Re:Learned Professionals?
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Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Heh, not just the average American - what he's done, militarily and economically, and environmentally, since his coup brought him to power, has had ramifications for everyone in the world. He's benefitted only the top 5% richest people, and killed a great deal of the world's poorest either directly or indirectly through globalisation.
There was a sign on a road near London, UK which said "14% of road accidents in this county were caused by speeding" - as a n attempt to justify the massive spread of GATSO speed cameras in the area. However, if 14% were caused by speeding, 86% were caused by other things such as the driver not paying due attention (yet still keeping to the speed limit) or driving with a car that's in an unsafe condition (defective brakes, steering, suspension, tyres etc).
This particular case is somewhat extreme - given that the limit was 25mph, and he says he was doing 60, he should go to prison anyway - he *says* he was doing more than twice the limit! But what I'd like to know is, why the cops spend so much time and effort catching people who are speeding when most crashes are caused not by excessive speed but by defective cars and inattentive or intoxicated drivers? The answer is basically money - the cops make a lot of money from speed tickets, it's easy to prove in court with the right equipment, and you don't even have to stop the speeding car - just send the ticket to the registered address for the car's owner.
He has some valid points, but tbh I reckon the virus-writing course should be a module in a much more in-depth course in writing anti-virus software, network security and the like, such that graduates of the course could leave with the best qualification in security possible. Then it'd be up to companies like F-Prot to either break their rather silly "no virus-writers" rule and employ them, or face them as competitors in business.
It's not so much that they've outgrown the legal system, more that the legal system bends itself to whatever multinational corporations want. Every meeting of the G* group of countries has resulted in more and more laws allowing the corporations more freedom, whilst removing the civil liberties of individuals. The only right that is truly respected by modern-day Western governments is the right to own property.
I'd imagine the resource impact comes from 2 things - 1: IIRC Razor & SpamAssassin are both perl scripts. If you could do the same thing with (say) C++ or native assembler they'd run a lot faster. 2: Using Razor involves extra network traffic to query and update it. Maybe a large ISP such as AOL could negociate with the people who run Vipul's Razor so that they get a local copy of it, which they then use at times when the network use is lower to send a weekly update to the main database? Just a thought - it'd require some work, but then the benefits are likely to far outweigh the costs.
A better move would be to use a content analysis tool such as SpamAssassin in conjunction with Vipul's Razor to check the mail for recognisable spam. Basically you get Procmail to check if each mail is on Razor, which is an online spam database. If it's on there, it gets deleted from your mail queue or if you wish, dumped into a quarantine folder. If it isn't there, SpamAssassin checks for various Spam elements like 419 scams, testimonials from "my wife Jody" etc. If it scores over a certain threshold, it gets reported to Vipul's Razor as spam, and deleted/quarantined. Should a spam get through all that, you can manually report it to Razor so next time it will get intercepted.
But the progress you're talking about there is progress in hardware, not software functionality. To an extent hardware innovation & increasing performance is a driver for new applications in new areas, but as regards business software, most of us just want a word-processor, spreadsheet and maybe a database - and the main functions used there haven't really changed since the late 80's, give or take tweaks in file formats & mail-merge functions.
Surely though in this age of education for all, where there are publicly funded schools, cheaply available newspapers and 24 hour news coverage, with freedom of the press & of speech, there's more reason than ever to assume everyone voting has at least adequate means of understanding the issues. If they don't that's down to their own laziness in not bothering to find out rather than anything else. The assumption that all voting Athenians neccessarily knew & understood the issues on everything that was voted upon is something of a shaky one at best.
The danger that 51% of a voting populace can enslave the other 49% is not eradicated by confining the power to a smaller group - if the Labour party has 51% of the seats in parliament compared to the rest having 49% they can do pretty well anything they want. The Lords can only reject a bill so many times before it can be forced through by the Commons. And just because a person has a full-time job as an MP doesn't preclude them from spending much of their time elsewhere, and does not make them an expert on everything that parliament votes upon. Check out the RIPA for a start, or the dreadful Criminal Justice Act the Tories passed in the mid-90's with its infringements of civil liberties. Parliament has bungled so many times, they cannot truly be regarded as experts in rule. What, then, is the value in handing the controls over your life to a group of people who will only ask your opinion on things every few years, and whose interests rarely coincide with yours? Surely that's as unstable as running things yourself directly?
