If someone is writing code without review that is used in some life-critical application based solely on a college degree then the management should be hung out to dry, not the inept coder.
Your argument smacks of someone who hasn't worked much in a job yet. The stuff you learn in school is maybe 5% of what you actually use in a job. Maybe even less.
We hire many people that are still in college. Most can't code very well when they come to us, no matter what their grades are in school. Our best "natural" coder was actually an unpaid high school intern, who we later hired for the summer. His code wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good, better than I've gotten from other college student/graduate hires, and he could turn out hundreds of lines per day that were actually usable, and with a little code review, maintainable.
It doesn't seem to happen as often with other computer hardware.
For "some reason" it always happens with removable media.
I don't think it's a coincidence: The people are organizing as one group and since they all speak the same language, nothing they imagine to do will be held back from them. Let us go down and confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other's speech.
Someone at the MPAA/media conglomerates must be a fan of the Bible.
I don't know about that. OpenSSH with RC4 can easily pump 200-300mbits on anything even remotely modern CPU-wise. It doesn't seem to have much space overhead either, since I get full 100mbit payload streams saturating a 100mbit link that are nearly the same speed as benchmarking the same link with ttcp or netcat.
My company's site redirects you to SSL at the beginning and leaves you there. No complaints about speed when we made the change to all SSL.
By the time your $3000 tape drive "pays off in the long run", I'll be buying 5TB disks for $150.
Redundancy and mirroring is the way to go these days. It doesn't much matter if your drive fails if it's just one drive in a RAID that is mirrored in other places on other completely independant RAIDs. In any case, ATA/SATA drives don't fail all that much more than SCSI, at least in the first 3 years*.
Even at work where we store multiple terabytes of business critical data, we use SATA. We just keep 3 independant copies of the data, one offsite. We use incremental rsync snapshots for incremental functionality.
*The great part is that there's no huge investment. If hard disk technology jumps next year, we can upgrade with no guilt, since we didn't sink a ton of money into it in the first place. Previously we'd milk our SCSI RAIDs and tape drives/robots until they were ridiculously obselete and undersized because the cost was so high to upgrade them. It's no big deal to completely replace every drive every 3 years. The upshot is you generally replace all your disks with half as many disks 3 years later, since sizes have doubled, and the cost is about constant. Your RAIDs slowly get more reliable as the number of drives drops every cycle.
You can brag about your baker's dozen of 36 GB 6 year old SCSI drives never failing, but I'll have a few 300 GB drives and have spent less money in absolute terms, and far less money once you count the time value of sunk costs into the equation.
The cypherpunk movement is dead. Just scanning the slashdot comments and reading all the "If you don't have anything to hide, why are you concerned?" posts makes that obvious.
At one point in Internet history, we (the libertarian/anarchists/cypherpunks) thought it might bring a new era of freedom. BBSs had given us a taste, and many people expected the Internet to be like a huge BBS, with everything you could imagine on it.
And it was, for a while.
Then some copyright lawyers started jumping on board, and harassing lyrics sites.
The Scientologists started suing people left and right.
Spam started snowballing.
MP3s cause the record companies to start wishing people were only trading lyrics.
Late 1998 though 1999 was the high point I think. Geeks were Gods. Stories of geek millionaires were all over the place. The US finally watered down the stupid crypto regulations. Things were looking up.
Then the Columbine shootings happened.
The 2000 elections brough all kinds of leftists out of the woodwork. Remember Nader? He sure got enough astroturfing here on Slashdot.
The so called "anarchists" get all over the news acting like total fuckwads at WTO "protests".
The WTC attack caused all the people with comfortable lives that liked to think they were cypherpunks to turn. Pull up some stories from Slashdot on 9/11 and 9/12 and see how many people were so willing to offer up the liberty for a slice of security. PATRIOT act flies through with little hassle.
News media reduced to saying things like "Some civil libertarians have concerns" instead of "What the fuck are they thinking?"
Scam artists hiding behind patent law started really milking it.
So you have left what you have today. An environment where you can't really do anything without the risk of lawsuit or arrest. I see things slowly shifting back toward the side of freedom, but it's been a slow recovery.
If Steve Jackson Games Raid happened today, would people be outraged enough to form something like the EFF? I doubt it.
That referred to a specific practice of filing extensions with the patent office to delay approval of an unpublished patent until after the patent was in common use. That way you got 17 full years of royalties on a patent no one even knew existed, and that everyone was infringing on. That practice has been almost eliminated by the patent office changing the rules to require publication earler.
