The Anonymous Coward is on the right track, but I actually see this as an opportunity for you to grow. College grads are newbies. You need to teach them how to do things the right way, giving them the background behind the right way so they'll start making more intelligent choices on their own. College grads are also very often shy about communication. Heck, I'm still shy sending emails to people 2 or 3 levels up from me. But for new grads, the shyness often starts at emailing just a mailing list, or more than 3 people.
Maybe you've already made up your mind about this guy, but if you're still on amiable terms, set up a weekly 1:1 with him to get him comfortable talking with you. Help him start email threads when he has questions, so he sees that the responses aren't "you're an idiot for asking that," but more often helpful advice. And maybe you have a project with a little more responsibility to send his way, so he'll feel challenged? Obviously don't give him something with a 1-week deadline, but maybe something big that you've always wanted but never can seem to get to. In exchange, take some of his easy text change tasks from him, which shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes, to show that you're all part of a team and you all should have a fair share of maintenance vs. challenges.
If you do this, you'll show that you're a leader and mentor, which is much more important to an organization in the long run than simply being a good coder.
You don't need a special widget to tap into land lines. If you're at a box, they all have regular phone jacks you can plug a regular phone into. There's only the legal system stopping someone from going to your house, finding your phone box outside, opening it with a screw driver, and making all the calls they want. Or they can listen to your calls if they'd prefer (but it takes special equipment to do this without putting a click on the line.)
I lived in an apartment complex in college, 20 units, and the phone box was completely insecure. Which was great when I wanted to figure out how they wired our 2nd line, but very worrying from a security standpoint.
What part of the constitution are you saying the CORPORATIONS violated? People's right against unreasonable searches and seizures? Because that's not something the corporations are violating -- they already have data. They don't need to search you for it. What may be unlawful on the side of the phone companies is that they gave out private information, which maybe that violates privacy laws, but it's not what the 4th amendment is talking about. The 4th amendment specifies what the government is not allowed to do.
Google released an explanation and apology on the Gmail public blog. In fact, there were announcements on the downtime status throughout the event, but they've since been deprecated for the final blog post.
I hope the conclusion you reached is that developers should be involved in UI design from a requirements perspective. At the very least, the consulting firm should have known what your tools were capable of. Secondly, good UI designers can take feedback like "it would be easier to do things this way," for example, if you already have a UI and you're trying to minimize changes. Your development team should have had engineering management on top of it who were aware of the consulting firm and should have injected themselves into the conversation. Even if it's a lead developer, it's easy to make the argument that engineering must be involved within the role required of it.
I sincerely hope your argument isn't against user experience consulting firms, because that wasn't the problem here, and designing an interface isn't always something that requires a permanent staff.
I'm glad you highlighted that line of the summary. The point of the obfuscation was to slow down analysis of the code and require special tools (SpiderMonkey) that average web users don't have. Here the malware author clearly won. The article author spent hours figuring out a new obfuscation technique and writing an article about it. If there are malware detectors, they have to be updated to detect the new obfuscations.
This is not the traditional DRM argument. No one's trying to decode a video or music file they have legal rights to access. This is a malware arms race: The point IS to hide what's going on, not to lock things down. What's more interesting here, and not even discussed, is the parallel between Javascript malware development and computer viruses. The technique the author uncovered is an adaptation of polymorphic virus concepts into web malware. And while the technique is something many developers could come up with, I haven't heard being used in practice yet, so it's likely a noteworthy step in the arms race.
Who are the 30% of people who don't approve of the Do Not Call list? The telemarketing industry is not that big. I don't think 30% of people are adamant enough to say that all telemarketing should be illegal, therefore they disapprove Do Not Call list: These people would probably be happy that there's something helping out. One statistic in the article showed that only 18% of respondents who placed themselves on the Do Not Call list now receive zero telemarketing calls, so maybe people don't feel the list is effective enough. But only 9% of respondents claimed no reduction in calls; 91% said the Do Not Call list reduced telemarketing calls. Yet these people still don't approve? I don't get it.
You don't need an MBA to know that. Maybe that's when you learned about the correlation, but it's widely discussed in software engineering courses too. See the widely cited book The Mythical Man Month, which I read in my 3rd year of computer science undergraduate study, for one example.
Now there's actually an incentive for Live search to return worthless results! 'Cause if they found anything worthwhile, it costs Microsoft money. Genius!
Actually, most dupes on Slashdot are a couple days apart like this one. After that they fail to be news and tend not to get reposted.
