Exactly so. Citrix NetScalers have the same issue. Those people claiming this is due to incompetent, stupid or lazy coders or admins have merely never seen the business end of a website big enough to need hardware load balancers with SSL offload.
I do a lot of recruiting/interviewing for my company, and the list of qualifications on the job ad are not absolutes. In fact, they're often put together by someone with no tech background from the resumes of other successful applicants. So you might be seeing the union of the resumes of the last five guys we hired. Apply anyway. We'll look at your resume. Frankly, I'll skim right past the list of acronyms and crap (unless it says J2EE plus nine other related acronyms, then you go in the trash) and see what projects you've worked on. Work, open source, just tinkering, they all count.
There are two audiences for your resume: the search engine and/or recruiter who gets you to me, and me. The former care about lists of languages and acronyms. I care about what you can do for me, and I'll assume you can learn whatever language our project is in this week.
Knowing this and ensuring there's something on there for both audiences is just part of the game. Though, the long list does do a good job of filtering out whiners or people without the ambition to even bother submitting a resume.
The article doesn't mention selection bias, which almost certainly colored these results. It seems likely to me that externalities other than programming skill biased the entrant pool.
In the US, the best programmers I know have jobs in programming that earn them quite a lot of money. When they go home at night, they may not want to write more code. If they do, they may choose to contribute to open-source projects or their own startup ideas. They're certainly not lining up to enter some silly NSA contest.
If you offered me $1000 to spend my weekend coding some contest, I'd decline. I make enough money programming the other 5 days of the week that I'd rather have my weekend to myself. Or, if I needed some cash, I could make more with those days doing a one-off consulting project.
For a programmer in India or China, that money is worth a lot more (relative to cost of living), and they're not getting paid nearly as much for their full-time job. So, I'd argue that programming contests like this (and TopCoder) have a stronger attraction for non-American programmers and, in order for the results of this to be at all interesting, that variable needs to be controlled for.
Yes, yes, everyone complains about 'teh evil' DRM. I'm sure the studios give Amazon the content with no restrictions at all and it's up to Amazon to decide what happens after that. Right. Sure. The prices must be the same way. Amazon gets it all for free and are just greedy bastards ripping you off like that.
The content owners who set the rules have little relationship with the guys who are providing access to the content. You got a complaint? Buy stock in the content holders and bring it to the shareholders meeting.
There's a reason Apple only has content deals with one studio (I leave it to the general paranoia of this thread to speculate on Jobs' relationship with Disney). It's probably like pulling teeth to get the studios to unclench their sphincters from around those digital copies even in DRM encumbered form.
Not only does sudo log what commands are executed, it tells you who executed them. This is useful even in day-to-day use when you do something silly. But in corporate environments, this is a necessity. If your company falls under the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, you are legally obliged to have this audit information.
I know it's convenient to log in as root, but convenience mixed with privilege mixed with production systems is going to lead to unhappiness in the long run. Suck it up and disable root logins (and configure sudo to prevent your lazy users from running shells).
Pfft. Set your display resolution to 640x480, like the NTSC television your PS2 is hooked up to, and you're on a level playing field.
The PC requirements are higher because most people are playing at a minimum of 1024x768 pixels, which means more memory, more bandwidth, and more GPU processing.
Yes. It's been legal in Canada since 1997 to make copies of digital recordings for "personal use" - that is, no redistribution allowed. See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml#copy_for_friend s for a full rulldown.
Yes. It's been legal in Canada since 1997 to make copies of digital recordings for "personal use" - that is, no redistribution allowed. See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml#copy_for_friend s for a full rulldown.
You might have no problem with this, but I sure do. I go through a lot of CD-Rs, but very few of them ever get music recorded onto them. Yet I'm paying this levy for every blank. There are a lot of uses of electronic storage that don't involve copying music.
Oh, I dunno, fudgefactor. I thought it was kind of cute the way they counterspun this.
