The problems associated with software production are unique in the world of engineering, and are mostly due to the compression of time we used to call "Internet Time." Consider the difference between software engineering and, say, civil engineering, i.e. bridge building.
1) The basic way bridges work have not changed in some time. Suspension bridges all work on the same basic principle. Software, on the other hand, is constantly changing from a theoretical standpoint. In the four years I've worked as a programmer, I've moved from procedural programming to client-server programming to web programming back to procedural (only this time with an object oriented tip) and the outlook is to move into a new paradigm. That's like designing a bridge for six months, then working on a tunnel, then moving up to a tressle.
2) Hardware is constantly changing -- meaning that APIs are constantly changing to add features and products that use those APIs have to change as well to keep "up to date." A bug in the hardware would cause a bug in the api which would cause a bug in products that use it and so on. In the bridge building world, there are only a few materials and it's easy to see if there's a flaw in them. If you've got a hunk of frayed steel cable, you don't try and wrap it with something to offset the error...you throw away the cable and the vendor eats the cost.
3) In the world of software engineering, the only engineering that occurs in most companies is low level, under the hood stuff. Basic usability design is often provided by non engineers -- marketers and well meaning product managers. This is a bit like relying on the guy who tells you what color to paint the bridge to make structural decisions. Marketers may know what sells, but they don't know what makes good software. And this is one of the main reasons for the dot com bust.
Now, nobody's proved that Time to Market is a factor in product success. In fact, waiting to do something right often proves much better. Apple dropped the ball on usability with the first rev of the Newton, and three years later a more mature Palm destroyed the proposed market for PDAs. Windows based PDAs are finally reaching the point of stability, speed and robustness that they will take the ball and run with it -- after nearly 4 years on the market.
Good software takes time and elegant design. Nuff said.
1) Small or integrated power cable. This is much more important than battery life. If you can build in a transformer that's so small i'm not embarassed to unwind it, there's really no need for battery life above 6 hours. I'm always at least 4 hours from a wall outlet or cigarette lighter.
2) Off-processor or otherwise more efficient multimedia processing. This would allow for a slower, cooler CPU to conserve batery life when not playing mp3s, movies or fancy shmancy games.
3) Full access to the hardware via a standardized API (either CE, Pocket PC or PocketLinux).
4) A microphone jack. Give me a mic jack and a wireless CF card with the ability to log into a GSM cell system and i've already got my cell phone.
5) Seperate peripheral and memory slots. The new Toshiba unit goes a step further than this, with seperate "Secure" digital memory and compactflash peripheral slots, as well as a built in 802.11b slot. That's what I want.
6) Built in "cradle." That is, I'd like a USB / firewire port on the unit and a USB slot on the machine, so that I can use quality, inexpensive USB cable and not the expensive proprietary stuff. If I could draw power from the line to charge up, it's an added plus.
7) 802.11b. Then I won't need a cradle at all:)
For my money, that new Tosh Pocket PC unit is close to perfect. It may offend you "pad & pencil" palm folks and you linux lovers to hear this, but the CE OS is very mature, has a ton of apps, is easy to develop for without heavy licensing costs (even if it is for the evil empire), and has so many genuine choices on the market, eg machines with very different hardware for people with different uses.
As an aside, I feel product placements, as long as they're not forced, are nice. I absolutely hate it when a program has to make up the name of a product. Ex: the first episode of Andy Richter's new show has him eating what are obviously Doritos, and referring to them as "Ranch style taco chips," which was not even funny. If they can make a few grand AND call them by their real name...hey, more power. After all, I don't say "hey, would you gross American style yellow beer?" -- I say "wanna bud?"
I generally use that time to take a big dump. Maybe the RIAA should sue my colon. If I know ahead of time, I can have taco bell for lunch and guarantee a large settlement.
About six months ago, somebody excitedly mentioned that they had successfully ported a webserver to WinCE. And I was thoroughly unimpressed, since the first thing I ever ported to the OS was Apache and it was almost a cakewalk.
Now, somebody has done the exact same thing except they've bound the webserver to a wireless card. Is this worthy of another post? I say thee nay, CorporalBurrito.
Anyway, I think the key here is that you palm kiddies don't understand an important thing about PocketPCs: they are not data managers, they do not simply replace a pad and pencil, they are not neat toys, they are not proof of concept demo pieces. They are PCs that fit in your hand, and anything you can do on a PC and fit into the 320x240 resolution you can do with a palm PC. My Cassiopeia has about the same power and ability of my old Cyrix 166, and I use it to do the same things I used to do -- I play games, I word process, I web browse, I manage files, I play music and movies, I compile programs and so forth. It's not like the palm world, where you're often crippled by the same design requirements that give you your long battery life -- a weak screen, a slow chip, little memory.
