Let me guess--they ran brand new credit checks on all 200000 workers and verified with each employee that no new credit accounts had appeared? And this didn't get leaked to the press? That isn't remotely believable. These people can't even do spin control well.
Oh good, another California State Government technology fiasco. Is this some kind of cosmic balance thing? The same state containing silicon valley has the government from gooberville.
Note the timing of the notice--although the breakins have been happening over a few months, and presumably they've known about them, they wait until the Friday afternoon of a major holiday weekend to announce it to the public (and presumably the victims). Somebody's trying to save his sorry ass.
The net impact of requiring monthly password changes is the majority of the user-base will work the month/year into their password. This means that your typical password will be bobmay02, or at best bob8mylf5, where 5 is the month. Making people change the password frequently causes them to split the password into the root, and either a time identifier or a monotonically increasing integer. Thus, your 8-char passwords are now really 3-7 char passwords.
Has anyone written a cracking program to take advantage of this? Instead of having to decode the entire password, you merely look for transformations that result in the beginning or end of the password translating to a string resulting in a mnemonic for the current month/year.
Software licensing is really complicated. The typical bureacrat is just not up to it. If State Governments paid what Industry pays for IT executives, especially in California, there might be some chance that this kind of thing could be brought under control.
Bullshit. This bit of graft has nothing to do with complexity, and everything to do with politics as usual--you fund my re-election, I steer sure-money government contracts your way. The only thing different here is that the department commiting the graft (Department of Information Technology) was in the spotlight, because it is a new department created to try to minimize the technology fiascos that have occurred in the 80s and 90s in CA goverment. ($200 million for Tandem Cyclones that weren't relevant to the DMV's needs, the child support payment tracking system that worked so badly they lost federal funding)
The idjits in DOIT and at Oracle got too greedy in a visible area, and they got caught. If the contract were "complex", then the graft wouldn't be so obvious.
The biggest drawback of STL is finding something to do with all the extra time you'll have. Just think--you won't spend days debugging somebody's insanely API'ed String implementation he developed when wired to the gills on Jolt.
You won't spend discouraged hours in meetings while ego-driven idiots argue over whose pet collection class hierarchy better suits the hypothetical abstractions of the project. You won't waste precious energy trying to reverse-engineer someone else's pattern building-blocks because now you immediately recognize STL method signatures.
STL reduces job security for programmers who rely on obscure implementation. Some may see that as a drawback. IMHO, good code is maintainable code, and STL usage in any project is a quantum jump towards maintainability. Remember, the "maintainer" will probably be yourself revisiting the code six weeks after that all-nighter.
It looks like CoreWars have graduated to the PC! Now we can have distributed spyware aps/killers duking it out on millions of PCs across the land! But how will we keep score?
It's not about piracy--its about destroying fair use and moving America to a pay-per-use business model. The whole piracy thing is arrant bullshit--content will still be created regardless of copying. After all, it's done pretty damned well even after 30 years of rampant analog copying.
The whole scare over "digital copying" is a red herring--what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to do is use this new-fangled technology thing to get rid of this profit-limiting concept of "buy once, play (or read) many times."
Get that message out there folks--its not about piracy, its about pay-per-view everywhere.
Given human nature, most management hierarchies are rather disfunctional, at least from a CS point of view (war story insert, I'm now trying to convince various PHBs that reinstalling jrun won't have a positive impact on a servlet that stalls for up to 5 minutes at a time due to a race condition. ((no, this ain't my code)) Oh, and I'm rather tired of telling VPs what that "bash" thingie is. It seems to set them off)
So, wouldn't you love to have a cookbook reference for how to head off the more common management stupidities?
A book on how to configure management would be useful. By "configure management", I mean:
-describe typical management structures
-explore how decisions are made
-attempt to aggregate and parametrize hierarchical processes, such that one can start referring to them by their "Pattern"-name shorthand.
-discuss what the managed can and cannot do to influence these decision-making structures.
You just know this position (The old guard of content owners is stifling innovation/solution is compulsory licensing of content) is gonna offend some of W Bush's owners. Michael Brown will be forced to retract ("clarify") his statements, just like Gale Norton did when she espoused a compromise position that would have required some cleanup by western mining companies.
Good point, and one I hadn't realized. But it shouldn't be that hard to set up rules that accumulate the java filenames needing rebuilding, and then run the list through a single javac instance, at least on a per-directory basis.
Except for the fact that make is inherently
evil. If you meant ant for Java related
development, then I'd mostly agree with you.
