangement, and furthermore, it's covering a topic of particular interest to me. I would've paid even (a little) more for it.
Plus, Jason's a nice guy who has done some great things for the Internet and the historical BBS community, by preserving our history with textfiles.com and now with this movie. He deserves a few bucks for his trouble.
I can also feel the 60 cycle hum in my brain, espescially in a room that's using lots of power, or one with a wiring fault. But usually the only times I consciously notice it is if there's a power outage. Everyone hears the fans in the computers and ventilation system slowly shut down, the moment of silence as everyone tries to figure out what's going on... but a fraction of a second before that, I feel the 60 cycle buzz abruptly stop.
Also, I have wifi at home and work. And I have slept in the same room with at least one powered-on computer, usually two, since I was 15 or so, and there's been a PCS or GSM cell phone glued to my face for the last 7 years. (there's an interesting visual)
Perhaps you could have read up on the process a little bit, and gotten yourself a slightly better understanding of the what telecine means before making such a statement. 3:2 pulldown is not a filter that you run on a single frame of video.
What is the problem?
on
Beyond Pay?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't I have a RIGHT to take a job where they make me work long hours and don't pay extra?
And don't I also have a right to go somewhere else, negotiate a better deal, or work by the hour as a contractor?
What is the problem here?
Anyhow, when someone thinks they are getting screwed because they are being forced to work extra hours without pay, the two relevant questions to ask are:
(1) Is the person a salaried aka "exempt" employee?
When they are, there's no legitimate legal claim. The "exempt" pretty much means they have chosen to take a position that is classified as exempt from most labor laws.
But if they're an hourly employee, they are legally entitled to get paid for all of the time they work, and probably higher overtime pay as well.
(2) Okay, so if they are an exempt employee, are they classified correctly according to the law?
The laws on this vary from state to state. In order to be exempt, usually the employee has to make some decisions on their own, have special training, have some control over their work schedule (again, as long as the job gets done), etc.
Many states have laws which make it very easy for pretty much any high-tech position to be exempt, which seems like a good thing to me.
I don't want to be forced to work hourly, because then I might have to accept a lower wage! If my position could not be classified as exempt, the company might lower their hourly offer to account for expected overtime. They may expect to have me work more than 40 hours per week. Then, to make the same money I make now, I'd need to work overtime every week instead of just when needed.
If I felt like my employer wasn't paying me enough (and if I didn't like it), I would focus on getting a better job rather than putting time and energy into a lawsuit.
Like a lot of other people, I've screwed up using the rm command before. It's a powerful and dangerous command. But I have also saved a lot of time and effort and money by having crazy powerful commands at my fingertips. I don't think rm is "brain-damaged," and I wouldn't change it just because it's a little dangerous.
Make your own "delete" command (alias "rm -i") if you are unsure of yourself when using the real stuff.
At my first real programming job I was in charge of maintaining several different versions of UNIX software for different platforms. I didn't have dedicated development boxes for most of them and in particular I had to share the SunOS4, AIX and Digital UNIX boxen which were on the other side of the building.
Anyhow I generally would telnet into these machines and then use NFS to mount my development directory on my box, then do the compilation and testing.
One day I was looking for a file on the SunOS box but the find command syntax was a little different. So I decided to just NFS mount the drive from the SunOS box on my Linux box so that I could use the find command I was more familiar with. I didn't normally do this, so I didn't have an fstab entry or established mount point. I figured this would just be a one time thing, so I just quickly did a mkdir/tmp/sunos and mounted the volume there.
Later that day I decided to clean out the temporary directory on my Linux box after installing some new software.
cd/tmp... pwd... (yep, we're safe)... rm -rf *... hey, why is this taking so long?
The SunOS box was slow, and it took a long time to restore the backup. Lost a day of work and the IT guys laughed about that one for quite a while.
Yes, in fact, someone has done something like that. Check out the first few pictures at http://www.marssociety.org/interactive/mars_charts.asp. Doesn't look too realistic since it's all cratery. But it's neat-o nonetheless.
