It was a bad job market. I didn't have much in the way of cash reserves. I noticed a lot of foreign workers, so I specifically asked about required work hours twice in the interviews. My future manager told me 45 hours was the norm. He lied. It took me a long time to build up enough money and ultimately find another job. After I was clear, I thought about raising a legal fuss, but it would come down to my word versus his. Also, any legal entanglements would have revealed the abuse of the H1Bs, my friends, who have already gone through far too much hell to risk getting deported now.
I've never been in exactly the same situation as you, but I do work (for about 4 weeks) in one of the administrative offices at a very large university. The network here is highly departmentalized. OIT controls the grand scheme. Then each college or department manages their own systems. Then there are subdivisions of those departments which also manage their own systems. Sometimes there are firewalls in place, sometimes there aren't. Sometimes systems are patched, often they are not. When it comes down to it, sometimes the person in control of keeping a small office patched up is just a student employee. As such, we have problems similar to those caused by your students.
To combat the problem, OIT has started to perform vulnerability scans across the network. If a machine is found to be vulnerable, they are (automagically?) disconnected from the network. I'm not sure how well received this method is, but it appears to work. A week before the big DCOM worm came out, OIT performed a scan and kicked off all of the vulnerable pcs. They made a big deal about how they were going to be doing it before hand also so admins had time to make sure they were patched up. As a result, I think we had very few problems across the campus.
I don't know how well this kind of strategy would work against average students. There would probably be a lot of resentment/confusion at first, and probably a lot at the beginning of each year and quarter. You'd have to find a clever way to distribute patches to disconnected machines and you'd also have to find a good way to let people know what has happened. On the bright side (for you) since we are talking about dorms, everyone in the dorm probably knows of at least one computer person they can go abuse for help when their machine can mysteriously no longer connect to the net.
So an organization whose tagline is, OPEN MARKETS, OPEN SYSTEMS, OPEN NETWORKS, AND FULL, FAIR AND OPEN COMPETITION, is asking that the department of homeland security not use Windows based on security concerns. For crying out loud, their mission statement is the following:
CCIA's mission is to further our members' business interests by being the leading industry advocate in promoting open, barrier-free competition in the offering of computer and communications products and services worldwide.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like nothing more than a high powered Washington based lobbying group whose business constituents are diametrically opposed to Microsoft. How is this even news?
Make sure you have skills that are so valuable that you won't be outsourced. If you can't do that, then find another line of work, you lazy bastard.
Anyone can be outsourced. I have always found accusations of laziness directed against IT personnel to be extremely offensive. Ever work 60-80 hours a week for months at a time without extra pay? Ever get called lazy while doing that?
If companies want to outsource to cheaper labor markets, so be it. What bothers me is when the government allows companies to import the cheap labor market and working conditions to the US. I've known many H1B's and they are good people, but they should never have been let in as second class citizens. It undermines us all.
So let's say I have a few room mates and we share one phone line. We then split the costs of the phone bill based on the number of minutes of calltime outgoing or incomming with a one minute minimum for each call. In the case of a telemarketer, whoever answers the phone takes the hit for that call. At this point, the called party is being charged for the call. Would it then be illegal to call any of us without our consent?
In the past, I have circumvented "I agree" click through agreements by using technical means. What legal challenges, if any, would a person face if they decided to set up a site that contained methods or programs designed to avoid agreeing to a eula? Would this be a DMCA violation?
I completely agree with library "censorship" when it comes to pron, or any of the things covered by the highly controversial filters.
As an individual who was forced (I eventually quit for unrelated reasons) to maintain internet content filtering software (Surf Control), let me just say I hated the software with a passion. Mind you, I didn't think Surf Control was any worse than any of their competitors, but the truth was:
1) It didn't stop people from being able to access porn, view sports sites, or shop online even though these were all blacklisted categories. Instead it would block maybe 90% in each category. All people had to do was find those 1 in 10 porn sites and they did, trust me.
2) It regularly and significantly hindered myself and coworkers in our efforts to do our jobs. The collateral damage was horrendous.
3) It provided a mechanism for administrators and department heads to spy on all of the system users. Management took full advantage of this feature. Perhaps more to the point, my boss very much enjoyed having the ability to blacklist sites of his choosing. I imagine there are many librarians out there that might also enjoy being able to choose their own filters.
So let's review. Content filtering software does not block the content it is supposed to. It prevents people from accessing perfectly "legit" resources. And, often, it allows people to spy on each other. I can't think of anything I'd rather have deployed in libraries and educational institutions throughout America.
Is this so Iran can't spy on its citizens? Or is it so the US can spy on disgruntled Iranians? Or both? Or neither? As an Iranian, why would you trust a country with multiple uncertain motivations to protect your privacy?
Seems to me that a lot of the sites that are shutting down for the day are ones that are frequented by people who are already aware of the issue.
Don't assume that. During my last three technical jobs since 1998 (ops, dev, dev), of the people I worked with, I met only one other person who knew what the DMCA was. There are a whole lot of admins and developers out there that are completely unaware or completely indifferent.
How do you say no? I was recently working in a hell hole where everyone else who came before me had already accepted insane hours sans overtime. Though he wouldn't admit it, my manager lied to me about the hours during my interview. I had to move to get the job, had signed a lease, and didn't have much of a cash reserve. Even if I did pursue a legal remedy, it would have taken a lot of time and money.
