I sent a postcard to the Mail Preference Service about three months ago.
The long distance Telephone company I use (Working Assets) tries to differentiate itself by being environmentally- (and, to my dismay, socially-) responsible.
Anyways, Working Assets sent this pre-addressed postcard to its subscribers, saying, "Hey! If you want to reduce junk mail and save trees, fill out and send in this postcard!" It sounded cool to me, so I filled out and sent in the postcard.
In the past few months, I have indeed noticed a change in the junk mail I receive. Make no mistake, I STILL GET JUNK MAIL. But now the mail is almost entirely companies with which I've had some interaction. Like, I ordered a gift of scented soap from a mailorder catalog 2 years ago, now I have a "relationship" with them and they try to sell me scented soap every month or so.
Whatever...it amuses me that these organizations take the trouble and expense to mail me paper which I immediately recycle without looking at it. Every few weeks I take out a big, heavy, grocery sack full of the ex-junk-mail to be recycled. Taken as a single whole, it would cost a hell of a lot to mail in one package.
Anyway, I used the service, and it made a slight difference. But make no mistake -- you'll still get junk mail, people....
What a great blockbuster Cryptonomicon would make...!
The movie could go into all the details of how wipe deletes data irrecoverably from hard drives, the Perl implementation of the Solitaire crypto, the way the window manager and keyboard were hacked to prevent shoulder surfing while the protagonist was in prison...
Hell, If that's not a mass-appeal blockbuster, I don't know what is!
From an interview with Gentry Lee in the January 1997 issue of SFX magazine:
"RAMA II should be by Arthur C.Clarke and Gentry Lee, the Garden of RAMA should be by Gentry Lee and Arthur C. Clarke, and RAMA Revealed should be by Gentry Lee."
Has anyone tried using the Loopback Encrypted Filesystems under 2.4? These require a patch to the kernel (which you can obtain from kerneli.org) and I was just wondering if anyone has a success (or horror) story.
BTW, the loopback encrypted filesystem has been working great in my 2.2.16 kernel, I *highly* recommend encrypting your hard drives (what if your computer gets stolen?) If yer interested, see the HOWTO
This is a rare case where a "Me, Too!" is in fact useful (I hope). Mr. O'Reilly, behold the truckloads of slashdotter Perl-lovers (er, like me) who are willing to queue up to pay money for The Perl Journal.
I Love TPJ. I Love Perl. Hell, I also loved all the Perl Conferences and most of the O'Reilly books (Perl or otherwise).
Please, fellow slashdotters -- join me in encouraging O'Reilly to Do The Right Thing.
The reasoning behind it is that the testing is to be performed under VERY precisely defined & controlled conditions, to prevent unscrupulous people from skewing the data.
In light of the Mindcraft debacle, most slashdotters should be able to at least understand the motivation involved, if not the practice itself.
Imagine using two computers for a database benchmark, but using a *slightly* different model hard drive in one (from the very same drive vendor, even) but with a 10% slower seek time. You better bet that benchmark will be skewed, and it would be HIGHLY unlikely anyone would catch it.
Everyone knows Ellison shoots his mouth off -- a lot. On the other hand, personally, I have more respect for the guy with cojones than whiny Bill threatening to sue.
God, threatening to sue. Pathetic. That's a sure indicator, Bill's panicking.
Anyway, I work for Oracle but don't speak for them, etc.
Ummm... a BIOS password is less then useless. Just take out the hard drive and read it with another laptop.
Okay, yeah, it's very "trendy" to say, "encryption alone won't make your laptop secure". But that's like saying "door locks alone won't make your house secure". The truth is, without an encrypted filesystem, your data will NEVER been secure. Period.
Oracle is a pretty heavy Unix shop. The URL for the internship program gives some typical internship openings, several of which explicitly give "UNIX" as one of the key technical areas: http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_sam. html
Agreed.
For you and I, we want a more creative, subtle role. But that is *NOT* for everybody.
I've never worked as a typist, but I've known some typists who became kick-ass Solaris admins. And after some years, some go on to become Oracle DBAs -- definitely not my cup of tea, but a lot more palatable than typing documents into Word or Framemaker all day for years on end!!
> I'm a little bothered by your association of "interesting things" with "the things that a company will pay you to do."
Okay, how about "interetsing" == "relevant to real people in the real world". You know, medical systems that help sick people, embedded systems that make cars burn cleaner, that kind of thing. Market economics makes this also correlate with "things people will give you money to do". "Companies" are, in fact, groups of people.
