I'm very skeptical that they can play DTMF tones at the exchange and get it to not hang up. I don't think control signalling for phone switches has been tones for at least a decade. (I could be wrong though, but I'd be a bit surprised)
It depends what country you live in, but on some phone systems, the call doesn't get cleared down until the _caller_ puts the phone on the hook (or the callee puts their phone on the hook for a certain period of time and the exchange times out). If your phone system works like this, they probably just didn't put their end on the hook.
The best time to do it is of course when you have major work to do on the house. Mine needed major repairs, so I stripped it down to the bare stone and replaced the interior walls, too. At that time, I put in the cabling. It all goes to a patch-panel in my under the stairs 'wiring closet'.
Have you considered PostgreSQL? You may find it more appropriate if moving from Oracle (unless of course you weren't using features such as enforcement of referential integrity, triggers etc.)
Your argument is a bit of a red herring. Firstly, security is a host problem more than a network problem, but let's ignore that for now.
Your IPv6 router can *still* be used to firewall off your internal IPv6 network even though it has globally addressable IP addresses. The added benefit (you might not think this is a benefit, but many firms do) is if everyone has globally unique address space, and say, for example, two companies become partners, they don't have to renumber vast amounts of machines so the two networks can interoperate properly.
The case involving Dmitry Sklyarov had *nothing* to do with record companies or music. Adobe eventually said they wanted to drop the case that put Sklyarov in prison, but by then it was too late; the DOJ was on it full-steam.
Also, as a matter of fact, I do live down there in a beloved socialist country (or rather up there, since the most southerly coast of our island is more north than any of the lower 48). Funnily enough, our income tax is less than half of what it is for all tax brackets, and people who earn up to about the equivalent of $14.5K don't pay any income tax at all...
But the record companies *loan* the money for artists to make their work. All that studio time, all the promotion etc. isn't actually paid by the record company - they just loan the money to the artist (the advance) to do it.
I was quite happy that when I was doing software work that I was being paid but a small fraction of my employer's revenue of the product. I would NOT have done the job if the employer had said, "Here's a loan for you to pay the costs of running the office, buying your own computer, and bearing all the costs of developing this software, and then we'll just pay you a normal salary and expect you to pay back the money for the development costs". That's exactly what the record companies do. They want it both ways - not only do they want artists to be doing "works for hire", but they want artists to pay a large proportion of the costs!
I use Linux as my home desktop. Recent RH distros are fine on the desktop - I have my Dad (who is not exactly computer literate) using the Linux desktop quite happily. A benefit of this is he can't run arbitary Windows.EXE files. We don't need the features of MS Office, Open Office does fine and we don't have to spend money on something we don't need. Kmail works fine for mail. xmms works fine for MP3s. Xine works fine for many different video formats. Linux drives my HP inkjet printer fine. I agree that MS Office and Outlook are a bit more polished, but it's an awful lot of money to pay for just a bit more polished. OO and KDE do everything we need without the high cost. If we used Microsoft software at home for what we're doing, the licensing costs would be more expensive than the (reasonably well specced) hardware it is running on.
I do have a Windows partition, but I'd rather not dual boot if I don't have to as it wastes time. The games I like to play (at the moment, RTCW and UT) run natively and run well under Linux, so why dual boot when I can play the games I want without dual booting?
Southwest Airlines isn't a mere price-cutting airline: they actually have management with a clue. Although having a good price is part of what SWA is about, also having sane pricing rules and decent customer service is a big attraction. This is why other airlines hate SWA so much - SWA doesn't play by their rules (which say an airline should be inflexible, and charge the earth if someone wants to change their journey).
For example, in the 'sane pricing rules' book, most airlines will, for example, not do last-minute low cost fares. British Airways said in a recent article in our local news (after quoting a massive price for someone who wanted to get on a plane that was only half full) "we don't do cheap last minute fares because it would encourage people to book at the last moment" (as if it was a crime to book at the last moment).