The farthest I got was to contact the department of labor and see if I had any case for claiming overtime. The answer came back that I wasn't eligible to go that route because I was a salaried professional and made more than $250/week (Ohio - your mileage may vary). It would have been much harder to prove some kind of fraud transpired because it would most likely come down to my word versus his.
Guys like this manager target people that will have a hard time fighting back. Except for me, the core technical staff was all on H1B visas. I only got hired due to a change in our parent company's policies on H1Bs.
Of our nine person department, everyone who could quit did in the span of 4 months. Some had jobs lined up when they left, others didn't.
After leaving, I considered bringing the H1B work conditions to the attention of whoever prosecutes that sort of thing, but the last thing I want to happen is for any of those guys to get deported. You form strong bonds working in the trenches. Since I didn't know what would happen, I restrained myself to discussing their options with them.
So, this being the second time I've been burned by employment contract dispute or misrepresentation, I've started to become a little paranoid. Has anyone ever tried to do things like bring tape recorders into interviews (maybe second round only)? How well is that received by interviewers?
I recently decided I might like product activation, but for a different reason. Many corporations and indendent software authors are going to do something to try to prevent illegal copying and redistribution. What I hate is when someone comes up with a copy protection scheme which includes a significant restriction on use, for example, a not easily copyable copy of a cd. I recently bought, as part of an academic bundle, Windows & Office XP and VSN.net, and I'm happy to say all discs burned on their first try without doing anything special and I was then able to install from my backup media flawlessly. If more companies used product activation instead of weird not easily copyable cds, I would be a much happier man today.
Hey, maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like a country concerned about abridging freedom of speech should be imposing taxes on communication mechanisms. I mean, if the government were providing a service for the tax like delivering a letter for postage or improving the state's public network infrastructure, then maybe I could see it. But, I find it unAmerican (in the old sense, not the new one) to force an individual to pay a fee to an essentially irrelevant (as in unrelated to the communication at hand) governing body in order to send a message. I mean it's called freedom of speech right?
I think there's a lot of very valid popularity related reasons that cause Microsoft to be subjected to a higer percentage of attacks per vendor than other systems.
First, consider who Microsoft based systems are popular with: home and office users. Often, as in the case of SoBig, the users are as much a target as the operating system.
Second, because Microsoft is so popular and because they have a history of problems (such as bluescreens), they have become extremely unpopular, particularly among that certain segment of the population that might create and unleash viruses. While I know of many corporations//organizations whose capacity for evil greatly exceeds Microsoft's (Monsanto, Phillip Morris, etc), I know of no company so hated by so many all over the world.
Finally, when you consider the amount of viruses, worms, and the like that affect Microsoft versus a nix, it is important to remember that Microsoft is an entire homogonized platform in and of itself. The misc services, the ftp server, the smtp server, the web server, the database server, the mail server, etc are all made by Microsoft and many of these components are standard, especially in a microsoft shop. Compare this to a nix where people more readily pick and choose each of the above components. If you are writing a multi-vector worm like Nimda, windows represents the easiest target because there are a lot of standard uniformly implemented services which are virtually guaranteed to be there. If you were writing the same thing for a Nix, you could target Apache, sendmail maybe, and then what? There's so much diversity in the Nix world that it makes it more difficult to target.
I am not excusing Microsoft's security problems in any way. I just believe that the popularity of Microsoft and its platforms has had an extremely significant effect on the number of times they are targetted, and as a result, compromised.
If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft recently decided they were going to turn the firewall on by default and that they may turn auto-updating on by default for all home users. Since presumably the firewall takes care of all open ports, it seems like all the major issues are already being addressed.
The next major initiative might be for Microsoft to purchase or contract an antivirus company then bundle virus definition updates along with critical updates. Would this get them into legal trouble a la Internet Explorer & Netscape? I can see a very solid argument for an antivirus system being tied to the Operating System, or rather platform, in that viruses are often platform specific. Maybe it would be safer for the OEM's to bundle the Anti-Virus software and then for Microsoft to contract the AV companies to integrate with windows updates.
Not necessarily, but all things considered, I would say that was the general trend. For instance, no one would argue that they would rather develop for an Office Suite written in C++ than one written in assembler or machine code. Also, please note that I never said that the code quality of Windows had improved.
Claiming "prove it" when referring to code quality on a closed-source operating system is probably going to be pretty difficult.
Exactly, couldn't have said it better myself. In essence, you and I agree that the parent's assertion that code quality had not improved was at best, speculation. In the pressence of strong outward evidence of overall improvement, it seems dubious at best, though not necessarily incorrect.
For the past two years, we've had to use VB6, MTS (some servers), COM+ (other servers), and ASP on various versions of IIS. Now we're moving to.Net, and it's like night and day -- everything, and I mean everything, works much better.
That's more or less the same sort of thing I was coming from. Things can still be rather frustrating, but everything considered, the new development tools are a huge improvement, especially for Web Apps. Not having to sacrifice a goat during an elaborate raindance ceremony to get the old Interdev to actually debug and not crash has just been an enormous time saver. I love having the functions + parameters explained to me by that auto comment feature. Very cool, if only people would use it.
Early versions of XP supposedly sucked, although I hadn't tried any, but I hear that it's improving over time.