Personally, I get involved with system design a lot, and a formal education was very useful in teaching me how to think critically. Don't think I'm saying college is inherently bad, anything but!
Look, much of a job is what the person makes of it. Let's say I give an implementation task to two people, Mary and John. John is a drone and kludges together something that works but is inelegant and will probably have to be redesigned when requirements change. Mary, on the other hand, writes a library of extremely generic, useful routines, uses a bunch of existing libraries, and makes a modular work of art that will last for years. Over time, John will find himself assigned with more mundane tasks and Mary will find herself assigned with more complex, abstract, creative tasks.
My point here is that the employee is at least 50% responsible if they have a drone job.
By the way, I consider myself a coder and an artist. Maybe not a really good artist, but I can at least appreciate and respect great art when I see it. Good code is not *like* poetry; good code IS poetry. One red-flag in my book is when I interview someone and they tell me the "don't want to be a coder". That means this person will not product much creative output.
> if you would like to meet smart people, learn interesting things, and get a leg up on a future career in your free time, then give college a chance
BZZZT! Wrong, my friend.
If you want to not only meet, but work intimately and learn from an incredible array of VERY smart people, get a job at a high-tech company and become part of a team.
If you want to learn INTERESTING things, help design a Perl module using XS. Put five different flavors of Unix, NT, and OS/390 on the same network. Design a database schema that will actually have people using it to get their work done.
If you want to learn BORING things, take that CS361 class on fifty different numerical methods for finding the derivative of a made-up function. Yawn.
If you want to get a leg up on a future career, start doing INTERESTING things now, 'cause they're the things a company will pay you to do!
I've been a software development manager for about 6 years now. In my experience, it is generally the case that the *best* people to hire are people who love IT and who taught themselves how to do things with minimal formal education. The *worst* people to hire have a Ph.D. from an Ivy-league school.
Ex-auto-mechanics, ex-army-soldiers, and ex-secretaries have worked out fantastically. IF, of course, these people have the right personal attitude: it helps if you're kind of a bastard, if you're used to having to fight your way through life, then you'll do great as a Unix sysadmin. Depending on the person's ability to work with subtle abstractions, they may also do very well as programmers, though it usually takes 1-2 years of experience to come up to speed.
People with a 4.0 GPA from an Ivy-League school? I'm sorry, but forget it! These are typically people who are not used to actually solving real problems. They know why the problem can't be solved. They spend endless days thinking about why it can't be solved while the ex-truck-driver keeps trying things and refuses to that that god-damned computer get the better of him!
Of course, if it's a senior software architect (who may do more thinking and designing than coding), that's a different game. But typically I need only a few Alpha-Thinkers, whereas I need many more Sysadmins, implementers, testers, bug-fixers, porters, and small-feature-implementers.
Re:We can't vote on every single thing...
on
Inside Echelon
·
· Score: 1
The problem with the DemoPol is that it elevates mediocrity. -Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
That's "Democratic Poll", as in "everybody votes on everything".
Americans (of which I am one) have some strange belief that if enough people vote, somehow the optimal solution will be selected, independent of whether the people who vote are capable of making rational choices.
Think about what the signal-to-noise ratio would be like on Slashdot if everyone got to moderate equally. (Hint: think seeing "penis bird" content while browsing at +4)
Personally, I like the suggestion Kurt Vonnegut had: when you go into the voting booth, you're presented with a simple quadratic equation with small, positive, integer roots. Input the two correct integers to proceed....
This is especially annoying if, like me, you use a voicemail service! Most of my voicemails are 5 seconds of "background telemarketing warehouse" noise (a million "Hello, Mr. Jones? My name is..." in the background)
> Have experience with chronic bullying and drug use
"chronic bullying" is 100% orthogonal to "drug use".
Yeah, yeah, the theory goes that the kid gets picked on and starts doing drugs to "escape". Anybody here fit that profile? No way!
Much more likely: "above-average intelligence" kid *reads* about mind-altering drugs and psychology, becomes interested, and like a good Future Scientist, does some experiments and finds out there's a lot to learn by experimenting!
I'd say that's pretty much unrelated to the fact that No-Neck the Football Star gives abovementioned kid a wedgie in gym class...
> Who defines the questions that define you as a member of the voting elite?