The extreme cases are actually measured in the years or hours. There's multiple cases of an article being duped 2-3 years later, especially when they're industry studies on how people use technology or occasionally about scientific discoveries. For the latter, it's often that a university announces they've done something and then publishes the results, which results in two very similar though arguably non-duplicative Slashdot articles.
On the other side, sometimes there's big news and an editor decides to get it out fast without reading the current front page. I've seen dupes within the same hour, but more likely they're 2-3 articles apart in the worst cases. This was one of the arguments for introducing the Slashdot subscription model, in fact: Subscribers have early access to upcoming articles and can tell editors that an upcoming article is a dupe. In many cases (but not all) the editor pulls the dupe before it gets pushed to the front page.
No one's kidnapped me and held me for $10 million in ransom yet either. Probably for similar reasons: It's not worth spending effort on cracking ReCAPTCHA, but it is worth cracking sign-up CAPTCHAs for well trusted email providers.
We can pick on Norway all we want, but they're not the only country voting for OOXML. Every other country voting 'yes' deserves just as much of a skeptical eye.
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968. The author thought items for sale would be displayed on a television, and people would order items through a different interface -- the telephone -- by pressing on a telephone keypad.
Instead, today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels. It seems so obvious now, and as a developer I still think we have a ways to go, but look how far we've come! This wasn't even fathomable 40 years ago.
Users have lower latency, hence loading web pages perceivably faster, if they're talking to servers in the same continent. There's hundreds of millions of people coming online each year in Asia, so it makes sense to grow data centers there to serve those users better.
RTFA. This is a device that you get in addition to your passport. You probably leave the device in your car, and it comes with a metallic sleeve so you can shield it when you're not crossing borders. You do not take it with you when you go traveling on a plane.
"The survey also revealed that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men."
This does not equate to more blogger being women. If there are twice the number of males reading blogs than females, then given the above ratio, 40% more men would be blogging than women. Unfortunately this article doesn't tell us the number of males reading blogs versus females, so we can't draw any conclusion either way. And I'd guess that there's more men reading blogs based on my use of Slashdot and Digg, but I really have no broad data to back me up.
The only thing this survey shows is that of blog readers who fill out surveys, females tend to blog more than males. And even then, the margin of error on a population size of 10,000,000 bloggers with their 1,000 user sample size is 3.1%. So the statistic is nearly meaningless...
Who except hotmail users will have an active Live ID and be logged in?
Suckers. The same people who click the monkey and refi their home loans to go on vacation. The very knowledge of whether someone is a sucker, or isn't, is extremely valuable. It's almost as good as knowing whether someone's a MySpace user.
I'm personally waiting for TV commercials saying, "Have you been threatened by a record company accusing you of copyright infringement? Get the justice you deserve!!"
Once these commercials are plastered all over Judge Judy's commercial breaks, I bet the record companies will stop their foolishness.
Perhaps you should read the second word in the summary. It's not the article, it's not even the whole summary, just the second word:
"Capitol"
In all of these cases, specific record companies are the plantiffs. In this case, it's one company, in other cases, it's two record companies. It's only the press that reports it as actions of the RIAA, since all the legal filings specify the record companies claiming infringement.
I wholeheartedly agree. People over 50 have had 50 years of repetition to remember birthdays. In addition, they're more likely to have bought homes, and therefore to have had their home phone number remain the same for a longer period of time. The study also doesn't take into account how young people tend to use home phones less than older people, and tend to provide their cell phone number instead of their home phone number more often than older people. Perhaps I have my own assumptions in the previous sentence, but the study didn't quantify them in either direction.
A more useful study would be to give people in each group a list of numbers to remember. Have them study it for a couple days. Then take it away for a week, and have them come in to recite it. Which group does better? My personal guess would be that the results would match the historical learning capabilities of a person's age (which I personally don't know). I doubt there would be a significant difference between results in a study 20 years ago versus a study today. But it would be nice to have a control group of people who don't use gadgets to compare to.
PHP began as a hacky side project of a lone developer (Rasmus Lerdorf). I'm not wholly aware of the details, but my understanding is that Rasmus was a Perl coder and wanted to generate minorly dynamic web pages by putting Perl-like code inside of his HTML. As the capabilities of his technology grew, he released it as an open source project, and due to its extreme ease of use it quickly turned into a popular web development language.
The reason PHP5 could not continue backward compatability is because of its roots: It was designed to be EASY. In the first few releases, there wasn't serious thought put into making a proper software development language. But as web pages became more complex, soft typing, lack of proper scope, and lack of OOP patterns made developing complex PHP applications a world of horror. In addition, concepts like putting all query parameters into the scope of the program, which made developing simple applications easy, created a difficult situation for those trying to make complex applications secure. So to remove these security problems, and to remain relevant by providing richer programming constructs like classes, PHP had to break backwards compatibility.