This is just a case of delayed enforcement. While Toyota could argue the patent holder is guilty of laches and is not eligible to enforce the patent anymore, that's a different matter.
It looks like a more reasonable ranking, closer to what I expected. Their methodology is still a little questionable, but it's much better than going on job listing numbers.
Those are unfilled jobs. Jobs that they couldn't find someone for without resorting to advertising. In other words, the jobs that get listed on job sites are the ones that no one wants.
It seems as though replication is becoming more common than "backups".
Yep. I still call ours backups though, because we use rsync-incremental snapshots to have snapshots of each day in the last 60 days.
I don't know if you are familiar with the technique, but the jist is you make a hard link farm, rsync always unlinks before modifying a file, so when a file changes all the older hard links point at the older version and the new link gets the new data. This way you can have "snapshots" of the data as it existed at any particular point in history.
rdiff-backup is a similar technique but instead of working on a file/hardlink level it works on a binary diff level, so it's more space efficient for large files that only have small changes in them.
Yeah, tape sucks. We had a "tapes in a robot" setup for our terabytes of data, we moved it to RAIDs a few years back. Took weeks to get all the data off the tapes. It would have been a real disaster if we had to do that in an emergency situation.
It's so much cheaper and easier to just get 2 or 3 RAIDs and mirror them all with rsync or whatever. Easier to do remote backups onto the remote RAID with rsync too.
When I do read Slashdot actively I never get mod points. Those are times I'd probably be most likely to mod.
When I get busy and start reading slashdot maybe once every 3 days, then I get mod points, that often expire with several unused because during those times I have less time for Slashdot.
If I were a more active submitter I could envision a similar situation, where there are days that I submit many stories and then periods when I submit none.
What about a message rated 50% meta 50% insightful?
I think people would just write a post about the content, then tack on a meta-comment at the end. People already do that to avoid editoral modslapping for meta content anyway.
On that topic, I think it's mature of taco et al that they didn't bitchslap this discussion and even posted this metastory.
Much better than handling of previous situations that are similar.
And let technology make the jobs of 5 or 6 people employed at OSDN irrelevant?
The editors will never go for that. As it is, they probably have the easiest job in the world, sort through what basically amounts to a spam filled inbox, find 5 or 10 good submissions, do some light editing and dup checking (yeah right), and hit post.
That'll not work. It'll just encourage karma whoring, lowering the quality of the discussion.
If these guys are smart enough to copy and paste stories to submit and get them posted, they are good enough to plagarize other posts and articles for karma whoring purposes.
Your UID is low enough to remember karma whoring before the karma cap I think.
I think we have more to fear from proprietary formats, when you are talking about accessing a work in 100 years.
Any DRM key can be brute force cracked by a computer 100 years from now in a few milliseconds flat (Assuming all that's left is a DRMed copy and not one someone decrypted). Putting the man hours into reverse engineering a format is a real barrier to accessing media in the future. It's unlikely a computer will ever be able to do something as complex as reverse engineering formats.
So I say go crazy with the DRM. Just use a well documented format with an open specification. Really open, not "pay $1000 to join our club and sign this NDA and poke your eyes out after 'open'".
I'm a Libertarian, so the Fair Tax isn't an ideal solution for me either. I still think it's a step in the right direction, eliminating the huge and bloated IRS and replacing it with a much smaller tax collection agency that has a very simple function.
If you run a business today you are a tax collector in every sense of the word. You withhold payroll taxes, you charge sales taxes, you file 1099s on interest and dividends you issue to ensure that the recipients pay the tax.
Businesses are already the main collectors of tax. Many even wind up paying $10,000 a year or more for accountants and accounting software to make sure they don't screw the taxes up.
The Fair Tax just simplifies the process by making all the federal taxes one simple to compute percentage.
The only legitimate challenge to the fair tax I've ever heard was from the man soon to be governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine. He said that just as you would diversify your investments, the government should have a diversified tax base, and the Fair Tax puts all your eggs in one basket. I don't agree with this for various reasons, but that's the only challenge to the Fair Tax I've ever heard that is even valid.
Slashdot Mirror
That argument is bogus.
If someone is writing code without review that is used in some life-critical application based solely on a college degree then the management should be hung out to dry, not the inept coder.
Your argument smacks of someone who hasn't worked much in a job yet. The stuff you learn in school is maybe 5% of what you actually use in a job. Maybe even less.
We hire many people that are still in college. Most can't code very well when they come to us, no matter what their grades are in school. Our best "natural" coder was actually an unpaid high school intern, who we later hired for the summer. His code wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good, better than I've gotten from other college student/graduate hires, and he could turn out hundreds of lines per day that were actually usable, and with a little code review, maintainable.