If you don't want people to look at your website, don't make it public.
If you DO make it public, and a lot of people suddenly look at it, and as a result you exceed your bandwidth/transfer-limit/server-specs limitations, this means one of two things:
(1) Your site has become, at least temporarily, far more popular than you anticipated! Hooray!! Now to call the ISP...
(2) You can't afford to be popular, so you probably shouldn't have made it so public. You, the server administrator, made a mistake. Perhaps you should have required a password to access the resources.
If someone runs their own web page, like/., they don't have to ask anyone's permission before linking to your site. A similar situation is, if someone finds a cool web site, they don't have to ask permission before forwarding the URL to their friends (even though that might cause it to be forwarded on to thousands more people)
If someone makes your server so popular that you can't handle it, that's really not their problem.
...publicly stating there is a crucial problem is different than showing how to exploit it. I think giving very direct info on how to carry out said bug steps beyond the middle ground.
In that respect, it feels like the plan is to make MS's exploits do harm to people and ruin MS's reputation, so people will leave the platform...
Well, if they were to mysteriously state that there is a problem, without enough information to reproduce the flaw, you are not giving enough information for the people to protect themselves. (You can tell them what settings to lock down, or you can just tell them not to browse the web with IE, but that is not the same as letting them protect themselves)
The people responsible for keeping PCs secure want to get their hands on the exploit ASAP, so that they can try to put up barriers to stop this problem. If you keep the exploit secret so that they cannot TEST their work, they are just working blind!
I don't really think there is a "plan" like you describe. I think that BugTraq is just doing their duty by disseminating this information. Microsoft should have known at least two weeks ago, that they needed to patch this flaw which could affect millions of users of their products. Yet they still have not done so. By the time BugTraq posted it, most of the electronic intrusion experts throughout the world already knew about it.
A lot of people don't fully understand the implications of removing the natural freedoms we have fought for in the USA. Now, laws are being passed to prevent or control all sorts of communications. The bought-and-paid-for politicians seem convinced that "digital" communication is somehow undeserving of the same protections as other types of communication. This is a lie, one that is eroding our freedom of speech slowly and quietly in the "Information Age."
It is important to save the lives of children, to fight against oppression (but how do you tell when it's "evil"?) and to voluntarily help your communities.
It's also important to protect our intellectual freedoms, or one day we might wake up to a world where our complacency has put oppressors in power, and for lack of freedom to communicate ideas, we are subsequently prevented from rallying others to the cause of regaining our ability to speak out against oppression. It's a dangerous proposition, the beginning of a road to oppression, if we start to compromise our 1st amendment rights because someone says they don't apply to digital media.
Nonetheless, virtually protesting McDonalds in simville is hopelessly stupid -- unless you have fun doing it, and then you go out into the world with a smile on your face and the will to actually do something worthwhile.
That's like saying, "the police in my town are lazy and aren't cracking down on crime. That's why we need to start committing crimes left and right and encouraging others to do the same until the cops are motivated enough."
No -- nobody is committing a crime yet. This is more like if Joe Whistleblower were to say, "My town's police are lazy and resistant to change their ways, so I am going to publically talk about their problems. The public needs to be warned for their safety, and the PD needs to get their a** in gear."
Well, after Joe says that, some residents may take extra precautions to protect themselves. Also, some potential criminals now know have information that police response time is bad, and they may take advantage of this by breaking the law.
Whose fault is that? The police, for failing to keep the town secure in the first place? JW, for letting potential criminals know about the flaw in the system? Or was it the criminal's fault because he was the one breaking the law?
I believe that it's mostly the fault of the criminal when crimes are committed, and some blame should also go to the police if they have failed to protect. Joe was just doing his duty.
But comparing MS to the police is too much of a frightening thought, time for the happy pill...;-)
If Google deliberatly wrote code to specifically lower someones ranking, that is a very bad thing.
Not true! Take a look at http://www.google.com/technology/... it says right there, "no one can buy a higher PageRank." And *that* is a good thing!
