One thing that is important about the
man-in-the-middle attack is that usually the
only time there is the request for the
certificate is the first time you connect
to the machine. The interloping machine
has no means of knowing, in general, whether
or not you already have a valid certificate,
so when you go to connect and get the
"is this certificate ok" message, if it is
not the first time you are connecting to
that machine you will know something is up
and can try to figure out what is going on
or get some help. The method of exchanging
certificates is a vulnerability, but you need
to start trust someone/something to get
going and it doesn't seem like this vulnerability
is that profound to a knowledgeable user.
Sorry about the earlier empty post.
Whose hands are the future in? What kids will
run the world? Well, to succeed you need
both analytical skills and social skills.
Katz' article over-emphasizes the importance analytical
skills, which can be developed to some extent
by games. The response over-emphasizes the
importance of social skills.
Both views have a point, and of course
both simplify the question of success. The point is that there are lots
of things that are important to success.
Analytical skills can be honed by some games,
and socialization skills can be honed by
spending time away from the console.
Katz' article makes the point that
there are some good analytical attitudes
developed by game playing (which goes for
board games as well as vids, to a certain
extent) and the idea that you should think
about behavior in a way that optimizes
something (points, dollars, happiness) is
a good attitude to develop.
It is not the extreme gamers who will succeed
necessarily, and is not that people who
totally avoid games will succeed necessarily.
As usual, the optimum is somewhere in the middle...
The article makes a number of excellent points.
It is hard to answer the question: How much
more would I be willing to pay to get something
that actually is very likely to work correctly
the first time? How much more am I willing to
pay for something that will last? This is cost is of course
going to vary significantly from person to person,
but in general I think that people tend to
underestimate the value of things working
Right the First Time and Actually Lasting. Saving $50 by getting
a cheaper brand of hard drive is great, but
if one out of 20 hard drives that you get
has a defect that takes more than an hour
to diagnose and fix, then you have to
factor in the cost of sorting out the problem
and it may longer be not such a bargain.
That being said, the guide for manufacturers
of products is the marketplace and what everyone
else is doing. Why risk being late to market
by actually doing a thorough job when you know
that your competitors are not going to worry
about high quality? Who wants to be the better
product that didn't catch on? These are issues
for all manufacturers, not just software, of course. And there have been too many instances
of better-engineered, higher-quality products
that did not suceed in the market for companies
to err on the side of caution. I don't think
you have to look hard to find very popular,
very sucessful, inferior products in the computer world...
The article is overly critical and I believe
takes some remarks by Guy Kawasaki out-of-context.
He often speaks in kind of ``commencement speech"
mode (and does in fact give commencement speeches)
so I suspect his comments about just getting
something out the door were meant to encourage the creative
spirit, rather than be a guideline for how
much to focus on quality in the software
industry. You can't blame him when he says ``Do not believe that the first version has to be perfect. If the software industry were honest, they would tell you the algorithm is: ship, then test."
That does summarize the attitude of the software
industry, but they are not doing it because
Guy Kawasaki told them to do it, but instead
because that is what is economically most sensible.
LaTeX is a wonderful way of expressing mathematical notions and is the defacto
standard amoung mathematicians. Once you
know TeX, using something else is a real
downer, from the elegance, portability and
functionality standpoints.
Unfortunately for the more mathematical amoung
us, LaTeX will never/has not caught on as
a competitor to HTML, largely because so
little of the web needs precise mathematical notation.
A few years ago, in the Notices of the American
Mathematical Society, an article appeared
about the promise of MathML. All the research
mathematicians I know had the same reaction to
the article, which was: "It took 40 lines of
code to express x^2+4x=0? Is this some kind of
joke?" (see the
article in PDF, which was rosy
about MathML and seemed to think that 40 lines
of code was reasonable for that...) Mozilla
supports MathML but MathML has not caught
on with mathematicians and will not budge
anyone away from TeX. People post their
preprints in TeX, journals and conferences
want articles in TeX, and it is the most
reasonable way of exchanging mathematical
papers.
It would be nice if TeX were more widely used,
but its role is different than HTML.
TeX is optimized for typesetting documents
that have significant mathematical structure
and though it can take a while to render something
complicated in TeX, the page layout will
be gorgeous. HTML or its replacements need
to be quickly rendered by the browser and
only very rarely have the need to use
mathematical expressions.
My baby brother works in Denmark and though they
are desparate for web-related jobs there, he does
have some benevolent wisdom to share. Notably:
Getting paid in Euros currently is a bummer.
Taxes and the cost of living are very high, so be
careful about estimating what your effective
income will be, and the uncertainty of the
currency makes it harder to compare.
Smaller companies often have signficantly
less experience hiring US workers and there is
enough paperwork that it can get complicated.
A safer bet, particularly for a first position
in the EU, is to work for a big company with
good experience sorting out the visas for you.