Democracy comes from two Greek root words, Demos, the people, and kratein, to rule or be strong. The idea is, the majority decide what goes. Is this actually any different from "mob rule"? Or is "mob rule" an idea put about by those in power who have a vested interest in seeing that the people do not in fact rule?
The Athenian democratic system allowed all citizens to vote on all laws - granted, their cities were smaller then & their definition of a citizen was basically a free, able-bodied male who would fight for the city if it was attacked, but these days we have the technology to enable the much larger numbers of citizens in our cities to all vote. Remember also that the ability to vote doesn't neccessarily mean the voter will vote either - they'll tend to vote only on matters that concern them directly, much as US Senators and UK MPs do now, but at least then we'd have proper democracy - rule of the people by the people, instead of rule/(mis)representation of the people by a privileged minority.
According to this site, V2s killed 2500 Londoners and seriously injured a further 6000, between the August of 1944 and March 1945. That's just with conventional warheads, and our armies advancing on the launching sites. Not bad. Compare with Iraqi successes with Scuds 12 years ago.
At the time, the V2 rocket was a hell of an achievement - the only rocket that could be launched in the Netherlands and land in London, a supersonic weapon which exploded on target before anyone had so much as heard it - no chance for air-raid sirens before the attack started, no chance of interception. To be on the receiving end of a V2 attack was an unprecedented, terrifying experience. Had they been loaded with biological warheads, there might have been a thoroughly different outcome to the War.
Why does it work in RH but not in MDK? Have a look in RH & see if there's a driver there called Actiontek that isn't in MDK, grab the source & recompile it in MDK. Cripes...
Sounds fine to me, at least for personal email accounts. If it's PGP signed, at least you can then verify the sender & get back to him/her. If it's PGP signed spam, you can block it effectively or get back to the spammer's ISP. Nice to know for real who exactly you're dealing with.
Well, granted, when you open up a hardware market like that you'll get a wide spectrum of quality, from cheapo-crappy to high-quality gear. I've spent money on my system where it counts - the motherboard - and saved it elsewhere, to give me exactly the machine I want at a low price. And no, I don't make them to sell to anyone.:-)
I'm not really a hardcore geek, but I don't like Windows because of the way Microsoft runs its business. So I have a choice - pay at least 600GBP for the oldest, lowest spec Mac around & try & upgrade it to OSX, or spend 200GBP less on a Duron-based PC system & install Mandrake Linux, which is about as easy/hard to use day-to-day as OSX (having tried out both). It just makes good financial sense. If Apple allowed third parties to make Macs in the same way that IBM allowed the PC manufacturers to copy their design & embellish upon it, we'd have much cheaper Mac hardware, & my argument would fall through.
Always assuming (ass-u-me?) that you can boot from CD. Many older machines can't. My first PC still functions pretty well but has lost the use of the floppy drive since the controller on the motherboard broke. Since it won't boot from CD (never has, I've tried all kinds of BIOS jiggery-pokery), I've no way to reinstall the OS (currently Win95) as far as I can see.
Your situation seems to work because your Project Manager is prepared to trust your expert opinion on how long you need to perform the tasks assigned to you, and is prepared to listen to you rather than just agreeing with a client a timescale in which the client needs stuff doing then dictating to you what timescale you have to work with & refusing to expand your team if the timescale is too small for the existing team to get the job done. Where the primary drivers are cost & client expectation, and no-one with a technical background was involved when selling the project to the client, as frequently happens in my experience, you have a recipe for disaster which can only be averted by the PM having enough technical knowledge to spot the flaws quick enough, or who will listen as yours does, and has the guts to go back & say "This can't be done in the time allotted with the resources available."
Good move! It's just being honest & having a bit of give & take. By connecting as people, you expand your circle of influence. I'll have to try that one myself.
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Heh, not just the average American - what he's done, militarily and economically, and environmentally, since his coup brought him to power, has had ramifications for everyone in the world. He's benefitted only the top 5% richest people, and killed a great deal of the world's poorest either directly or indirectly through globalisation.