Is it impressive that I can play networked Quake and use Java c-s apps and run PostgreSQL and ssh into my server wirelessly from my pocket pc? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Not on your life.
15 years ago, the C64 was still king. Every classroom in my elementary school had one. Many kids had a stack of games that their siblings/cousins/parents had "copied" using Renegade or whatever, but no computer. We would trade disks and hop over to a friend's house to play.
The school held an "activity" period three days a week in which children were allowed to stay after class. Those activity periods became our game time. Soon as classes were over, we'd hunt for a free machine while another group of kids would find the school's joystick. Soon as we found them, we'd LOAD "*",8,1 and start playing. Summer games. GI JOE. Airwolf. We got so many kids staying after that teachers set up reserve sheets for the activity period and we would assign different games to the machines.
Sure, we were playing stolen games. Sure, we probably shouldn't have been doing it in school. But the enthusiasm we had for the computers continued into adulthood. One of our charter members runs a Windows CE contractor in Georgia.
I'm a big supporter of games and their ability to teach. You want to play UT? Well, it'll help you a lot if you first learn how to network some computers, and to know a little about hardware. Playing games encouraged me to learn how to program -- in fact, my first program ever was to make a couple animal sprites dance in a piece of software called "Logo."
Most sports teams in high schools pay for their "improvements" such as new uniforms and bleachers with ticket and concession sales from their games. Our wrestling team had a yearly banquet, the cost of which was wholly offset from bottles of soda we sold during our home matches. And we weren't even a good team.
Textbooks and computers, on the other hand, are not usually the auspice of any "club" and therefore must be paid for with surplus funds, stipends or bond acts. When have you ever seen a bond act for new basketballs? A new fieldhouse, maybe...but fieldhouses bring money from alumns which feeds stipends, etc.
Sure, a lot of teen athletes are failures after high school...so are a lot of computer dorks. Three of the guys from my high school's Tech Model Railroad Club work Joe jobs -- coffee shops, supermarkets and the like. Our star quarterback works for IBM.
Your selective bias may make it seem like high school athletes are failures, but it ain't necessarily so.
Because even though digital projectors and copy protected, digital only movies sounds good from an IP standpoint, when local theatres can't afford it and movies aren't available in middle america the studios will fall back on optical film. It's not good business to alienate the market just because you want to support your own halftruths about content theft...at the end of the day, it's receipts and not soundbites that feed the industry.
Besides, look at the excuse Lucas made for why Ep 2's opening day was so soft..."not enough theatres had digital." Do you think your "Dude, Where's My Car" producers of the world want to reduce their opening draw (of which they keep the lion's share) any more by setting two dates: one for digital, one for optical?
After all, not everybody supports THX or even Dolby. I saw Jay & Silent Bob for $4 at a stereo only theatre in Colorado. I saw the re release of Star Wars in Schenectady on a makeshift projector with a marshall stack. Both theatres were packed with people, and nobody complained about the quality.
Digital film is an expensive solution to a nonexistant problem. Colour me a bright shade of unimpressed (use Pantone, please).
My IT folks love to talk about the mandatory password change. I change my password once every 15 days. It has to include three of four character classes: numeric, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. And finally, it can't be any of your last five changes.
And yet, we've been hacked a few times. How's that possible, you ask? Well, the same IT folks have set up a network that uses plaintext passwords for everything, unless you know how to properly tunnel things.
The draconian password policy has created other difficulties. A few employees have a set list of five passwords that they rotate; one has his written on the calendar. Many of us have password lists under our keyboards, which in an open floor is about as secure as...well, it isn't secure. Finally, the majority of the passwords follow a simple theme: capitalize the first letter, add a numeral to the end. A dictionary attack for that would take what, five minutes?
Rapidly changing passwords are a hassle for everyone but the paranoid, and that makes them insecure based solely on inconvenience. Want a nice, secure password? Change it once every six months (with a reset any time you suspect network funny business) and generate it yourself. Anybody can memorize any password given enough time -- and forcing the change only results in easier to crack passwords.
He's rediscovered nothing. It was Wolfram's tool -- Mathematica -- that gave many burgeoning "chaosticians" the ability to run their simulations. His modern work with CAs, however, goes out of the Mandelbrot era of "this looks neat" and attempts to combine it with quantum mechanics, relativity and general physics.
To suggest that he's merely extending Chaos is to make light of the specifics of what he's attempting to do with it...basically, his urge to legitimize order through disorder and back again mathematics by suggesting it as the generator of more complex (and, conversely, more basic) equations. But, at heart, he is selling a book with lots of math and pretty pictures...looks like Chaos to me.
Way to trump an ingeinous mathematical path to philosophy by saying that it won't be useful in the "real world."