And while Java is mostly backwards compatible, the technologies for developing Java on the web have changed dramatically. Originally, JSP developers would put Java code right in their HTML! Today this is highly frowned upon (though backward compatible). So developers switched to JSP tags, such as the JSP Standard Tag Library, which coincidentally enough aren't backward compatible between versions. If you're running a Java app server, you'll definitely run into problems when upgrading WebSphere, WebLogic or Tomcat, due to updated tag libraries and other JARs being incompatible with their previous versions. These problems aren't as bad as porting your average PHP app from PHP4 to PHP5, but upgrading versions not a straight-forward process with either programming language.
Stepping back, PHP is in a pretty similar spot to Visual Basic. VB.NET is wholely incompatible with VB6. Microsoft has announced a dropping of support for VB6. However, half of VB developers still program in VB6. Many VB programmers don't understand VB.NET's features, and hence are quite reluctant to move to VB.NET (and they're probably angry, too). And most existing VB6 code would nearly require a complete rewrite to get running in VB.NET. What might just happen is that Microsoft and PHP will have to continue supporting their legacy versions or simply lose beginning programmers as customers. Microsoft will probably continue to end-of-life VB6, but I believe they will release a language highly similar to VB6 that's easier to move over to. It will be interesting to see whether PHP follows a similar path or just leaves its developers to either learn PHP5 or move to another webby language, like Python.
The current AT&T is actually SBC. SBC bought the guts of the AT&T brand, which was basically an empty company after spinoffs like AT&T Wireless, and then changed their name to seem more "respectable." Cingular, previously a joint venture of SBC and BellSouth, became fully owned by AT&T when it acquired BellSouth shortly after renaming itself. So the AT&T management now is actually SBC management, and Cingular probably had its head chopped off in all the mergers, and the old SBC management is continuing down its predatory path and growing through lobbying the FCC.
So don't blame Cingular, or even the old AT&T -- blame SBC, which is who "AT&T" really is.
Slashdot Mirror
The Anonymous Coward is on the right track, but I actually see this as an opportunity for you to grow. College grads are newbies. You need to teach them how to do things the right way, giving them the background behind the right way so they'll start making more intelligent choices on their own. College grads are also very often shy about communication. Heck, I'm still shy sending emails to people 2 or 3 levels up from me. But for new grads, the shyness often starts at emailing just a mailing list, or more than 3 people.
Maybe you've already made up your mind about this guy, but if you're still on amiable terms, set up a weekly 1:1 with him to get him comfortable talking with you. Help him start email threads when he has questions, so he sees that the responses aren't "you're an idiot for asking that," but more often helpful advice. And maybe you have a project with a little more responsibility to send his way, so he'll feel challenged? Obviously don't give him something with a 1-week deadline, but maybe something big that you've always wanted but never can seem to get to. In exchange, take some of his easy text change tasks from him, which shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes, to show that you're all part of a team and you all should have a fair share of maintenance vs. challenges.
If you do this, you'll show that you're a leader and mentor, which is much more important to an organization in the long run than simply being a good coder.
You don't need a special widget to tap into land lines. If you're at a box, they all have regular phone jacks you can plug a regular phone into. There's only the legal system stopping someone from going to your house, finding your phone box outside, opening it with a screw driver, and making all the calls they want. Or they can listen to your calls if they'd prefer (but it takes special equipment to do this without putting a click on the line.)
I lived in an apartment complex in college, 20 units, and the phone box was completely insecure. Which was great when I wanted to figure out how they wired our 2nd line, but very worrying from a security standpoint.
What part of the constitution are you saying the CORPORATIONS violated? People's right against unreasonable searches and seizures? Because that's not something the corporations are violating -- they already have data. They don't need to search you for it. What may be unlawful on the side of the phone companies is that they gave out private information, which maybe that violates privacy laws, but it's not what the 4th amendment is talking about. The 4th amendment specifies what the government is not allowed to do.
Google released an explanation and apology on the Gmail public blog. In fact, there were announcements on the downtime status throughout the event, but they've since been deprecated for the final blog post.
I hope the conclusion you reached is that developers should be involved in UI design from a requirements perspective. At the very least, the consulting firm should have known what your tools were capable of. Secondly, good UI designers can take feedback like "it would be easier to do things this way," for example, if you already have a UI and you're trying to minimize changes. Your development team should have had engineering management on top of it who were aware of the consulting firm and should have injected themselves into the conversation. Even if it's a lead developer, it's easy to make the argument that engineering must be involved within the role required of it.