There was a sign on a road near London, UK which said "14% of road accidents in this county were caused by speeding" - as a n attempt to justify the massive spread of GATSO speed cameras in the area. However, if 14% were caused by speeding, 86% were caused by other things such as the driver not paying due attention (yet still keeping to the speed limit) or driving with a car that's in an unsafe condition (defective brakes, steering, suspension, tyres etc).
This particular case is somewhat extreme - given that the limit was 25mph, and he says he was doing 60, he should go to prison anyway - he *says* he was doing more than twice the limit! But what I'd like to know is, why the cops spend so much time and effort catching people who are speeding when most crashes are caused not by excessive speed but by defective cars and inattentive or intoxicated drivers? The answer is basically money - the cops make a lot of money from speed tickets, it's easy to prove in court with the right equipment, and you don't even have to stop the speeding car - just send the ticket to the registered address for the car's owner.
He has some valid points, but tbh I reckon the virus-writing course should be a module in a much more in-depth course in writing anti-virus software, network security and the like, such that graduates of the course could leave with the best qualification in security possible. Then it'd be up to companies like F-Prot to either break their rather silly "no virus-writers" rule and employ them, or face them as competitors in business.
Sorry - sticky shift key - that should read G8.
It's not so much that they've outgrown the legal system, more that the legal system bends itself to whatever multinational corporations want. Every meeting of the G* group of countries has resulted in more and more laws allowing the corporations more freedom, whilst removing the civil liberties of individuals. The only right that is truly respected by modern-day Western governments is the right to own property.
Tech jobs in my local area fell by 80% recently. So we'll end up in 2010 with 40% of the jobs we had here last year? Whoopee!
I'd imagine the resource impact comes from 2 things - 1: IIRC Razor & SpamAssassin are both perl scripts. If you could do the same thing with (say) C++ or native assembler they'd run a lot faster. 2: Using Razor involves extra network traffic to query and update it. Maybe a large ISP such as AOL could negociate with the people who run Vipul's Razor so that they get a local copy of it, which they then use at times when the network use is lower to send a weekly update to the main database? Just a thought - it'd require some work, but then the benefits are likely to far outweigh the costs.
A better move would be to use a content analysis tool such as SpamAssassin in conjunction with Vipul's Razor to check the mail for recognisable spam. Basically you get Procmail to check if each mail is on Razor, which is an online spam database. If it's on there, it gets deleted from your mail queue or if you wish, dumped into a quarantine folder. If it isn't there, SpamAssassin checks for various Spam elements like 419 scams, testimonials from "my wife Jody" etc. If it scores over a certain threshold, it gets reported to Vipul's Razor as spam, and deleted/quarantined. Should a spam get through all that, you can manually report it to Razor so next time it will get intercepted.
So, are you going to devote your talents to another project, e.g. Linux? Not trying to troll here - I just think it'd be a waste not to.
But the progress you're talking about there is progress in hardware, not software functionality. To an extent hardware innovation & increasing performance is a driver for new applications in new areas, but as regards business software, most of us just want a word-processor, spreadsheet and maybe a database - and the main functions used there haven't really changed since the late 80's, give or take tweaks in file formats & mail-merge functions.
Better yet would be a robot to do the battling & keep us humans safe behind the front line.
Surely though in this age of education for all, where there are publicly funded schools, cheaply available newspapers and 24 hour news coverage, with freedom of the press & of speech, there's more reason than ever to assume everyone voting has at least adequate means of understanding the issues. If they don't that's down to their own laziness in not bothering to find out rather than anything else. The assumption that all voting Athenians neccessarily knew & understood the issues on everything that was voted upon is something of a shaky one at best.
:-)
The danger that 51% of a voting populace can enslave the other 49% is not eradicated by confining the power to a smaller group - if the Labour party has 51% of the seats in parliament compared to the rest having 49% they can do pretty well anything they want. The Lords can only reject a bill so many times before it can be forced through by the Commons. And just because a person has a full-time job as an MP doesn't preclude them from spending much of their time elsewhere, and does not make them an expert on everything that parliament votes upon. Check out the RIPA for a start, or the dreadful Criminal Justice Act the Tories passed in the mid-90's with its infringements of civil liberties. Parliament has bungled so many times, they cannot truly be regarded as experts in rule. What, then, is the value in handing the controls over your life to a group of people who will only ask your opinion on things every few years, and whose interests rarely coincide with yours? Surely that's as unstable as running things yourself directly?