Here's a few unuseful equations that sure make the world more interesting: p=mv e=mc^2 F=Gm1m2/r
The point to Wolfram's search for the equation that generates the universe's "randomness" is that from it can be derived into useful equations. Ain't nobody suggesting he run a "simulation" of life, the universe and everything. For one, it's theoretically impossible to emulate the universe in full detail within itself. For another, it would be prohibitively slow.
Support deal: $100 per seat, maybe $10,000 for a site.
Training: $1000 per user, and it probably won't help if it took them years of hands on to learn Windows. You weren't thinking a $50 CompUSA class, were you?
VMWare: $100 per seat plus the windows license.
Plus the work you lose while the enployees away and when they come back and resist the transition.
Those $200 yearly office upgrades don't look so bad when combined with your $1200 per machine transition costs (plus labor costs and $100 "geeks" working to make Wine work "near perfect").
Tell them you've already cancelled.
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I cancelled an account on a really shitty freelance services (read: website for you to lose business to foreign companies who undercut your price with undermined abilities) asp. It took me three months to figure out how to cancel; there was of course no option to do it online.
When I finally got the guy (via an email to an email from an online email form), I said that I'd already cancelled three months ago and they kept billing me. A lie? Certainly -- but since I hadn't ever used their service and they wouldn't let me leave, they were technically stealing from me. And my mother taught me that theft is worse than falsehood.
They did give me back my $75. Which is more than I can say for my bank (lets call them "El Banquo del Llaves"), which when I quit charge me $290 in overdraft fees because they never turned off my "online bill payment" system. I told the man who called to collect the cash that this was absurd...I had cancelled all the stuff before I cut up my bankbook, just to be sure. "Oh no," he said, "our records show you only cancelled the payees...not the payments. This was all explained in the user agreement you clicked 'yes' too and so you do have to pay the fees. Sucks to be you!" (this last sentance I added for embellishment, because I cannot properly describe his condescending "Read the EULA, idiot" tone. Wait, yes I can. Go to your Pat Burns sysadmin and ask him how to create a shortcut).
Right. Clicked yes. I read all about the legal difference between payees and payments and databases without referential integrity and then consciously made the decision to cancel one and not the other. Sheesh. It's a good thing I'm a highly paid tech worker making the market wage for my skillset(snicker).
And just because you feel it should be so does not give you the right to speak for them. That right belongs to the mother, who is responsible for the life. You have no legal right to take her decision, and no ability short of constant surveilance to be sure she doesn't make it.
All this doctor killing nonsense is the work of ignorant, bloodthirsty individuals who use religion as a scapegoat to support their need for violence and hatred. And to think Jesus taught tolerance and walked with prostitutes (if you think a prostitute did not know and practice abortion in the 1st Century AD, think again)...
If you have a great skillset now and have connections, you can bypass college. Collegiate CS is not all it's cracked up to be -- I went to school for a different subject and am considered an equal with the BS students, at this office anyway. However, it is much easier to get a high base salary or pick up a job with another company if you have that degree, even an associates degree, behind you. It takes a lot of "equivalent experience" (say, five years or so) to equal that in the mind of HR folks.
If you ever intend to be an architect/manager/director/CIO, college will definitely be a boost and may be your only choice, unless you can get in good with a hot startup.
As for your career path...IT and programming are so vastly different in both mood and expectation that I wish they wouldn't get lumped together -- even though their daily tasks may be similar. Programmers answer to managers, but IT folks most often answer to everybody. Programmers are expected to do more problem solving, wheras IT folks are expected to do more solution implementation. And in my opinion, the path that's best for you depends on your outlook on life. Are you a patient optimist with a fervor for new technology? You should program. Are you a solution minded pessimist with a get-it-done attitude? You should be IT. Your outlook is the key to success in computing.
Of course, how hard would that have been if his email address were JLoFan51985@aol.com or his AIM SN was SexyGrl^_^LOL. Most people aren't as concerned with alias maintenance as we 'dotters are. Furthermore, how is this any simpler or more dangerous than a creepy guy following you around the mall, or a prank caller from your math class? If anything, the added layer of specialization needed to get that info will deter all but the most technical predators, and hopefully they have something better to do, like take away Sandra Bullock's identity.
Oh, and feel free to do a goole of das Megabyte. I'm quite proud of some of the stuff out there.
My domains I've had since college have my mother's address listed as the contact. Verisign sent her renewal letters for six of my domains, and she opened one to recycle it, thinking it was junk mail. When she read the "danger of expiry" and "please renew" messages, she jumped in her car & drove them over to my new house -- 40 minutes away.
She had read about claim jumping porn sites and was afraid if I didn't get the letters that I'd lost my websites and thus my paycheck. I have since explained to her that verisign are dicks, nobody in their right mind pays $30 per year for a domain name, and that my registrar (directnic) emails me automatically to renew...i just have to reply to the email. Also, that no technology company that does business via snail mail will be in business long enough to survive.
