Unfortunately, I've bills to pay, and until all my debts are paid off (which won't happen for 3+-2 years), I can't afford a lateral move to an insecure, low-paying job.
I should add, though, that I personally enjoy learning theory a lot more than learning practice. I've picked up quite a few skill in Linux administration on my last job, but that's not nearly as gratifying as learning the theory behind OS schedulers was. Maybe that's just me, though.
School can be an accomplishment too. I've enjoied high school Calculus, and most of my college classes, much more than I enjoy work -- because I could almost physically feel my knowledge improving as I was studying in these classes. That's a rush. Getting your yearly Christmas bonus is nothing, in comparison.
Yes, but technically, you never buy music (at least, not anymore). Instead, you buy a license to listen to a particular piece of music on some particular device (a limited or, sometimes, unlimited number of times), plus the physical media that grants you a way to exercise this license. The license is non-transferrable, so you can't give anyone else the right to listen to this piece of music, and you can't listen to it on a different device, without paying extra.
> The government may not be interested in my online banking password, but the corrupt underpaid civil servant who does the actual snooping for them might be.
I've tried this. The most common response is that corruption is rare, and that we already have mechanisms in place to stop it. Furthermore, an average individual is fairly insignificant, and there are many more people than there are government officials. Thus, the chances of your bank account getting stolen are vanishingly small.
Yes, I personally do realize that the above argument is false, but, again, it's hard to convince people of this.
Your request is self-defeating. I am a de-facto sysadmin for most of my friends and family, and I can summarize their stance on security in a few bullet points:
1). Security is not important. Only computer geeks worry about it. I just want to browse the web, send email, and play games. 2). Viruses happen to other people. I have nothing special on my machine, thus virus writers don't care about me, thus there's no need to worry. 3). I don't know what spyware, trojans, backdoors, or keyloggers are, and I don't care (see (1)). 4). I will not do anything, or install any software, that requires me to take any additional actions whatsoever, no matter how rarely (see (1)). 5). If my computer is not working properly, the likeliest cause is that all the security software (antivirus, spyware scanner, etc.) is messing things up. The obvious solution is to disable it. 6). There's no reason for me to learn about security by reading books or articles, because I already know all I need to know (namely, (1)-(5)).
You may think that I am caricaturizing the views of non-technical people, but, rest assured, I am not. This is literally how people think. Thus, showing them security guides etc. is useless, because they won't read them. It also means that whatever antivirus software you install has to be completely invisible, or they'll remove it. Most unfortunately, when they do get infected with some horrific trojan, they will neither understand not care about what happened; if it becomes too much of a problem, they will either call you in to "make my computer fast", or they'll buy a new PC.
I think the reason for this is that non-geeks think about computers in a completely different way from geeks. Non-geeks do not know, or care to know, how the computer works. To them, the computer is a monolithic tool, sort of like a fork or a spoon or a TV or a car. It does what it's supposed to do. It doesn't have any user-serviceable parts. Messing with it is for special people who like to mess with things, such as car mechanics or computer engineers.
Keep in mind that most geeks also feel this way about various objects. Can you claim the same level of understanding about the food you eat, or the car you drive, or the airplane that takes you to DefCon, or even your microwave oven, as the understanding you have about your Linux distro ? Most people cannot.
So, it is not the case that end-users are especially stupid, or especially lazy. It just means that human nature itself prevents computer security from becoming an end-user concern.
Agreed. I'm also at a loss to figure out why we can't just set up a voting booth the way we set up e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com. If security is a concern, open up the code, as well as the hardware, and hold a public security audit. If anonymity is a concern, give the voting officials a pile of random hash keys (in the form of smartcards or whatever), and hand them out to voters when they show up. One voter gets one hash key, and the value of the hash key is random, so it's impossible to ID the voter.
Has anyone ever found a persuasive counterargument to the notion that "if you've nothing to hide, you have no reason to fear surveillance" ? This notion seems intuitively wrong to me, but most people find it intuitively true. So, how would you change their minds ?