I started using XP on the desktop, not at the beginning, but about 18 months ago. I prefer it to a 2000 desktop, but not by a whole lot. Basically it is just nice to have a professional OS that is still main stream as a consumer OS.
Still, I think you'll agree that Linux and FreeBSD are much more stable, and more worry-free than Windows has ever been.
Sure, that's been pretty plain for a while. Linux outnumbers Windows 4 to 1 in my home. But pure unabated evilness aside, Windows has done a lot to close the gap in terms of stability and security. To be honest, and this is soley an academic question, I wonder whether something like Red Hat Enterprise actually has fewer security (code) bugs than Windows 2003 server. In other words, if Linux were as homogonized, hated, and popular as Microsoft, how would Linux compare security wise?
Why keep struggling with a faulty legacy codebase when you can pick up a top-shelf, stable one under the BSD license for nothing? It would take much less work to turn that into Windows 2004 than to actually WRITE Windows 2004 from the legacy codebase...
It would be pretty hard to make a case for that kind of conversion. As you know, Windows isn't just an OS, it's a platform that many, many applications and businesses rely upon. If Windows turns into Linux, what happens to all of those other products out there like Office, Visual Studio, the XBox, Windows CE based embedded products, my old company's shiny new Dot Net based webstore? It might be theoretically possible to create or build on something like Wine, but it wouldn't really be desirable compared to native solutions. Also, Microsoft is a company of thousands of developers with a very specific skillset, Microsoft's. Retraining or rehiring for all their product lines would be an absolute nightmare. Then there's the business case, Microsoft thrives on its incompatibilities. If all of a sudden, they became compatible with nix everywhere, and if all of their products were effectively ports, their market share would disappear very quickly.
I'm not sure I understand how this would work. If it were set up by the RIAA/MPAA, wouldn't any copies distributed through this organization be legitimate? Put another way, how can you give a company permission to distribute your content without your permission?
Yeah, I mean some of these people appear to have some very strong gut reactions against P2P and general purpose computers. I remember watching some streamed debate with Jack Valenti (MPAA) and he had the emotional appearance of a man who, utterly convinced of his own correctness, was attempting to convince a group of middle agers that the world was round. I mean he really looks like he believes all this stuff is necessary to protect his industry from piracy. I'm not saying he's not a good actor, just that at a glance, he seems sincere. Perhaps that just means it's easy to look sincere when all you care about is money and all you are trying to do is ensure you will get money forever.
On the other hand, all this whining by the record industry does look more like a scam. Take all these copy protected cds for example. They don't work. Everyone knows they don't work, but the Recording Industry still spits them out. It's the same thing with sites like buymusic.com where the labels have forced everything to be protected by extremely complex unlikable licenses with truly nasty DRM. I mean, if we were thieves, we wouldn't be trying to buy music from them. These activities just look and feel like deliberate self sabotage.
It is the same as me, a non-smoker, saying I have boycotted the tobacco industry.
Okay, so here's a semi on-topic question I've occassionaly wondered about. When someone organizes a boycott of RIAA members or say the tobacco industry, do you only target that industry or do you target "the whole thing". For example, let's say you are boycotting the tobacco industry and therefore Phillip Morris cigarettes (Marlboro, Virginia Slims, Benson & Hedges, Merit, Parliament, Alpine, Basic, Cambridge, Bristol, Bucks, Chesterfield, Collector's Choice, Commander, English Ovals, Lark, L&M, Players and Saratoga). Are you also then boycotting Kraft and Nabisco? In this particular case I'm not sure they are still part of the "People of Phillip Morris", but they were at one point.
Asides from arrangers in a boycott, do individual participants often actually boycott subsidiaries, parent companies, or those companies with close related business ties? Should we? I mean it seems like it would be a much better way to induce change, provided enough people did it. If all of a sudden RIAA/MPAA member AOL Time Warner were to start losing sales in all of its industries (lots of Magazines, AOL, AIM, ICQ, Netscape, cable tv, road runner, compuserve, etc), those other parts of AOLTW might pressure the Music labels to reform.
I guess the trend I have seen among participants in boycotts is that they generally focuss only on the immediate evil, rather than the big picture. One of the barriers to a more general boycott seems to be that nobody knows who owns what. I mean there's some stuff out there like the Columbia Journalism Review, but thatonly covers media. Does anyone know of any good online resources for finding out which companies are really all part of the same company?
I have a problem with anti-spam legislation. The solution to spam is to rearchitect the email system to integrate authentication, approved contact lists, and overall security. Everywhere spam of any sort prospers (snail mail, telephones, windows messenger, etc), it is because these kind of controls are not in place. Take icq and aim for example. In the past two or three years I have never seen a single unwanted junk message.
A legislative solution *might* reduce the amount of spam, but it won't come close to fixing the problem. Also, our legislators, good intentioned or not, do not have a very good track record of when it comes to technology related legislation. Finally, it is already going to be hard to convince the world to re-engineer the email system. Despite the fact that spam and other problems are intrinsic to the system, people will use the illegality of spam to avoid addressing the core problems. It becomes more of a problem for law enforcement and less of a problem for the IT community.
I believe in legislation, but only as an absolute last resort. There are already far too many laws.
You just listed 4 components (counting "oil" as a component) in a car. Which are all exceptionally minor.
Hence the phrase, "as well as some very minor home maintenance like spark plugs, oil change, replace a tire, and replace brake pads?"