It is complicated and painful enough so that you
will want someone's help.
Another strategy is to work for a US
company with offices in Europe before committing
to a more permanent move.
There are many places where the working
language is English, which is a plus or a minus
depending on what you are looking for.
Vacation policies are generally much
more generous there than here. He gets six
weeks so we actually see him at
least as much now as when he was doing web
page design here in the US.
All your friends will come and visit you
and crash with you, which is a plus or a minus
depending...
He has thought about coming back to the US several
times but each time they keep giving him a raise
there, so that is a good sign for people who are
thinking about heading that way...
One key variable for the LinuxPPC v. MacOS X
decision is of course the applications, and one promising
thing about OS X is that the number of
apps (some perhaps running only under the Classic environment)
will suddenly be huge compared to
the LinuxPPC side. With
the MacOnLinux project it is currently possible to
run Mac OS under LinuxPPC, but that project
is ongoing and doesn't have
strong hardware support. Then again,
OS X doesn't have strong hardware support
yet either, especially if you want to do
something exotic like print... And Apple
has significantly more resources than MOL...
LinuxPPC has the excellent implementation
of
Applixware
and hopefully that will continue to happen,
though of course there is some doubt with
the recent decision by Applix to focus on server-side instead of
the desktop app market. Supposedly StarOffice
will be available for LinuxPPC but I don't
think that has happened yet.
reasonable science-type orgs as charities
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 1
A few things to consider are some
science-type organizations, for example
the International Dark Sky Association
(ISDA site)
working to promote sensible policies about
lighting to keep stars reasonably visible in
urban and suburban areas by fighting light
pollution, and there are other astronomical-type
orgs that work to promote awareness, get kids
interested, and so on.
Another good organization to consider might be
the Committee for the Scientific Investigation
of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP page)
They have their work cut out trying to debunk
lots of fraudulent claims.
There are also science advocacy organizations,
for example those listed at
this page, who often have their work cut out for them promoting sensible research
against the uncompromising efforts of PETA and so on.
There are also
organizations like
Zero Population Growth,
ZPG site
who try to do what they can to address what
is clearly behind many current and impending
problems, the lack of thought that goes into
reproductive decisions worldwide.
Libraries of course are historically important
for science literacy and depend on contributions.
There hasn't been a local library that I know of
that hasn't been very happy to get a subscription
to Sky and Telescope, for example.
These aren't charities in the traditional sense,
but they are underfunded groups working for
causes that may be important to geeks.
exponential growth and limited resources
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
Continued exponential growth can only take
place with unlimited resources. In the
case of information, it does take resources
(not a great deal) to create and distribute.
Presumably, the cost of producing and
distributing resources will select out the
information that is actually productive
and valuable. Furthermore, there is already
a growing industry of "information selection"
where there is a pay-service which weeds out
the decent information from the useless.
There is a great deal of useless or poorly-
presented information out there, and there is
more every day, but exponetial growth cannot
take place indefinitely and we are likely to
see good providers of information flourish and
poor providers of information get ignored and
eventually wither from lack of resources.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that is important about the man-in-the-middle attack is that usually the only time there is the request for the certificate is the first time you connect to the machine. The interloping machine has no means of knowing, in general, whether or not you already have a valid certificate, so when you go to connect and get the "is this certificate ok" message, if it is not the first time you are connecting to that machine you will know something is up and can try to figure out what is going on or get some help. The method of exchanging certificates is a vulnerability, but you need to start trust someone/something to get going and it doesn't seem like this vulnerability is that profound to a knowledgeable user. Sorry about the earlier empty post.
Both views have a point, and of course both simplify the question of success. The point is that there are lots of things that are important to success. Analytical skills can be honed by some games, and socialization skills can be honed by spending time away from the console. Katz' article makes the point that there are some good analytical attitudes developed by game playing (which goes for board games as well as vids, to a certain extent) and the idea that you should think about behavior in a way that optimizes something (points, dollars, happiness) is a good attitude to develop. It is not the extreme gamers who will succeed necessarily, and is not that people who totally avoid games will succeed necessarily. As usual, the optimum is somewhere in the middle...
Notice the bolt mounts on the bottom for fixed installation and it is pretty clear that this is not a mouse in the usual sense...
The article makes a number of excellent points. It is hard to answer the question: How much more would I be willing to pay to get something that actually is very likely to work correctly the first time? How much more am I willing to pay for something that will last? This is cost is of course going to vary significantly from person to person, but in general I think that people tend to underestimate the value of things working Right the First Time and Actually Lasting. Saving $50 by getting a cheaper brand of hard drive is great, but if one out of 20 hard drives that you get has a defect that takes more than an hour to diagnose and fix, then you have to factor in the cost of sorting out the problem and it may longer be not such a bargain.