Well, your answers make sense, but they are not intuitively obvious. That is, I don't know how I would've found answers to these questions on my own, without doing some extensive research. I'm lucky in that I happened to already know some of the answers, mostly collected through word-of-mouth (and word-of-google).
Your answers, however, do leave a lot of room for error. There's no one way to do things in Linux; it depends on the distribution, the vendor, your sysadmin's whim (/bin vs ~/bin etc.) In many cases, there's not a lot of UI to guide you, and the UI is inconsistent; for example, there are at least three or four different "Save File" dialog boxes, and that's just the ones I've seen today. And you can forget about customizing X or even editing your keyboard preferences (.bashrc, if you're lucky); that stuff is for experts.
At home (and at work), I do exactly what you recommend: run cygwin on Windows, and use PuTTY and X when it can't be avoided. Until Linux developers put a lot of work into streamlining it, and providing consistent UI (like Apple did), Linux will remain an "expert-only" OS. Maybe that's for the best, really -- after all, how many grandmas need to run Apache ?
Well, I'm a "power user", and I disagree with your assessment. I'd love if Linux gave me simple answers to the following questions:
* Where should I save my work ? * How do I read files from a CD ? * When I install programs, where do they go ? * Speaking of which, how do I install something ?
Windows provides answers to these questions in form of GUI. I can click on the CD-Rom icon, I can pick programs from the Start menu, I can add/remove programs using the GUI tool, and I can save my files pretty much anywhere I want. As a power user, I know some registry hacks and UI tweaks and such, but I can function without them; I can also fit most of the implementation details (registry, c:\Program Files, D: drive) into my head at once.
Linux provides *no* answers to these questions -- or, at best, a whole host of confusing, conflicting answers. I'd love it if Linux worked like Windows, by providing all these answers in the GUI. I'd love it *even more* if Linux had a consistent way of doing all these things from the terminal... But it does not. You've got apt-get, rpm,/user/bin,/sbin,/bin, that weird-ass K-Menu or Gnome with three different things named "Settings" that lead to different places, CD-Rom drives that you need to remember to mount... It's a mess, and it's a *different* mess in each and every distribution. Until this is fixed, power users such as myself will stick to Windows.
I understand that, with quite a bit of work, I can configure Linux to work the way I want. But Windows answers my questions out of the box, and I need to get work done, so I don't care to spend a week getting Linux to behave.
This is offtopic, but I actually considered Mulholland Drive an ok film. I don't hate it, but it could've been a lot better if it were a bit more focused, IMO. Good but not great.
What are you going to do in order to prevent the repetitive grind that most MMOs are [in]famous for ? How many quests in your game follow ye olde template of "kill 20 goblins and bring me their noses... but a goblin only has a 30% chance to drop a nose" ?
At higher levels, will your game require a massive investment of time into raiding the same dungeon over and over, in order to stay competitive with other players ?
Re:Dunno about MS, but that's not true about Googl
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 1
If you need to put in some extra time, then you can. If you want to work a normal week, then you can. It's all results-based, not time based.
That sounds a bit ominous to me. I've worked at a company with a similar policy before, and what translated into was, "the project is due in 2 weeks, we don't care how much you work as long as it's done by then". This, inevitably, translates into, "I have to work 24/7 or I fail".
I understand that at Google the motivation to work comes from you, not from the management (at least, not directly), but if that still translates into the same work hours, then maybe life at MS is better.
Basically, how many engineers at Google really do keep regular hours all the time ? I'd like to know the answer, just to satisfy my curiosity.
Well, I'm a fairly average user as far as music, video, and ebooks are concerned. I've never cared about writing any code that manipulates them in any way; I just want to listen, watch, and read.
