I doubt anyone can say that writing software is a highly specialised task that no-one, other than highly trained software engineers, can perform. In this case, he created an administrative tool, and police work nowadays is pretty much entirely paperwork.
So, yes, I think the software does belong to the employer. (much as I hate to admit it, as a software engineer myself).
RTFA - they had a special forum for unregistered guests to post (stupid in this day and age), and it was that forum that received 50,000 posts for all kinds of spam spew.
However, you're still right in that the forum software should ask unregistered viewers who want to post to answer a captcha, and perhaps restrict their posting to 1 every 5 minutes or so.
What does/. use to prevent anonymous cowards from posting? The only spams I see are gnaa, no casino, poker, viagra, stock pumping or porn.
you have a point, I am an idiot. At least he started off good:)
Stephen Soderberg perhaps, or Luc Besson or.. oh sod it - get them to bri.. offer a quarter billion dollars to Ridley Scott to do it.
He'd bring some excellent lighting to it - plenty of dawn shots of the Shire, mix greens and browns and produce a story of wanderlust that doesn't just repeat the book, but explores the need of us all to escape from mudane lives in search of big adventure, danger and excitement.
Oh I don't know, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, George Lucas even.. there are a lot of extremely good directors who are far more talented than Jackson. I hope one of them get to do the Hobbit, then we might have better plot, characters and far, far intrusive CGI nonsense. We'll look back at LoTR in a few years and say 'god, it looks so dated, those CGI battles are just crap', whereas no-one says that about the very first Star Wars.
Bear in mind, that if *I* directed the LoTR trilogy, they'd have still made a fortune at the box office, and if he had a script that wasn't as instantly profitable as LoTR (say, a movie about a giant gorilla), then it would not have nearly the following or critical acclaim.
Credit where its due? He did alright, but he cannot be described as one of the truly great directors.
Agreed: developers should absolutely take responsibility for the code the write Yep, this includes the developers of the PHP language itself.:)
My personal opinion is that PHP should come out-of-the-installer with *all* its security features turned on. Safe_mode, register_globals, syscall restrictions, open_basedir set to the home directory even. Then, all the new PHP devs to the language will more likely work with these features. Of course, they can still be turned off if necessary, but I hope less people will do that.
Fishy indeed - remember that due to the sheer number of transactions, accounts and so on that paypal deals with almost everything is automated. I'm sure nobody at Paypal even knew this account had been created until it was flagged as a phishing fraud scam.
Deadspin messed up, possibly without realising it, but it still their fault, their responsibilty. And their whining about it afterwards. Its not even like they won't get the money - they'll just have to wait a little while.
I think the interest is peanuts compared to the charges they apply normally. Its not an 'evil' thing to do, you should look at terms for any merchant account, they all have rolling periods before they rleease your money.
and considering he now has a "its a charity, honest, just pay the monies into my personal bank account, it'll be ok, I'll pay the money on, no really" paypal account, I think its quite reasonable to hold onto the money for a while to see if people complain, or to check its validity.
Most (ie all) payment processors hold onto your money anyway, they have a rolling period before releasing your cash in case of chargebacks and the like. Paypal is very good in this regard, just try getting yourself a real merchant account, and tell them its a charity. Expect many many hoops to jump through.
The stated problem is obviously programmers who don't know enough about what they're doing and require an easy-to-use language that makes up for their shortcomings.:-)
On the other hand, it does look like they're beginning to address the editorial problem with the FireHose. Now, when they post a dupe, they can at least point to the readers and say 'yes, but you lot kept voting for both articles'.
sure... beta... I hope they'll remove already-selected articles from the list, and will also remove obviously nonsense (eg spam, adverts) articles.
tosh. If it wasn't for M$, we'd be posting this using our time-sharing allocation on one of the 6 IBM computers the world would be using.
Regardless of the 'damage', there hasn't been a viable alternative to the OS that everyone wanted to use. Sure, Apple has been around for ages, but its hardly captured the imagination of business users who (obviously) havn't bought millions of PCs. You may not like M$s market monopolisation, but you should be happy that they have brought the world to the position where everyone has several computers available to them.