A computer has: chassis, CPU, motherboard.... I'm not seeing consumer level complexity here.
I wasn't talking about consumer complexity. I was talking about the a computer system's actual overall complexity.
I can assure you that you do not have a crystal clear understanding of how your car works. You probably do have a more clear understanding of how your computer works, especially with a four year degree. Unless colleges went really downhill, you should be required to have courses in logic gates, and such. You may not know how to build a processor, but you should at least now how they work.
I did not say I had a crystal clear understanding of how my car works. I said compared to my understanding of the complex set of applications and systems that make up my computer, my understanding of how cars work was crystal clear. This was said after I had deliberately demonstrated having at best, a layman's understanding of automobiles, in order to drive home my point. As you said before, I can learn to take a car apart and put it back together during the span of a few months to a year. It might take me a several years to get a good understanding of everything involved. As an expert in computer systems, I know with absolute certainty I could not analyze and discover the workings of all of the software and hardware components that make up my home pc, no matter how many lifetimes I had. Just for the record I had two or three classes involving logic gates and other (exceedingly boring) topics. In one, we went over the entire design of a mips processor in excruciating detail on paper, but hardware is trivial compared to software. For example, in any of the three companies in which I have done software development, I have never met a single person that understood how any of our homegrown software systems worked in their entirety. In any of the companies, it would have been extremely difficult to do, and that's just one specialized set of software.
To work how the consumer wants them to work, within the bounds of their design. A car does meet those expectations, and has since 1908.
We are drifting away from the topic of complexity and in to the topic of comparitive operation which I still don't think makes very much sense but.... You are making the assumption that software is designed to work perfectly, and that, in failing to do so, it fails the above criteria. It isn't designed to work perfectly. If it were, we would probably still be waiting for the internet to became a big thing. There are many things about cars that don't meet my expectations (energy source, autonomy, safety, etc), but the features I want are not part of the design just like error free execution is not part of general software design.
If you compare any utility item (cars, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, Walkman/Discman, dishwasher, fridge) a computer comes in at the bottom by using the criteria above. That's my point, not the comparison and contrasting of cars and computers. Utility items should work, and computers just don't.
While I disagree that a computer should be judged against these kind of devices in this kind of comparison, I will concede that from an everyday perspective, this idea makes sense. My personal belief is that computer systems are vastly more complex and capable than any of these other utility items and, in accomplishing so much more than any of these devices, they can not justly be compared by these criteria alone. As a last ditch argument along this line, let me try this bit. You mentioned several utility devices above that you purport all satisfy your utility criteria better than a computer: cars, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, Walk
Spoken by a person who doesn't understand cars. If you honestly think a computer is more complex than a car, you need to go pick up some books. If you compare a consumer based car and a computer, you will quickly see which is more complex.
Ok, I confess I'm not a big car person. The extent of my automobile knowledge is a rather basic understanding of major components as well as some very minor home maintenance like spark plugs, oil change, replace a tire, and replace brake pads. However the extent of my computer knowledge is a four year degree, a couple years of professional software development with a little admin work, and now the beginnings of a master's degree in the subject. My book shelves are lined with computer books. Except in an extraordinarily academic sense, I have no idea how my computer actually does 99.999999% of the things it does. By comparison, I have a wonderfully crystal clear understanding of how my car works. A typical home computer is astronomically more complex than a car.
Here's an exercise: Take all of the base components out of a computer and learn what each one is. That should take you about an hour, maybe two. Take each of the base components out of a car, and learn what each one is. That should take you a couple of weeks.
First, the large physical items inside of a computer do not represent its basic components. Many of the basic components consist of extraordinarly complex circuitry whose size is measured in microns. Second, the majority of a home pc's complexity is not in hardware, it is in software. For the barest, most minimal idea of what I'm talking about, search your hard drive for some basic executable file formats. In my case I found nearly 6000 dll, ocx, and exe files. Each of these components is capable of performing numerous tasks. Given the source code, I could easily spend several lifetimes trying to figure out how all of it worked in terms of the highest level languages used to create them and still not succeed. And this stuff is just the merest tip of the ice berg.
Cars have more components, just as finely tuned electronic equipment, and are more stable than any computer system. You know why?
Because they are designed with an entirely different purpose and set of design criteria in mind? Because they are much much simpler? Because they have been around in public use for a century?
Cars are more stable than any computer system.
They are two extraordinarily different things with different purposes and design criteria. What can this possibly even mean? Do we want to sit around comparing failure rates? How many times does a piston fire before a cyclinder cracks versus how many instructions, on average, a modern processor executes before the machine blue screens (think a billion instructions per second)? The truth is they are apples and oranges, it just doesn't make sense to compare them at this level.
Lets have predictive processors that detect when bad code is coming in and counter for it.
I think this is provably mathematically impossible. It's actually probably one of those famous theories I can't remember after spending too much time doing practical work. On the other hand, there are related constructs in programming like for instance, modern error handling. You can't generally tell if a program will throw an error, but you can execute a block of code, check if it threw an error, and then force it to run some other code in an attempt to handle the error or force the system back into a valid state.
Slashdot Mirror
no...just stupid
It was a bad job market. I didn't have much in the way of cash reserves. I noticed a lot of foreign workers, so I specifically asked about required work hours twice in the interviews. My future manager told me 45 hours was the norm. He lied. It took me a long time to build up enough money and ultimately find another job. After I was clear, I thought about raising a legal fuss, but it would come down to my word versus his. Also, any legal entanglements would have revealed the abuse of the H1Bs, my friends, who have already gone through far too much hell to risk getting deported now.