It doesn't seem to happen as often with other computer hardware.
For "some reason" it always happens with removable media.
I don't think it's a coincidence: The people are organizing as one group and since they all speak the same language, nothing they imagine to do will be held back from them. Let us go down and confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other's speech.
Someone at the MPAA/media conglomerates must be a fan of the Bible.
I don't know about that. OpenSSH with RC4 can easily pump 200-300mbits on anything even remotely modern CPU-wise. It doesn't seem to have much space overhead either, since I get full 100mbit payload streams saturating a 100mbit link that are nearly the same speed as benchmarking the same link with ttcp or netcat.
My company's site redirects you to SSL at the beginning and leaves you there. No complaints about speed when we made the change to all SSL.
Bah, Joel invented this on MST3000 years ago. Where's my edible sneakers?
By the time your $3000 tape drive "pays off in the long run", I'll be buying 5TB disks for $150.
Redundancy and mirroring is the way to go these days. It doesn't much matter if your drive fails if it's just one drive in a RAID that is mirrored in other places on other completely independant RAIDs. In any case, ATA/SATA drives don't fail all that much more than SCSI, at least in the first 3 years*.
Even at work where we store multiple terabytes of business critical data, we use SATA. We just keep 3 independant copies of the data, one offsite. We use incremental rsync snapshots for incremental functionality.
*The great part is that there's no huge investment. If hard disk technology jumps next year, we can upgrade with no guilt, since we didn't sink a ton of money into it in the first place. Previously we'd milk our SCSI RAIDs and tape drives/robots until they were ridiculously obselete and undersized because the cost was so high to upgrade them. It's no big deal to completely replace every drive every 3 years. The upshot is you generally replace all your disks with half as many disks 3 years later, since sizes have doubled, and the cost is about constant. Your RAIDs slowly get more reliable as the number of drives drops every cycle.
You can brag about your baker's dozen of 36 GB 6 year old SCSI drives never failing, but I'll have a few 300 GB drives and have spent less money in absolute terms, and far less money once you count the time value of sunk costs into the equation.
The cypherpunk movement is dead. Just scanning the slashdot comments and reading all the "If you don't have anything to hide, why are you concerned?" posts makes that obvious.
At one point in Internet history, we (the libertarian/anarchists/cypherpunks) thought it might bring a new era of freedom. BBSs had given us a taste, and many people expected the Internet to be like a huge BBS, with everything you could imagine on it.
And it was, for a while.
Then some copyright lawyers started jumping on board, and harassing lyrics sites.
The Scientologists started suing people left and right.
Spam started snowballing.
MP3s cause the record companies to start wishing people were only trading lyrics.
Late 1998 though 1999 was the high point I think. Geeks were Gods. Stories of geek millionaires were all over the place. The US finally watered down the stupid crypto regulations. Things were looking up.
Then the Columbine shootings happened.
The 2000 elections brough all kinds of leftists out of the woodwork. Remember Nader? He sure got enough astroturfing here on Slashdot.
The so called "anarchists" get all over the news acting like total fuckwads at WTO "protests".
The WTC attack caused all the people with comfortable lives that liked to think they were cypherpunks to turn. Pull up some stories from Slashdot on 9/11 and 9/12 and see how many people were so willing to offer up the liberty for a slice of security. PATRIOT act flies through with little hassle.
News media reduced to saying things like "Some civil libertarians have concerns" instead of "What the fuck are they thinking?"
Scam artists hiding behind patent law started really milking it.
So you have left what you have today. An environment where you can't really do anything without the risk of lawsuit or arrest. I see things slowly shifting back toward the side of freedom, but it's been a slow recovery.
If Steve Jackson Games Raid happened today, would people be outraged enough to form something like the EFF? I doubt it.
Technically it's not submarine patents.
That referred to a specific practice of filing extensions with the patent office to delay approval of an unpublished patent until after the patent was in common use. That way you got 17 full years of royalties on a patent no one even knew existed, and that everyone was infringing on. That practice has been almost eliminated by the patent office changing the rules to require publication earler.
This is just a case of delayed enforcement. While Toyota could argue the patent holder is guilty of laches and is not eligible to enforce the patent anymore, that's a different matter.
It looks like a more reasonable ranking, closer to what I expected. Their methodology is still a little questionable, but it's much better than going on job listing numbers.
That's not a good measurement.
Those are unfilled jobs. Jobs that they couldn't find someone for without resorting to advertising. In other words, the jobs that get listed on job sites are the ones that no one wants.
