and of course, what if i just want to run an encrypted web-based email system on my personal box? self-signing is hardly fun with browsers throwing up warnings every time you access it
Read your browser's documentation to learn how to import your home-perm-kit CA's cert into the browser. Presto, no more warnings.
I've got a question here... I know you can set up HTTPS services using a self-signed certificate if you don't mind browsers screaming at it. However, what if I were to use 2 of my own boxes to create a certificate? Although not "credible" enough for an ecommerce site, would it be fine for personal use?
I don't understand what you're getting at here, but there's no difference between using one computer to create the certificate, and using two.
Now this is crap. What possible reason could there be to base the pricing on crypto strength ? There is absolutely no difference in trust or work for them.
It's called price discrimination. Take in more revenue by creating cost-neutral differentiations in your product line that will sort out your clients based on their willingness to pay.
It's the same thing used by airlines when they requre a Saturday-night stay for discount fares. Perfectly acceptable business practice, in the absence of a monopoly (in which case the mildest of things can become abhorrent).
Actually, it's something of a hassle just to get a legitimate cert. You must, for instance, have a Dun & Bradstreet listing (among some of Verisign's irritating requirements.)
Yet, Thawte, which Verisign owns, has no such requirements. You can get a certificate from them that works just as well, for much less money.
Last time I applied for one, the only documentation they needed was a faxed copy of the Secretary of State's acknowledge of receipt of incorporation papers, and maybe an old phone bill or something.
Hey, I go to Berkeley and I don't think we have it. Would you care digging a berkeley.edu page about it, or you prefer to correct your statement (e.g.: only one building/doesn't radio count?/I made that up)
Far as I know, all Berkeley has is a deal with Metricom for Ricochet service. Much slower than what we're talking about here, but on the other hand you can go all over Berkely/San Francisco with it.
If less is charged for software, less money is made on software; less money exists to pay people working with it.
Ah, I see the problem here.
You don't work in the software industry; you just make stuff up about it.
In point of fact, almost all programmers do not work on producing software for sale or distribution. They work or consult for organizations that are producing or maintaining custom software for specific purposes.
So yes, the spread of open-source tools and baseband software infrastructure means these people can be more productive for less money and therefore increase the rate of return per $$ spent on hiring them, and therefore economically rational employers will hire more of them and pay them more money.
Unemployment in many countries (including the US) is at or near all-time low. It's never been easier to find a job (except maybe a year ago, which is irrelevant since that was an aberration).
Now you are being silly and confusing aggregate statistics with what it's like for an individual to get a job. The unemployment rate acts as one of a number of factors that help you judge the state of a regional economy, but it doesn't effect your job prospects much.
Statistics are the aggregate of what it's like for all the individuals to find jobs, so yes, they're quite informative.
Unemployment is near an all-time low. I guarantee you that all these jobs are not for steamship coal-shovelers, or barrelwrights, or phrenology assistants. Rather, a disproportionate number of open positions are in high tech.
Unemployment is in fact lowest in the areas with the most high-tech work. So, the more programmers around you, the easier it is for you (as a programmer, after all the topic of this post) to find a job.
I am sure you can come up with someone in Moonpie, Alaska who got laid off from the only dot-com in town and who is now having trouble finding JavaScript work. But that has nothing to do with anything except for one lone loser who isn't matching his skills with his choice of location. The same could be said for a forest ranger in Brooklyn; doesn't mean it's hard for forest rangers in general to find jobs.
Naturally, with a large game you can't keep everything in memory, but just by keeping the most frequently used things in memory you should be able to increase performs. Once somebody logs in, store their relevant info in a Bean. I have been brainwashed into using Java as the solution, but I'm sure you could do it in another language like C++ or Perl. But I don't think it can be done in a scripting language such as PHP, ASP or Python.
Sure it can (in PHP, anyway). Just use a memory-based session handler (rather than the default disk-based one) and keep all the user-specific information there.
As an added bonus, you'll have the entire application developed while the Java people are still waiting for all the floating windows on their IDE to come up.
You should be worried if open source programmers develop the same things as you do without charging anything. Why pay you then?
Open source programmers create general-purpose tools. Company employees get paid to use these tools to produce solutions to company-specific problems and needs.
Thanks to open source, companies can get more return on their IT investment and therefore will put more money into staffing.