My poor mother. She thought she was helping me out...and instead she was wasting gas & time thanks to scare tactics from one of the least trustworthy companies in the net world.
My personal favorite warning label came from a huge Vermeer drill (the kind used to drill diagonally under roadways, train tracks, rivers, and other obstructions). It was alongside the high speed shaft that does the actual drilling and showed mr stick figure man WRAPPED AROUND the shaft three or four times.
Of course, this made us boring-gel-cleaners and shaft-connecter-thread-re-greasers somewhat nervous about running in there to clean goopy bore gel and grease up a new drilling shaft. But we were comforted by the vodka the operator liked to put in his iced tea, knowing that if we did get sucked in, we'd probably die quickly because he'd never think to turn off the rotor.
I contend that any "obscure API" that is installed on however many hundreds of millions of copies of windows is not at all obscure.
Example: I am playing around in an "undocumented" networking api through my debugger at work and have noticed that whenever I send a certain control sequence to another api, it crashes my NIC. This means that sending that control sequence on any other machine with the same API will result in similar failure. It's obscure in that I don't know the syntax of the api -- but that doesn't stop me from calling it. In fact, that makes it even more dangerous, because the repair of the API now rests in the hands of a chosen few at MS.
Looking at the 1992 film, I can't help but notice how dumb, ugly, poorly acted and generally embarrassing it is. Faithful representation on $500? Yeah, and for this alone I applaud him. But I don't want to see a cheap faithful representation. Because back when the original script was written, comics had horrid color, no real depth and hackneyed stories. Much as I hate to say it, true believers, I vastly prefer the digitally coloured, dolled up Bendis/Bagley Ultimate Spiderman series that Marvel introduced back in 2000 to the silver age original. Just as I preferred the 1988 "Spiderman" series as drawn by the megalomaniacal Todd McFarlane to its precursors. I want to see "Ultimate Spiderman" on the screen, not "Peter Parker, My Dad's College Roommate." I want to see him face the pressures of modern life, not of stylzed 1950s existance.
Which is why U.S. (the comic) is so great. Marvel's "Ultimates" series is a new "world" that reorigins some of their most popular characters --so that modern fans, like my twelve year old brother, don't have to buy and read through thousands of issues of backstory to get the low down on the characters and their relationships. They've made minor changes to the original stories as well as changed the pacing to more of a serialized "Dawson's Creek" soap opera with action and plot development. Updates such as making Peter Parker the DailyBugle.com's webmaster (and not a teenage photgrapher, which is silly) or making Thor a eco-warrior hippy are minor and do nothing to destroy the mood of characters. This is exactly what comics needs to draw in new readers -- a way to relate them to people of today, not a reminder of the silver age of rehashing pulp novels by dressing middleaged guys in spandex, giving them bad parted haircuts and calling them "teen-agers".
The Spider-man movie is a natural extension of this idea -- bring readers to the comics that are most like the film, and from there move them into the "harder stuff." Hey, it worked for me -- Tim Burton's Batman sold me hard on Frank Miller's Dark Knight stuff and I've had a sub ever since.
There are two classes of malevolent viruses: nuisance viruses, which do nothing more than cause senseless destruction and "make a name" for the author, and voodoo viruses, those looking to use computing resources on a distributed level.
The first class of virus is only useful when it can attach itself to a a wide area of the population, which is why they're always prevalent in "best of breed" software. Windows, Office, IIS and Outlook are arguably easy to write viruses for, but i content that a lot of the shareware and even open source apps out there are just as easy. Hell, my news reader crashes every time i get a connection to my mail port; it'll probably never be fixed because it's just one guy writing it. But the ease of writing isn't the point -- the point is that these software packages are used by many, many people and even a difficult to exploit bug will have far reaching consequences.
For the voodoo writer, it's not the number of machines so much as the class of machine that's important. You want fast computers with fast connections (dumbass site admins help too). This means you want a critical bug with lots of power.
Neither of these class of author will ever write a pda or cell phone virus. Why? Because there are so many different implementations, each markedly different from the others, that an exploit would only apply to a specific phone on a specific provider. I mean, come on! There's not even a unified protocol for ring tones!
Not to mention that everything is processed by a proxy server before it even hits the phone. Result? A few complaints, and then the proxy is updated to save the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
The problems associated with software production are unique in the world of engineering, and are mostly due to the compression of time we used to call "Internet Time." Consider the difference between software engineering and, say, civil engineering, i.e. bridge building.