Well, I like Kurt Vonnegut's semi-facetious suggestion: upon entering the voting booth, you are presented with a simple binomial equation, one with distinct small-valued integer roots. Provide the roots and make your votes!
More seriously, I can easily imagine a few multiple-choice questions that, if you don't know the answer right away, you *should not* vote.
Example:
"The conditions most likely to preceed a Dictatorship are: A) Prosperity, everyone has a job and money B) Recession, some people are out of work C) Chaos, society breaking down, nobody in control"
Frank Herbert explored this concept in "The Dosadi Experiment" He called it the DemoPol (Short for 'Democratic Poll', I think). His basic observation was that a "pure" democracy serves to elevate mediocrity.
Quite right. Already we allow anyone to vote, whether or not they have spent even 5 seconds thinking rationally about the issue.
Americans seem to think that, by magic, if enough people would just vote, somehow the "correct" decision or candidate will prevail. How hopelessly wrong!
Intentionally or not, you are a role model for a certain type of kid/teen-ager -- the kind of kid who prefers to write code than to watch TV or play football. [Fifteen years ago, when I was in that stage, it wasn't chic to be a geek and there really weren't contemporary role models...]
Do you get contacted by young people looking for guidance / validation / advice? What's your reaction? Give us some interesting anecdotes. Also, do you have any sort of general words of advice for the young programmers of today? (go ahead, pontificate, here's an excellent opportunity)
As a previous poster said, ANYTHING can be made more-or less "invisible", simply by hard-coding a hack into the tool that you use to "see" with. In *nix, you might recompile ps to that 'my_superroot' never shows up in the output.
Then replace the real ps with it, set its timestamp back, and viola. Hell, you can even hack 'ls' so that it always reports the right size and timestamp for the 'ps' program (and ls itself, of course). The above examples are not *nix-specific, the same method applies to process viewer -- or, hell, the.DLLs it relies on for system information!
MORAL: Once someone has "administrator" (root) on your system, it's only a matter of how bad they want to f&*% you.
> There's no reason for anyone to work 50-60 hours per week, unless they own the business they're > building up. Programmers who work insane hours week after week are simply helping their > employer get away with not hiring the true number of people required to do the work > assigned.
Or.. gasp!... the people working 50+ hours a week really believe in what they are doing. And / or, they (okay, *we*) really enjoy coding for its own sake.
Sure, I could make tons more money (like: double my salary) if I wanted to get paid by the hour. If I wanted to let someone else tell me what to code. Most people make a (possibly unconcious) minimax calculation involving $$ income, freedom of what to work on, creative input, and how fast the computers will be (I probably would not be using Sun Ultra Enterprise E4000 servers if I worked for a 6-person startup).
If you are writing software in exchange for money but don't totally love what you're doing: duh, find a new job, one you *do* love.
I'd be working at least 60 hours a week even if I won $100 million in the lottery tomorrow. Granted, I might or might not work for a salary at that point. But I *would* be doing what I love. Programming. Software Engineering. Designing. And if it happens to be the case that an already- existing company is working on what I am most interested in working on -- I'm there!
Even among those of us who do code (for a living, even) some people have extra experience with, say, documentation or testing issues, which can also be lent toward the 'free-source' project of your choice.
Just answering posts on usenet is a big help to the community - provided they are clear, concise, well-researched posts. Things like, "yeah, I had that problem too, and doing this fixed it".
I can certainly vouch that lots of people here (I work at Oracle) run Linux. 1400 machines, in my completely unofficial personal opinion, is probably all that they had "officially" found, not at all the actual number!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The long distance Telephone company I use (Working Assets) tries to differentiate itself by being environmentally- (and, to my dismay, socially-) responsible.
Anyways, Working Assets sent this pre-addressed postcard to its subscribers, saying, "Hey! If you want to reduce junk mail and save trees, fill out and send in this postcard!" It sounded cool to me, so I filled out and sent in the postcard.
In the past few months, I have indeed noticed a change in the junk mail I receive. Make no mistake, I STILL GET JUNK MAIL. But now the mail is almost entirely companies with which I've had some interaction. Like, I ordered a gift of scented soap from a mailorder catalog 2 years ago, now I have a "relationship" with them and they try to sell me scented soap every month or so.
Whatever...it amuses me that these organizations take the trouble and expense to mail me paper which I immediately recycle without looking at it. Every few weeks I take out a big, heavy, grocery sack full of the ex-junk-mail to be recycled. Taken as a single whole, it would cost a hell of a lot to mail in one package.