Things will be different in the future, but then it'll probably be Sony PCs everywhere running your home cinema instead:(
I'd like to think his comment was directed at the female half of the relationship, 'cos lets face it, of all the dodgy fetishes that people in the world could have, and all the niche fetish sites there are on the internet, not one of them is interested in watching a slashdotter's sex video.
damn right. I see this happening on CSI all the time, the licence plate, blurred, reflected in a window, with someone standing in front of it.. just 'clean up the image', and bobs your uncle - one licence plate revealed clear as day.:)
1. he's going to have to buy an OS eventually, so buy a copy of XP with a 'free upgrade to Vista' voucher.
2. Keep running with it connected via a cable. He says it mostly works when 'hardwired', I assume he meant cabled and although he's having DNS issues, he says it works some of the times.
3. Run the webbrowsing via a VM image - VMware is free, and there are plenty of 'browser appliances' you can use that will use their own (linux) stacks bridged to the adapter.
4. Run it through one of the other computers Internet connection - so he proxies through a XP install. This may work, but ICA is easy to set up so it won't be too much of a hardship for a couple of weeks.
5. Try Vista RC2 or a later build of RC1? Wasn't 5600 the last one they released?
and if your user is in an area with no internet connection? What happens then?
Not just places with no wireless or mobile coverage (and believe me, they'd notice trying to run citrix-style thin clients over a gsm modem) but places with no coverage of any kind. These are military and government systems, so they can be expected to crop up in places where there is no network infrastructure - eg. New Orleans after the hurricane, African countries, Iraq, etc etc.
In short, your solution does not even begin to address the problem the client actually wanted to solve.
I've got to say, not knowing very much about your systems, procedures or staff, that you need to look into the difficulty in logging calls. We use a thing called Clarify, and while we have to use it, its a real PITA. So much, that we now have 3 different logging systems for different departments - everyone wants to use something else, if they can.
So, check out what it takes to log a call, and don't be afraid to change the system.
well, 1 core to handle your typing, 1 core to handle the spellcheck, 1 core to handle the grammar check, etc etc, and Word would go faster. However, they'd all be accessing the same memory and would probably bottleneck there instead - so yes, you're quite right, it'd still be too slow.
I think 2 cores is about right for desktop machines - who needs more than that, given the apps we curently have (niche or specialist apps are not considered here as they're.. well, niche), so I cannot see massively parallel cores will become anything like mainstream for quite some time. Storage access times need to be improved for standard desktops to become faster next.
Yes, I was really pissed off that the time-honoured menu bar was removed for the sake of it. MS seems to be moving away from menus. Anyway, the good old menu can be restored - but once you do, you'll see its always underneath the toolbar (sigh). Fortunately, this registry key will put it back init s rightful position: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser " set the value "ITBar7Position" to a dwrord 1 and its back as you'd want it.
To turn the menu bar on in the first place - go to the tools menu/button and select 'menu bar'
(or put this in notepad, save as a reg file and then click it)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser] "ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001
No ISP will offer better facilities for P2P.. yet. Once it becomes 'legal' then we might see different plans from them. However, until then people just need to shop around (as with everything) for the better ISPs - eg the one I'm with has capped bandwidth, but only at peak time (4pm to midnight) and then its unmetered. So, my P2P, backups and big downloads take place overnight, and I'm happy with that.
ISPs do traffic shap for P2P, and I think they should be allowed to do so to keep prices down, however a lot of P2P systems are trying to circumvent this by encrypting ansd obfuscating packets and I think, ultimately, is counter-productive as they will have to start shaping all traffic but web and email if this practise becomes widespread enough for them to notice.
Common carrier status is a good thing, but that'll be up to politics and vested interest's narrowminded legalities.
Yup. Heaven forbid that their customers actually use all the bandwidth they pay for -- if that happened... the cost of my broadband connection would quadruple.
Unfortunately, the real world is still as it is, so allowing ISPs to traffic shape, and block packets - otherwise they wouldn't be able to block spam-spewing clients on port 25.