I've never been in exactly the same situation as you, but I do work (for about 4 weeks) in one of the administrative offices at a very large university. The network here is highly departmentalized. OIT controls the grand scheme. Then each college or department manages their own systems. Then there are subdivisions of those departments which also manage their own systems. Sometimes there are firewalls in place, sometimes there aren't. Sometimes systems are patched, often they are not. When it comes down to it, sometimes the person in control of keeping a small office patched up is just a student employee. As such, we have problems similar to those caused by your students.
To combat the problem, OIT has started to perform vulnerability scans across the network. If a machine is found to be vulnerable, they are (automagically?) disconnected from the network. I'm not sure how well received this method is, but it appears to work. A week before the big DCOM worm came out, OIT performed a scan and kicked off all of the vulnerable pcs. They made a big deal about how they were going to be doing it before hand also so admins had time to make sure they were patched up. As a result, I think we had very few problems across the campus.
I don't know how well this kind of strategy would work against average students. There would probably be a lot of resentment/confusion at first, and probably a lot at the beginning of each year and quarter. You'd have to find a clever way to distribute patches to disconnected machines and you'd also have to find a good way to let people know what has happened. On the bright side (for you) since we are talking about dorms, everyone in the dorm probably knows of at least one computer person they can go abuse for help when their machine can mysteriously no longer connect to the net.
So an organization whose tagline is, OPEN MARKETS, OPEN SYSTEMS, OPEN NETWORKS, AND FULL, FAIR AND OPEN COMPETITION, is asking that the department of homeland security not use Windows based on security concerns. For crying out loud, their mission statement is the following:
CCIA's mission is to further our members' business interests by being the leading industry advocate in promoting open, barrier-free competition in the offering of computer and communications products and services worldwide.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like nothing more than a high powered Washington based lobbying group whose business constituents are diametrically opposed to Microsoft. How is this even news?
Make sure you have skills that are so valuable that you won't be outsourced. If you can't do that, then find another line of work, you lazy bastard.
Anyone can be outsourced. I have always found accusations of laziness directed against IT personnel to be extremely offensive. Ever work 60-80 hours a week for months at a time without extra pay? Ever get called lazy while doing that?
If companies want to outsource to cheaper labor markets, so be it. What bothers me is when the government allows companies to import the cheap labor market and working conditions to the US. I've known many H1B's and they are good people, but they should never have been let in as second class citizens. It undermines us all.
So let's say I have a few room mates and we share one phone line. We then split the costs of the phone bill based on the number of minutes of calltime outgoing or incomming with a one minute minimum for each call. In the case of a telemarketer, whoever answers the phone takes the hit for that call. At this point, the called party is being charged for the call. Would it then be illegal to call any of us without our consent?
In the past, I have circumvented "I agree" click through agreements by using technical means. What legal challenges, if any, would a person face if they decided to set up a site that contained methods or programs designed to avoid agreeing to a eula? Would this be a DMCA violation?
I completely agree with library "censorship" when it comes to pron, or any of the things covered by the highly controversial filters.
As an individual who was forced (I eventually quit for unrelated reasons) to maintain internet content filtering software (Surf Control), let me just say I hated the software with a passion. Mind you, I didn't think Surf Control was any worse than any of their competitors, but the truth was:
1) It didn't stop people from being able to access porn, view sports sites, or shop online even though these were all blacklisted categories. Instead it would block maybe 90% in each category. All people had to do was find those 1 in 10 porn sites and they did, trust me.
2) It regularly and significantly hindered myself and coworkers in our efforts to do our jobs. The collateral damage was horrendous.
3) It provided a mechanism for administrators and department heads to spy on all of the system users. Management took full advantage of this feature. Perhaps more to the point, my boss very much enjoyed having the ability to blacklist sites of his choosing. I imagine there are many librarians out there that might also enjoy being able to choose their own filters.
So let's review. Content filtering software does not block the content it is supposed to. It prevents people from accessing perfectly "legit" resources. And, often, it allows people to spy on each other. I can't think of anything I'd rather have deployed in libraries and educational institutions throughout America.
Is this so Iran can't spy on its citizens? Or is it so the US can spy on disgruntled Iranians? Or both? Or neither? As an Iranian, why would you trust a country with multiple uncertain motivations to protect your privacy?
Seems to me that a lot of the sites that are shutting down for the day are ones that are frequented by people who are already aware of the issue.
Don't assume that. During my last three technical jobs since 1998 (ops, dev, dev), of the people I worked with, I met only one other person who knew what the DMCA was. There are a whole lot of admins and developers out there that are completely unaware or completely indifferent.
The average person wouldn't have a clue about what a developer was doing.
Second that. In my experience the average developer wouldn't have a clue what the kid was working on, and that's not meant as a rip on developers.
A company I once worked for, NCR (National Cash Register), built a moat around their headquarters.
How do you say no? I was recently working in a hell hole where everyone else who came before me had already accepted insane hours sans overtime. Though he wouldn't admit it, my manager lied to me about the hours during my interview. I had to move to get the job, had signed a lease, and didn't have much of a cash reserve. Even if I did pursue a legal remedy, it would have taken a lot of time and money.