Mathematically, of course, if one half the problems are not my fault, that leaves the other half firmly in my court. This is obvious.
The fact that Microsoft is saying "half the problems aren't even ours" like it's a good thing begs for comment. From a literary (journalistic?) perspective, the ironic and entirely correct juxtaposition of the two ideas is an excellent way to do this. The fact that the article mentions the true quote immediately below the headline makes this clear, and prevents the headline from detracting from the facts of the story.
There is unmistakeable editorial bias on Slashdot, and most of us like it that way (considering the unbiased, objective reporting that we get from the real media). However, this is not an instance of that; You would be better served to save your vitriol for more important things, or at least for more egrarious examples of editorial bias.
There have been some useful answers as to why you can't get stuff shipped to Hungary: credit card fraud, excessive credit card handling fees, possible need for export/import documents...
Fine, but I live in Canada. None of these apply. Our credit cards have very similar fraud rates, and there are no extra fees for merchants charging a Canadian card. Heck, I can even get a US Dollar card drawn from Citibank if ya like.
Even those merchants who don't flatly refuse to sell to me make it prohibitively expensive by making their lowest tier international service "DHL 1-hour delivery - $529.99." Thanks guys, but you can just throw that in a box and send it parcel post. I'll pay the duty when the mail carrier comes to my house. I've had this argument with ThinkGeek a few times, and they cannot even comprehend the basic concept of mailing something to a non-US address.
For me, at least, this is maddeningly frustrating. It should be entirely transparent to the merchant to send stuff to me in Canada. The credit card gets charged in USD, and it bills me with the current rate. Merchants don't need to fill out any forms; Canada Post (or UPS, or FedEx) does that for me when I get the package. Same as above with duty and taxes.
Considering that this process is transparent to the merchant, those who say "Only ship to USA" or those who only offer expensive shipping to Canada are making a very clear statement about their priorities. I don't know what that statement is, considering that I'm trying very hard to give them my money, but there's a statement in there for sure.
> But most of business IT cost is labor of construction. Microsoft understands this, and their > marketing materials address that. I don't see the Linux vendors understanding this point, and you > certainly don't seem to recognize it in your post.
Fair enough. I figured I could discount large corporate entities with all that hand-waving in my first paragraph. I don't know anything about large companies.
If you'll recall, I said 'in my experience' which I later qualified as being primarily with small research groups and companies. The fact that your experience is different shouldn't dismay you as much as it does: The two markets are different.
I realize that Microsoft is doing a pretty good job of meeting the needs of large companies. I was merely pointing out that unlike OS/2, Linux is finding a home in places which Gates' comments don't seem to address.
Your final points about labor cost are correct (rather, they seem reasonable to me, but we've established that this is not my area of expertise). However, if we have a hypothetical SmallGuy Inc. who provides web services similar to those of MegaCorp on a tighter budget, I imagine MegaCorp will be curious. Perhaps, after investigating, they will determine that the little guy's edge is not the software at all. Perhaps it's an organizational issue, or perhaps it's simply the synergy of a few smart, dedicated people with lots to lose.
Anyhow, I think your points are excellent, but I don't think they are inconsistent with my own. There are two markets here.
Bill's assertion that Linux and OS/2 pose the same sort of threat are flawed because of this.
(From the article) > For any project, if you look at communications > costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that, > software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd > ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project.
Wow. Not my experience, to say the least.
To me, this is indicative of exactly where Linux does and will continue to shine. The above statement is probably true for Chase Manhattan, and I doubt we'll see Chase switching to Linux anytime soon (although I don't doubt that their big iron is still a commercial UNIX).
Most of the people I deal with, though, are either small research groups or small businesses: Five guys with three computers and a world to conquer. This is where Linux is already excelling, and I think this is where it will excel for the immediate future.
That is why Gates is wrong. OS/2 had some advantages over Windows (such as the 'IBM army' as he puts it), but it was competing with Windows for the same goal. Where I see Linux being really successful is in places where the Microsoft Barrier-to-Entry(tm) is just too high. Unlike OS/2, Linux isn't going to be driven from these places. Linux is not going away, although it may not be going to the foreground, either.