I am pretty sure that Google imposes a targeted ranking penalty (sometimes referred to as "PR-zero" by SEOs) on sites that attempt to artificially inflate Google ranking for other sites. One type of site that does this is a "link farm." I don't really think that the penalty is a big secret, either. It may be automatic and perhaps considered "part of the algorithm" but it probably also has a manual component and override capabilities.
As it says on the page, a link is like a vote. Google says nobody can buy a higher PageRank. SearchKing was attempting to make that statement false, by selling PageRank. Google is shutting that down. Good for Google!
... MP3 ringers would be amusing...but Packet, my 6035, is just too darn BIG. I miss my little StarTAC; I got the 6035 because my StarTAC met an untimely accident... --Rachel
Awww... you named your smartphone "Packet," that is so cute! I don't have a smartphone (6035's too big!) but if I did, I predict I'd probably want it to be a 7135, and I just might name it Rachel.;-)
Of course, what's really awful is sitting in my programming class and hearing the teacher explain that copying a string into a buffer that's too small (with strcpy) will truncate the string. This man will be personally responsible for hundreds of buffer overflows in the next few years.
You mean you didn't correct him?
My Pascal teacher from college (yeah, yeah) still owes me "a million dollars" from the time he wagered me, in front of the whole class, that Turbo Pascal simply would not let you change the value of the integer iterator from within its For loop.
Provided with proof the following week (it's quite a common thing to do, really) he retracted the statement and offered to pay the debt with the equivalent value in back issues of PC Magazine... It's really too bad I didn't have any place to store them;-)
I wish more people cared enough to put their principles before money or even security. You don't have to be stupid or wealthy to be a person who tries to always do what they think is right.
As for me, personally I am curious and interested to see what RH has done with the desktop in v8, and don't feel too strongly about the KDE/GNOME/Bluecurve arguments -- and I don't know enough about whether I should agree with Bero's statements about crippling KDE.
The primary ideas/assumptions I use when preparing interview questions and actually interviewing (for programmers usually, or any other position) are as follows:
* Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior * Most people can not lie well (and won't anyhow) when being questioned directly to arbitrary levels of detail * Technical ability is best determined by specific and relevant tests * "IQ testing" can be fun and enhance the interview experience, but it's not of primary importance.
But let's take a step back. To get ideas for questions, I start by making two lists: "hard" skills, like particular technologies and experience levels, and "soft" skills, like ethics, interpersonal skills, and general fit with company culture.
From the "hard" skills list, I try to think of a few technical questions that I can ask informally, like academic questions about programming languages, or other specific knowledge. If possible, I'll also use a short programming problem that can be completed in 30-60 minutes. The rapid-dev code sample is always informative! If this isn't an option, asking them to send in their answer later still tells a lot, but less about how well they code under pressure.
Then comes the fun part. From both "hard" AND "soft" skills, I think of behaviors or circumstances that come up where they would need to be exercised. Then I ask the person questions like "Think of the last time you [were asked to complete a project without enough time] or [had a dispute with a coworker] or [had to design a schema]. What did you do?"
Sometimes, the person will answer saying "Well, I always.." or something like this. If that happens, I tell the candidate that I would really like them to think about a specific single occurance, so we can talk about it.
When they tell about what was going on, and what they did about it, you can learn a lot about their personality, real-life communication skills, self-image and more. But don't stop there! Ask for more detail. Ask about the algorithms, or the outcome of a dispute, or what they learned from it.
It's important also to manage your own perceptions throughout the interview. If you start to get the idea that this candidate is *really good* or *really bad* in a particular area, you should challenge that thought right away in the interview, by asking a question that gives them a chance to talk about their strengths (if you think they are weak) or how they have been challenged (if you think they are strong) in that particular area.
Through this kind of questioning, you get to know the interview candidate a lot better. A textbook response or whatever their friend told them to say just won't be helpful here. A lie will get complex very quickly when you tack on follow up questions. And you let them choose the best ways to explain themselves, while learning what you need to know about their behavior.