Anyway, I used the service, and it made a slight difference. But make no mistake -- you'll still get junk mail, people....
The movie could go into all the details of how wipe deletes data irrecoverably from hard drives, the Perl implementation of the Solitaire crypto, the way the window manager and keyboard were hacked to prevent shoulder surfing while the protagonist was in prison...
Hell, If that's not a mass-appeal blockbuster, I don't know what is!
(Okay, I'm done being sarcastic for the moment.)
BTW, the loopback encrypted filesystem has been working great in my 2.2.16 kernel, I *highly* recommend encrypting your hard drives (what if your computer gets stolen?) If yer interested, see the HOWTO
This is a rare case where a "Me, Too!" is in fact useful (I hope). Mr. O'Reilly, behold the truckloads of slashdotter Perl-lovers (er, like me) who are willing to queue up to pay money for The Perl Journal.
I Love TPJ. I Love Perl. Hell, I also loved all the Perl Conferences and most of the O'Reilly books (Perl or otherwise).
Please, fellow slashdotters -- join me in encouraging O'Reilly to Do The Right Thing.
The reasoning behind it is that the testing is to be performed under VERY precisely defined & controlled conditions, to prevent unscrupulous people from skewing the data.
In light of the Mindcraft debacle, most slashdotters should be able to at least understand the motivation involved, if not the practice itself.
Imagine using two computers for a database benchmark, but using a *slightly* different model hard drive in one (from the very same drive vendor, even) but with a 10% slower seek time. You better bet that benchmark will be skewed, and it would be HIGHLY unlikely anyone would catch it.
Everyone knows Ellison shoots his mouth off -- a lot. On the other hand, personally, I have more respect for the guy with cojones than whiny Bill threatening to sue.
God, threatening to sue. Pathetic. That's a sure indicator, Bill's panicking.
Anyway, I work for Oracle but don't speak for them, etc.
That doesn't follow. You can always use low-level tools to write a new boot sector and then read the data on the drive.
;-)
If the drive really is locked via firmware, that would make it non-trivially harder
Ummm... a BIOS password is less then useless. Just take out the hard drive and read it with another laptop.
Okay, yeah, it's very "trendy" to say, "encryption alone won't make your laptop secure". But that's like saying "door locks alone won't make your house secure". The truth is, without an encrypted filesystem, your data will NEVER been secure. Period.
http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_sam. html
and the Internships page itself:
http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_int.html
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle and like it here, so I am probably biased!
Agreed.
For you and I, we want a more creative, subtle role. But that is *NOT* for everybody.
I've never worked as a typist, but I've known some typists who became kick-ass Solaris admins. And after some years, some go on to become Oracle DBAs -- definitely not my cup of tea, but a lot more palatable than typing documents into Word or Framemaker all day for years on end!!
> I'm a little bothered by your association of "interesting things" with "the things that a company will pay you to do."
Okay, how about "interetsing" == "relevant to real people in the real world". You know, medical systems that help sick people, embedded systems that make cars burn cleaner, that kind of thing. Market economics makes this also correlate with "things people will give you money to do". "Companies" are, in fact, groups of people.
Personally, I get involved with system design a lot, and a formal education was very useful in teaching me how to think critically. Don't think I'm saying college is inherently bad, anything but!
Look, much of a job is what the person makes of it. Let's say I give an implementation task to two people, Mary and John. John is a drone and kludges together something that works but is inelegant and will probably have to be redesigned when requirements change. Mary, on the other hand, writes a library of extremely generic, useful routines, uses a bunch of existing libraries, and makes a modular work of art that will last for years. Over time, John will find himself assigned with more mundane tasks and Mary will find herself assigned with more complex, abstract, creative tasks.
My point here is that the employee is at least 50% responsible if they have a drone job.
By the way, I consider myself a coder and an artist. Maybe not a really good artist, but I can at least appreciate and respect great art when I see it. Good code is not *like* poetry; good code IS poetry. One red-flag in my book is when I interview someone and they tell me the "don't want to be a coder". That means this person will not product much creative output.
> if you would like to meet smart people, learn interesting things, and get a leg up on a future career in your free time, then give college a chance
BZZZT! Wrong, my friend.
If you want to not only meet, but work intimately and learn from an incredible array of VERY smart people, get a job at a high-tech company and become part of a team.
