the underlying driver for this kind of employee surveillance is still typically profit.
I don't disagree that the intentions at the highest level may be profit, but once it exits the mouth of the CEO that part is quickly lost in translation. The people at the high level are far too busy to be bothered with the technical details and just want a summary of whatever they're measuring so they can say "loss in profit wasn't us, our numbers look great!".
For example: say you're in charge of a department of 20-30 programmers. Upper management is given the directive "more profit". Upper management comes to you and says "your department needs to cut costs", and so the two of you agree on a way to measure this. They're smart enough to know that things like "lines of code" or "number of bug trackers" are easily gamed, so you agree that the metric you're going to use will be "cost per hour of coding". If you reduce the cost per hour of code, that means you've become more efficient right?
So the first thing you do is start making noise about outsourceing and find a coding sweatshop in india that will write software for $3/hour. You hire 15 indians to start cranking out code for you and boom! You just cut your cost per hour of coding in half. You use the fact that your brilliant management has cut costs in half to justify increased budget and workforce for your department, resulting in no need for layoffs. Your programmers continue to do what they were doing before, with the exception of tasking a few junior programmers who now have the assignment of gaining experience in writing requirements by keeping the indian sweatshop busy writing nonsense programs.
So in this example, while the original drive may have been profit the end result was basically a really overpriced requirements writing simulator for the guys you want to groom to become project managers.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.
I've been running AV free since the early 2000s up until MSE came out, and constantly took flak from self declared IT experts whenever I mentioned it (they'd insist that my computer must be an infected cesspool and I was just too dumb to notice). tbh I'm actually surprised the comments here aren't filled with people insisting that aftermarket AV is an absolute necessity and insinuating that the mozillia developer must be in league with some botnet owners.
They buy a case or bumper to ensure that the screen and/or glass back don't get destroyed the first time the damn thing falls out of your pocket. It also renders the whole "thinner is better" thing rather stupid for similar reasons, as that "life proof" or "otter box" case is adding a hella whole lot more thickness to the phone than either a headphone jack or thicker battery.
My Nexus 4 (yes I still have it, no repairs required yet) has a bumper case that protects the outer perimeter but leaves the back uncovered. I love it because it protects the most common case for cracking the glass (dropping it on a corner) while not really adding much bulk or weight. I haven't been able to find similar cases for other phones though for some reason.
I was actually just being snarky and making a funny, but once you started to rant, it did make me happy that you weren't enjoying it.
Eh? The guy was sharing some good information that's highly relevant to the discussion on a subject he's clearly knowledgeable about. I find it kind of sad that on a site supposedly for nerds, you confuse an infodump for a rant.
I had the good fortune of being able to work on the most interesting parts of our projects and to participate in business development. That gave me the advantage of knowing what contracts we were hoping to win and what technology I needed to know to keep myself employed.
That part is key. I've been doing defense contracting for a while now and as much as I hate all of the business and management stuff (I just want to build things and then blow them up) I've always had an ear out for the business development side and it's served me well. Knowing what's coming up next not only allows me to build skills in that direction, but it also allows me to look for places where work I'm doing on one project can also be used on an upcoming project with minimal modification.
3) Defense Contracting - if you can get a security clearance, there is abundant work where defense contracts are strong (around DC and military installations.)
This is a really fun option. Generally in the defense industry there's a sliding scale between stable/boring production projects and unstable/exciting R&D projects. Get on the R&D (like real "make something new" R&D, not "we're going to make a minor improvement on an existing product" R&D) side in a big company and you'll never be bored.
My ISP explicitly allows me to do whatever the hell I want* with my connection. Port 25 is blocked by default, but they'll unblock it for you right away if you ask.
*Assuming it's not generating complaints, e.g. sending spam or something.
Yes, but they're basically saying "my team won in yardage but lost in points, so I think future games should be decided based on yardage". The problem there is that if they change the rules, the other team is going to change strategy as well. They're probably not going to do any better with the rule change, and they're potentially causing all kinds of unforeseen issues by screwing with the rules after the game has been established for so long.
The bigger issue with California is that it had so many wasted votes; over 3.4 million Democrats in the state could have stayed at home with no change to the winner of the state.