Getting off-topic here, but what's so evil about gnu-make w/ java? I've been using it for a couple years with java, including EJB-based projects. Ant kind of looks like a solution in search of a problem.
The most transparent (as in instantly responsive, and requiring no mental effort expended on performing rote tasks) IDE is two text editor (I favor emacs, but that's another rant) windows side by side on a 21 inch monitor, and half-a dozen xterms with shell prompts. Set up your repeated commands each in a shell, such that a trivial two-keystroke command will execute them. Important: set your mouse focus to be location based, not requiring a click to activate a window.
Thus, the only time your hands need to leave the keyboard is to make a vague mouse "gesture", moving to a general area of the screen to place the cursor in an xterm. None of this hunting through pulldown menus for the cryptic command that does desired variation of "Make (force | clean | all | libraries | autogen)".
A side benefit is that you're using gnu-make to do your builds (unless you're an idiot), so there's no bullshit build dependencies on somebody's favorite IDE.
First, you can get a great detail of information at http://www.realrates.com . Nolo press http://www.nolo.com also has some good advice (and books) on the subject.
In my experience, 1099 (Independent Contractor) is the best option, and the 14% cut they're taking is reasonable. I've heard as low as 10% for 1099, but 14% is decent.
From first-hand experience (in California), avoid setting up a corporation unless you can realize some ancillary benefits such as purchasing health benefits or equipment with pre-tax dollars. The downside of a corp is that maintaining your corp is a royal PITA--assume you will spend 4-8 hours monthly just making certain you stay compliant with stupid little rules. Or you can pay an accountant/lawyer to do that for you ($200-500/month).
W2 sucks for several reasons: you can't deduct anything from taxes, you're depending on your body shop to collect for you (and you have little legal recourse if they don't), your only retirement savings options are whatever the body shop offers (at best a 401K with crappy mutual funds), and a 38% cut is way too high.
1099 allows a minimum of hassle, decent deductions, and up to $13500/year into a SEP-IRA. If you really want it, you can still purchase liability insurance as a 1099 contractor, though I've often heard of liability insurance (whether for a 1099 or small Corp) as "sue-me bait". Basically, if you don't have over $100,000 in assets or policies, you're not worth sueing.
Agreed. And there are some successful non-Microsoft apps on windows. They do tend to get borg'ed, however.
Its just a harder road to take--you need a business concept that will support the higher implementation costs, while knowing that you must ship before Microsoft does or decides to make a vaporware announcement. Thus, so many corners are cut the typical project looks round.
Its not a level playing field. Blaming Microsoft competitors for releasing crappy software on windows ignores the significantly higher development costs incurred by orgs that don't have access to the real APIs, don't have advance knowledge of OS changes, don't have the ability to specify OS or API tweaks that will benefit their designs. Oh, and Microsoft app developers have a relatively lower risk that Microsoft will change the OS deliberately to break their app ("DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run").
Think about it--can you name a non-microsoft app using OLE that actually works well? They can't *all* be fragile pieces of shit due to implementation incompetence.
Um, that *is* capitalism. Big winners in capitalism have always depended on external factors such as royal charters, exclusive government contracts, legal restrictions, monopolies (technology or geography-based), knee-breaking thugs, and so on.
I'm not sure there's every been an era of "pure" capitalism, which actually makes me hopeful that by historical standards, the current attempts to create competitive advantage by outlawing actions and ideas anathema to the established corps isn't so bad. Right.
The cable companies are just looking for a juicier revenue model. Instead of just charging for a throttled piple of bandwidth, they want to add a fixed monthly cost per device behind the cable modem. And good luck convincing them that your house-guest's laptop is no longer hooked up.
What's next? An IR sensor on the settop box that counts the number of people in the living room and adjusts your bill accordingly ("Billy! Get Rover out of the living room before the cable company charges us!")
But somehow, it became a story that we were looking for special new powers to hack into personal computers.
This could be taken to mean: we're satisfied that we've retained our prior legal right to hack into personal computers. Nowhere in that response do they disavow hacking end-users' PCs. They just say they never lobbied congress for that right. They do go on and on about "technical measures". Isn't a virus a technical measure?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess--they ran brand new credit checks on all 200000 workers and verified with each employee that no new credit accounts had appeared? And this didn't get leaked to the press? That isn't remotely believable. These people can't even do spin control well.
Oh good, another California State Government technology fiasco. Is this some kind of cosmic balance thing? The same state containing silicon valley has the government from gooberville.
