"Now, whether the world needs a bunch of long-lived , fat, self-indulgant slobs is another question for which many of the residents of this forum are curiously well-equipped to argue."
Thank you for your kind remarks. The folks here at Slashdot pride themselves on both their interest in the sort of hypothetical futures you describe, and their ability to apply their formidable intellects to exploring the consequences of... hey, wait a minute!
The easiest way to get money from an ATM is just to take the ATM.
Robber #1: "Lets get this bank back to the hideout and we'll break into it later!" (Sirens sound) Robber #2: "Its the cops!" Robber #3: "Worse! The Police Cops!"
Never mind, bad idea. I had it running for a few minutes, and it looks like all it's doing is filling up my ISP's nameserver with garbage. I like my ISP.
This really sucks. And blows. It's a sucky, blowy thing.
How long will it take me to write a script that continuously sends out requests for domain names like "www.98237498766783264786237864.com"? I'm starting now. Anyone who comes up with one, respond below with "first ddos!" and share your technique.
I don't think there's any way to stop this outsourcing trend, so why not take advantage of it? The dollars that were once going to American IT professionals are now heading to India, where they're being used to train up a huge army of coders. As the skills of American workers are languishing within the ranks of the unemployed, Indian coders are becoming steadily more competent and more common.
Soon, the overall expertise in India is going to get pretty close to parity with America, and the difference in quality between "hiring American" and offshoring will shrink greatly.
So here's one of those insane, just-dreamed-it-up-five-minutes-ago business plans: Move to India. Get two or three friends to help build a company. Start working the immigration bureaucracy, and do whatever it takes to get either Indian citizenship or at least permanent residence. Once there, hire about ten or twenty coders locally.
Then put a couple of salespeople on commission to drum up clients in the U.S. Ideally, get some contracts in place while planning the move. End result: You've created a wholly Indian business that can directly compete with all the big companies who want to send all the development over to India and reap the benefits back in the States.
The upside: You live in a country that's racked up three thousand years of culture, and you can live fairly well there for $5000 a year. And you're adding momentum to the wrecking ball that these CIOs don't see coming, as they continue to train their own future competition.
Admittedly, it's a strange idea, and I'm clueless about immigration laws. But I'm afraid that this offshore drive is going to gut America's IT industry, and if that happens, I'd rather be living somewhere where I can code. Besides, once all the geeks are in India, we can jack up our prices as high as we want!:)
"the more a program does, the greater its potential for security flaws."
Yeah, that's basically what I was saying. Seem to have gotten trollbranded for it.:)
Technically, I guess a truly "perfect" program would actually have to accomplish something.
Re:Schneier's book considered harmful, or passe
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1
In "Secrets and Lies," Schneider admitted that back when he wrote AP, he had too high of hopes for secure systems, and that his enthusiasm rubbed off on too many. Now people seem to think that you can just sprinkle an application with "encryption," and make it ironclad.
Now his attitude is closer to "no system can ever be made secure, and that goes quadruple for systems which rely on the security practices of users." So Schneider himself isn't totally happy with AP.
Lesson #2: No matter how obvious it is that you're trying to be funny, someone will mistake your comment for totally serious and sincere (or, in this case, totally sincere in sarcasm). Which leads to...
Lesson #3: Don't try and be funny. You'll just end up having to explain it, and--as the Heisenberg Principle attests--an explained joke ceases to be funny.
Seeing how the parent didn't specify which security issues were fixed by switching from C/C++ to Java, and the website is devoted to "secure programming" without regard for language, the parent gives the impression that switching to Java automatically renders an application completely secure.
Despite Java's safer memory usage, an application is still open to a wide variety of attacks. Such grandiose security claims about managed languages are worthless (except for the schmucks trying to get a contract to rewrite a critical application in Java or C#).
I don't try and make their lives hell. If I can get them talking about their day, their love life, or their family, it still accomplishes my goal. Plus they get to feel like somebody is sympathetic, and sometimes they lead fascinating lives.
Sadly, the best telemarketers are always the hardest to draw off topic, and they're also the first to sniff out the fact that I'm not really interested.
I'm always as polite as possible. I don't think they deserve verbal abuse.