I sincerely hope your argument isn't against user experience consulting firms, because that wasn't the problem here, and designing an interface isn't always something that requires a permanent staff.
I thought cloud computing was getting your lolz on YouTube after smoking a bowl?
I'm glad you highlighted that line of the summary. The point of the obfuscation was to slow down analysis of the code and require special tools (SpiderMonkey) that average web users don't have. Here the malware author clearly won. The article author spent hours figuring out a new obfuscation technique and writing an article about it. If there are malware detectors, they have to be updated to detect the new obfuscations.
This is not the traditional DRM argument. No one's trying to decode a video or music file they have legal rights to access. This is a malware arms race: The point IS to hide what's going on, not to lock things down. What's more interesting here, and not even discussed, is the parallel between Javascript malware development and computer viruses. The technique the author uncovered is an adaptation of polymorphic virus concepts into web malware. And while the technique is something many developers could come up with, I haven't heard being used in practice yet, so it's likely a noteworthy step in the arms race.
Who are the 30% of people who don't approve of the Do Not Call list? The telemarketing industry is not that big. I don't think 30% of people are adamant enough to say that all telemarketing should be illegal, therefore they disapprove Do Not Call list: These people would probably be happy that there's something helping out. One statistic in the article showed that only 18% of respondents who placed themselves on the Do Not Call list now receive zero telemarketing calls, so maybe people don't feel the list is effective enough. But only 9% of respondents claimed no reduction in calls; 91% said the Do Not Call list reduced telemarketing calls. Yet these people still don't approve? I don't get it.
You don't need an MBA to know that. Maybe that's when you learned about the correlation, but it's widely discussed in software engineering courses too. See the widely cited book The Mythical Man Month, which I read in my 3rd year of computer science undergraduate study, for one example.
Now there's actually an incentive for Live search to return worthless results! 'Cause if they found anything worthwhile, it costs Microsoft money. Genius!
the lucidity of your post was ironically injured by its polysyllabic delivery.
Actually, most dupes on Slashdot are a couple days apart like this one. After that they fail to be news and tend not to get reposted.
The extreme cases are actually measured in the years or hours. There's multiple cases of an article being duped 2-3 years later, especially when they're industry studies on how people use technology or occasionally about scientific discoveries. For the latter, it's often that a university announces they've done something and then publishes the results, which results in two very similar though arguably non-duplicative Slashdot articles.
On the other side, sometimes there's big news and an editor decides to get it out fast without reading the current front page. I've seen dupes within the same hour, but more likely they're 2-3 articles apart in the worst cases. This was one of the arguments for introducing the Slashdot subscription model, in fact: Subscribers have early access to upcoming articles and can tell editors that an upcoming article is a dupe. In many cases (but not all) the editor pulls the dupe before it gets pushed to the front page.
No one has cracked ReCAPTCHA yet.
No one's kidnapped me and held me for $10 million in ransom yet either. Probably for similar reasons: It's not worth spending effort on cracking ReCAPTCHA, but it is worth cracking sign-up CAPTCHAs for well trusted email providers.
We can pick on Norway all we want, but they're not the only country voting for OOXML. Every other country voting 'yes' deserves just as much of a skeptical eye.
They're all Flash based, for sure, but only Photoshop Express and Buzzword are owned by Adobe so far.
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968. The author thought items for sale would be displayed on a television, and people would order items through a different interface -- the telephone -- by pressing on a telephone keypad.
Instead, today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels. It seems so obvious now, and as a developer I still think we have a ways to go, but look how far we've come! This wasn't even fathomable 40 years ago.
Users have lower latency, hence loading web pages perceivably faster, if they're talking to servers in the same continent. There's hundreds of millions of people coming online each year in Asia, so it makes sense to grow data centers there to serve those users better.
RTFA. This is a device that you get in addition to your passport. You probably leave the device in your car, and it comes with a metallic sleeve so you can shield it when you're not crossing borders. You do not take it with you when you go traveling on a plane.
The body of the article states:
...
"The survey also revealed that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men."
This does not equate to more blogger being women. If there are twice the number of males reading blogs than females, then given the above ratio, 40% more men would be blogging than women. Unfortunately this article doesn't tell us the number of males reading blogs versus females, so we can't draw any conclusion either way. And I'd guess that there's more men reading blogs based on my use of Slashdot and Digg, but I really have no broad data to back me up.