Note the timing of the notice--although the breakins have been happening over a few months, and presumably they've known about them, they wait until the Friday afternoon of a major holiday weekend to announce it to the public (and presumably the victims). Somebody's trying to save his sorry ass.
The net impact of requiring monthly password changes is the majority of the user-base will work the month/year into their password. This means that your typical password will be bobmay02, or at best bob8mylf5, where 5 is the month. Making people change the password frequently causes them to split the password into the root, and either a time identifier or a monotonically increasing integer. Thus, your 8-char passwords are now really 3-7 char passwords.
Has anyone written a cracking program to take advantage of this? Instead of having to decode the entire password, you merely look for transformations that result in the beginning or end of the password translating to a string resulting in a mnemonic for the current month/year.
Software licensing is really complicated. The typical bureacrat is just not up to it. If State Governments paid what Industry pays for IT executives, especially in California, there might be some chance that this kind of thing could be brought under control.
Bullshit. This bit of graft has nothing to do with complexity, and everything to do with politics as usual--you fund my re-election, I steer sure-money government contracts your way. The only thing different here is that the department commiting the graft (Department of Information Technology) was in the spotlight, because it is a new department created to try to minimize the technology fiascos that have occurred in the 80s and 90s in CA goverment. ($200 million for Tandem Cyclones that weren't relevant to the DMV's needs, the child support payment tracking system that worked so badly they lost federal funding)
The idjits in DOIT and at Oracle got too greedy in a visible area, and they got caught. If the contract were "complex", then the graft wouldn't be so obvious.
The biggest drawback of STL is finding something to do with all the extra time you'll have. Just think--you won't spend days debugging somebody's insanely API'ed String implementation he developed when wired to the gills on Jolt.
You won't spend discouraged hours in meetings while ego-driven idiots argue over whose pet collection class hierarchy better suits the hypothetical abstractions of the project. You won't waste precious energy trying to reverse-engineer someone else's pattern building-blocks because now you immediately recognize STL method signatures.
STL reduces job security for programmers who rely on obscure implementation. Some may see that as a drawback. IMHO, good code is maintainable code, and STL usage in any project is a quantum jump towards maintainability. Remember, the "maintainer" will probably be yourself revisiting the code six weeks after that all-nighter.
It looks like CoreWars have graduated to the PC! Now we can have distributed spyware aps/killers duking it out on millions of PCs across the land! But how will we keep score?
It's not about piracy--its about destroying fair use and moving America to a pay-per-use business model. The whole piracy thing is arrant bullshit--content will still be created regardless of copying. After all, it's done pretty damned well even after 30 years of rampant analog copying.
The whole scare over "digital copying" is a red herring--what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to do is use this new-fangled technology thing to get rid of this profit-limiting concept of "buy once, play (or read) many times."
Get that message out there folks--its not about piracy, its about pay-per-view everywhere.
Um, yah.
Given human nature, most management hierarchies are rather disfunctional, at least from a CS point of view (war story insert, I'm now trying to convince various PHBs that reinstalling jrun won't have a positive impact on a servlet that stalls for up to 5 minutes at a time due to a race condition. ((no, this ain't my code)) Oh, and I'm rather tired of telling VPs what that "bash" thingie is. It seems to set them off)
So, wouldn't you love to have a cookbook reference for how to head off the more common management stupidities?
"Practical Java" by Peter Haggar does some of this. I find it almost as useful as the second Scott Meyer "Effective C++" book.
For the general problem, hacking, solution case, "Programming Pearls" (Richard Bennett?) is good.
A book on how to configure management would be useful. By "configure management", I mean:
-describe typical management structures
-explore how decisions are made
-attempt to aggregate and parametrize hierarchical processes, such that one can start referring to them by their "Pattern"-name shorthand.
-discuss what the managed can and cannot do to influence these decision-making structures.
You just know this position (The old guard of content owners is stifling innovation/solution is compulsory licensing of content) is gonna offend some of W Bush's owners. Michael Brown will be forced to retract ("clarify") his statements, just like Gale Norton did when she espoused a compromise position that would have required some cleanup by western mining companies.
Mod this up--speakeasy rocks. I just hope they're profitable (I notice they repriced their IDSL from $59/month to $89).
Good point, and one I hadn't realized. But it shouldn't be that hard to set up rules that accumulate the java filenames needing rebuilding, and then run the list through a single javac instance, at least on a per-directory basis.
I'll try that today...