SWA gives cheap last minute fares. And they make a profit (the only major US airline to make a profit since Sept. 11th, I believe). SWA's reasoning: if a plane's only half-full with advanced bookers, we might as well fill the rest of the plane, even if we don't charge much because it's money we otherwise wouldn't have made, because those who really must travel will book early. We can catch the opportunitist traveller who would otherwise not have travelled at all if it wasn't for a good last-minute deal.
Result: after Sept. 11th, SWA did *not* cut their schedule or lay off pilots like all the other airlines did. SWA's planes were always full. They didn't blink like all the other airlines. SWA made a profit in extremely difficult circumstances. SWA have clueful management - not just cheap prices.
This is not the answer to road safety. The trouble is, the safer the driver feels, the more dangerous they get (see the Volvo driver syndrome - Volvo drivers are terrible, because they feel invulnerable).
I think road safety could be vastly improved if:
1. Seatbelts are banned. 2. ABS is banned. 3. Airbags are banned. 4. An 8-inch spike is fitted to the hub of the steering wheel.
Would people do their make-up or read the paper whilst driving if the steering wheel had an 8-inch spike sticking out of it at them? I think not!
But were you writing *code* on an aircraft carrier?
I've done non-code jobs where there were 12-hour shifts, and it wasn't a big deal - it *is* possible depending on the work. However, in my experience, writing code isn't one of those jobs where you get a linear increase in work done for each hour worked by an individual, and in my experience when you go past a certain amount of hours per day/days per week, you reach diminishing returns, then negative productivity.
From what I've seen, 60 hours/week with code is about the most before negative productivity begins to creep in. Also, consider the fact when you joined the military, you expected the sort of work you were given. When you sign a contract saying the normal work week is 40 hrs, 5 days a week and then are told to work a 7 day, 84 hour week (over double the hours) for no extra pay because management were too spineless to negotiate a better deal, morale doesn't generally get boosted meaning a double blow to the worker's productivity.
The company will find out the hard way that working 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week writing code is a sure way to get poor quality code and make a project cost more and take longer than decent working hours.
12 hrs/7 days in a thought-intensive job is fatiguing (I know, I've been there and done that). After about a 50 hour week, you start hitting diminishing returns. After about 60 hours, in my experience, you start getting negative returns (the project actually starts regressing) because more bugs than good code is put in.
Is there a proper software process in the firm? I think not if they agreed to those sort of terms.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not only that, but I think a programmer improves with age.
My coding skills are _vastly_ superior to what they were 10 years ago. Sure, 10 years ago, I could write 1000 lines of code in a week without working up a sweat, and now I write [0] just a fraction of that in a week. But the difference is that fraction of LOC does just as much, and it actually _works_:-)
[0] Actually, I'm in a BOFH/co-ordinator job rather than a coding job. I needed a break from programming for a living. Besides those jobs are being shipped abroad, so I've moved into work which requires physical on-site presence and so can't be moved to India.
1. I was running 2.4.19, which has a local root hole (I had band-aided it, but I really wanted a fixed kernel). 2. I wanted the skas3 patch for UMLs.
I also don't have physical access to the machine - it's 4800 miles away. I *hate* remotely upgrading kernels. However, this can be mitigated by doing local testing with the newly built kernel image (or in my case, since the machine at home is P4, and the remote is Athlon, a build with the same config options apart from the different processor being selected).
I would write a long rant about firewalls and people thinking, "Oh, it's OK, we have a firewall" and not dealing with internal security, but this article does it adequately:
Don't forget the ZX-81 also came as a *kit*. You needed guidance to not only plug in the keyboard, but the CPU, the memory, and possibly how to use a soldering iron!
When I started, it was with the Sinclair ZX-81 I had as a Christmas present.
Today, I don't think it's necessarily the lack of built-in languages (as others have pointed out - most OSes come with a language of some sort) but a lack of where-to-get-started.