And as more and more small businesses and contractors and researchers use Linux to do cool and interesting things on the cheap, bigger businesses will start to notice.
You've got things all twisted around, but I don't blame you. Many people have this perception. Mom's not the one being tested, the OS is. The computer should be meeting the user's needs. If it does not, the failing is the result of the software. (All right, there are some users who will consistently be disappointed, at least for the forseeable future.)
When people are unable to perform tasks in Windows the perceived fault is with them, and when people are unable to perform tasks with alternative software, the fault is with the software. This perception is one more thing that needs to change before Microsoft's dominance will fade. Advocates of Linux or other systems need to do two things, in this order:
1) Encourage people to have higher expectations from their computer 2) Meet those expectations
Apple has been doing the second for a long time, but it's only with the new 'Switch' campaign that they're trying to address the first. We should all be cheering them on, because if they can do it, things will be better for everybody (even Microsoft users, assuming Microsoft picks up on point number 2).
I actually attend this department as an undergraduate. I've taken courses with Dr. Aycock (http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock) who is teaching the malware course, and he's one of the better lecturers I've had. He is also involved in the OpenBSD project, and may have been at that barbecue with you. I was unfortunately unable to make it, as I was out of town.
Anyhow, your assumption that there is a strong Java/Microsoft bias in the department is incorrect. While we don't 'teach' C, students are expected to know it, and there are several courses that use it extensively.
The professor you spoke to - it would probably have been Katrin Becker (http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~becker) - has her reasons for feeling the way she does, and is usually quite conversant about them. She also has very little influence in the policy decisions made by the software engineers in charge. Those people labour under the misconception that programmers can be replaced with pretty graphing tools, and are changing the program to reflect this, despite the best efforts of most of the faculty.
Your points about C are well taken, and I agree with all of them. However, your conjecture into the tone and attitude of the department are off base.
Re:I hate math...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, yes, congratulations on completing first year computer science (or math, for that matter).
Don't you think that the current denomination systems are designed specifically so that the greedy change-making algorithm will work?
The poster you were replying to seemed aware of that; They were merely saying that since the current denominational system has this property, it is easy to use. The problem with adding 32- and/or 18-cent coins is that the greedy approach may no longer make the most optimal change.
Sure, sure. But Flash RAM can only be written/erased a few thousand times. People got pissed when hard disk warranties went down to a year - how will they feel when a disk wears out in months?
Or at least, I read the story and immediately thought of applications to my own projects (I'm a Research Assistant at my University, and I'm a little tired of writing Perl scripts to batch long jobs with combinatorial arguments).
If such a tool exists, I too would be interested in it. I think it rash to assume that the poster is looking for exploit automation.
I can't answer your question in general, but I'd like to point out that Canadians HAVE purchased the right to copy music CD's with this levy.
See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml for details, if you're Canadian. It basically boils down to the fact that you can make copies of recordings for yourself, even if you don't own the original. The copy has to be for 'personal use,' so you can't give it to a friend, but you can lend that friend your CD, your computer, and a blank CD and let them go nuts.
Shaw has cracked down on anyone using more than ~5GB a month. The official company line - straight from the mouth of the dear girl who called me, is that 'there is no bandwidth limit, but if you use too much bandwidth we'll have to cut off your access'. They refuse to say how much it too much, but some people have gotten calls after what they say is only 3-4 GB/month.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly so. Citrix NetScalers have the same issue. Those people claiming this is due to incompetent, stupid or lazy coders or admins have merely never seen the business end of a website big enough to need hardware load balancers with SSL offload.