The farthest I got was to contact the department of labor and see if I had any case for claiming overtime. The answer came back that I wasn't eligible to go that route because I was a salaried professional and made more than $250/week (Ohio - your mileage may vary). It would have been much harder to prove some kind of fraud transpired because it would most likely come down to my word versus his.
Guys like this manager target people that will have a hard time fighting back. Except for me, the core technical staff was all on H1B visas. I only got hired due to a change in our parent company's policies on H1Bs.
Of our nine person department, everyone who could quit did in the span of 4 months. Some had jobs lined up when they left, others didn't.
After leaving, I considered bringing the H1B work conditions to the attention of whoever prosecutes that sort of thing, but the last thing I want to happen is for any of those guys to get deported. You form strong bonds working in the trenches. Since I didn't know what would happen, I restrained myself to discussing their options with them.
So, this being the second time I've been burned by employment contract dispute or misrepresentation, I've started to become a little paranoid. Has anyone ever tried to do things like bring tape recorders into interviews (maybe second round only)? How well is that received by interviewers?
I recently decided I might like product activation, but for a different reason. Many corporations and indendent software authors are going to do something to try to prevent illegal copying and redistribution. What I hate is when someone comes up with a copy protection scheme which includes a significant restriction on use, for example, a not easily copyable copy of a cd. I recently bought, as part of an academic bundle, Windows & Office XP and VSN .net, and I'm happy to say all discs burned on their first try without doing anything special and I was then able to install from my backup media flawlessly. If more companies used product activation instead of weird not easily copyable cds, I would be a much happier man today.
Hey, maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like a country concerned about abridging freedom of speech should be imposing taxes on communication mechanisms. I mean, if the government were providing a service for the tax like delivering a letter for postage or improving the state's public network infrastructure, then maybe I could see it. But, I find it unAmerican (in the old sense, not the new one) to force an individual to pay a fee to an essentially irrelevant (as in unrelated to the communication at hand) governing body in order to send a message. I mean it's called freedom of speech right?
I think there's a lot of very valid popularity related reasons that cause Microsoft to be subjected to a higer percentage of attacks per vendor than other systems.
First, consider who Microsoft based systems are popular with: home and office users. Often, as in the case of SoBig, the users are as much a target as the operating system.
Second, because Microsoft is so popular and because they have a history of problems (such as bluescreens), they have become extremely unpopular, particularly among that certain segment of the population that might create and unleash viruses. While I know of many corporations//organizations whose capacity for evil greatly exceeds Microsoft's (Monsanto, Phillip Morris, etc), I know of no company so hated by so many all over the world.
Finally, when you consider the amount of viruses, worms, and the like that affect Microsoft versus a nix, it is important to remember that Microsoft is an entire homogonized platform in and of itself. The misc services, the ftp server, the smtp server, the web server, the database server, the mail server, etc are all made by Microsoft and many of these components are standard, especially in a microsoft shop. Compare this to a nix where people more readily pick and choose each of the above components. If you are writing a multi-vector worm like Nimda, windows represents the easiest target because there are a lot of standard uniformly implemented services which are virtually guaranteed to be there. If you were writing the same thing for a Nix, you could target Apache, sendmail maybe, and then what? There's so much diversity in the Nix world that it makes it more difficult to target.
I am not excusing Microsoft's security problems in any way. I just believe that the popularity of Microsoft and its platforms has had an extremely significant effect on the number of times they are targetted, and as a result, compromised.
If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft recently decided they were going to turn the firewall on by default and that they may turn auto-updating on by default for all home users. Since presumably the firewall takes care of all open ports, it seems like all the major issues are already being addressed.
The next major initiative might be for Microsoft to purchase or contract an antivirus company then bundle virus definition updates along with critical updates. Would this get them into legal trouble a la Internet Explorer & Netscape? I can see a very solid argument for an antivirus system being tied to the Operating System, or rather platform, in that viruses are often platform specific. Maybe it would be safer for the OEM's to bundle the Anti-Virus software and then for Microsoft to contract the AV companies to integrate with windows updates.
Well, better tool does not equal better code.
Not necessarily, but all things considered, I would say that was the general trend. For instance, no one would argue that they would rather develop for an Office Suite written in C++ than one written in assembler or machine code. Also, please note that I never said that the code quality of Windows had improved.
Claiming "prove it" when referring to code quality on a closed-source operating system is probably going to be pretty difficult.
Exactly, couldn't have said it better myself. In essence, you and I agree that the parent's assertion that code quality had not improved was at best, speculation. In the pressence of strong outward evidence of overall improvement, it seems dubious at best, though not necessarily incorrect.
For the past two years, we've had to use VB6, MTS (some servers), COM+ (other servers), and ASP on various versions of IIS. Now we're moving to .Net, and it's like night and day -- everything, and I mean everything, works much better.
That's more or less the same sort of thing I was coming from. Things can still be rather frustrating, but everything considered, the new development tools are a huge improvement, especially for Web Apps. Not having to sacrifice a goat during an elaborate raindance ceremony to get the old Interdev to actually debug and not crash has just been an enormous time saver. I love having the functions + parameters explained to me by that auto comment feature. Very cool, if only people would use it.
Early versions of XP supposedly sucked, although I hadn't tried any, but I hear that it's improving over time.