Maybe MacOS has been fixed since I last used it seriously, but as I remember it was really awful at this. It didn't really understand the idea of an abstract type, only types directly attached to applications. When you passed an file that was of a normal type (like HTML or Postscript or something), it would try to open it with whatever created the document. Often this application didn't exist on the computer, though there was an application that could handle the filetype.
Yes, this has been fixed. If the application doesn't exist, it will now give you a list of viable options to choose from (i.e., all applications that have nominated themselves as being able to open that type of file).
For those who don't know it... on a Mac, in the System folder extensions, control panels, drivers, etc. all have reasonable descriptive filenames -- and often in much less than the thirty odd character limit.
Not only that, but they have a VERSION resource. Got that, Windows people? Every driver, every application can tell you exactly what version it is, right from the desktop. No need to cross-reference the creation date and file size with obscure charts, no need to randomly swap in and out 85 different copies of VX78TY9.DLL until something works.
The problem is that the OS thinks that it knows more than I do... for example, certain text editors on the mac will tag the files in such a way that netscape won't parse any html in the file. I find it very annoying as a non-mac user to have to figure out how to change the internal file descriptor. I know that it's very easy, but it's not obvious. On a Wintel machine, the extension controls everything, so if a program is freaking out, just change the extension.
Most Windows users have the "hide extensions for common file types" thing turned on, so they never see extensions and in my experience have no idea what they are.
This is worse than with the Mac: Mac users who know what's up can go change the Type/Creator as they please; the rest use the intuitive methods described by another poster above.
In Windows, on the other hand, you have the extremely annoying situation where any one extension is hijacked by a particular application. If you have three HTML editors, and you work on different projects in different editors, you have to manually select the application EVERY DAMN TIME you open one of the files. Furthermore, the extension-space is so limited, crowded, and poorly adjudicated that various applications are always stomping on each other's extensions. Photoshop and Visual Studio are particularly egregious examples; each of these, when installed, registers itself as being responsible for about half the namespace. Worse yet, they both register various types that overlap, even though they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPES OF FILES.
maybe you're layed off not because you aren't qualified, but the company tanked and no one keeps there job... whatever region you're working in is so strapped, that there are NO open jobs in your field. It doesn't matter how qualified you are if you aren't in control of a zillion other factors.
Don't be silly. Unemployment in many countries (including the US) is at or near all-time low. It's never been easier to find a job (except maybe a year ago, which is irrelevant since that was an aberration).
but...a lawyer? for chrissakes man, turn back before it's too late!
He'll figure it out eventually. Basically all lawyers I know hate their jobs with burning passion. Those who could afford it (not easy with law school loan payments) have quit and gone back to school. The only ones I know who are satisfied are working for the government as prosecutors or public defenders.
I haven't seen polls, but I'd guess it's pretty low on the job-satisfaction totem pole.
That doesn't work. A copyright is for a specific expression of a thought.
If you copyright "I love walking under the silver moon," that provides you no protection should I write "To me, the light of the moon makes walking a delight." If you paint a picture of a duck with a hat, I can paint a different picture of a duck with a hat, despite your copyright.
Yet there are countless ways of paraphrasing the description of a process. A patent provides protection on the concept, not the words.
But we don't have the highest murder rate in the world (murders per capita). That honor goes to South Africa, with its official ANC ban on personal firearm ownership. Fancy that!
One day when you're big enough to go potty all by yourself you might get to go to school, where you'll learn about things like "cause and effect."
The ANC has moved to restrict firearm ownership because the tremendous number of firearms purchased by whites during Apartheid and in the vacuum immediately after turned their society into a volatile tinderbox.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, they have a long hard road ahead of them. Until they get rid of the guns, South Africa will be a deadly place with debilitating crime, just as the US is to a lesser extent.
The first official peice of legislation passed by the Nazi controlled Reichstag in 1933 was banning of personal firearms.
As they always say, "At least with Hitler the trains ran on time."
I can list a million and one things the Nazis did: They glorified white folk, they promoted classical music, they revalued the currency, they recalled some ambassadors, they beefed up the military, they changed the flag.
Quick: Which one of these is the guaranteed first step down an inexorable path to tyranny?
Answer: Whichever one you're arguing against at the moment. Because that's how the "The Nazis Did It" school of polemics works.
An armed populace is the ONLY way to be certain that your government won't take too many freedoms.