I do a lot of recruiting/interviewing for my company, and the list of qualifications on the job ad are not absolutes. In fact, they're often put together by someone with no tech background from the resumes of other successful applicants. So you might be seeing the union of the resumes of the last five guys we hired. Apply anyway. We'll look at your resume. Frankly, I'll skim right past the list of acronyms and crap (unless it says J2EE plus nine other related acronyms, then you go in the trash) and see what projects you've worked on. Work, open source, just tinkering, they all count.
There are two audiences for your resume: the search engine and/or recruiter who gets you to me, and me. The former care about lists of languages and acronyms. I care about what you can do for me, and I'll assume you can learn whatever language our project is in this week.
Knowing this and ensuring there's something on there for both audiences is just part of the game. Though, the long list does do a good job of filtering out whiners or people without the ambition to even bother submitting a resume.
The article doesn't mention selection bias, which almost certainly colored these results. It seems likely to me that externalities other than programming skill biased the entrant pool.
In the US, the best programmers I know have jobs in programming that earn them quite a lot of money. When they go home at night, they may not want to write more code. If they do, they may choose to contribute to open-source projects or their own startup ideas. They're certainly not lining up to enter some silly NSA contest.
If you offered me $1000 to spend my weekend coding some contest, I'd decline. I make enough money programming the other 5 days of the week that I'd rather have my weekend to myself. Or, if I needed some cash, I could make more with those days doing a one-off consulting project.
For a programmer in India or China, that money is worth a lot more (relative to cost of living), and they're not getting paid nearly as much for their full-time job. So, I'd argue that programming contests like this (and TopCoder) have a stronger attraction for non-American programmers and, in order for the results of this to be at all interesting, that variable needs to be controlled for.
Most of them do, in fact, have subtitles.
Yes, yes, everyone complains about 'teh evil' DRM. I'm sure the studios give Amazon the content with no restrictions at all and it's up to Amazon to decide what happens after that. Right. Sure. The prices must be the same way. Amazon gets it all for free and are just greedy bastards ripping you off like that.
The content owners who set the rules have little relationship with the guys who are providing access to the content. You got a complaint? Buy stock in the content holders and bring it to the shareholders meeting.
There's a reason Apple only has content deals with one studio (I leave it to the general paranoia of this thread to speculate on Jobs' relationship with Disney). It's probably like pulling teeth to get the studios to unclench their sphincters from around those digital copies even in DRM encumbered form.
wine.com - an Amazon partner.
Not only does sudo log what commands are executed, it tells you who executed them. This is useful even in day-to-day use when you do something silly. But in corporate environments, this is a necessity. If your company falls under the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, you are legally obliged to have this audit information.
I know it's convenient to log in as root, but convenience mixed with privilege mixed with production systems is going to lead to unhappiness in the long run. Suck it up and disable root logins (and configure sudo to prevent your lazy users from running shells).
> their account is always-on, tied to their Internet Protocol address
Ummm, no. Browser cookies are the technology you're looking for - let's just leave the network layer out of things, shall we?
Pfft. Set your display resolution to 640x480, like the NTSC television your PS2 is hooked up to, and you're on a level playing field.
The PC requirements are higher because most people are playing at a minimum of 1024x768 pixels, which means more memory, more bandwidth, and more GPU processing.
Meh. I have a Radeon 9800 Pro and a SB Audigy2 filling the slots in my Shuttle XPC with the default 200W power supply.
I've had no stability problems at all, even when playing Far Cry.
Yes. It's been legal in Canada since 1997 to make copies of digital recordings for "personal use" - that is, no redistribution allowed. See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml#copy_for_friend s for a full rulldown.
Yes. It's been legal in Canada since 1997 to make copies of digital recordings for "personal use" - that is, no redistribution allowed. See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml#copy_for_friend s for a full rulldown.
You might have no problem with this, but I sure do. I go through a lot of CD-Rs, but very few of them ever get music recorded onto them. Yet I'm paying this levy for every blank. There are a lot of uses of electronic storage that don't involve copying music.
Oh, I dunno, fudgefactor. I thought it was kind of cute the way they counterspun this.