Alright, just so we're clear, modifying your computer is, or at least SHOULD BE illegal. Just think about it. If you are adjusting the multiplier on your Athlon, you are effectively stealing from AMD. Anyone who is USING a 2 gigahertz processor had better be paying for it. There's no such thing as a free lunch. When those prices keep going UP UP UP on computer hardware, remember, it's the thieves -- like Billy down the street with his home-brewed water cooling system -- that are driving those constant increases.
The sad thing is that nobody seems to realize. "It's my computer, my cell phone, my automobile," they say -- but never think of the poor corporations who worked uncountable man-months to bring these technological innovations. When you've got an innovation that great, you aren't going to be able to make it any better with your little "mods." can't you people just shut up and consume products like you're told? Or are you all pinko commies?
[ Before September 11th... airlines were relatively safe from terrorism ]
Oh, really, is that a fact? In what ways were they any safer than they are today?
[ Airports need to be locked down so that fanatics cannot use our devices of mass transportation to knock down any more buildings. ]
How will identification requirements protect us from fanatics? Perhaps a new checkbox on the driver's license application form, "Please check here if you are currently a terrorist, or plan to be in the future"? That way, when we check ID's in the airport, we could note the ones that are terrorists, and take them aside... hmm.
[ And that will help us all be safer in our offices and in our planes. ]
"Until" the terrorists figure out how to make fake ID's. Luckily they don't have such means at their disposal, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The mandatory player quality degradation occurs over non-HDCP compliant *digital* (DVI/HDMI) connections. They don't deem it necessary to lower the rez for analog (Component) connections.
The main purpose of this is apparently to make it a pain in the ass to play movies, so that consumers like me will get their hidef entertainment from satellite TV and the internet, rather than their stupid discs and format-crippled players. Yay!
Don't be so sure. The foil hats themselves are most likely part of a government conspiracy to control your mind.
Whoa there. It is NOT bullshit. In fact it is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE to recover overwritten data from a hard drive, even if it was written over several times with random or nonrandom data. Remember that magnetic media cannot really store 1 and 0. It can only store a magnetic flux using ANALOG electronic components!
d ings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/
The NSA today (and other people) can use Magentic Force Microscopy to extract enough detail to reconstruct what used to be on the drive. With only one or two overwrites, a sensitive oscilloscope could suffice.
Here's one paper from ten years ago that talks more about the recovery technique.
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/procee
From the paper:
"In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal. What the software does is generate an "ideal" read signal and subtract it from what was actually read, leaving as the difference the remnant of the previous signal."
Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.
Used items that are still in demand should be reused as much as possible, to reduce the demand for manufacturing these items (with all the power and waste involved in that) and the size of landfills.
No, I think it is priced just right.
;-)
We're talking 3 DVDs, essentially 8 separate documentaries on different aspects of the history of the BBS scene -- inception, ANSI art scene, hpac, and more. It's entertaining, REAL, and better for your brain than a Star Wars movie.
Furthermore, Star Wars movies are $14 a copy (not $10, at least not at Amazon) because they have the economy of scale -- they're going to sell millions of copies of each one. You can't *reasonably* expect someone creating a special interest project like this to price it as if it were going to sell millions of copies! That's just not how it's done.
I just received my pre-ordered copy and I gotta say, this is an extremely high quality documentary in terms of filming, editing and arrangement, and furthermore, it's covering a topic of particular interest to me. I would've paid even (a little) more for it.
Plus, Jason's a nice guy who has done some great things for the Internet and the historical BBS community, by preserving our history with textfiles.com and now with this movie. He deserves a few bucks for his trouble.
Appreciate, dammit!
I can also feel the 60 cycle hum in my brain, espescially in a room that's using lots of power, or one with a wiring fault. But usually the only times I consciously notice it is if there's a power outage. Everyone hears the fans in the computers and ventilation system slowly shut down, the moment of silence as everyone tries to figure out what's going on ... but a fraction of a second before that, I feel the 60 cycle buzz abruptly stop.