1) The basic way bridges work have not changed in some time. Suspension bridges all work on the same basic principle. Software, on the other hand, is constantly changing from a theoretical standpoint. In the four years I've worked as a programmer, I've moved from procedural programming to client-server programming to web programming back to procedural (only this time with an object oriented tip) and the outlook is to move into a new paradigm. That's like designing a bridge for six months, then working on a tunnel, then moving up to a tressle.
2) Hardware is constantly changing -- meaning that APIs are constantly changing to add features and products that use those APIs have to change as well to keep "up to date." A bug in the hardware would cause a bug in the api which would cause a bug in products that use it and so on. In the bridge building world, there are only a few materials and it's easy to see if there's a flaw in them. If you've got a hunk of frayed steel cable, you don't try and wrap it with something to offset the error...you throw away the cable and the vendor eats the cost.
3) In the world of software engineering, the only engineering that occurs in most companies is low level, under the hood stuff. Basic usability design is often provided by non engineers -- marketers and well meaning product managers. This is a bit like relying on the guy who tells you what color to paint the bridge to make structural decisions. Marketers may know what sells, but they don't know what makes good software. And this is one of the main reasons for the dot com bust.
Now, nobody's proved that Time to Market is a factor in product success. In fact, waiting to do something right often proves much better. Apple dropped the ball on usability with the first rev of the Newton, and three years later a more mature Palm destroyed the proposed market for PDAs. Windows based PDAs are finally reaching the point of stability, speed and robustness that they will take the ball and run with it -- after nearly 4 years on the market.
Good software takes time and elegant design. Nuff said.
1) Small or integrated power cable. This is much more important than battery life. If you can build in a transformer that's so small i'm not embarassed to unwind it, there's really no need for battery life above 6 hours. I'm always at least 4 hours from a wall outlet or cigarette lighter.
:)
2) Off-processor or otherwise more efficient multimedia processing. This would allow for a slower, cooler CPU to conserve batery life when not playing mp3s, movies or fancy shmancy games.
3) Full access to the hardware via a standardized API (either CE, Pocket PC or PocketLinux).
4) A microphone jack. Give me a mic jack and a wireless CF card with the ability to log into a GSM cell system and i've already got my cell phone.
5) Seperate peripheral and memory slots. The new Toshiba unit goes a step further than this, with seperate "Secure" digital memory and compactflash peripheral slots, as well as a built in 802.11b slot. That's what I want.
6) Built in "cradle." That is, I'd like a USB / firewire port on the unit and a USB slot on the machine, so that I can use quality, inexpensive USB cable and not the expensive proprietary stuff. If I could draw power from the line to charge up, it's an added plus.
7) 802.11b. Then I won't need a cradle at all
For my money, that new Tosh Pocket PC unit is close to perfect. It may offend you "pad & pencil" palm folks and you linux lovers to hear this, but the CE OS is very mature, has a ton of apps, is easy to develop for without heavy licensing costs (even if it is for the evil empire), and has so many genuine choices on the market, eg machines with very different hardware for people with different uses.
I like the idea of Mozilla. But a day after installing it, I'm still using IE. Why? IE is more responsive...and that's what's important to me.
I do use it at home sometimes...but only because the wife hates it, and therefore she never checks my pr0n history (heh).
As an aside, I feel product placements, as long as they're not forced, are nice. I absolutely hate it when a program has to make up the name of a product. Ex: the first episode of Andy Richter's new show has him eating what are obviously Doritos, and referring to them as "Ranch style taco chips," which was not even funny. If they can make a few grand AND call them by their real name...hey, more power. After all, I don't say "hey, would you gross American style yellow beer?" -- I say "wanna bud?"
I generally use that time to take a big dump. Maybe the RIAA should sue my colon. If I know ahead of time, I can have taco bell for lunch and guarantee a large settlement.
About six months ago, somebody excitedly mentioned that they had successfully ported a webserver to WinCE. And I was thoroughly unimpressed, since the first thing I ever ported to the OS was Apache and it was almost a cakewalk.
Now, somebody has done the exact same thing except they've bound the webserver to a wireless card. Is this worthy of another post? I say thee nay, CorporalBurrito.
Anyway, I think the key here is that you palm kiddies don't understand an important thing about PocketPCs: they are not data managers, they do not simply replace a pad and pencil, they are not neat toys, they are not proof of concept demo pieces. They are PCs that fit in your hand, and anything you can do on a PC and fit into the 320x240 resolution you can do with a palm PC. My Cassiopeia has about the same power and ability of my old Cyrix 166, and I use it to do the same things I used to do -- I play games, I word process, I web browse, I manage files, I play music and movies, I compile programs and so forth. It's not like the palm world, where you're often crippled by the same design requirements that give you your long battery life -- a weak screen, a slow chip, little memory.
Is it impressive that I can play networked Quake and use Java c-s apps and run PostgreSQL and ssh into my server wirelessly from my pocket pc? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Not on your life.