The great thing about the ZX-81 is that it came with a manual. Not like a PC manual of today which tells you how to plug in the keyboard and monitor (the ZX-81 manual had this) - the ZX-81 manual also had instructions on programming things - from the basics of programming onwards. It taught you what variables were, what loops were, what if statements did. You got a starting point with the computer as soon as you unpacked it and plugged it in for the first time.
The BBC Microcomputer was the best - it had a built in 6502 assembler. (I also learned Z80 for the Spectrum I had after the ZX-81). Knowing asm made it a lot easier to learn C, especially pointers (which I've noticed time and time again newbies always struggle with).
This is my experience with (accidentally!) left on mobile phones (GSM variety) in aircraft.
I fly light aircraft. On a dark, rainy night, a friend and I was approaching Ronaldsway. My friend was the 'handling pilot' (i.e. the guy who's waggling the stick), and I was in charge of the radios - setting up frequencies, identing navaids, talking to ATC etc. Although our aircraft (a Grumman Cheetah) only requires one aircraft, we fly together reasonably often and find this arrangement works very well.
My friend was at the time a very new instrument pilot. Ceilings (the bases of the clouds) were about 800 feet, winds were light, and it was pelting with rain. It was about an hour after sunset.
We were just intercepting the localiser (the horizontal guidance part of the ILS - instrument landing system), and we had been cleared for the ILS approach.
Suddenly, the radio was blotted out with:
'Bip-b b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip' - the highly recognisable radio interference from a GSM phone. My friend had forgotten to switch it off when we had taken off an hour and a half earlier. His wife was phoning him.
It completely blotted out the COM radio with the extremely loud 'Bip-b b bip b b bip bzzzzzzzzzzzz' noise as the phone went off. However, it did not intefere with the nav radios nor the compass - the localiser needle continued to behave how it should have, as did the other instruments (the direction indicator, for example, is gyroscopic) and it did not affect the compass. However, the noise was extremely distracting, and if ATC had any further instructions, we had no chance of hearing them until we got the phone shut off or my friend's wife hung up.
Fortunately, with two of us on board, it was a non-event (I could fly whilst my friend turned the phone off).
An important point to remember: aircraft fly on the rules of Bernoulli and Newton, not the rules of Marconi! It's perfectly possible to fly without radios. The problem is in instrument conditions (i.e. in the clouds) where you can't navigate by looking out the windows. Even so, a prudent pilot always plans an 'out' in case of radio failure, and does not bet their lives on the continued operation of the com and nav radios!
I think it's a GREAT thing that PC's are a member of a domain and that being an administrator of said domain automatically grants me FULL access to every PC in the domain, while limiting access to every PC for people that aren't admins.
My reply here is a bit late in the day, so I hope it gets read at all:-)
Roaming profiles/central user administration was old hat in the UNIX (and inherited in Linux) world back in 1991 when I was a first year at university. Domain membership (which of course MS touts as something new) has its equivalent through Network Information Services.
When I went to uni, you had a roaming profile on all the Sun workstations. This was five years before Microsoft implemented this sort of thing - indeed, MS operating systems didn't even have a TCP/IP stack at the time.
The Unix world has had the 'make it easy to administer hundreds of users' features for decades, and 'make it easy to administer lots of machines' for at least 15 years.
A DCC CHAT for example will have mIRC open up a new port to listen on. If your IRC client is indeed listening, and your firewall is normally blocking this, this is a potential route of infection via your IRC client.
*Something* has to be listening on some port. Get a Unix system and a copy of nmap and portscan yourself: you might be surprised (and shocked) at what you find.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very skeptical that they can play DTMF tones at the exchange and get it to not hang up. I don't think control signalling for phone switches has been tones for at least a decade. (I could be wrong though, but I'd be a bit surprised)
It depends what country you live in, but on some phone systems, the call doesn't get cleared down until the _caller_ puts the phone on the hook (or the callee puts their phone on the hook for a certain period of time and the exchange times out). If your phone system works like this, they probably just didn't put their end on the hook.