That being said, the guide for manufacturers of products is the marketplace and what everyone else is doing. Why risk being late to market by actually doing a thorough job when you know that your competitors are not going to worry about high quality? Who wants to be the better product that didn't catch on? These are issues for all manufacturers, not just software, of course. And there have been too many instances of better-engineered, higher-quality products that did not suceed in the market for companies to err on the side of caution. I don't think you have to look hard to find very popular, very sucessful, inferior products in the computer world...
The article is overly critical and I believe takes some remarks by Guy Kawasaki out-of-context. He often speaks in kind of ``commencement speech" mode (and does in fact give commencement speeches) so I suspect his comments about just getting something out the door were meant to encourage the creative spirit, rather than be a guideline for how much to focus on quality in the software industry. You can't blame him when he says ``Do not believe that the first version has to be perfect. If the software industry were honest, they would tell you the algorithm is: ship, then test." That does summarize the attitude of the software industry, but they are not doing it because Guy Kawasaki told them to do it, but instead because that is what is economically most sensible.
LaTeX is a wonderful way of expressing mathematical notions and is the defacto standard amoung mathematicians. Once you know TeX, using something else is a real downer, from the elegance, portability and functionality standpoints.
Unfortunately for the more mathematical amoung us, LaTeX will never/has not caught on as a competitor to HTML, largely because so little of the web needs precise mathematical notation.
A few years ago, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, an article appeared about the promise of MathML. All the research mathematicians I know had the same reaction to the article, which was: "It took 40 lines of code to express x^2+4x=0? Is this some kind of joke?" (see the article in PDF, which was rosy about MathML and seemed to think that 40 lines of code was reasonable for that...) Mozilla supports MathML but MathML has not caught on with mathematicians and will not budge anyone away from TeX. People post their preprints in TeX, journals and conferences want articles in TeX, and it is the most reasonable way of exchanging mathematical papers.
It would be nice if TeX were more widely used, but its role is different than HTML. TeX is optimized for typesetting documents that have significant mathematical structure and though it can take a while to render something complicated in TeX, the page layout will be gorgeous. HTML or its replacements need to be quickly rendered by the browser and only very rarely have the need to use mathematical expressions.
- Getting paid in Euros currently is a bummer.
Taxes and the cost of living are very high, so be
careful about estimating what your effective
income will be, and the uncertainty of the
currency makes it harder to compare.
- Smaller companies often have signficantly
less experience hiring US workers and there is
enough paperwork that it can get complicated.
A safer bet, particularly for a first position
in the EU, is to work for a big company with
good experience sorting out the visas for you.
It is complicated and painful enough so that you
will want someone's help.
- Another strategy is to work for a US
company with offices in Europe before committing
to a more permanent move.
- There are many places where the working
language is English, which is a plus or a minus
depending on what you are looking for.
- Vacation policies are generally much
more generous there than here. He gets six
weeks so we actually see him at
least as much now as when he was doing web
page design here in the US.
- All your friends will come and visit you
and crash with you, which is a plus or a minus
depending...
He has thought about coming back to the US several times but each time they keep giving him a raise there, so that is a good sign for people who are thinking about heading that way...LinuxPPC has the excellent implementation of Applixware and hopefully that will continue to happen, though of course there is some doubt with the recent decision by Applix to focus on server-side instead of the desktop app market. Supposedly StarOffice will be available for LinuxPPC but I don't think that has happened yet.
There was a reasonable comparison between Mac on Linux under LinuxPPC and the Classic environment under OS X which basically said that OS X does a better job intergrating the earlier OS's (just in a window) but they both are very reasonable.
Another good organization to consider might be the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP page) They have their work cut out trying to debunk lots of fraudulent claims.
There are also science advocacy organizations, for example those listed at this page, who often have their work cut out for them promoting sensible research against the uncompromising efforts of PETA and so on.
There are also organizations like Zero Population Growth, ZPG site who try to do what they can to address what is clearly behind many current and impending problems, the lack of thought that goes into reproductive decisions worldwide.
Libraries of course are historically important for science literacy and depend on contributions. There hasn't been a local library that I know of that hasn't been very happy to get a subscription to Sky and Telescope, for example.
These aren't charities in the traditional sense, but they are underfunded groups working for causes that may be important to geeks.
Continued exponential growth can only take place with unlimited resources. In the case of information, it does take resources (not a great deal) to create and distribute. Presumably, the cost of producing and distributing resources will select out the information that is actually productive and valuable. Furthermore, there is already a growing industry of "information selection" where there is a pay-service which weeds out the decent information from the useless. There is a great deal of useless or poorly- presented information out there, and there is more every day, but exponetial growth cannot take place indefinitely and we are likely to see good providers of information flourish and poor providers of information get ignored and eventually wither from lack of resources.