I started using XP on the desktop, not at the beginning, but about 18 months ago. I prefer it to a 2000 desktop, but not by a whole lot. Basically it is just nice to have a professional OS that is still main stream as a consumer OS.
Still, I think you'll agree that Linux and FreeBSD are much more stable, and more worry-free than Windows has ever been.
Sure, that's been pretty plain for a while. Linux outnumbers Windows 4 to 1 in my home. But pure unabated evilness aside, Windows has done a lot to close the gap in terms of stability and security. To be honest, and this is soley an academic question, I wonder whether something like Red Hat Enterprise actually has fewer security (code) bugs than Windows 2003 server. In other words, if Linux were as homogonized, hated, and popular as Microsoft, how would Linux compare security wise?
Why keep struggling with a faulty legacy codebase when you can pick up a top-shelf, stable one under the BSD license for nothing? It would take much less work to turn that into Windows 2004 than to actually WRITE Windows 2004 from the legacy codebase...
It would be pretty hard to make a case for that kind of conversion. As you know, Windows isn't just an OS, it's a platform that many, many applications and businesses rely upon. If Windows turns into Linux, what happens to all of those other products out there like Office, Visual Studio, the XBox, Windows CE based embedded products, my old company's shiny new Dot Net based webstore? It might be theoretically possible to create or build on something like Wine, but it wouldn't really be desirable compared to native solutions. Also, Microsoft is a company of thousands of developers with a very specific skillset, Microsoft's. Retraining or rehiring for all their product lines would be an absolute nightmare. Then there's the business case, Microsoft thrives on its incompatibilities. If all of a sudden, they became compatible with nix everywhere, and if all of their products were effectively ports, their market share would disappear very quickly.
Windows has been the de facto virus target, but that doesn't seem to have increased code quality...
Prove it. Windows has substantially better development tools, better security tools, and better administration tools than it did five years ago.
I'm not sure I understand how this would work. If it were set up by the RIAA/MPAA, wouldn't any copies distributed through this organization be legitimate? Put another way, how can you give a company permission to distribute your content without your permission?
Yeah, I mean some of these people appear to have some very strong gut reactions against P2P and general purpose computers. I remember watching some streamed debate with Jack Valenti (MPAA) and he had the emotional appearance of a man who, utterly convinced of his own correctness, was attempting to convince a group of middle agers that the world was round. I mean he really looks like he believes all this stuff is necessary to protect his industry from piracy. I'm not saying he's not a good actor, just that at a glance, he seems sincere. Perhaps that just means it's easy to look sincere when all you care about is money and all you are trying to do is ensure you will get money forever.
On the other hand, all this whining by the record industry does look more like a scam. Take all these copy protected cds for example. They don't work. Everyone knows they don't work, but the Recording Industry still spits them out. It's the same thing with sites like buymusic.com where the labels have forced everything to be protected by extremely complex unlikable licenses with truly nasty DRM. I mean, if we were thieves, we wouldn't be trying to buy music from them. These activities just look and feel like deliberate self sabotage.
It is the same as me, a non-smoker, saying I have boycotted the tobacco industry.
Okay, so here's a semi on-topic question I've occassionaly wondered about. When someone organizes a boycott of RIAA members or say the tobacco industry, do you only target that industry or do you target "the whole thing". For example, let's say you are boycotting the tobacco industry and therefore Phillip Morris cigarettes (Marlboro, Virginia Slims, Benson & Hedges, Merit, Parliament, Alpine, Basic, Cambridge, Bristol, Bucks, Chesterfield, Collector's Choice, Commander, English Ovals, Lark, L&M, Players and Saratoga). Are you also then boycotting Kraft and Nabisco? In this particular case I'm not sure they are still part of the "People of Phillip Morris", but they were at one point.
Asides from arrangers in a boycott, do individual participants often actually boycott subsidiaries, parent companies, or those companies with close related business ties? Should we? I mean it seems like it would be a much better way to induce change, provided enough people did it. If all of a sudden RIAA/MPAA member AOL Time Warner were to start losing sales in all of its industries (lots of Magazines, AOL, AIM, ICQ, Netscape, cable tv, road runner, compuserve, etc), those other parts of AOLTW might pressure the Music labels to reform.
I guess the trend I have seen among participants in boycotts is that they generally focuss only on the immediate evil, rather than the big picture. One of the barriers to a more general boycott seems to be that nobody knows who owns what. I mean there's some stuff out there like the Columbia Journalism Review, but thatonly covers media. Does anyone know of any good online resources for finding out which companies are really all part of the same company?
Legislation is the ONLY way to get rid of spam.
I have a problem with anti-spam legislation. The solution to spam is to rearchitect the email system to integrate authentication, approved contact lists, and overall security. Everywhere spam of any sort prospers (snail mail, telephones, windows messenger, etc), it is because these kind of controls are not in place. Take icq and aim for example. In the past two or three years I have never seen a single unwanted junk message.
A legislative solution *might* reduce the amount of spam, but it won't come close to fixing the problem. Also, our legislators, good intentioned or not, do not have a very good track record of when it comes to technology related legislation. Finally, it is already going to be hard to convince the world to re-engineer the email system. Despite the fact that spam and other problems are intrinsic to the system, people will use the illegality of spam to avoid addressing the core problems. It becomes more of a problem for law enforcement and less of a problem for the IT community.