Mathematically, of course, if one half the problems are not my fault, that leaves the other half firmly in my court. This is obvious.
The fact that Microsoft is saying "half the problems aren't even ours" like it's a good thing begs for comment. From a literary (journalistic?) perspective, the ironic and entirely correct juxtaposition of the two ideas is an excellent way to do this. The fact that the article mentions the true quote immediately below the headline makes this clear, and prevents the headline from detracting from the facts of the story.
There is unmistakeable editorial bias on Slashdot, and most of us like it that way (considering the unbiased, objective reporting that we get from the real media). However, this is not an instance of that; You would be better served to save your vitriol for more important things, or at least for more egrarious examples of editorial bias.
~1.4something MHz, because that was the frequency of the crystals used to sync NTSC TV transmissions, so you could buy the crystals by the boatload,
There have been some useful answers as to why you can't get stuff shipped to Hungary: credit card fraud, excessive credit card handling fees, possible need for export/import documents...
Fine, but I live in Canada. None of these apply. Our credit cards have very similar fraud rates, and there are no extra fees for merchants charging a Canadian card. Heck, I can even get a US Dollar card drawn from Citibank if ya like.
Even those merchants who don't flatly refuse to sell to me make it prohibitively expensive by making their lowest tier international service "DHL 1-hour delivery - $529.99." Thanks guys, but you can just throw that in a box and send it parcel post. I'll pay the duty when the mail carrier comes to my house. I've had this argument with ThinkGeek a few times, and they cannot even comprehend the basic concept of mailing something to a non-US address.
For me, at least, this is maddeningly frustrating. It should be entirely transparent to the merchant to send stuff to me in Canada. The credit card gets charged in USD, and it bills me with the current rate. Merchants don't need to fill out any forms; Canada Post (or UPS, or FedEx) does that for me when I get the package. Same as above with duty and taxes.
Considering that this process is transparent to the merchant, those who say "Only ship to USA" or those who only offer expensive shipping to Canada are making a very clear statement about their priorities. I don't know what that statement is, considering that I'm trying very hard to give them my money, but there's a statement in there for sure.
> But most of business IT cost is labor of construction. Microsoft understands this, and their
> marketing materials address that. I don't see the Linux vendors understanding this point, and you
> certainly don't seem to recognize it in your post.
Fair enough. I figured I could discount large corporate entities with all that hand-waving in my first paragraph. I don't know anything about large companies.
If you'll recall, I said 'in my experience' which I later qualified as being primarily with small research groups and companies. The fact that your experience is different shouldn't dismay you as much as it does: The two markets are different.
I realize that Microsoft is doing a pretty good job of meeting the needs of large companies. I was merely pointing out that unlike OS/2, Linux is finding a home in places which Gates' comments don't seem to address.
Your final points about labor cost are correct (rather, they seem reasonable to me, but we've established that this is not my area of expertise). However, if we have a hypothetical SmallGuy Inc. who provides web services similar to those of MegaCorp on a tighter budget, I imagine MegaCorp will be curious. Perhaps, after investigating, they will determine that the little guy's edge is not the software at all. Perhaps it's an organizational issue, or perhaps it's simply the synergy of a few smart, dedicated people with lots to lose.
Anyhow, I think your points are excellent, but I don't think they are inconsistent with my own. There are two markets here.
Bill's assertion that Linux and OS/2 pose the same sort of threat are flawed because of this.
(From the article)
> For any project, if you look at communications
> costs, hardware costs, personnel costs, all that,
> software licensing ranges -- the highest you'd
> ever find is, like, 3% of any IT-type project.
Wow. Not my experience, to say the least.
To me, this is indicative of exactly where Linux does and will continue to shine. The above statement is probably true for Chase Manhattan, and I doubt we'll see Chase switching to Linux anytime soon (although I don't doubt that their big iron is still a commercial UNIX).
Most of the people I deal with, though, are either small research groups or small businesses: Five guys with three computers and a world to conquer. This is where Linux is already excelling, and I think this is where it will excel for the immediate future.