"If you want a job done properly..."
Democracy comes from two Greek root words, Demos, the people, and kratein, to rule or be strong. The idea is, the majority decide what goes. Is this actually any different from "mob rule"? Or is "mob rule" an idea put about by those in power who have a vested interest in seeing that the people do not in fact rule?
The Athenian democratic system allowed all citizens to vote on all laws - granted, their cities were smaller then & their definition of a citizen was basically a free, able-bodied male who would fight for the city if it was attacked, but these days we have the technology to enable the much larger numbers of citizens in our cities to all vote. Remember also that the ability to vote doesn't neccessarily mean the voter will vote either - they'll tend to vote only on matters that concern them directly, much as US Senators and UK MPs do now, but at least then we'd have proper democracy - rule of the people by the people, instead of rule/(mis)representation of the people by a privileged minority.
According to this site, V2s killed 2500 Londoners and seriously injured a further 6000, between the August of 1944 and March 1945. That's just with conventional warheads, and our armies advancing on the launching sites. Not bad. Compare with Iraqi successes with Scuds 12 years ago.
At the time, the V2 rocket was a hell of an achievement - the only rocket that could be launched in the Netherlands and land in London, a supersonic weapon which exploded on target before anyone had so much as heard it - no chance for air-raid sirens before the attack started, no chance of interception. To be on the receiving end of a V2 attack was an unprecedented, terrifying experience. Had they been loaded with biological warheads, there might have been a thoroughly different outcome to the War.
Not forgetting mandrake, which is currently IIRC either top or second most commonly installed distro.
Why does it work in RH but not in MDK? Have a look in RH & see if there's a driver there called Actiontek that isn't in MDK, grab the source & recompile it in MDK. Cripes...
Hmm... good point. That could ruin the whole PGP keyserver "web of trust" thing. Back to the drawing board I guess...
Sounds fine to me, at least for personal email accounts. If it's PGP signed, at least you can then verify the sender & get back to him/her. If it's PGP signed spam, you can block it effectively or get back to the spammer's ISP. Nice to know for real who exactly you're dealing with.
I hear it's going to suck ass - Bernhard Rosenkraenzer has just quit RH because he reckons they're trying to make KDE crippleware in RH8.
Well, granted, when you open up a hardware market like that you'll get a wide spectrum of quality, from cheapo-crappy to high-quality gear. I've spent money on my system where it counts - the motherboard - and saved it elsewhere, to give me exactly the machine I want at a low price. And no, I don't make them to sell to anyone. :-)
I'm not really a hardcore geek, but I don't like Windows because of the way Microsoft runs its business. So I have a choice - pay at least 600GBP for the oldest, lowest spec Mac around & try & upgrade it to OSX, or spend 200GBP less on a Duron-based PC system & install Mandrake Linux, which is about as easy/hard to use day-to-day as OSX (having tried out both). It just makes good financial sense. If Apple allowed third parties to make Macs in the same way that IBM allowed the PC manufacturers to copy their design & embellish upon it, we'd have much cheaper Mac hardware, & my argument would fall through.
Always assuming (ass-u-me?) that you can boot from CD. Many older machines can't. My first PC still functions pretty well but has lost the use of the floppy drive since the controller on the motherboard broke. Since it won't boot from CD (never has, I've tried all kinds of BIOS jiggery-pokery), I've no way to reinstall the OS (currently Win95) as far as I can see.
Your situation seems to work because your Project Manager is prepared to trust your expert opinion on how long you need to perform the tasks assigned to you, and is prepared to listen to you rather than just agreeing with a client a timescale in which the client needs stuff doing then dictating to you what timescale you have to work with & refusing to expand your team if the timescale is too small for the existing team to get the job done. Where the primary drivers are cost & client expectation, and no-one with a technical background was involved when selling the project to the client, as frequently happens in my experience, you have a recipe for disaster which can only be averted by the PM having enough technical knowledge to spot the flaws quick enough, or who will listen as yours does, and has the guts to go back & say "This can't be done in the time allotted with the resources available."
Good move! It's just being honest & having a bit of give & take. By connecting as people, you expand your circle of influence. I'll have to try that one myself.