After all the hack attempts I've seen via buggy PHP scripts, I thought it stood for Pretty Hopeless Privacy!
If you don't like the name MySQL, there's always PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is also a much more powerful database system than MySQL.
The best time to do it is of course when you have major work to do on the house. Mine needed major repairs, so I stripped it down to the bare stone and replaced the interior walls, too.
At that time, I put in the cabling. It all goes to a patch-panel in my under the stairs 'wiring closet'.
Have you considered PostgreSQL? You may find it more appropriate if moving from Oracle (unless of course you weren't using features such as enforcement of referential integrity, triggers etc.)
Your argument is a bit of a red herring. Firstly, security is a host problem more than a network problem, but let's ignore that for now.
Your IPv6 router can *still* be used to firewall off your internal IPv6 network even though it has globally addressable IP addresses. The added benefit (you might not think this is a benefit, but many firms do) is if everyone has globally unique address space, and say, for example, two companies become partners, they don't have to renumber vast amounts of machines so the two networks can interoperate properly.
And besides, it'll be IPv7, not IPv8. (There is an IPv5 already).
The case involving Dmitry Sklyarov had *nothing* to do with record companies or music. Adobe eventually said they wanted to drop the case that put Sklyarov in prison, but by then it was too late; the DOJ was on it full-steam.
Also, as a matter of fact, I do live down there in a beloved socialist country (or rather up there, since the most southerly coast of our island is more north than any of the lower 48). Funnily enough, our income tax is less than half of what it is for all tax brackets, and people who earn up to about the equivalent of $14.5K don't pay any income tax at all...
But the record companies *loan* the money for artists to make their work. All that studio time, all the promotion etc. isn't actually paid by the record company - they just loan the money to the artist (the advance) to do it.
I was quite happy that when I was doing software work that I was being paid but a small fraction of my employer's revenue of the product. I would NOT have done the job if the employer had said, "Here's a loan for you to pay the costs of running the office, buying your own computer, and bearing all the costs of developing this software, and then we'll just pay you a normal salary and expect you to pay back the money for the development costs". That's exactly what the record companies do. They want it both ways - not only do they want artists to be doing "works for hire", but they want artists to pay a large proportion of the costs!
I use Linux as my home desktop. Recent RH distros are fine on the desktop - I have my Dad (who is not exactly computer literate) using the Linux desktop quite happily. A benefit of this is he can't run arbitary Windows .EXE files. We don't need the features of MS Office, Open Office does fine and we don't have to spend money on something we don't need. Kmail works fine for mail. xmms works fine for MP3s. Xine works fine for many different video formats. Linux drives my HP inkjet printer fine. I agree that MS Office and Outlook are a bit more polished, but it's an awful lot of money to pay for just a bit more polished. OO and KDE do everything we need without the high cost. If we used Microsoft software at home for what we're doing, the licensing costs would be more expensive than the (reasonably well specced) hardware it is running on.
I do have a Windows partition, but I'd rather not dual boot if I don't have to as it wastes time. The games I like to play (at the moment, RTCW and UT) run natively and run well under Linux, so why dual boot when I can play the games I want without dual booting?
Southwest Airlines isn't a mere price-cutting airline: they actually have management with a clue. Although having a good price is part of what SWA is about, also having sane pricing rules and decent customer service is a big attraction. This is why other airlines hate SWA so much - SWA doesn't play by their rules (which say an airline should be inflexible, and charge the earth if someone wants to change their journey).
For example, in the 'sane pricing rules' book, most airlines will, for example, not do last-minute low cost fares. British Airways said in a recent article in our local news (after quoting a massive price for someone who wanted to get on a plane that was only half full) "we don't do cheap last minute fares because it would encourage people to book at the last moment" (as if it was a crime to book at the last moment).