As a former telemarketer, maybe you could answer a few questions. What percentage of calls led to sales? Of those, what percent do you think were sincerely interested in the service, and what percentage do you think were just being polite? I've always been under the impression that most sales were made because the person just wanted to be polite.
This is precisely why I do it. The longer I keep this person on the line, the less time the caller has to make calls to other people. Ergo, fewer people will be contacted, and fewer people will be strongarmed into buying something they really didn't want in the first place.
I know that the person on the other end has a rough life, and that they'd rather be doing something else. I sympathize, but that sympathy is tempered by the fact that these companies aren't helpfully connecting willing customers to valuable goods and services. Most sales come because, at the end of all the excuses the person on the other end of the line has tried, they still haven't found a way to deny the telemarketer without being rude and just saying "Not interested."
You argue that the telemarketing companies aren't hurt, but this isn't true at all. I worked at an inbound call center for a short time, and our $8/hr salaries represented only a quarter of the cost of having a telemarketer on the phone. Infrastructure, phone lines, management, oversight, quality control, and many other factors dwarfed what we were actually being paid. They turned a profit by billing the customer (the company paying us to be there) somewhere around $60 an hour.
Finally, if this tactic costs the telemarketer salary, I'm not happy about it. But perhaps that reduced salary will impel them to look for a job where their employer isn't a worthless leech on the intestinal tract of humanity, in which case I'm overjoyed.
That's why I love to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible. I know I'm never going to buy whatever crap they're peddling. Even if they do come across with something that sounds interesting (hasn't happened yet), I plan on finding out exactly what company is selling so that I can look for a similar service among their competitors.
The trick to keeping them on the line for upwards of a half hour is to sound like you're interested, but have certain specific objections that need to be overcome first. If somebody calls offering a two week cruise, you object that you don't have that much vacation time. When she quote the price, you tell her you're a little short right now.
As things go along, get more and more absurd. When she describes white, sandy beaches, tell the caller that you're allergic to saltwater. When she tells you that one of their destinations is the Bahamas, ask for her assurance that you won't run into any "foreigners" down there. Ask if they'll let you take your golden retreiver, and then describe Sparky's bladder control problems in lengthy detail. Just keep making up weird crap, until it becomes obvious that the telemarketer desperately wants the phone call to end.
Finally, explain that you'll have to make some plans, and consult both your wife and your mistress. Ask for a callback number. Then politely let her go. Even better, ask them to call you back in a week.
Hey, I'm a frequent Slashdot poster, so it's not like I have anything better to do.:)
Oracle takes its own big chunk as well. Just look at the whole debacle in California (the state dramatically overpaid for licenses, I think to the tune of 900 million). But I would guess that the vast majority of software expenditures are for customized software.
" Whoa, pally--for some of "us" (as in, people who read slashdot), it's NOT about a principle. At all. It's totally, entirely, wholly about money. And is that bad?"
As far as your choice of operating system, not at all. But please do us all a favor and don't stretch this principle any further.:)
Totally off-topic, but what is James Hogan smoking these days? I read "The Anguished Dawn," his most recent(?) book, and I'm at a loss to understand what happened. Isn't this the same guy who wrote "Code of the Lifemaker"? The opening chapter was probably the best depiction of evolution I'll probably ever read.
But now he seems to have leapt wholeheartedly into "Intelligent Design" arguments, bogus mathematical arguments against evolution, and even seems to take Immanuel Velikovsky seriously. Can anyone explain just what happened?
No, I think it is possible. Just snip the cable at the top. Now instead of one object with a center of mass in geostationary orbit, you have two objects, one above GEO and one below. The only thing holding up the cable in the first place was the counterweight.
Nor would it be Earth's atmosphere causing the "whip" effect. It's simple conservation of energy. If an object is in orbit, and you push it straight down, you've done nothing to slow it in the direction of the orbit. Since it's going too fast for the orbit you tried to put it in, it simply gains altitude until it's back in the original orbit.
But in the case of the cable, it can't go back up because the downward pull never gets released, so it moves faster and faster, picking up more and more energy.
But I do agree that this issue will be properly addressed before it's built. I always figured the cable could be segmented via explosives or some chemical process, so that most of the cable pieces would simply stay in orbit.