That is why Gates is wrong. OS/2 had some advantages over Windows (such as the 'IBM army' as he puts it), but it was competing with Windows for the same goal. Where I see Linux being really successful is in places where the Microsoft Barrier-to-Entry(tm) is just too high. Unlike OS/2, Linux isn't going to be driven from these places. Linux is not going away, although it may not be going to the foreground, either.
And as more and more small businesses and contractors and researchers use Linux to do cool and interesting things on the cheap, bigger businesses will start to notice.
> my mom doesn't pass the Windows XP mom test
You've got things all twisted around, but I don't blame you. Many people have this perception. Mom's not the one being tested, the OS is. The computer should be meeting the user's needs. If it does not, the failing is the result of the software. (All right, there are some users who will consistently be disappointed, at least for the forseeable future.)
When people are unable to perform tasks in Windows the perceived fault is with them, and when people are unable to perform tasks with alternative software, the fault is with the software. This perception is one more thing that needs to change before Microsoft's dominance will fade. Advocates of Linux or other systems need to do two things, in this order:
1) Encourage people to have higher expectations from their computer
2) Meet those expectations
Apple has been doing the second for a long time, but it's only with the new 'Switch' campaign that they're trying to address the first. We should all be cheering them on, because if they can do it, things will be better for everybody (even Microsoft users, assuming Microsoft picks up on point number 2).
I actually attend this department as an undergraduate. I've taken courses with Dr. Aycock (http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock) who is teaching the malware course, and he's one of the better lecturers I've had. He is also involved in the OpenBSD project, and may have been at that barbecue with you. I was unfortunately unable to make it, as I was out of town.
Anyhow, your assumption that there is a strong Java/Microsoft bias in the department is incorrect. While we don't 'teach' C, students are expected to know it, and there are several courses that use it extensively.
The professor you spoke to - it would probably have been Katrin Becker (http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~becker) - has her reasons for feeling the way she does, and is usually quite conversant about them. She also has very little influence in the policy decisions made by the software engineers in charge. Those people labour under the misconception that programmers can be replaced with pretty graphing tools, and are changing the program to reflect this, despite the best efforts of most of the faculty.
Your points about C are well taken, and I agree with all of them. However, your conjecture into the tone and attitude of the department are off base.
Yes, yes, congratulations on completing first year computer science (or math, for that matter).
Don't you think that the current denomination systems are designed specifically so that the greedy change-making algorithm will work?
The poster you were replying to seemed aware of that; They were merely saying that since the current denominational system has this property, it is easy to use. The problem with adding 32- and/or 18-cent coins is that the greedy approach may no longer make the most optimal change.
Sure, sure. But Flash RAM can only be written/erased a few thousand times. People got pissed when hard disk warranties went down to a year - how will they feel when a disk wears out in months?
I don't think so...
Or at least, I read the story and immediately thought of applications to my own projects (I'm a Research Assistant at my University, and I'm a little tired of writing Perl scripts to batch long jobs with combinatorial arguments).
If such a tool exists, I too would be interested in it. I think it rash to assume that the poster is looking for exploit automation.
I can't answer your question in general, but I'd like to point out that Canadians HAVE purchased the right to copy music CD's with this levy.
See http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml for details, if you're Canadian. It basically boils down to the fact that you can make copies of recordings for yourself, even if you don't own the original. The copy has to be for 'personal use,' so you can't give it to a friend, but you can lend that friend your CD, your computer, and a blank CD and let them go nuts.
Cheap, USB I/O boards. There is currently a usermode Linux interface using libusb, and a kernel module is in the works.
www.phidgets.com
Shaw has cracked down on anyone using more than ~5GB a month. The official company line - straight from the mouth of the dear girl who called me, is that 'there is no bandwidth limit, but if you use too much bandwidth we'll have to cut off your access'. They refuse to say how much it too much, but some people have gotten calls after what they say is only 3-4 GB /month.