SWA gives cheap last minute fares. And they make a profit (the only major US airline to make a profit since Sept. 11th, I believe). SWA's reasoning: if a plane's only half-full with advanced bookers, we might as well fill the rest of the plane, even if we don't charge much because it's money we otherwise wouldn't have made, because those who really must travel will book early. We can catch the opportunitist traveller who would otherwise not have travelled at all if it wasn't for a good last-minute deal.
Result: after Sept. 11th, SWA did *not* cut their schedule or lay off pilots like all the other airlines did. SWA's planes were always full. They didn't blink like all the other airlines. SWA made a profit in extremely difficult circumstances. SWA have clueful management - not just cheap prices.
I take it the name "Dmitry Skylarov" means nothing to you. Adobe had Dmitry Skylarov put in prison for discussing their weak E-book security.
(However, the company Dmitry works for is no 'saintly software firm'. It has also written spamming software).
This is not the answer to road safety. The trouble is, the safer the driver feels, the more dangerous they get (see the Volvo driver syndrome - Volvo drivers are terrible, because they feel invulnerable).
I think road safety could be vastly improved if:
1. Seatbelts are banned.
2. ABS is banned.
3. Airbags are banned.
4. An 8-inch spike is fitted to the hub of the steering wheel.
Would people do their make-up or read the paper whilst driving if the steering wheel had an 8-inch spike sticking out of it at them? I think not!
But were you writing *code* on an aircraft carrier?
I've done non-code jobs where there were 12-hour shifts, and it wasn't a big deal - it *is* possible depending on the work. However, in my experience, writing code isn't one of those jobs where you get a linear increase in work done for each hour worked by an individual, and in my experience when you go past a certain amount of hours per day/days per week, you reach diminishing returns, then negative productivity.
From what I've seen, 60 hours/week with code is about the most before negative productivity begins to creep in. Also, consider the fact when you joined the military, you expected the sort of work you were given. When you sign a contract saying the normal work week is 40 hrs, 5 days a week and then are told to work a 7 day, 84 hour week (over double the hours) for no extra pay because management were too spineless to negotiate a better deal, morale doesn't generally get boosted meaning a double blow to the worker's productivity.
The company will find out the hard way that working 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week writing code is a sure way to get poor quality code and make a project cost more and take longer than decent working hours.
12 hrs/7 days in a thought-intensive job is fatiguing (I know, I've been there and done that). After about a 50 hour week, you start hitting diminishing returns. After about 60 hours, in my experience, you start getting negative returns (the project actually starts regressing) because more bugs than good code is put in.
Is there a proper software process in the firm? I think not if they agreed to those sort of terms.
Not only that, but I think a programmer improves with age.
:-)
My coding skills are _vastly_ superior to what they were 10 years ago. Sure, 10 years ago, I could write 1000 lines of code in a week without working up a sweat, and now I write [0] just a fraction of that in a week. But the difference is that fraction of LOC does just as much, and it actually _works_
[0] Actually, I'm in a BOFH/co-ordinator job rather than a coding job. I needed a break from programming for a living. Besides those jobs are being shipped abroad, so I've moved into work which requires physical on-site presence and so can't be moved to India.
I found it worth upgrading because:
1. I was running 2.4.19, which has a local root hole (I had band-aided it, but I really wanted a fixed kernel).
2. I wanted the skas3 patch for UMLs.
I also don't have physical access to the machine - it's 4800 miles away. I *hate* remotely upgrading kernels. However, this can be mitigated by doing local testing with the newly built kernel image (or in my case, since the machine at home is P4, and the remote is Athlon, a build with the same config options apart from the different processor being selected).
I would write a long rant about firewalls and people thinking, "Oh, it's OK, we have a firewall" and not dealing with internal security, but this article does it adequately:
Firewall Systems Considered Harmful
Have you ever noticed that the Cisco logo looks like a pair of tits? Need to wonder now? :-)
Don't forget the ZX-81 also came as a *kit*. You needed guidance to not only plug in the keyboard, but the CPU, the memory, and possibly how to use a soldering iron!