Except for the fact that make is inherently evil. If you meant ant for Java related development, then I'd mostly agree with you.
Getting off-topic here, but what's so evil about gnu-make w/ java? I've been using it for a couple years with java, including EJB-based projects. Ant kind of looks like a solution in search of a problem.
The most transparent (as in instantly responsive, and requiring no mental effort expended on performing rote tasks) IDE is two text editor (I favor emacs, but that's another rant) windows side by side on a 21 inch monitor, and half-a dozen xterms with shell prompts. Set up your repeated commands each in a shell, such that a trivial two-keystroke command will execute them. Important: set your mouse focus to be location based, not requiring a click to activate a window.
Thus, the only time your hands need to leave the keyboard is to make a vague mouse "gesture", moving to a general area of the screen to place the cursor in an xterm. None of this hunting through pulldown menus for the cryptic command that does desired variation of "Make (force | clean | all | libraries | autogen)".
A side benefit is that you're using gnu-make to do your builds (unless you're an idiot), so there's no bullshit build dependencies on somebody's favorite IDE.
The story was "Green Marauder" from Playgrounds of the Mind.
Most likely it one of the tales from Draco's Tavern, by Larry Niven. Conversation was with a Chirpsithtra, perhaps?
First, you can get a great detail of information at http://www.realrates.com . Nolo press http://www.nolo.com also has some good advice (and books) on the subject.
In my experience, 1099 (Independent Contractor) is the best option, and the 14% cut they're taking is reasonable. I've heard as low as 10% for 1099, but 14% is decent.
From first-hand experience (in California), avoid setting up a corporation unless you can realize some ancillary benefits such as purchasing health benefits or equipment with pre-tax dollars. The downside of a corp is that maintaining your corp is a royal PITA--assume you will spend 4-8 hours monthly just making certain you stay compliant with stupid little rules. Or you can pay an accountant/lawyer to do that for you ($200-500/month).
W2 sucks for several reasons: you can't deduct anything from taxes, you're depending on your body shop to collect for you (and you have little legal recourse if they don't), your only retirement savings options are whatever the body shop offers (at best a 401K with crappy mutual funds), and a 38% cut is way too high.
1099 allows a minimum of hassle, decent deductions, and up to $13500/year into a SEP-IRA. If you really want it, you can still purchase liability insurance as a 1099 contractor, though I've often heard of liability insurance (whether for a 1099 or small Corp) as "sue-me bait". Basically, if you don't have over $100,000 in assets or policies, you're not worth sueing.
Hope this helps
Now can they turn silicon into unobtanium?
Agreed. And there are some successful non-Microsoft apps on windows. They do tend to get borg'ed, however.
Its just a harder road to take--you need a business concept that will support the higher implementation costs, while knowing that you must ship before Microsoft does or decides to make a vaporware announcement. Thus, so many corners are cut the typical project looks round.
Its not a level playing field. Blaming Microsoft competitors for releasing crappy software on windows ignores the significantly higher development costs incurred by orgs that don't have access to the real APIs, don't have advance knowledge of OS changes, don't have the ability to specify OS or API tweaks that will benefit their designs. Oh, and Microsoft app developers have a relatively lower risk that Microsoft will change the OS deliberately to break their app ("DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run").
Think about it--can you name a non-microsoft app using OLE that actually works well? They can't *all* be fragile pieces of shit due to implementation incompetence.
Um, that *is* capitalism. Big winners in capitalism have always depended on external factors such as royal charters, exclusive government contracts, legal restrictions, monopolies (technology or geography-based), knee-breaking thugs, and so on.
I'm not sure there's every been an era of "pure" capitalism, which actually makes me hopeful that by historical standards, the current attempts to create competitive advantage by outlawing actions and ideas anathema to the established corps isn't so bad. Right.
Speakeasy seems to get it.
The cable companies are just looking for a juicier revenue model. Instead of just charging for a throttled piple of bandwidth, they want to add a fixed monthly cost per device behind the cable modem. And good luck convincing them that your house-guest's laptop is no longer hooked up.
What's next? An IR sensor on the settop box that counts the number of people in the living room and adjusts your bill accordingly ("Billy! Get Rover out of the living room before the cable company charges us!")
But somehow, it became a story that we were looking for special new powers to hack into personal computers.
This could be taken to mean: we're satisfied that we've retained our prior legal right to hack into personal computers. Nowhere in that response do they disavow hacking end-users' PCs. They just say they never lobbied congress for that right. They do go on and on about "technical measures". Isn't a virus a technical measure?