Most ISPs don't want to ban P2P traffic, they just want to spread it out so the network is fully utilised instead of saturated at 6pm and unused at 6am. There are a lot of providers who do this, so if you don't like it, move your custom to them. If you absolutely must have 24x7x100% utilisation then pay them for their unmetered 'business' accounts.
I thought the problem was that in order to build a driver, you have to use the C headers to get the data structures and other API code, so all binary drivers are technically licenced with the GPL and should be open sourced.
If this is the case (and I'm not 100% sure I'm right here) then I think the linux licence needs these 'APIs' to be released differently.
One of the biggest 'problems' is the way PHP is generally executed as an apache module. You get a lot of shared webhosts that run php as a module, and so the apache user runs the code. Fine, except that if you want to give your PHP script access to your data, you're effectively giving it access to everyone else's data too. So features like open_basedir were added to restrict this.
Then there is features like safe_mode that turns off many system functions that an attacker could use to get round the other restrictions, and register_globals which is a feature designed to work around an inherently insecure system of passing variables to php pages.
and so on, and so forth.. possibly the biggest problem is the ease of coding it, the barrier to entry is so low you will attract coders who (to be polite) don't know as much as they could about programming. So you get a lot of PHP code that is poor quality, makes too many assumptions on things that they should have tightened up (eg, not initialising variables to prevent an attacker from passing them in with their desired values), or checking input to functions from the form or url.
Its the same issue as VB - it was so easy to code VB apps, my boss could do it. So he did. And they looked, performed and crashed as if a manager had coded them:(
Seriously, businesses are about money, and all of them will pay for support because paying a full-time dev to fix things will work out more expensive than paying the support fees. If you have a part-time dev, there's the chance that he will not be good enough (ie as familiar with the code/system as he needs to be) to fix things.
Then there's the risk you have to cover that your devs are on holiday when something breaks, or the risk that he just cannot fix it. eg. the company I work for has Oracle support so when the customer site broke (100% cpu usage for far too long), a call to Oracle resulted in things to look for and things to do to prevent it happening again. In terms of the cost of that downtime, the support fee was insignificant.
Also support fees are a business expense so the taxman pays for most of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt anyone can say that writing software is a highly specialised task that no-one, other than highly trained software engineers, can perform. In this case, he created an administrative tool, and police work nowadays is pretty much entirely paperwork.
So, yes, I think the software does belong to the employer. (much as I hate to admit it, as a software engineer myself).
RTFA - they had a special forum for unregistered guests to post (stupid in this day and age), and it was that forum that received 50,000 posts for all kinds of spam spew.
/. use to prevent anonymous cowards from posting? The only spams I see are gnaa, no casino, poker, viagra, stock pumping or porn.
However, you're still right in that the forum software should ask unregistered viewers who want to post to answer a captcha, and perhaps restrict their posting to 1 every 5 minutes or so.
What does
you have a point, I am an idiot. At least he started off good :)
Stephen Soderberg perhaps, or Luc Besson or.. oh sod it - get them to bri.. offer a quarter billion dollars to Ridley Scott to do it.
He'd bring some excellent lighting to it - plenty of dawn shots of the Shire, mix greens and browns and produce a story of wanderlust that doesn't just repeat the book, but explores the need of us all to escape from mudane lives in search of big adventure, danger and excitement.
Oh I don't know, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, George Lucas even.. there are a lot of extremely good directors who are far more talented than Jackson. I hope one of them get to do the Hobbit, then we might have better plot, characters and far, far intrusive CGI nonsense. We'll look back at LoTR in a few years and say 'god, it looks so dated, those CGI battles are just crap', whereas no-one says that about the very first Star Wars.
Bear in mind, that if *I* directed the LoTR trilogy, they'd have still made a fortune at the box office, and if he had a script that wasn't as instantly profitable as LoTR (say, a movie about a giant gorilla), then it would not have nearly the following or critical acclaim.
Credit where its due? He did alright, but he cannot be described as one of the truly great directors.
My personal opinion is that PHP should come out-of-the-installer with *all* its security features turned on. Safe_mode, register_globals, syscall restrictions, open_basedir set to the home directory even. Then, all the new PHP devs to the language will more likely work with these features. Of course, they can still be turned off if necessary, but I hope less people will do that.