It's a press release. It says so right at the top. It's not like some secret agenda.
GTA San Andreas apparently used Mario 64 a a role model for how to make a good camera system.
I just love the cinematic thrill of driving in one direction and looking behind me after doing a sharp turn. Really gives the game that added touch.
It seems as though replication is becoming more common than "backups".
Yep. I still call ours backups though, because we use rsync-incremental snapshots to have snapshots of each day in the last 60 days.
I don't know if you are familiar with the technique, but the jist is you make a hard link farm, rsync always unlinks before modifying a file, so when a file changes all the older hard links point at the older version and the new link gets the new data. This way you can have "snapshots" of the data as it existed at any particular point in history.
rdiff-backup is a similar technique but instead of working on a file/hardlink level it works on a binary diff level, so it's more space efficient for large files that only have small changes in them.
gtetrinet/tetrinet/bloktrix is 6 player free internet tetris, pretty fun.
Hopefully, I will never have to do a restore
Yeah, tape sucks. We had a "tapes in a robot" setup for our terabytes of data, we moved it to RAIDs a few years back. Took weeks to get all the data off the tapes. It would have been a real disaster if we had to do that in an emergency situation.
It's so much cheaper and easier to just get 2 or 3 RAIDs and mirror them all with rsync or whatever. Easier to do remote backups onto the remote RAID with rsync too.
That system never sat right with me.
When I do read Slashdot actively I never get mod points. Those are times I'd probably be most likely to mod.
When I get busy and start reading slashdot maybe once every 3 days, then I get mod points, that often expire with several unused because during those times I have less time for Slashdot.
If I were a more active submitter I could envision a similar situation, where there are days that I submit many stories and then periods when I submit none.
What about a message rated 50% meta 50% insightful?
I think people would just write a post about the content, then tack on a meta-comment at the end. People already do that to avoid editoral modslapping for meta content anyway.
On that topic, I think it's mature of taco et al that they didn't bitchslap this discussion and even posted this metastory.
Much better than handling of previous situations that are similar.
And let technology make the jobs of 5 or 6 people employed at OSDN irrelevant?
The editors will never go for that. As it is, they probably have the easiest job in the world, sort through what basically amounts to a spam filled inbox, find 5 or 10 good submissions, do some light editing and dup checking (yeah right), and hit post.
They aren't going to kill the goose.
That'll not work. It'll just encourage karma whoring, lowering the quality of the discussion.
If these guys are smart enough to copy and paste stories to submit and get them posted, they are good enough to plagarize other posts and articles for karma whoring purposes.
Your UID is low enough to remember karma whoring before the karma cap I think.
Heh.
As always, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a kernel of truth in all those claims.
Things that were the realm of conspiracy theory have come out as mostly true before, look at eschelon and carnivore and things of that sort.
DRM is pretty ineffective.
I think we have more to fear from proprietary formats, when you are talking about accessing a work in 100 years.
Any DRM key can be brute force cracked by a computer 100 years from now in a few milliseconds flat (Assuming all that's left is a DRMed copy and not one someone decrypted). Putting the man hours into reverse engineering a format is a real barrier to accessing media in the future. It's unlikely a computer will ever be able to do something as complex as reverse engineering formats.
So I say go crazy with the DRM. Just use a well documented format with an open specification. Really open, not "pay $1000 to join our club and sign this NDA and poke your eyes out after 'open'".
I'm sure MS hasn't heard of modularity before. Thanks for your wonderful public service.
Hah, I should get them to output that on the imagesetter at work. That would make one hell of a poster.
the right to wander off in search of an angel.
I'm a Libertarian, so the Fair Tax isn't an ideal solution for me either. I still think it's a step in the right direction, eliminating the huge and bloated IRS and replacing it with a much smaller tax collection agency that has a very simple function.
Mr. AC,
You really should get something for that cough.
kfg:
If you run a business today you are a tax collector in every sense of the word. You withhold payroll taxes, you charge sales taxes, you file 1099s on interest and dividends you issue to ensure that the recipients pay the tax.
Businesses are already the main collectors of tax. Many even wind up paying $10,000 a year or more for accountants and accounting software to make sure they don't screw the taxes up.
The Fair Tax just simplifies the process by making all the federal taxes one simple to compute percentage.
The only legitimate challenge to the fair tax I've ever heard was from the man soon to be governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine. He said that just as you would diversify your investments, the government should have a diversified tax base, and the Fair Tax puts all your eggs in one basket. I don't agree with this for various reasons, but that's the only challenge to the Fair Tax I've ever heard that is even valid.