15 years ago, the C64 was still king. Every classroom in my elementary school had one. Many kids had a stack of games that their siblings/cousins/parents had "copied" using Renegade or whatever, but no computer. We would trade disks and hop over to a friend's house to play.
The school held an "activity" period three days a week in which children were allowed to stay after class. Those activity periods became our game time. Soon as classes were over, we'd hunt for a free machine while another group of kids would find the school's joystick. Soon as we found them, we'd LOAD "*",8,1 and start playing. Summer games. GI JOE. Airwolf. We got so many kids staying after that teachers set up reserve sheets for the activity period and we would assign different games to the machines.
Sure, we were playing stolen games. Sure, we probably shouldn't have been doing it in school. But the enthusiasm we had for the computers continued into adulthood. One of our charter members runs a Windows CE contractor in Georgia.
I'm a big supporter of games and their ability to teach. You want to play UT? Well, it'll help you a lot if you first learn how to network some computers, and to know a little about hardware. Playing games encouraged me to learn how to program -- in fact, my first program ever was to make a couple animal sprites dance in a piece of software called "Logo."
Most sports teams in high schools pay for their "improvements" such as new uniforms and bleachers with ticket and concession sales from their games. Our wrestling team had a yearly banquet, the cost of which was wholly offset from bottles of soda we sold during our home matches. And we weren't even a good team.
Textbooks and computers, on the other hand, are not usually the auspice of any "club" and therefore must be paid for with surplus funds, stipends or bond acts. When have you ever seen a bond act for new basketballs? A new fieldhouse, maybe...but fieldhouses bring money from alumns which feeds stipends, etc.
Sure, a lot of teen athletes are failures after high school...so are a lot of computer dorks. Three of the guys from my high school's Tech Model Railroad Club work Joe jobs -- coffee shops, supermarkets and the like. Our star quarterback works for IBM.
Your selective bias may make it seem like high school athletes are failures, but it ain't necessarily so.
Because even though digital projectors and copy protected, digital only movies sounds good from an IP standpoint, when local theatres can't afford it and movies aren't available in middle america the studios will fall back on optical film. It's not good business to alienate the market just because you want to support your own halftruths about content theft...at the end of the day, it's receipts and not soundbites that feed the industry.
Besides, look at the excuse Lucas made for why Ep 2's opening day was so soft..."not enough theatres had digital." Do you think your "Dude, Where's My Car" producers of the world want to reduce their opening draw (of which they keep the lion's share) any more by setting two dates: one for digital, one for optical?
After all, not everybody supports THX or even Dolby. I saw Jay & Silent Bob for $4 at a stereo only theatre in Colorado. I saw the re release of Star Wars in Schenectady on a makeshift projector with a marshall stack. Both theatres were packed with people, and nobody complained about the quality.
Digital film is an expensive solution to a nonexistant problem. Colour me a bright shade of unimpressed (use Pantone, please).
My IT folks love to talk about the mandatory password change. I change my password once every 15 days. It has to include three of four character classes: numeric, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. And finally, it can't be any of your last five changes.
And yet, we've been hacked a few times. How's that possible, you ask? Well, the same IT folks have set up a network that uses plaintext passwords for everything, unless you know how to properly tunnel things.
The draconian password policy has created other difficulties. A few employees have a set list of five passwords that they rotate; one has his written on the calendar. Many of us have password lists under our keyboards, which in an open floor is about as secure as...well, it isn't secure. Finally, the majority of the passwords follow a simple theme: capitalize the first letter, add a numeral to the end. A dictionary attack for that would take what, five minutes?
Rapidly changing passwords are a hassle for everyone but the paranoid, and that makes them insecure based solely on inconvenience. Want a nice, secure password? Change it once every six months (with a reset any time you suspect network funny business) and generate it yourself. Anybody can memorize any password given enough time -- and forcing the change only results in easier to crack passwords.
He's rediscovered nothing. It was Wolfram's tool -- Mathematica -- that gave many burgeoning "chaosticians" the ability to run their simulations. His modern work with CAs, however, goes out of the Mandelbrot era of "this looks neat" and attempts to combine it with quantum mechanics, relativity and general physics.
To suggest that he's merely extending Chaos is to make light of the specifics of what he's attempting to do with it...basically, his urge to legitimize order through disorder and back again mathematics by suggesting it as the generator of more complex (and, conversely, more basic) equations. But, at heart, he is selling a book with lots of math and pretty pictures...looks like Chaos to me.
Way to trump an ingeinous mathematical path to philosophy by saying that it won't be useful in the "real world."