Fishy indeed - remember that due to the sheer number of transactions, accounts and so on that paypal deals with almost everything is automated. I'm sure nobody at Paypal even knew this account had been created until it was flagged as a phishing fraud scam.
Deadspin messed up, possibly without realising it, but it still their fault, their responsibilty. And their whining about it afterwards. Its not even like they won't get the money - they'll just have to wait a little while.
I think the interest is peanuts compared to the charges they apply normally. Its not an 'evil' thing to do, you should look at terms for any merchant account, they all have rolling periods before they rleease your money.
and considering he now has a "its a charity, honest, just pay the monies into my personal bank account, it'll be ok, I'll pay the money on, no really" paypal account, I think its quite reasonable to hold onto the money for a while to see if people complain, or to check its validity.
Most (ie all) payment processors hold onto your money anyway, they have a rolling period before releasing your cash in case of chargebacks and the like. Paypal is very good in this regard, just try getting yourself a real merchant account, and tell them its a charity. Expect many many hoops to jump through.
Perhaps the next-gen will be to develop a material that is semi-liquid at room temperature, but can then be baked solid.
The stated problem is obviously programmers who don't know enough about what they're doing and require an easy-to-use language that makes up for their shortcomings. :-)
On the other hand, it does look like they're beginning to address the editorial problem with the FireHose. Now, when they post a dupe, they can at least point to the readers and say 'yes, but you lot kept voting for both articles'.
sure... beta... I hope they'll remove already-selected articles from the list, and will also remove obviously nonsense (eg spam, adverts) articles.
tosh. If it wasn't for M$, we'd be posting this using our time-sharing allocation on one of the 6 IBM computers the world would be using.
:(
Regardless of the 'damage', there hasn't been a viable alternative to the OS that everyone wanted to use. Sure, Apple has been around for ages, but its hardly captured the imagination of business users who (obviously) havn't bought millions of PCs. You may not like M$s market monopolisation, but you should be happy that they have brought the world to the position where everyone has several computers available to them.
Things will be different in the future, but then it'll probably be Sony PCs everywhere running your home cinema instead
I'd like to think his comment was directed at the female half of the relationship, 'cos lets face it, of all the dodgy fetishes that people in the world could have, and all the niche fetish sites there are on the internet, not one of them is interested in watching a slashdotter's sex video.
damn right. I see this happening on CSI all the time, the licence plate, blurred, reflected in a window, with someone standing in front of it.. just 'clean up the image', and bobs your uncle - one licence plate revealed clear as day. :)
1. he's going to have to buy an OS eventually, so buy a copy of XP with a 'free upgrade to Vista' voucher.
2. Keep running with it connected via a cable. He says it mostly works when 'hardwired', I assume he meant cabled and although he's having DNS issues, he says it works some of the times.
3. Run the webbrowsing via a VM image - VMware is free, and there are plenty of 'browser appliances' you can use that will use their own (linux) stacks bridged to the adapter.
4. Run it through one of the other computers Internet connection - so he proxies through a XP install. This may work, but ICA is easy to set up so it won't be too much of a hardship for a couple of weeks.
5. Try Vista RC2 or a later build of RC1? Wasn't 5600 the last one they released?
and if your user is in an area with no internet connection? What happens then?
Not just places with no wireless or mobile coverage (and believe me, they'd notice trying to run citrix-style thin clients over a gsm modem) but places with no coverage of any kind. These are military and government systems, so they can be expected to crop up in places where there is no network infrastructure - eg. New Orleans after the hurricane, African countries, Iraq, etc etc.
In short, your solution does not even begin to address the problem the client actually wanted to solve.
I've got to say, not knowing very much about your systems, procedures or staff, that you need to look into the difficulty in logging calls. We use a thing called Clarify, and while we have to use it, its a real PITA. So much, that we now have 3 different logging systems for different departments - everyone wants to use something else, if they can.
So, check out what it takes to log a call, and don't be afraid to change the system.