When the climber goes up, it's moving too slowly for its new height. So it starts pulling on the cable, which pulls back (tension in the cable).
It's like a rubber band. If the top is attached to a big friggin' rock, and the bottom is being held by gravity, anything that pushes parallel to the ground is going to increase tension in the cable.
Actually, a space elevator from the moon wouldn't be such a bad idea. The trick is that you have to be moving at a pretty good clip to grab the tail end of it. Then it's a free ride all the way up.
Why would we want cheap access to the surface of Mars? I can think of a few reasons. First, it would be a good mock-up for the Earth-based elevator. Second, it might make mining profitable. Finally, we could meet some hot Martian babes. The green skin is a real turn-on, though I don't know how I feel about the antennae.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you aren't in a position where you can quit your job immediately, you have basically enslaved yourself. Being unemployed sucks, but getting in the position where you have to stay with an employer-turned-evil like SCO because you just couldn't bear to drop your standard of living an inch is irresponsible. Possibly even evil.
I'm haven't fully convinced myself of that last part, but I'm working on it.
For me, it's all about priorities. Is a new car worth your freedom? Is a nice house with a nice, hefty mortgage worth your freedom? How about a nicer set of furniture? Dining out twice a week? Dropping $10 on lunch rather than making yourself a sandwich on the way out the door?
Individually, or even collectively, these things aren't wrong. They're enjoyable, and good to have. But first things have to come first: You have to create a buffer between yourself and the nasty, scary demon of unemployment. You have to know that, if you get in a position where your employer asks you to do something that goes wholly against your most cherished principles, you don't have to choose between violating them and letting your family and your cat starve.
There are some people who don't fear unemployment. Even in this job market, they're confident that they can roll with the punches. In some ways, they have a more realistic outlook. It's kind of hard for a skilled person to starve these days. This advice isn't for them, because their confidence is all the buffer they need.
But for those who dread having to sell the house, sell the car, sell the children, you need to take stock of yourself and your situation. Not building an escape hatch for your current job is like sending out a ship with no lifeboats. Sure, you may get lucky and everything will go fine. But you have to plan for the worst. If you have your principles, don't willingly allow yourself into a situation where you have to violate them.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that, at this rate, you'll disappear entirely within 2.5 years.
Good luck with the diet. It takes a lot of dedication, but it will be worth it.
(Sirens sound)
Robber #2: "Its the cops!"
Robber #3: "Worse! The Police Cops!"
Never mind, bad idea. I had it running for a few minutes, and it looks like all it's doing is filling up my ISP's nameserver with garbage. I like my ISP.
This really sucks. And blows. It's a sucky, blowy thing.
How long will it take me to write a script that continuously sends out requests for domain names like "www.98237498766783264786237864.com"? I'm starting now. Anyone who comes up with one, respond below with "first ddos!" and share your technique.
But, wait a minute, wouldn't that be a good thing?
Or do you mean that every country will be equally exploited?
Pinky? Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
:)
I don't think there's any way to stop this outsourcing trend, so why not take advantage of it? The dollars that were once going to American IT professionals are now heading to India, where they're being used to train up a huge army of coders. As the skills of American workers are languishing within the ranks of the unemployed, Indian coders are becoming steadily more competent and more common.
Soon, the overall expertise in India is going to get pretty close to parity with America, and the difference in quality between "hiring American" and offshoring will shrink greatly.
So here's one of those insane, just-dreamed-it-up-five-minutes-ago business plans: Move to India. Get two or three friends to help build a company. Start working the immigration bureaucracy, and do whatever it takes to get either Indian citizenship or at least permanent residence. Once there, hire about ten or twenty coders locally.
Then put a couple of salespeople on commission to drum up clients in the U.S. Ideally, get some contracts in place while planning the move. End result: You've created a wholly Indian business that can directly compete with all the big companies who want to send all the development over to India and reap the benefits back in the States.
The upside: You live in a country that's racked up three thousand years of culture, and you can live fairly well there for $5000 a year. And you're adding momentum to the wrecking ball that these CIOs don't see coming, as they continue to train their own future competition.