Here's a few unuseful equations that sure make the world more interesting:
p=mv
e=mc^2
F=Gm1m2/r
The point to Wolfram's search for the equation that generates the universe's "randomness" is that from it can be derived into useful equations. Ain't nobody suggesting he run a "simulation" of life, the universe and everything. For one, it's theoretically impossible to emulate the universe in full detail within itself. For another, it would be prohibitively slow.
Great. Way to make things cheaper, ace.
Support deal: $100 per seat, maybe $10,000 for a site.
Training: $1000 per user, and it probably won't help if it took them years of hands on to learn Windows. You weren't thinking a $50 CompUSA class, were you?
VMWare: $100 per seat plus the windows license.
Plus the work you lose while the enployees away and when they come back and resist the transition.
Those $200 yearly office upgrades don't look so bad when combined with your $1200 per machine transition costs (plus labor costs and $100 "geeks" working to make Wine work "near perfect").
I cancelled an account on a really shitty freelance services (read: website for you to lose business to foreign companies who undercut your price with undermined abilities) asp. It took me three months to figure out how to cancel; there was of course no option to do it online.
When I finally got the guy (via an email to an email from an online email form), I said that I'd already cancelled three months ago and they kept billing me. A lie? Certainly -- but since I hadn't ever used their service and they wouldn't let me leave, they were technically stealing from me. And my mother taught me that theft is worse than falsehood.
They did give me back my $75. Which is more than I can say for my bank (lets call them "El Banquo del Llaves"), which when I quit charge me $290 in overdraft fees because they never turned off my "online bill payment" system. I told the man who called to collect the cash that this was absurd...I had cancelled all the stuff before I cut up my bankbook, just to be sure. "Oh no," he said, "our records show you only cancelled the payees...not the payments. This was all explained in the user agreement you clicked 'yes' too and so you do have to pay the fees. Sucks to be you!" (this last sentance I added for embellishment, because I cannot properly describe his condescending "Read the EULA, idiot" tone. Wait, yes I can. Go to your Pat Burns sysadmin and ask him how to create a shortcut).
Right. Clicked yes. I read all about the legal difference between payees and payments and databases without referential integrity and then consciously made the decision to cancel one and not the other. Sheesh. It's a good thing I'm a highly paid tech worker making the market wage for my skillset(snicker).
And just because you feel it should be so does not give you the right to speak for them. That right belongs to the mother, who is responsible for the life. You have no legal right to take her decision, and no ability short of constant surveilance to be sure she doesn't make it.
All this doctor killing nonsense is the work of ignorant, bloodthirsty individuals who use religion as a scapegoat to support their need for violence and hatred. And to think Jesus taught tolerance and walked with prostitutes (if you think a prostitute did not know and practice abortion in the 1st Century AD, think again)...
If you have a great skillset now and have connections, you can bypass college. Collegiate CS is not all it's cracked up to be -- I went to school for a different subject and am considered an equal with the BS students, at this office anyway. However, it is much easier to get a high base salary or pick up a job with another company if you have that degree, even an associates degree, behind you. It takes a lot of "equivalent experience" (say, five years or so) to equal that in the mind of HR folks.
If you ever intend to be an architect/manager/director/CIO, college will definitely be a boost and may be your only choice, unless you can get in good with a hot startup.
As for your career path...IT and programming are so vastly different in both mood and expectation that I wish they wouldn't get lumped together -- even though their daily tasks may be similar. Programmers answer to managers, but IT folks most often answer to everybody. Programmers are expected to do more problem solving, wheras IT folks are expected to do more solution implementation. And in my opinion, the path that's best for you depends on your outlook on life. Are you a patient optimist with a fervor for new technology? You should program. Are you a solution minded pessimist with a get-it-done attitude? You should be IT. Your outlook is the key to success in computing.
It was baklava, but you get the idea.
So, he did the right thing and told you, and for this you took away his rights?
Way to reward responsibility. I don't know anything about you, but it sounds like you people suck.
(5) Cling to them. It will make them like you more.
(6) Be paranoid. Kids respect unfounded fears.
(7) Tell them what they can and can't do, because you know best. Teenagers especially have great respect for authority.
(8) By all means, don't let them make their own mistakes. That's not how we learn.
Great job!
Of course, how hard would that have been if his email address were JLoFan51985@aol.com or his AIM SN was SexyGrl^_^LOL. Most people aren't as concerned with alias maintenance as we 'dotters are. Furthermore, how is this any simpler or more dangerous than a creepy guy following you around the mall, or a prank caller from your math class? If anything, the added layer of specialization needed to get that info will deter all but the most technical predators, and hopefully they have something better to do, like take away Sandra Bullock's identity.
Oh, and feel free to do a goole of das Megabyte. I'm quite proud of some of the stuff out there.
My domains I've had since college have my mother's address listed as the contact. Verisign sent her renewal letters for six of my domains, and she opened one to recycle it, thinking it was junk mail. When she read the "danger of expiry" and "please renew" messages, she jumped in her car & drove them over to my new house -- 40 minutes away.