Eg, we don't need to run Word 100 times faster
.. well, niche), so I cannot see massively parallel cores will become anything like mainstream for quite some time. Storage access times need to be improved for standard desktops to become faster next.
well, 1 core to handle your typing, 1 core to handle the spellcheck, 1 core to handle the grammar check, etc etc, and Word would go faster. However, they'd all be accessing the same memory and would probably bottleneck there instead - so yes, you're quite right, it'd still be too slow.
I think 2 cores is about right for desktop machines - who needs more than that, given the apps we curently have (niche or specialist apps are not considered here as they're
To turn the menu bar on in the first place - go to the tools menu/button and select 'menu bar'
(or put this in notepad, save as a reg file and then click it) [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser]
"ITBar7Position"=dword:00000001
No ISP will offer better facilities for P2P.. yet. Once it becomes 'legal' then we might see different plans from them. However, until then people just need to shop around (as with everything) for the better ISPs - eg the one I'm with has capped bandwidth, but only at peak time (4pm to midnight) and then its unmetered. So, my P2P, backups and big downloads take place overnight, and I'm happy with that.
ISPs do traffic shap for P2P, and I think they should be allowed to do so to keep prices down, however a lot of P2P systems are trying to circumvent this by encrypting ansd obfuscating packets and I think, ultimately, is counter-productive as they will have to start shaping all traffic but web and email if this practise becomes widespread enough for them to notice.
Common carrier status is a good thing, but that'll be up to politics and vested interest's narrowminded legalities.
Yup. Heaven forbid that their customers actually use all the bandwidth they pay for -- if that happened ... the cost of my broadband connection would quadruple.
Unfortunately, the real world is still as it is, so allowing ISPs to traffic shape, and block packets - otherwise they wouldn't be able to block spam-spewing clients on port 25.
Most ISPs don't want to ban P2P traffic, they just want to spread it out so the network is fully utilised instead of saturated at 6pm and unused at 6am. There are a lot of providers who do this, so if you don't like it, move your custom to them. If you absolutely must have 24x7x100% utilisation then pay them for their unmetered 'business' accounts.
I thought the problem was that in order to build a driver, you have to use the C headers to get the data structures and other API code, so all binary drivers are technically licenced with the GPL and should be open sourced.
If this is the case (and I'm not 100% sure I'm right here) then I think the linux licence needs these 'APIs' to be released differently.
One of the biggest 'problems' is the way PHP is generally executed as an apache module. You get a lot of shared webhosts that run php as a module, and so the apache user runs the code. Fine, except that if you want to give your PHP script access to your data, you're effectively giving it access to everyone else's data too. So features like open_basedir were added to restrict this.
:(
Then there is features like safe_mode that turns off many system functions that an attacker could use to get round the other restrictions, and register_globals which is a feature designed to work around an inherently insecure system of passing variables to php pages.
and so on, and so forth.. possibly the biggest problem is the ease of coding it, the barrier to entry is so low you will attract coders who (to be polite) don't know as much as they could about programming. So you get a lot of PHP code that is poor quality, makes too many assumptions on things that they should have tightened up (eg, not initialising variables to prevent an attacker from passing them in with their desired values), or checking input to functions from the form or url.
Its the same issue as VB - it was so easy to code VB apps, my boss could do it. So he did. And they looked, performed and crashed as if a manager had coded them
perhaps a better idea than forking PHP would be to add these desirable sections to python instead.
Then a php to python coverter, and then we could start to forget about magic_quotes and safe mode.
sure. Get a job. :-)
Seriously, businesses are about money, and all of them will pay for support because paying a full-time dev to fix things will work out more expensive than paying the support fees. If you have a part-time dev, there's the chance that he will not be good enough (ie as familiar with the code/system as he needs to be) to fix things.
Then there's the risk you have to cover that your devs are on holiday when something breaks, or the risk that he just cannot fix it. eg. the company I work for has Oracle support so when the customer site broke (100% cpu usage for far too long), a call to Oracle resulted in things to look for and things to do to prevent it happening again. In terms of the cost of that downtime, the support fee was insignificant.
Also support fees are a business expense so the taxman pays for most of it.