It pisses me off to no end that I can't do those things, at all, because of DRM (at least, not without risking jail time). Sure, I can listen to a song N times on a single computer, but that's not what I do with my music; I want to copy it to my MP3 players, I want to burn it for playing in the car, I want it to survive my frequent OS/hardware upgrades, etc. Right now there's no way to do that, and there's no way at all to download videos in electronic format. Most ebooks also don't allow you to copy/paste things, which is just a slap in the face.
I am also pretty pissed off about the fact that e-ink ebook readers do not exist; that HDTV is still a bit wonky; that PS3 is in DNF territory; that Vista will require massive hardware "upgrades"; and that there's a format war that prevents me from burning DVDs. All of these problems are a direct result of DRM. And don't even talk to me about region coding.
I'm not sure how this will work. Considering the amount of energy their capacitor must store, and the 5-minute time frame, the power requirements (power is energy over time) must be enormous, far beyound the limits that a household electrical circuit can supply.
There's a difference. In the past, there was no known way of visiting other planets, this is true. However, our current situation is much worse -- we know, with a very high degree of certainty, that constructing a reactionless drive is impossible. The laws of physics that power most of our modern technology also happen to prohibit reactionless drives. There's a chance our understanding of these laws could be wrong, of course, but that's a very small chance.
This is the thing that most people misunderstand about modern science: it doesn't just tell you what's possible, it also tells you what isn't. You can't have one without the other.
which is the same as saying you can patent a specific use of an algorithm.
No, it's not. When patenting mechanical devices, you really must itemize every single gear and doodad, and how they connect to each other, and what they do. You can't simply say, "I'm gonna burn some fuel and use the heat for energy" (or, "I'm gonna use bubble sort to sort stuff"), you must say exactly how your engine converts heat to motion with pistons, valves, and whatnot (or, you should be required submit your exact source code).
Now, these are the rules for mechanical patents. As other posters have pointed out, these rules aren't always followed, but that's a problem with enforcement, not with the rules themselves. Unfortunately, with software patents, it's the rules themselves that are broken, because you can basically patent pretty much any crazy idea that comes into your head, without any specific implementation attached to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I've bills to pay, and until all my debts are paid off (which won't happen for 3+-2 years), I can't afford a lateral move to an insecure, low-paying job.
I should add, though, that I personally enjoy learning theory a lot more than learning practice. I've picked up quite a few skill in Linux administration on my last job, but that's not nearly as gratifying as learning the theory behind OS schedulers was. Maybe that's just me, though.
School can be an accomplishment too. I've enjoied high school Calculus, and most of my college classes, much more than I enjoy work -- because I could almost physically feel my knowledge improving as I was studying in these classes. That's a rush. Getting your yearly Christmas bonus is nothing, in comparison.
Yes, but technically, you never buy music (at least, not anymore). Instead, you buy a license to listen to a particular piece of music on some particular device (a limited or, sometimes, unlimited number of times), plus the physical media that grants you a way to exercise this license. The license is non-transferrable, so you can't give anyone else the right to listen to this piece of music, and you can't listen to it on a different device, without paying extra.
:-(
Neat, huh ?
Yes, and Macs can also run Breakout... Super Breakout... Uh... Photoshop... :-)
Aren't they still running Windows, in that case ? Come to think of it, even if they run Parallels, they'd still have the same problem.
"Get a Mac" is simply not a valid option for people who like to play games on their home computer. Sad, but true.
> The government may not be interested in my online banking password, but the corrupt underpaid civil servant who does the actual snooping for them might be.
I've tried this. The most common response is that corruption is rare, and that we already have mechanisms in place to stop it. Furthermore, an average individual is fairly insignificant, and there are many more people than there are government officials. Thus, the chances of your bank account getting stolen are vanishingly small.
Yes, I personally do realize that the above argument is false, but, again, it's hard to convince people of this.
Your request is self-defeating. I am a de-facto sysadmin for most of my friends and family, and I can summarize their stance on security in a few bullet points:
1). Security is not important. Only computer geeks worry about it. I just want to browse the web, send email, and play games.