Admittedly, it's a strange idea, and I'm clueless about immigration laws. But I'm afraid that this offshore drive is going to gut America's IT industry, and if that happens, I'd rather be living somewhere where I can code. Besides, once all the geeks are in India, we can jack up our prices as high as we want!
Technically, I guess a truly "perfect" program would actually have to accomplish something.
In "Secrets and Lies," Schneider admitted that back when he wrote AP, he had too high of hopes for secure systems, and that his enthusiasm rubbed off on too many. Now people seem to think that you can just sprinkle an application with "encryption," and make it ironclad.
Now his attitude is closer to "no system can ever be made secure, and that goes quadruple for systems which rely on the security practices of users." So Schneider himself isn't totally happy with AP.
int main()
{
return 0;
}
// Try hacking THIS, suckas!
Lesson #2: No matter how obvious it is that you're trying to be funny, someone will mistake your comment for totally serious and sincere (or, in this case, totally sincere in sarcasm). Which leads to...
Lesson #3: Don't try and be funny. You'll just end up having to explain it, and--as the Heisenberg Principle attests--an explained joke ceases to be funny.
Seeing how the parent didn't specify which security issues were fixed by switching from C/C++ to Java, and the website is devoted to "secure programming" without regard for language, the parent gives the impression that switching to Java automatically renders an application completely secure.
Despite Java's safer memory usage, an application is still open to a wide variety of attacks. Such grandiose security claims about managed languages are worthless (except for the schmucks trying to get a contract to rewrite a critical application in Java or C#).
See? See how not-funny you made me?
Lesson #1: All Java programs are automatically secure.
:)
See, that's why I keep coming to Slashdot. You learn something new every day.
I don't try and make their lives hell. If I can get them talking about their day, their love life, or their family, it still accomplishes my goal. Plus they get to feel like somebody is sympathetic, and sometimes they lead fascinating lives.
Sadly, the best telemarketers are always the hardest to draw off topic, and they're also the first to sniff out the fact that I'm not really interested.
I'm always as polite as possible. I don't think they deserve verbal abuse.
As a former telemarketer, maybe you could answer a few questions. What percentage of calls led to sales? Of those, what percent do you think were sincerely interested in the service, and what percentage do you think were just being polite? I've always been under the impression that most sales were made because the person just wanted to be polite.
Any horror stories would also be entertaining.
This is precisely why I do it. The longer I keep this person on the line, the less time the caller has to make calls to other people. Ergo, fewer people will be contacted, and fewer people will be strongarmed into buying something they really didn't want in the first place.
I know that the person on the other end has a rough life, and that they'd rather be doing something else. I sympathize, but that sympathy is tempered by the fact that these companies aren't helpfully connecting willing customers to valuable goods and services. Most sales come because, at the end of all the excuses the person on the other end of the line has tried, they still haven't found a way to deny the telemarketer without being rude and just saying "Not interested."
You argue that the telemarketing companies aren't hurt, but this isn't true at all. I worked at an inbound call center for a short time, and our $8/hr salaries represented only a quarter of the cost of having a telemarketer on the phone. Infrastructure, phone lines, management, oversight, quality control, and many other factors dwarfed what we were actually being paid. They turned a profit by billing the customer (the company paying us to be there) somewhere around $60 an hour.
Finally, if this tactic costs the telemarketer salary, I'm not happy about it. But perhaps that reduced salary will impel them to look for a job where their employer isn't a worthless leech on the intestinal tract of humanity, in which case I'm overjoyed.
That's why I love to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible. I know I'm never going to buy whatever crap they're peddling. Even if they do come across with something that sounds interesting (hasn't happened yet), I plan on finding out exactly what company is selling so that I can look for a similar service among their competitors.
:)
The trick to keeping them on the line for upwards of a half hour is to sound like you're interested, but have certain specific objections that need to be overcome first. If somebody calls offering a two week cruise, you object that you don't have that much vacation time. When she quote the price, you tell her you're a little short right now.
As things go along, get more and more absurd. When she describes white, sandy beaches, tell the caller that you're allergic to saltwater. When she tells you that one of their destinations is the Bahamas, ask for her assurance that you won't run into any "foreigners" down there. Ask if they'll let you take your golden retreiver, and then describe Sparky's bladder control problems in lengthy detail. Just keep making up weird crap, until it becomes obvious that the telemarketer desperately wants the phone call to end.