Also, I have wifi at home and work. And I have slept in the same room with at least one powered-on computer, usually two, since I was 15 or so, and there's been a PCS or GSM cell phone glued to my face for the last 7 years. (there's an interesting visual)
No dain bramage yet. yargh.
Nah, I'd suggest Swedish school instead... :-)
Perhaps you could have read up on the process a little bit, and gotten yourself a slightly better understanding of the what telecine means before making such a statement. 3:2 pulldown is not a filter that you run on a single frame of video.
Here is some easily digestible information for you. Cheers.
Don't I have a RIGHT to take a job where they make me work long hours and don't pay extra?
And don't I also have a right to go somewhere else, negotiate a better deal, or work by the hour as a contractor?
What is the problem here?
Anyhow, when someone thinks they are getting screwed because they are being forced to work extra hours without pay, the two relevant questions to ask are:
(1) Is the person a salaried aka "exempt" employee?
When they are, there's no legitimate legal claim. The "exempt" pretty much means they have chosen to take a position that is classified as exempt from most labor laws.
But if they're an hourly employee, they are legally entitled to get paid for all of the time they work, and probably higher overtime pay as well.
(2) Okay, so if they are an exempt employee, are they classified correctly according to the law?
The laws on this vary from state to state. In order to be exempt, usually the employee has to make some decisions on their own, have special training, have some control over their work schedule (again, as long as the job gets done), etc.
Many states have laws which make it very easy for pretty much any high-tech position to be exempt, which seems like a good thing to me.
I don't want to be forced to work hourly, because then I might have to accept a lower wage! If my position could not be classified as exempt, the company might lower their hourly offer to account for expected overtime. They may expect to have me work more than 40 hours per week. Then, to make the same money I make now, I'd need to work overtime every week instead of just when needed.
If I felt like my employer wasn't paying me enough (and if I didn't like it), I would focus on getting a better job rather than putting time and energy into a lawsuit.
-=Ivan
Bah. Mistakes will be made.
Like a lot of other people, I've screwed up using the rm command before. It's a powerful and dangerous command. But I have also saved a lot of time and effort and money by having crazy powerful commands at my fingertips. I don't think rm is "brain-damaged," and I wouldn't change it just because it's a little dangerous.
Make your own "delete" command (alias "rm -i") if you are unsure of yourself when using the real stuff.
-=Ivan
At my first real programming job I was in charge of maintaining several different versions of UNIX software for different platforms. I didn't have dedicated development boxes for most of them and in particular I had to share the SunOS4, AIX and Digital UNIX boxen which were on the other side of the building.
/tmp/sunos and mounted the volume there.
/tmp ... pwd ... (yep, we're safe) ... rm -rf * ... hey, why is this taking so long?
Anyhow I generally would telnet into these machines and then use NFS to mount my development directory on my box, then do the compilation and testing.
One day I was looking for a file on the SunOS box but the find command syntax was a little different. So I decided to just NFS mount the drive from the SunOS box on my Linux box so that I could use the find command I was more familiar with. I didn't normally do this, so I didn't have an fstab entry or established mount point. I figured this would just be a one time thing, so I just quickly did a mkdir
Later that day I decided to clean out the temporary directory on my Linux box after installing some new software.
cd
The SunOS box was slow, and it took a long time to restore the backup. Lost a day of work and the IT guys laughed about that one for quite a while.
-=Ivan
Yes, in fact, someone has done something like that. Check out the first few pictures at http://www.marssociety.org/interactive/mars_charts .asp. Doesn't look too realistic since it's all cratery. But it's neat-o nonetheless.
If you don't want people to look at your website, don't make it public.
/., they don't have to ask anyone's permission before linking to your site. A similar situation is, if someone finds a cool web site, they don't have to ask permission before forwarding the URL to their friends (even though that might cause it to be forwarded on to thousands more people)
If you DO make it public, and a lot of people suddenly look at it, and as a result you exceed your bandwidth/transfer-limit/server-specs limitations, this means one of two things:
(1) Your site has become, at least temporarily, far more popular than you anticipated! Hooray!! Now to call the ISP...