The only thing this survey shows is that of blog readers who fill out surveys, females tend to blog more than males. And even then, the margin of error on a population size of 10,000,000 bloggers with their 1,000 user sample size is 3.1%. So the statistic is nearly meaningless
Who except hotmail users will have an active Live ID and be logged in?
Suckers. The same people who click the monkey and refi their home loans to go on vacation. The very knowledge of whether someone is a sucker, or isn't, is extremely valuable. It's almost as good as knowing whether someone's a MySpace user.
I'm personally waiting for TV commercials saying, "Have you been threatened by a record company accusing you of copyright infringement? Get the justice you deserve!!"
Once these commercials are plastered all over Judge Judy's commercial breaks, I bet the record companies will stop their foolishness.
Perhaps you should read the second word in the summary. It's not the article, it's not even the whole summary, just the second word:
"Capitol"
In all of these cases, specific record companies are the plantiffs. In this case, it's one company, in other cases, it's two record companies. It's only the press that reports it as actions of the RIAA, since all the legal filings specify the record companies claiming infringement.
I wholeheartedly agree. People over 50 have had 50 years of repetition to remember birthdays. In addition, they're more likely to have bought homes, and therefore to have had their home phone number remain the same for a longer period of time. The study also doesn't take into account how young people tend to use home phones less than older people, and tend to provide their cell phone number instead of their home phone number more often than older people. Perhaps I have my own assumptions in the previous sentence, but the study didn't quantify them in either direction.
A more useful study would be to give people in each group a list of numbers to remember. Have them study it for a couple days. Then take it away for a week, and have them come in to recite it. Which group does better? My personal guess would be that the results would match the historical learning capabilities of a person's age (which I personally don't know). I doubt there would be a significant difference between results in a study 20 years ago versus a study today. But it would be nice to have a control group of people who don't use gadgets to compare to.
PHP began as a hacky side project of a lone developer (Rasmus Lerdorf). I'm not wholly aware of the details, but my understanding is that Rasmus was a Perl coder and wanted to generate minorly dynamic web pages by putting Perl-like code inside of his HTML. As the capabilities of his technology grew, he released it as an open source project, and due to its extreme ease of use it quickly turned into a popular web development language.
The reason PHP5 could not continue backward compatability is because of its roots: It was designed to be EASY. In the first few releases, there wasn't serious thought put into making a proper software development language. But as web pages became more complex, soft typing, lack of proper scope, and lack of OOP patterns made developing complex PHP applications a world of horror. In addition, concepts like putting all query parameters into the scope of the program, which made developing simple applications easy, created a difficult situation for those trying to make complex applications secure. So to remove these security problems, and to remain relevant by providing richer programming constructs like classes, PHP had to break backwards compatibility.
And while Java is mostly backwards compatible, the technologies for developing Java on the web have changed dramatically. Originally, JSP developers would put Java code right in their HTML! Today this is highly frowned upon (though backward compatible). So developers switched to JSP tags, such as the JSP Standard Tag Library, which coincidentally enough aren't backward compatible between versions. If you're running a Java app server, you'll definitely run into problems when upgrading WebSphere, WebLogic or Tomcat, due to updated tag libraries and other JARs being incompatible with their previous versions. These problems aren't as bad as porting your average PHP app from PHP4 to PHP5, but upgrading versions not a straight-forward process with either programming language.
Stepping back, PHP is in a pretty similar spot to Visual Basic. VB.NET is wholely incompatible with VB6. Microsoft has announced a dropping of support for VB6. However, half of VB developers still program in VB6. Many VB programmers don't understand VB.NET's features, and hence are quite reluctant to move to VB.NET (and they're probably angry, too). And most existing VB6 code would nearly require a complete rewrite to get running in VB.NET. What might just happen is that Microsoft and PHP will have to continue supporting their legacy versions or simply lose beginning programmers as customers. Microsoft will probably continue to end-of-life VB6, but I believe they will release a language highly similar to VB6 that's easier to move over to. It will be interesting to see whether PHP follows a similar path or just leaves its developers to either learn PHP5 or move to another webby language, like Python.
The current AT&T is actually SBC. SBC bought the guts of the AT&T brand, which was basically an empty company after spinoffs like AT&T Wireless, and then changed their name to seem more "respectable." Cingular, previously a joint venture of SBC and BellSouth, became fully owned by AT&T when it acquired BellSouth shortly after renaming itself. So the AT&T management now is actually SBC management, and Cingular probably had its head chopped off in all the mergers, and the old SBC management is continuing down its predatory path and growing through lobbying the FCC.
So don't blame Cingular, or even the old AT&T -- blame SBC, which is who "AT&T" really is.