Correction: An armed populace is the only way to be certain your government won't take away too many freedoms, if your populace are all dumb as posts. Likewise the only way for a schoolyard bully to get rich is to beat kids up and take their money. The smart ones figure out cleverer - and more effective - ways.
My feeling is, if the people have sunk to the point where they are too moronic and ineffectual to keep hold of their freedom without resorting to the threat of pointing guns around, then they have lost any claim to said freedom.
Just slip the CD into your pocket, and... Does anyone see another "longbox problem" on the horizon? How the hell can these be packaged in any kind of environmentally sane way?
Very good question. It'll be especially interesting to see what happens on BMG's home turf (Germany), where rules on excess packaging are extremely stringent.
I suppose they could use those big plastic exoskeletons that have to be removed by the cashier with a special tool. But they certainly haven't been terribly popular to date.
And I dare anyone to say that the DVD format has been a failure!!
Maybe it's just where I'm sitting, but it doesn't seem like it's exactly saturated society. I have never even seen a DVD (I've seen the cases at electronics stores but I've never seen one open). I have never seen a DVD playing, unless I happened to walk by one at Circuit City or something and not noticed it. I do not know anyone who has a DVD player (other than one pre-installed in a computer - my own included - in which case the DVD function has to my knowledge never been used).
I have seen a fair number of VCDs, but only in Asia, where it seems like they're being played at every restaurant, bar and hotel. As far as I know VCD players are not commonly available in North America.
I'm sure someone is using and buying DVDs, but nowhere near me. In these parts we use VCRs, and as long as that's the appliance that gives us a recordable medium, it's likely to stay that way.
You see, contrary to what the typical, self-centered pseudo-anarchist pirate-citizen believes, it is NOT beneficial for music and other forms of art to be freely stolen.
That's all fine. Just keep your battle out of my living room. I'm not making illegal pirate CDs, and no way in hell will I be treated as if I am.
Want to go after criminal piracy? Use the legal system. That's what it's for. And, I might add, it's a whole lot more effective than any technological measures to date (or on the horizon).
Reverse engineering is NOT piracy. It's just maneuvering things back to a usable state after they've been flummed up by snake-oil "digital rights management" hucksters.
The distributed server thing ala peer-2-peer for online playing is a great idea! Have each server be a land or portion of a land and you must pass through some kind of gate to move to the next server or perhaps cross some mountains, or take a boat ride, or enter some caves etc.
Yes, this is an idea that many have floated before, in various guises, over the years at WorldForge, and because of that I would have to bet that when we're further along, people will experiment with doing that.
Back in 1990 we did a fair amount of work along these lines. Never came to anything though, because we kept running into a fundamentally insurmountable problem: Cheating.
The best we could come up with was a central server that authorized the allocation of experience points, treasure, etc., and each "area" (on its own server) was only able to give out an amount of these commodities in proportion to the total number of visitors it received. That way, in the worst case, an area that gave all the treasure to its owner's friends would soon develop a reputation as unfair and other people would stop going there. But then it came back to the scaling problem again.
I'd be fascinated to watch what sort of solutions eventually do appear.
Re:Rampant homophobia? Not necessarily.
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It seems to have evolved into more of a slang term rather than 'anti-homosexual'. I use the word "gay" all the time, but verbally the same way I'd say "lame"
This is interesting. Is it maybe a regional thing? I think the last time I heard the word used in that way was in the early 1980s. Around here, you say "gay" when you mean "gay".
Yeah yeah sure. All I know is that my friend who sacrificed his life to get straight A's has a line of companies offering him jobs. Where I have years of non-work experence, and can't get a company to fart in my general direction.
So yeah, GPA is all that matters.
Don't sell yourself so tall.
Your friend has the jobs lined up because he is diligent, hardworking, and effective. It's not because of his grades.
Look around you. There are plenty of people who get A's and yet are fundamentally useless.
If you're not getting hired it's because you (pick any one or more):
Are feeling sorry for yourself and it shows
Are incapable of, or unwilling to show respect to potential employers
Are applying for jobs you do not have the requisite skills for
Are applying for jobs you do have the skills for, but are too poor a communicator to make employers aware of that
Are sabotaging yourself by deliberately (perhaps subconsciously) applying for jobs you know you can't get
Are unwilling to realize that you gotta pay your dues before you become Bill Gates
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Read your browser's documentation to learn how to import your home-perm-kit CA's cert into the browser. Presto, no more warnings.