(2) You can't afford to be popular, so you probably shouldn't have made it so public. You, the server administrator, made a mistake. Perhaps you should have required a password to access the resources.
If someone runs their own web page, like
If someone makes your server so popular that you can't handle it, that's really not their problem.
-=Ivan
The people responsible for keeping PCs secure want to get their hands on the exploit ASAP, so that they can try to put up barriers to stop this problem. If you keep the exploit secret so that they cannot TEST their work, they are just working blind!
I don't really think there is a "plan" like you describe. I think that BugTraq is just doing their duty by disseminating this information. Microsoft should have known at least two weeks ago, that they needed to patch this flaw which could affect millions of users of their products. Yet they still have not done so. By the time BugTraq posted it, most of the electronic intrusion experts throughout the world already knew about it.
-=Ivan
Those are all valuable causes. All six of them.
A lot of people don't fully understand the implications of removing the natural freedoms we have fought for in the USA. Now, laws are being passed to prevent or control all sorts of communications. The bought-and-paid-for politicians seem convinced that "digital" communication is somehow undeserving of the same protections as other types of communication. This is a lie, one that is eroding our freedom of speech slowly and quietly in the "Information Age."
It is important to save the lives of children, to fight against oppression (but how do you tell when it's "evil"?) and to voluntarily help your communities.
It's also important to protect our intellectual freedoms, or one day we might wake up to a world where our complacency has put oppressors in power, and for lack of freedom to communicate ideas, we are subsequently prevented from rallying others to the cause of regaining our ability to speak out against oppression. It's a dangerous proposition, the beginning of a road to oppression, if we start to compromise our 1st amendment rights because someone says they don't apply to digital media.
Nonetheless, virtually protesting McDonalds in simville is hopelessly stupid -- unless you have fun doing it, and then you go out into the world with a smile on your face and the will to actually do something worthwhile.
-=Ivan
No -- nobody is committing a crime yet. This is more like if Joe Whistleblower were to say, "My town's police are lazy and resistant to change their ways, so I am going to publically talk about their problems. The public needs to be warned for their safety, and the PD needs to get their a** in gear."
Well, after Joe says that, some residents may take extra precautions to protect themselves. Also, some potential criminals now know have information that police response time is bad, and they may take advantage of this by breaking the law.
Whose fault is that? The police, for failing to keep the town secure in the first place? JW, for letting potential criminals know about the flaw in the system? Or was it the criminal's fault because he was the one breaking the law?
I believe that it's mostly the fault of the criminal when crimes are committed, and some blame should also go to the police if they have failed to protect. Joe was just doing his duty.
But comparing MS to the police is too much of a frightening thought, time for the happy pill...
-=Ivan
I am pretty sure that Google imposes a targeted ranking penalty (sometimes referred to as "PR-zero" by SEOs) on sites that attempt to artificially inflate Google ranking for other sites. One type of site that does this is a "link farm." I don't really think that the penalty is a big secret, either. It may be automatic and perhaps considered "part of the algorithm" but it probably also has a manual component and override capabilities.
As it says on the page, a link is like a vote. Google says nobody can buy a higher PageRank. SearchKing was attempting to make that statement false, by selling PageRank. Google is shutting that down. Good for Google!
-=Ivan
-=Ivan
My Pascal teacher from college (yeah, yeah) still owes me "a million dollars" from the time he wagered me, in front of the whole class, that Turbo Pascal simply would not let you change the value of the integer iterator from within its For loop.
Provided with proof the following week (it's quite a common thing to do, really) he retracted the statement and offered to pay the debt with the equivalent value in back issues of PC Magazine... It's really too bad I didn't have any place to store them
-=Ivan
I wish more people cared enough to put their principles before money or even security. You don't have to be stupid or wealthy to be a person who tries to always do what they think is right.
As for me, personally I am curious and interested to see what RH has done with the desktop in v8, and don't feel too strongly about the KDE/GNOME/Bluecurve arguments -- and I don't know enough about whether I should agree with Bero's statements about crippling KDE.