She had read about claim jumping porn sites and was afraid if I didn't get the letters that I'd lost my websites and thus my paycheck. I have since explained to her that verisign are dicks, nobody in their right mind pays $30 per year for a domain name, and that my registrar (directnic) emails me automatically to renew...i just have to reply to the email. Also, that no technology company that does business via snail mail will be in business long enough to survive.
My poor mother. She thought she was helping me out...and instead she was wasting gas & time thanks to scare tactics from one of the least trustworthy companies in the net world.
My personal favorite warning label came from a huge Vermeer drill (the kind used to drill diagonally under roadways, train tracks, rivers, and other obstructions). It was alongside the high speed shaft that does the actual drilling and showed mr stick figure man WRAPPED AROUND the shaft three or four times.
Of course, this made us boring-gel-cleaners and shaft-connecter-thread-re-greasers somewhat nervous about running in there to clean goopy bore gel and grease up a new drilling shaft. But we were comforted by the vodka the operator liked to put in his iced tea, knowing that if we did get sucked in, we'd probably die quickly because he'd never think to turn off the rotor.
I contend that any "obscure API" that is installed on however many hundreds of millions of copies of windows is not at all obscure.
Example: I am playing around in an "undocumented" networking api through my debugger at work and have noticed that whenever I send a certain control sequence to another api, it crashes my NIC. This means that sending that control sequence on any other machine with the same API will result in similar failure. It's obscure in that I don't know the syntax of the api -- but that doesn't stop me from calling it. In fact, that makes it even more dangerous, because the repair of the API now rests in the hands of a chosen few at MS.
Looking at the 1992 film, I can't help but notice how dumb, ugly, poorly acted and generally embarrassing it is. Faithful representation on $500? Yeah, and for this alone I applaud him. But I don't want to see a cheap faithful representation. Because back when the original script was written, comics had horrid color, no real depth and hackneyed stories. Much as I hate to say it, true believers, I vastly prefer the digitally coloured, dolled up Bendis/Bagley Ultimate Spiderman series that Marvel introduced back in 2000 to the silver age original. Just as I preferred the 1988 "Spiderman" series as drawn by the megalomaniacal Todd McFarlane to its precursors. I want to see "Ultimate Spiderman" on the screen, not "Peter Parker, My Dad's College Roommate." I want to see him face the pressures of modern life, not of stylzed 1950s existance.
Which is why U.S. (the comic) is so great. Marvel's "Ultimates" series is a new "world" that reorigins some of their most popular characters --so that modern fans, like my twelve year old brother, don't have to buy and read through thousands of issues of backstory to get the low down on the characters and their relationships. They've made minor changes to the original stories as well as changed the pacing to more of a serialized "Dawson's Creek" soap opera with action and plot development. Updates such as making Peter Parker the DailyBugle.com's webmaster (and not a teenage photgrapher, which is silly) or making Thor a eco-warrior hippy are minor and do nothing to destroy the mood of characters. This is exactly what comics needs to draw in new readers -- a way to relate them to people of today, not a reminder of the silver age of rehashing pulp novels by dressing middleaged guys in spandex, giving them bad parted haircuts and calling them "teen-agers".
The Spider-man movie is a natural extension of this idea -- bring readers to the comics that are most like the film, and from there move them into the "harder stuff." Hey, it worked for me -- Tim Burton's Batman sold me hard on Frank Miller's Dark Knight stuff and I've had a sub ever since.
There are two classes of malevolent viruses: nuisance viruses, which do nothing more than cause senseless destruction and "make a name" for the author, and voodoo viruses, those looking to use computing resources on a distributed level.
The first class of virus is only useful when it can attach itself to a a wide area of the population, which is why they're always prevalent in "best of breed" software. Windows, Office, IIS and Outlook are arguably easy to write viruses for, but i content that a lot of the shareware and even open source apps out there are just as easy. Hell, my news reader crashes every time i get a connection to my mail port; it'll probably never be fixed because it's just one guy writing it. But the ease of writing isn't the point -- the point is that these software packages are used by many, many people and even a difficult to exploit bug will have far reaching consequences.
For the voodoo writer, it's not the number of machines so much as the class of machine that's important. You want fast computers with fast connections (dumbass site admins help too). This means you want a critical bug with lots of power.
Neither of these class of author will ever write a pda or cell phone virus. Why? Because there are so many different implementations, each markedly different from the others, that an exploit would only apply to a specific phone on a specific provider. I mean, come on! There's not even a unified protocol for ring tones!
Not to mention that everything is processed by a proxy server before it even hits the phone. Result? A few complaints, and then the proxy is updated to save the phone.
I love FUD.