When I started, it was with the Sinclair ZX-81 I had as a Christmas present.
Today, I don't think it's necessarily the lack of built-in languages (as others have pointed out - most OSes come with a language of some sort) but a lack of where-to-get-started.
The great thing about the ZX-81 is that it came with a manual. Not like a PC manual of today which tells you how to plug in the keyboard and monitor (the ZX-81 manual had this) - the ZX-81 manual also had instructions on programming things - from the basics of programming onwards. It taught you what variables were, what loops were, what if statements did. You got a starting point with the computer as soon as you unpacked it and plugged it in for the first time.
The BBC Microcomputer was the best - it had a built in 6502 assembler. (I also learned Z80 for the Spectrum I had after the ZX-81). Knowing asm made it a lot easier to learn C, especially pointers (which I've noticed time and time again newbies always struggle with).
That would be Birmingham Small Arms (based in Birmingham, England).
This is my experience with (accidentally!) left on mobile phones (GSM variety) in aircraft.
I fly light aircraft. On a dark, rainy night, a friend and I was approaching Ronaldsway. My friend was the 'handling pilot' (i.e. the guy who's waggling the stick), and I was in charge of the radios - setting up frequencies, identing navaids, talking to ATC etc. Although our aircraft (a Grumman Cheetah) only requires one aircraft, we fly together reasonably often and find this arrangement works very well.
My friend was at the time a very new instrument pilot. Ceilings (the bases of the clouds) were about 800 feet, winds were light, and it was pelting with rain. It was about an hour after sunset.
We were just intercepting the localiser (the horizontal guidance part of the ILS - instrument landing system), and we had been cleared for the ILS approach.
Suddenly, the radio was blotted out with:
'Bip-b b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip' - the highly recognisable radio interference from a GSM phone. My friend had forgotten to switch it off when we had taken off an hour and a half earlier. His wife was phoning him.
It completely blotted out the COM radio with the extremely loud 'Bip-b b bip b b bip bzzzzzzzzzzzz' noise as the phone went off. However, it did not intefere with the nav radios nor the compass - the localiser needle continued to behave how it should have, as did the other instruments (the direction indicator, for example, is gyroscopic) and it did not affect the compass. However, the noise was extremely distracting, and if ATC had any further instructions, we had no chance of hearing them until we got the phone shut off or my friend's wife hung up.
Fortunately, with two of us on board, it was a non-event (I could fly whilst my friend turned the phone off).
An important point to remember: aircraft fly on the rules of Bernoulli and Newton, not the rules of Marconi! It's perfectly possible to fly without radios. The problem is in instrument conditions (i.e. in the clouds) where you can't navigate by looking out the windows. Even so, a prudent pilot always plans an 'out' in case of radio failure, and does not bet their lives on the continued operation of the com and nav radios!
I think it's a GREAT thing that PC's are a member of a domain and that being an administrator of said domain automatically grants me FULL access to every PC in the domain, while limiting access to every PC for people that aren't admins.
:-)
My reply here is a bit late in the day, so I hope it gets read at all
Roaming profiles/central user administration was old hat in the UNIX (and inherited in Linux) world back in 1991 when I was a first year at university. Domain membership (which of course MS touts as something new) has its equivalent through Network Information Services.
When I went to uni, you had a roaming profile on all the Sun workstations. This was five years before Microsoft implemented this sort of thing - indeed, MS operating systems didn't even have a TCP/IP stack at the time.
The Unix world has had the 'make it easy to administer hundreds of users' features for decades, and 'make it easy to administer lots of machines' for at least 15 years.
A DCC CHAT for example will have mIRC open up a new port to listen on. If your IRC client is indeed listening, and your firewall is normally blocking this, this is a potential route of infection via your IRC client.
*Something* has to be listening on some port. Get a Unix system and a copy of nmap and portscan yourself: you might be surprised (and shocked) at what you find.