-=Ivan
Ack, sorry to switch from "I" to "you" partway through. How disconcerting! *bad Ivan!*
-=Ivan
The primary ideas/assumptions I use when preparing interview questions and actually interviewing (for programmers usually, or any other position) are as follows:
* Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior
* Most people can not lie well (and won't anyhow) when being questioned directly to arbitrary levels of detail
* Technical ability is best determined by specific and relevant tests
* "IQ testing" can be fun and enhance the interview experience, but it's not of primary importance.
But let's take a step back. To get ideas for questions, I start by making two lists: "hard" skills, like particular technologies and experience levels, and "soft" skills, like ethics, interpersonal skills, and general fit with company culture.
From the "hard" skills list, I try to think of a few technical questions that I can ask informally, like academic questions about programming languages, or other specific knowledge. If possible, I'll also use a short programming problem that can be completed in 30-60 minutes. The rapid-dev code sample is always informative! If this isn't an option, asking them to send in their answer later still tells a lot, but less about how well they code under pressure.
Then comes the fun part. From both "hard" AND "soft" skills, I think of behaviors or circumstances that come up where they would need to be exercised. Then I ask the person questions like "Think of the last time you [were asked to complete a project without enough time] or [had a dispute with a coworker] or [had to design a schema]. What did you do?"
Sometimes, the person will answer saying "Well, I always.." or something like this. If that happens, I tell the candidate that I would really like them to think about a specific single occurance, so we can talk about it.
When they tell about what was going on, and what they did about it, you can learn a lot about their personality, real-life communication skills, self-image and more. But don't stop there! Ask for more detail. Ask about the algorithms, or the outcome of a dispute, or what they learned from it.
It's important also to manage your own perceptions throughout the interview. If you start to get the idea that this candidate is *really good* or *really bad* in a particular area, you should challenge that thought right away in the interview, by asking a question that gives them a chance to talk about their strengths (if you think they are weak) or how they have been challenged (if you think they are strong) in that particular area.
Through this kind of questioning, you get to know the interview candidate a lot better. A textbook response or whatever their friend told them to say just won't be helpful here. A lie will get complex very quickly when you tack on follow up questions. And you let them choose the best ways to explain themselves, while learning what you need to know about their behavior.
Alright, just so we're clear, modifying your computer is, or at least SHOULD BE illegal. Just think about it. If you are adjusting the multiplier on your Athlon, you are effectively stealing from AMD. Anyone who is USING a 2 gigahertz processor had better be paying for it. There's no such thing as a free lunch. When those prices keep going UP UP UP on computer hardware, remember, it's the thieves -- like Billy down the street with his home-brewed water cooling system -- that are driving those constant increases.
;)
The sad thing is that nobody seems to realize. "It's my computer, my cell phone, my automobile," they say -- but never think of the poor corporations who worked uncountable man-months to bring these technological innovations. When you've got an innovation that great, you aren't going to be able to make it any better with your little "mods." can't you people just shut up and consume products like you're told? Or are you all pinko commies?
-=Ivan
[ Before September 11th ... airlines were relatively safe from terrorism ]
Oh, really, is that a fact? In what ways were they any safer than they are today?
[ Airports need to be locked down so that fanatics cannot use our devices of mass transportation to knock down any more buildings. ]
How will identification requirements protect us from fanatics? Perhaps a new checkbox on the driver's license application form, "Please check here if you are currently a terrorist, or plan to be in the future"? That way, when we check ID's in the airport, we could note the ones that are terrorists, and take them aside... hmm.
[ And that will help us all be safer in our offices and in our planes. ]
"Until" the terrorists figure out how to make fake ID's. Luckily they don't have such means at their disposal, right?
-=Ivan
[ Just imagine what this is going to do to the Playboy Channel and Spice TV.... ]
Well, those channels are already getting some targeted client-side pop-ups, triggered by scripted content.
-=Ivan
Practice safe browsing! Suppress pop-ups! Use Mozilla.