I don't understand what you're getting at here, but there's no difference between using one computer to create the certificate, and using two.
It's called price discrimination. Take in more revenue by creating cost-neutral differentiations in your product line that will sort out your clients based on their willingness to pay.
It's the same thing used by airlines when they requre a Saturday-night stay for discount fares. Perfectly acceptable business practice, in the absence of a monopoly (in which case the mildest of things can become abhorrent).
Yet, Thawte, which Verisign owns, has no such requirements. You can get a certificate from them that works just as well, for much less money.
Last time I applied for one, the only documentation they needed was a faxed copy of the Secretary of State's acknowledge of receipt of incorporation papers, and maybe an old phone bill or something.
That would be a lot more convincing if zsh didn't predate WIndows 95 by 5 years or more.
Far as I know, all Berkeley has is a deal with Metricom for Ricochet service. Much slower than what we're talking about here, but on the other hand you can go all over Berkely/San Francisco with it.
Ah, I see the problem here.
You don't work in the software industry; you just make stuff up about it.
In point of fact, almost all programmers do not work on producing software for sale or distribution. They work or consult for organizations that are producing or maintaining custom software for specific purposes.
So yes, the spread of open-source tools and baseband software infrastructure means these people can be more productive for less money and therefore increase the rate of return per $$ spent on hiring them, and therefore economically rational employers will hire more of them and pay them more money.
Statistics are the aggregate of what it's like for all the individuals to find jobs, so yes, they're quite informative.
Unemployment is near an all-time low. I guarantee you that all these jobs are not for steamship coal-shovelers, or barrelwrights, or phrenology assistants. Rather, a disproportionate number of open positions are in high tech.
Unemployment is in fact lowest in the areas with the most high-tech work. So, the more programmers around you, the easier it is for you (as a programmer, after all the topic of this post) to find a job.
I am sure you can come up with someone in Moonpie, Alaska who got laid off from the only dot-com in town and who is now having trouble finding JavaScript work. But that has nothing to do with anything except for one lone loser who isn't matching his skills with his choice of location. The same could be said for a forest ranger in Brooklyn; doesn't mean it's hard for forest rangers in general to find jobs.
Sure it can (in PHP, anyway). Just use a memory-based session handler (rather than the default disk-based one) and keep all the user-specific information there.
As an added bonus, you'll have the entire application developed while the Java people are still waiting for all the floating windows on their IDE to come up.
You're much more likely to want/need an accountant than a lawyer, but that comes later (i.e., after you have some income). You will need a lawyer if:
Otherwise you can definitely do the paperwork on your own. Just pick up a book or two from Nolo and you're on your way.
Open source programmers create general-purpose tools. Company employees get paid to use these tools to produce solutions to company-specific problems and needs.
Thanks to open source, companies can get more return on their IT investment and therefore will put more money into staffing.
Yes, this has been fixed. If the application doesn't exist, it will now give you a list of viable options to choose from (i.e., all applications that have nominated themselves as being able to open that type of file).
Not only that, but they have a VERSION resource. Got that, Windows people? Every driver, every application can tell you exactly what version it is, right from the desktop. No need to cross-reference the creation date and file size with obscure charts, no need to randomly swap in and out 85 different copies of VX78TY9.DLL until something works.
Most Windows users have the "hide extensions for common file types" thing turned on, so they never see extensions and in my experience have no idea what they are.
This is worse than with the Mac: Mac users who know what's up can go change the Type/Creator as they please; the rest use the intuitive methods described by another poster above.
In Windows, on the other hand, you have the extremely annoying situation where any one extension is hijacked by a particular application. If you have three HTML editors, and you work on different projects in different editors, you have to manually select the application EVERY DAMN TIME you open one of the files. Furthermore, the extension-space is so limited, crowded, and poorly adjudicated that various applications are always stomping on each other's extensions. Photoshop and Visual Studio are particularly egregious examples; each of these, when installed, registers itself as being responsible for about half the namespace. Worse yet, they both register various types that overlap, even though they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPES OF FILES.
To sum up: Windows is unusable.
Don't be silly. Unemployment in many countries (including the US) is at or near all-time low. It's never been easier to find a job (except maybe a year ago, which is irrelevant since that was an aberration).