As an interesting corollary to that, a lot of republicans in california do stay home for exactly that reason. The state is so overwhelmingly democrat that voting (at least in the presidential part of the ballot) feels kind of pointless. I personally voted 3rd party because I knew a republican vote wouldn't matter. One of my friends wrote himself in and got a few tens of otherwise republican voters to write him in too for the laughs. I wouldn't be surprised if the same sort of thing was happening all up and down the state. Probably not enough to account for multiple millions of votes or actually make a real difference, but I'd bet it's enough of an effect to show up in the stats.
By "black supremacist" you mean an African-American who is concerned they are far more likely to be unarmed and yet still shot to death by a police officer than a white American.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he means the actual black supremacists, and not whatever strawman you're thinking of. Or are you under the impression that only white people are capable of being racists?
Apparently you're just as dumb if you think just knowing the regular IP is going to fix shit with a hosed DHCP config..
Please quote the part where I said knowing "the regular IP" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) would fix a hosed DHCP config. For all you know I was referring to people who jump to conclusions.
That and janitorial work is the easiest way to get a job at any place that does software tbh. It gets you in contact with all kinds of people within the company, and it's also pretty easy to stand out among your peers if we're talking entry-level helpdesk kind of stuff. Even if there's no direct and published path for getting from some kind of contract IT support to a full time developer position, you can still be among the first to know when there are job openings. Plus it's a lot easier to tailor a resume if you know the internal culture of the company, have chatted with developers on the project about what they do, and fixed the computer of the HR guy who reads all the resumes.
I think he might be mixing up the fact that most internships often make below the income threshold for taxes. I had a paid internship for all 6 years I spent in college. It was basically full time over the summer and 15-20 hours a week during the semester. I'd have to look through my tax forms to be sure, but from memory even earning something like 14-16k/year I was basically paying very little to nothing in income tax.
The thing with phones is that if they start doing something they're not supposed to (e.g. running GPS or listening to the microphone when not asked), the limited resources of a phone make it pretty obvious pretty fast. Anyone who's accidentally left a navigation app navigating or a streaming app streaming can attest to this. An app on your phone acting badly will stick out like a sore thumb in the form of higher than normal resource usage. Even real-world cases of malware have had this problem out in the wild. Remember that one blackberry virus that was supposed to be able to spread by proximity during the olympics a few years back? If my memory serves me correctly, it basically amounted to the infected persons phone dieing in a matter of hours due to the radio constantly transmitting, and spread to a number of people counted in the double digits despite being released into a crowd of millions.
The problem with a plugged in device is that it has no such limitations. It can suddenly decide to start logging all audio and you'd never notice the increased power draw. Most peoples home internet is unmetered and much faster than they'll ever need, so it could upload data without anyone noticing. It's large and not in contact with your body 16/7, so it could be running its processor full blast to farm bitcoins using your electricity and you'd be less likely to notice the increased heat. And even if you do pay attention, it's in a consistent enough environment and has enough spare processing power that it could probably monitor things like network traffic and local activity in order to perform nefarious acts only when you're not liable to notice.
I work at an engineering company that had this happen. I saw an email with subject line "test" arrive from department.all@company and thought "wait, this actually happens in real life?" as I settled in to watch the show. To everyones credit, it actually did stay quiet for a while until some smartass replied with "did the test work". That then unleashed a flood of "take me off this list right now!!!" and "stop replying to this email!!!!" emails until someone figured out how to shut it down.
tbh it makes for a really great method of identifying the stupid people in the company. It might be usable as a strategy for selecting potential candidates for the next round of layoffs.
Question: how did they find the errors that the two-human team missed? Presumably with a third human. Does this mean a three-person team can beat out both a two-person team and ASR? Or was there a script that was used to generate the audio? That would raise other questions, such as the accuracy of the speakers.
I had the same question. We ran into a similar problem in a school project making an AI that interpreted results from a polysomnogram. In theory we got over ~90% accuracy, but different humans would score the same sleep study differently, which basically meant that humans got 90% accuracy compared to each other too.
And preferably able to recognize the difference between a road and some sheets of plywood covered in construction dust laying on top of exposed rebar covering up a 100 foot drop....
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, nice writeup.
Thanks. I actually much prefer positive comments over positive mod points anyway.
the underlying driver for this kind of employee surveillance is still typically profit.