2). Viruses happen to other people. I have nothing special on my machine, thus virus writers don't care about me, thus there's no need to worry.
3). I don't know what spyware, trojans, backdoors, or keyloggers are, and I don't care (see (1)).
4). I will not do anything, or install any software, that requires me to take any additional actions whatsoever, no matter how rarely (see (1)).
5). If my computer is not working properly, the likeliest cause is that all the security software (antivirus, spyware scanner, etc.) is messing things up. The obvious solution is to disable it.
6). There's no reason for me to learn about security by reading books or articles, because I already know all I need to know (namely, (1)-(5)).
You may think that I am caricaturizing the views of non-technical people, but, rest assured, I am not. This is literally how people think. Thus, showing them security guides etc. is useless, because they won't read them. It also means that whatever antivirus software you install has to be completely invisible, or they'll remove it. Most unfortunately, when they do get infected with some horrific trojan, they will neither understand not care about what happened; if it becomes too much of a problem, they will either call you in to "make my computer fast", or they'll buy a new PC.
I think the reason for this is that non-geeks think about computers in a completely different way from geeks. Non-geeks do not know, or care to know, how the computer works. To them, the computer is a monolithic tool, sort of like a fork or a spoon or a TV or a car. It does what it's supposed to do. It doesn't have any user-serviceable parts. Messing with it is for special people who like to mess with things, such as car mechanics or computer engineers.
Keep in mind that most geeks also feel this way about various objects. Can you claim the same level of understanding about the food you eat, or the car you drive, or the airplane that takes you to DefCon, or even your microwave oven, as the understanding you have about your Linux distro ? Most people cannot.
So, it is not the case that end-users are especially stupid, or especially lazy. It just means that human nature itself prevents computer security from becoming an end-user concern.
Agreed. I'm also at a loss to figure out why we can't just set up a voting booth the way we set up e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com. If security is a concern, open up the code, as well as the hardware, and hold a public security audit. If anonymity is a concern, give the voting officials a pile of random hash keys (in the form of smartcards or whatever), and hand them out to voters when they show up. One voter gets one hash key, and the value of the hash key is random, so it's impossible to ID the voter.
Has anyone ever found a persuasive counterargument to the notion that "if you've nothing to hide, you have no reason to fear surveillance" ? This notion seems intuitively wrong to me, but most people find it intuitively true. So, how would you change their minds ?
Well, your answers make sense, but they are not intuitively obvious. That is, I don't know how I would've found answers to these questions on my own, without doing some extensive research. I'm lucky in that I happened to already know some of the answers, mostly collected through word-of-mouth (and word-of-google).
Your answers, however, do leave a lot of room for error. There's no one way to do things in Linux; it depends on the distribution, the vendor, your sysadmin's whim (/bin vs ~/bin etc.) In many cases, there's not a lot of UI to guide you, and the UI is inconsistent; for example, there are at least three or four different "Save File" dialog boxes, and that's just the ones I've seen today. And you can forget about customizing X or even editing your keyboard preferences (.bashrc, if you're lucky); that stuff is for experts.
At home (and at work), I do exactly what you recommend: run cygwin on Windows, and use PuTTY and X when it can't be avoided. Until Linux developers put a lot of work into streamlining it, and providing consistent UI (like Apple did), Linux will remain an "expert-only" OS. Maybe that's for the best, really -- after all, how many grandmas need to run Apache ?
Well, I'm a "power user", and I disagree with your assessment. I'd love if Linux gave me simple answers to the following questions:
/user/bin, /sbin, /bin, that weird-ass K-Menu or Gnome with three different things named "Settings" that lead to different places, CD-Rom drives that you need to remember to mount... It's a mess, and it's a *different* mess in each and every distribution. Until this is fixed, power users such as myself will stick to Windows.
* Where should I save my work ?
* How do I read files from a CD ?
* When I install programs, where do they go ?