Finally, explain that you'll have to make some plans, and consult both your wife and your mistress. Ask for a callback number. Then politely let her go. Even better, ask them to call you back in a week.
Hey, I'm a frequent Slashdot poster, so it's not like I have anything better to do.
Oracle takes its own big chunk as well. Just look at the whole debacle in California (the state dramatically overpaid for licenses, I think to the tune of 900 million). But I would guess that the vast majority of software expenditures are for customized software.
Totally off-topic, but what is James Hogan smoking these days? I read "The Anguished Dawn," his most recent(?) book, and I'm at a loss to understand what happened. Isn't this the same guy who wrote "Code of the Lifemaker"? The opening chapter was probably the best depiction of evolution I'll probably ever read.
But now he seems to have leapt wholeheartedly into "Intelligent Design" arguments, bogus mathematical arguments against evolution, and even seems to take Immanuel Velikovsky seriously. Can anyone explain just what happened?
No, I think it is possible. Just snip the cable at the top. Now instead of one object with a center of mass in geostationary orbit, you have two objects, one above GEO and one below. The only thing holding up the cable in the first place was the counterweight.
Nor would it be Earth's atmosphere causing the "whip" effect. It's simple conservation of energy. If an object is in orbit, and you push it straight down, you've done nothing to slow it in the direction of the orbit. Since it's going too fast for the orbit you tried to put it in, it simply gains altitude until it's back in the original orbit.
But in the case of the cable, it can't go back up because the downward pull never gets released, so it moves faster and faster, picking up more and more energy.
But I do agree that this issue will be properly addressed before it's built. I always figured the cable could be segmented via explosives or some chemical process, so that most of the cable pieces would simply stay in orbit.
IANAP
When the climber goes up, it's moving too slowly for its new height. So it starts pulling on the cable, which pulls back (tension in the cable).
It's like a rubber band. If the top is attached to a big friggin' rock, and the bottom is being held by gravity, anything that pushes parallel to the ground is going to increase tension in the cable.
Actually, a space elevator from the moon wouldn't be such a bad idea. The trick is that you have to be moving at a pretty good clip to grab the tail end of it. Then it's a free ride all the way up.
Why would we want cheap access to the surface of Mars? I can think of a few reasons. First, it would be a good mock-up for the Earth-based elevator. Second, it might make mining profitable. Finally, we could meet some hot Martian babes. The green skin is a real turn-on, though I don't know how I feel about the antennae.
You need to start watching more television.
You've got speed down. Now let's work on uptime. :)
I'll be there in three days. Can you send me your address? I need a place to crash for a while.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you aren't in a position where you can quit your job immediately, you have basically enslaved yourself. Being unemployed sucks, but getting in the position where you have to stay with an employer-turned-evil like SCO because you just couldn't bear to drop your standard of living an inch is irresponsible. Possibly even evil.
I'm haven't fully convinced myself of that last part, but I'm working on it.
For me, it's all about priorities. Is a new car worth your freedom? Is a nice house with a nice, hefty mortgage worth your freedom? How about a nicer set of furniture? Dining out twice a week? Dropping $10 on lunch rather than making yourself a sandwich on the way out the door?
Individually, or even collectively, these things aren't wrong. They're enjoyable, and good to have. But first things have to come first: You have to create a buffer between yourself and the nasty, scary demon of unemployment. You have to know that, if you get in a position where your employer asks you to do something that goes wholly against your most cherished principles, you don't have to choose between violating them and letting your family and your cat starve.
There are some people who don't fear unemployment. Even in this job market, they're confident that they can roll with the punches. In some ways, they have a more realistic outlook. It's kind of hard for a skilled person to starve these days. This advice isn't for them, because their confidence is all the buffer they need.
But for those who dread having to sell the house, sell the car, sell the children, you need to take stock of yourself and your situation. Not building an escape hatch for your current job is like sending out a ship with no lifeboats. Sure, you may get lucky and everything will go fine. But you have to plan for the worst. If you have your principles, don't willingly allow yourself into a situation where you have to violate them.