I don't disagree that the intentions at the highest level may be profit, but once it exits the mouth of the CEO that part is quickly lost in translation. The people at the high level are far too busy to be bothered with the technical details and just want a summary of whatever they're measuring so they can say "loss in profit wasn't us, our numbers look great!".
For example: say you're in charge of a department of 20-30 programmers. Upper management is given the directive "more profit". Upper management comes to you and says "your department needs to cut costs", and so the two of you agree on a way to measure this. They're smart enough to know that things like "lines of code" or "number of bug trackers" are easily gamed, so you agree that the metric you're going to use will be "cost per hour of coding". If you reduce the cost per hour of code, that means you've become more efficient right?
So the first thing you do is start making noise about outsourceing and find a coding sweatshop in india that will write software for $3/hour. You hire 15 indians to start cranking out code for you and boom! You just cut your cost per hour of coding in half. You use the fact that your brilliant management has cut costs in half to justify increased budget and workforce for your department, resulting in no need for layoffs. Your programmers continue to do what they were doing before, with the exception of tasking a few junior programmers who now have the assignment of gaining experience in writing requirements by keeping the indian sweatshop busy writing nonsense programs.
So in this example, while the original drive may have been profit the end result was basically a really overpriced requirements writing simulator for the guys you want to groom to become project managers.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.
I've been running AV free since the early 2000s up until MSE came out, and constantly took flak from self declared IT experts whenever I mentioned it (they'd insist that my computer must be an infected cesspool and I was just too dumb to notice). tbh I'm actually surprised the comments here aren't filled with people insisting that aftermarket AV is an absolute necessity and insinuating that the mozillia developer must be in league with some botnet owners.
They buy a case or bumper to ensure that the screen and/or glass back don't get destroyed the first time the damn thing falls out of your pocket. It also renders the whole "thinner is better" thing rather stupid for similar reasons, as that "life proof" or "otter box" case is adding a hella whole lot more thickness to the phone than either a headphone jack or thicker battery.
My Nexus 4 (yes I still have it, no repairs required yet) has a bumper case that protects the outer perimeter but leaves the back uncovered. I love it because it protects the most common case for cracking the glass (dropping it on a corner) while not really adding much bulk or weight. I haven't been able to find similar cases for other phones though for some reason.
I was actually just being snarky and making a funny, but once you started to rant, it did make me happy that you weren't enjoying it.
Eh? The guy was sharing some good information that's highly relevant to the discussion on a subject he's clearly knowledgeable about. I find it kind of sad that on a site supposedly for nerds, you confuse an infodump for a rant.
I had the good fortune of being able to work on the most interesting parts of our projects and to participate in business development. That gave me the advantage of knowing what contracts we were hoping to win and what technology I needed to know to keep myself employed.
That part is key. I've been doing defense contracting for a while now and as much as I hate all of the business and management stuff (I just want to build things and then blow them up) I've always had an ear out for the business development side and it's served me well. Knowing what's coming up next not only allows me to build skills in that direction, but it also allows me to look for places where work I'm doing on one project can also be used on an upcoming project with minimal modification.
3) Defense Contracting - if you can get a security clearance, there is abundant work where defense contracts are strong (around DC and military installations.)
This is a really fun option. Generally in the defense industry there's a sliding scale between stable/boring production projects and unstable/exciting R&D projects. Get on the R&D (like real "make something new" R&D, not "we're going to make a minor improvement on an existing product" R&D) side in a big company and you'll never be bored.
Wow! What a courageous move by apple to cut their production like that!
My ISP explicitly allows me to do whatever the hell I want* with my connection. Port 25 is blocked by default, but they'll unblock it for you right away if you ask.
*Assuming it's not generating complaints, e.g. sending spam or something.
Yes, but they're basically saying "my team won in yardage but lost in points, so I think future games should be decided based on yardage". The problem there is that if they change the rules, the other team is going to change strategy as well. They're probably not going to do any better with the rule change, and they're potentially causing all kinds of unforeseen issues by screwing with the rules after the game has been established for so long.
The bigger issue with California is that it had so many wasted votes; over 3.4 million Democrats in the state could have stayed at home with no change to the winner of the state.