* Speaking of which, how do I install something ?
Windows provides answers to these questions in form of GUI. I can click on the CD-Rom icon, I can pick programs from the Start menu, I can add/remove programs using the GUI tool, and I can save my files pretty much anywhere I want. As a power user, I know some registry hacks and UI tweaks and such, but I can function without them; I can also fit most of the implementation details (registry, c:\Program Files, D: drive) into my head at once.
Linux provides *no* answers to these questions -- or, at best, a whole host of confusing, conflicting answers. I'd love it if Linux worked like Windows, by providing all these answers in the GUI. I'd love it *even more* if Linux had a consistent way of doing all these things from the terminal... But it does not. You've got apt-get, rpm,
I understand that, with quite a bit of work, I can configure Linux to work the way I want. But Windows answers my questions out of the box, and I need to get work done, so I don't care to spend a week getting Linux to behave.
This is offtopic, but I actually considered Mulholland Drive an ok film. I don't hate it, but it could've been a lot better if it were a bit more focused, IMO. Good but not great.
Easy ? Hah ! As the CoEx says: "Paradox picks off the careless ones".
Real roleplayers play Mage 2nd Ed, and pity the hack-and-slashers !
Great post BTW; I agree with you 100%. It's nice to know that I'm not the only politically incorrect individual in the world.
What are you going to do in order to prevent the repetitive grind that most MMOs are [in]famous for ? How many quests in your game follow ye olde template of "kill 20 goblins and bring me their noses... but a goblin only has a 30% chance to drop a nose" ?
At higher levels, will your game require a massive investment of time into raiding the same dungeon over and over, in order to stay competitive with other players ?
I understand that at Google the motivation to work comes from you, not from the management (at least, not directly), but if that still translates into the same work hours, then maybe life at MS is better.
Basically, how many engineers at Google really do keep regular hours all the time ? I'd like to know the answer, just to satisfy my curiosity.
Well, I'm a fairly average user as far as music, video, and ebooks are concerned. I've never cared about writing any code that manipulates them in any way; I just want to listen, watch, and read.
It pisses me off to no end that I can't do those things, at all, because of DRM (at least, not without risking jail time). Sure, I can listen to a song N times on a single computer, but that's not what I do with my music; I want to copy it to my MP3 players, I want to burn it for playing in the car, I want it to survive my frequent OS/hardware upgrades, etc. Right now there's no way to do that, and there's no way at all to download videos in electronic format. Most ebooks also don't allow you to copy/paste things, which is just a slap in the face.
I am also pretty pissed off about the fact that e-ink ebook readers do not exist; that HDTV is still a bit wonky; that PS3 is in DNF territory; that Vista will require massive hardware "upgrades"; and that there's a format war that prevents me from burning DVDs. All of these problems are a direct result of DRM. And don't even talk to me about region coding.
I'm an average joe, and I want DRM to die.
I'm not sure how this will work. Considering the amount of energy their capacitor must store, and the 5-minute time frame, the power requirements (power is energy over time) must be enormous, far beyound the limits that a household electrical circuit can supply.
Yeah, I'd take phlogiston over reactionless drives any day -- at least the phlogiston semi-worked :-)
There's a difference. In the past, there was no known way of visiting other planets, this is true. However, our current situation is much worse -- we know, with a very high degree of certainty, that constructing a reactionless drive is impossible. The laws of physics that power most of our modern technology also happen to prohibit reactionless drives. There's a chance our understanding of these laws could be wrong, of course, but that's a very small chance.
This is the thing that most people misunderstand about modern science: it doesn't just tell you what's possible, it also tells you what isn't. You can't have one without the other.
Now, these are the rules for mechanical patents. As other posters have pointed out, these rules aren't always followed, but that's a problem with enforcement, not with the rules themselves. Unfortunately, with software patents, it's the rules themselves that are broken, because you can basically patent pretty much any crazy idea that comes into your head, without any specific implementation attached to it.