I believe in legislation, but only as an absolute last resort. There are already far too many laws.
You just listed 4 components (counting "oil" as a component) in a car. Which are all exceptionally minor.
.... I'm not seeing consumer level complexity here.
.... You are making the assumption that software is designed to work perfectly, and that, in failing to do so, it fails the above criteria. It isn't designed to work perfectly. If it were, we would probably still be waiting for the internet to became a big thing. There are many things about cars that don't meet my expectations (energy source, autonomy, safety, etc), but the features I want are not part of the design just like error free execution is not part of general software design.
Hence the phrase, "as well as some very minor home maintenance like spark plugs, oil change, replace a tire, and replace brake pads?"
A computer has: chassis, CPU, motherboard
I wasn't talking about consumer complexity. I was talking about the a computer system's actual overall complexity.
I can assure you that you do not have a crystal clear understanding of how your car works. You probably do have a more clear understanding of how your computer works, especially with a four year degree. Unless colleges went really downhill, you should be required to have courses in logic gates, and such. You may not know how to build a processor, but you should at least now how they work.
I did not say I had a crystal clear understanding of how my car works. I said compared to my understanding of the complex set of applications and systems that make up my computer, my understanding of how cars work was crystal clear. This was said after I had deliberately demonstrated having at best, a layman's understanding of automobiles, in order to drive home my point. As you said before, I can learn to take a car apart and put it back together during the span of a few months to a year. It might take me a several years to get a good understanding of everything involved. As an expert in computer systems, I know with absolute certainty I could not analyze and discover the workings of all of the software and hardware components that make up my home pc, no matter how many lifetimes I had. Just for the record I had two or three classes involving logic gates and other (exceedingly boring) topics. In one, we went over the entire design of a mips processor in excruciating detail on paper, but hardware is trivial compared to software. For example, in any of the three companies in which I have done software development, I have never met a single person that understood how any of our homegrown software systems worked in their entirety. In any of the companies, it would have been extremely difficult to do, and that's just one specialized set of software.
To work how the consumer wants them to work, within the bounds of their design. A car does meet those expectations, and has since 1908.
We are drifting away from the topic of complexity and in to the topic of comparitive operation which I still don't think makes very much sense but
If you compare any utility item (cars, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, Walkman/Discman, dishwasher, fridge) a computer comes in at the bottom by using the criteria above. That's my point, not the comparison and contrasting of cars and computers. Utility items should work, and computers just don't.
While I disagree that a computer should be judged against these kind of devices in this kind of comparison, I will concede that from an everyday perspective, this idea makes sense. My personal belief is that computer systems are vastly more complex and capable than any of these other utility items and, in accomplishing so much more than any of these devices, they can not justly be compared by these criteria alone. As a last ditch argument along this line, let me try this bit. You mentioned several utility devices above that you purport all satisfy your utility criteria better than a computer: cars, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, Walk
Spoken by a person who doesn't understand cars. If you honestly think a computer is more complex than a car, you need to go pick up some books. If you compare a consumer based car and a computer, you will quickly see which is more complex.
Ok, I confess I'm not a big car person. The extent of my automobile knowledge is a rather basic understanding of major components as well as some very minor home maintenance like spark plugs, oil change, replace a tire, and replace brake pads. However the extent of my computer knowledge is a four year degree, a couple years of professional software development with a little admin work, and now the beginnings of a master's degree in the subject. My book shelves are lined with computer books. Except in an extraordinarily academic sense, I have no idea how my computer actually does 99.999999% of the things it does. By comparison, I have a wonderfully crystal clear understanding of how my car works. A typical home computer is astronomically more complex than a car.
Here's an exercise: Take all of the base components out of a computer and learn what each one is. That should take you about an hour, maybe two. Take each of the base components out of a car, and learn what each one is. That should take you a couple of weeks.
First, the large physical items inside of a computer do not represent its basic components. Many of the basic components consist of extraordinarly complex circuitry whose size is measured in microns. Second, the majority of a home pc's complexity is not in hardware, it is in software. For the barest, most minimal idea of what I'm talking about, search your hard drive for some basic executable file formats. In my case I found nearly 6000 dll, ocx, and exe files. Each of these components is capable of performing numerous tasks. Given the source code, I could easily spend several lifetimes trying to figure out how all of it worked in terms of the highest level languages used to create them and still not succeed. And this stuff is just the merest tip of the ice berg.
Cars have more components, just as finely tuned electronic equipment, and are more stable than any computer system. You know why?
Because they are designed with an entirely different purpose and set of design criteria in mind? Because they are much much simpler? Because they have been around in public use for a century?
Cars are more stable than any computer system.
They are two extraordinarily different things with different purposes and design criteria. What can this possibly even mean? Do we want to sit around comparing failure rates? How many times does a piston fire before a cyclinder cracks versus how many instructions, on average, a modern processor executes before the machine blue screens (think a billion instructions per second)? The truth is they are apples and oranges, it just doesn't make sense to compare them at this level.
Lets have predictive processors that detect when bad code is coming in and counter for it.
I think this is provably mathematically impossible. It's actually probably one of those famous theories I can't remember after spending too much time doing practical work. On the other hand, there are related constructs in programming like for instance, modern error handling. You can't generally tell if a program will throw an error, but you can execute a block of code, check if it threw an error, and then force it to run some other code in an attempt to handle the error or force the system back into a valid state.