As an interesting corollary to that, a lot of republicans in california do stay home for exactly that reason. The state is so overwhelmingly democrat that voting (at least in the presidential part of the ballot) feels kind of pointless. I personally voted 3rd party because I knew a republican vote wouldn't matter. One of my friends wrote himself in and got a few tens of otherwise republican voters to write him in too for the laughs. I wouldn't be surprised if the same sort of thing was happening all up and down the state. Probably not enough to account for multiple millions of votes or actually make a real difference, but I'd bet it's enough of an effect to show up in the stats.
By "black supremacist" you mean an African-American who is concerned they are far more likely to be unarmed and yet still shot to death by a police officer than a white American.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he means the actual black supremacists, and not whatever strawman you're thinking of. Or are you under the impression that only white people are capable of being racists?
Apparently you're just as dumb if you think just knowing the regular IP is going to fix shit with a hosed DHCP config..
Please quote the part where I said knowing "the regular IP" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) would fix a hosed DHCP config. For all you know I was referring to people who jump to conclusions.
and apparently so are some people who style themselves as geeks
how is that different than what he already does?
It's not, which probably has something to do with the reason he's president elect now.
To add a bit of ancedote to your statement, I have a work-issued iPhone and I find it to be pretty unappealing.
That and janitorial work is the easiest way to get a job at any place that does software tbh. It gets you in contact with all kinds of people within the company, and it's also pretty easy to stand out among your peers if we're talking entry-level helpdesk kind of stuff. Even if there's no direct and published path for getting from some kind of contract IT support to a full time developer position, you can still be among the first to know when there are job openings. Plus it's a lot easier to tailor a resume if you know the internal culture of the company, have chatted with developers on the project about what they do, and fixed the computer of the HR guy who reads all the resumes.
I think he might be mixing up the fact that most internships often make below the income threshold for taxes. I had a paid internship for all 6 years I spent in college. It was basically full time over the summer and 15-20 hours a week during the semester. I'd have to look through my tax forms to be sure, but from memory even earning something like 14-16k/year I was basically paying very little to nothing in income tax.
The thing with phones is that if they start doing something they're not supposed to (e.g. running GPS or listening to the microphone when not asked), the limited resources of a phone make it pretty obvious pretty fast. Anyone who's accidentally left a navigation app navigating or a streaming app streaming can attest to this. An app on your phone acting badly will stick out like a sore thumb in the form of higher than normal resource usage. Even real-world cases of malware have had this problem out in the wild. Remember that one blackberry virus that was supposed to be able to spread by proximity during the olympics a few years back? If my memory serves me correctly, it basically amounted to the infected persons phone dieing in a matter of hours due to the radio constantly transmitting, and spread to a number of people counted in the double digits despite being released into a crowd of millions.
The problem with a plugged in device is that it has no such limitations. It can suddenly decide to start logging all audio and you'd never notice the increased power draw. Most peoples home internet is unmetered and much faster than they'll ever need, so it could upload data without anyone noticing. It's large and not in contact with your body 16/7, so it could be running its processor full blast to farm bitcoins using your electricity and you'd be less likely to notice the increased heat. And even if you do pay attention, it's in a consistent enough environment and has enough spare processing power that it could probably monitor things like network traffic and local activity in order to perform nefarious acts only when you're not liable to notice.
Is your lab made out of granite or on the top of a mountain or something?
I work at an engineering company that had this happen. I saw an email with subject line "test" arrive from department.all@company and thought "wait, this actually happens in real life?" as I settled in to watch the show. To everyones credit, it actually did stay quiet for a while until some smartass replied with "did the test work". That then unleashed a flood of "take me off this list right now!!!" and "stop replying to this email!!!!" emails until someone figured out how to shut it down.
tbh it makes for a really great method of identifying the stupid people in the company. It might be usable as a strategy for selecting potential candidates for the next round of layoffs.
Question: how did they find the errors that the two-human team missed? Presumably with a third human. Does this mean a three-person team can beat out both a two-person team and ASR? Or was there a script that was used to generate the audio? That would raise other questions, such as the accuracy of the speakers.
I had the same question. We ran into a similar problem in a school project making an AI that interpreted results from a polysomnogram. In theory we got over ~90% accuracy, but different humans would score the same sleep study differently, which basically meant that humans got 90% accuracy compared to each other too.
preferably able to see large trucks
And preferably able to recognize the difference between a road and some sheets of plywood covered in construction dust laying on top of exposed rebar covering up a 100 foot drop....