He'll figure it out eventually. Basically all lawyers I know hate their jobs with burning passion. Those who could afford it (not easy with law school loan payments) have quit and gone back to school. The only ones I know who are satisfied are working for the government as prosecutors or public defenders.
I haven't seen polls, but I'd guess it's pretty low on the job-satisfaction totem pole.
That doesn't work. A copyright is for a specific expression of a thought.
If you copyright "I love walking under the silver moon," that provides you no protection should I write "To me, the light of the moon makes walking a delight." If you paint a picture of a duck with a hat, I can paint a different picture of a duck with a hat, despite your copyright.
Yet there are countless ways of paraphrasing the description of a process. A patent provides protection on the concept, not the words.
One day when you're big enough to go potty all by yourself you might get to go to school, where you'll learn about things like "cause and effect."
The ANC has moved to restrict firearm ownership because the tremendous number of firearms purchased by whites during Apartheid and in the vacuum immediately after turned their society into a volatile tinderbox.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, they have a long hard road ahead of them. Until they get rid of the guns, South Africa will be a deadly place with debilitating crime, just as the US is to a lesser extent.
As they always say, "At least with Hitler the trains ran on time."
I can list a million and one things the Nazis did: They glorified white folk, they promoted classical music, they revalued the currency, they recalled some ambassadors, they beefed up the military, they changed the flag.
Quick: Which one of these is the guaranteed first step down an inexorable path to tyranny?
Answer: Whichever one you're arguing against at the moment. Because that's how the "The Nazis Did It" school of polemics works.
Correction: An armed populace is the only way to be certain your government won't take away too many freedoms, if your populace are all dumb as posts. Likewise the only way for a schoolyard bully to get rich is to beat kids up and take their money. The smart ones figure out cleverer - and more effective - ways.
My feeling is, if the people have sunk to the point where they are too moronic and ineffectual to keep hold of their freedom without resorting to the threat of pointing guns around, then they have lost any claim to said freedom.
Very good question. It'll be especially interesting to see what happens on BMG's home turf (Germany), where rules on excess packaging are extremely stringent.
I suppose they could use those big plastic exoskeletons that have to be removed by the cashier with a special tool. But they certainly haven't been terribly popular to date.
Maybe it's just where I'm sitting, but it doesn't seem like it's exactly saturated society. I have never even seen a DVD (I've seen the cases at electronics stores but I've never seen one open). I have never seen a DVD playing, unless I happened to walk by one at Circuit City or something and not noticed it. I do not know anyone who has a DVD player (other than one pre-installed in a computer - my own included - in which case the DVD function has to my knowledge never been used).
I have seen a fair number of VCDs, but only in Asia, where it seems like they're being played at every restaurant, bar and hotel. As far as I know VCD players are not commonly available in North America.
I'm sure someone is using and buying DVDs, but nowhere near me. In these parts we use VCRs, and as long as that's the appliance that gives us a recordable medium, it's likely to stay that way.
That's all fine. Just keep your battle out of my living room. I'm not making illegal pirate CDs, and no way in hell will I be treated as if I am.
Want to go after criminal piracy? Use the legal system. That's what it's for. And, I might add, it's a whole lot more effective than any technological measures to date (or on the horizon).
Reverse engineering is NOT piracy. It's just maneuvering things back to a usable state after they've been flummed up by snake-oil "digital rights management" hucksters.
Back in 1990 we did a fair amount of work along these lines. Never came to anything though, because we kept running into a fundamentally insurmountable problem: Cheating.
The best we could come up with was a central server that authorized the allocation of experience points, treasure, etc., and each "area" (on its own server) was only able to give out an amount of these commodities in proportion to the total number of visitors it received. That way, in the worst case, an area that gave all the treasure to its owner's friends would soon develop a reputation as unfair and other people would stop going there. But then it came back to the scaling problem again.
I'd be fascinated to watch what sort of solutions eventually do appear.
This is interesting. Is it maybe a regional thing? I think the last time I heard the word used in that way was in the early 1980s. Around here, you say "gay" when you mean "gay".
Don't sell yourself so tall.
Your friend has the jobs lined up because he is diligent, hardworking, and effective. It's not because of his grades.
Look around you. There are plenty of people who get A's and yet are fundamentally useless.
If you're not getting hired it's because you (pick any one or more):