If you want to learn INTERESTING things, help design a Perl module using XS. Put five different flavors of Unix, NT, and OS/390 on the same network. Design a database schema that will actually have people using it to get their work done.
If you want to learn BORING things, take that CS361 class on fifty different numerical methods for finding the derivative of a made-up function. Yawn.
If you want to get a leg up on a future career, start doing INTERESTING things now, 'cause they're the things a company will pay you to do!
I've been a software development manager for about 6 years now. In my experience, it is generally the case that the *best* people to hire are people who love IT and who taught themselves how to do things with minimal formal education. The *worst* people to hire have a Ph.D. from an Ivy-league school.
Ex-auto-mechanics, ex-army-soldiers, and ex-secretaries have worked out fantastically. IF, of course, these people have the right personal attitude: it helps if you're kind of a bastard, if you're used to having to fight your way through life, then you'll do great as a Unix sysadmin. Depending on the person's ability to work with subtle abstractions, they may also do very well as programmers, though it usually takes 1-2 years of experience to come up to speed.
People with a 4.0 GPA from an Ivy-League school? I'm sorry, but forget it! These are typically people who are not used to actually solving real problems. They know why the problem can't be solved. They spend endless days thinking about why it can't be solved while the ex-truck-driver keeps trying things and refuses to that that god-damned computer get the better of him!
Of course, if it's a senior software architect (who may do more thinking and designing than coding), that's a different game. But typically I need only a few Alpha-Thinkers, whereas I need many more Sysadmins, implementers, testers, bug-fixers, porters, and small-feature-implementers.
-Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
That's "Democratic Poll", as in "everybody votes on everything".
Americans (of which I am one) have some strange belief that if enough people vote, somehow the optimal solution will be selected, independent of whether the people who vote are capable of making rational choices.
Think about what the signal-to-noise ratio would be like on Slashdot if everyone got to moderate equally. (Hint: think seeing "penis bird" content while browsing at +4)
Personally, I like the suggestion Kurt Vonnegut had: when you go into the voting booth, you're presented with a simple quadratic equation with small, positive, integer roots. Input the two correct integers to proceed....
As John Lithgow's character yelled in the movie _2010_:
"It's Shrinking! It's Shrinking!"
Seriously, when the Microsofties all cash in their options to save what real cash they can, this will do more damage than the DoJ ever could.
This is especially annoying if, like me, you use a voicemail service! Most of my voicemails are 5 seconds of "background telemarketing warehouse" noise (a million "Hello, Mr. Jones? My name is..." in the background)
#define rant 1
ClearCase *used* to be a great product.. Rational bought it, and it's stagnated BIG TIME over the past 3 years.
Remember Clear Track? KILLED by Rational software.
Clear Guide? KILLED by Rational software.
Pure DDTS? Same thing. KILLED by Rational software.
Rational is A *?&^ Microsoft wannabe. They innovate NOTHING, they merely SWALLOW great products and turn them into uninspired MUSH.
The difference is only that Rational has had a somewhat more discerning palate, and have generally swallowed better products than M$ has.
Thanks, I feel better now.
> Have experience with chronic bullying and drug use
"chronic bullying" is 100% orthogonal to "drug use".
Yeah, yeah, the theory goes that the kid gets picked on and starts doing drugs to "escape". Anybody here fit that profile? No way!
Much more likely: "above-average intelligence" kid *reads* about mind-altering drugs and psychology, becomes interested, and like a good Future Scientist, does some experiments and finds out there's a lot to learn by experimenting!
I'd say that's pretty much unrelated to the fact that No-Neck the Football Star gives abovementioned kid a wedgie in gym class...
> Who defines the questions that define you as a member of the voting elite?
Well, I like Kurt Vonnegut's semi-facetious suggestion: upon entering the voting booth, you are presented with a simple binomial equation, one with distinct small-valued integer roots. Provide the roots and make your votes!
More seriously, I can easily imagine a few multiple-choice questions that, if you don't know the answer right away, you *should not* vote.
Example:
"The conditions most likely to preceed a Dictatorship are:
A) Prosperity, everyone has a job and money
B) Recession, some people are out of work
C) Chaos, society breaking down, nobody in control"
Frank Herbert explored this concept in "The Dosadi Experiment" He called it the DemoPol (Short for 'Democratic Poll', I think). His basic observation was that a "pure" democracy serves to elevate mediocrity.
Quite right. Already we allow anyone to vote, whether or not they have spent even 5 seconds thinking rationally about the issue.
Americans seem to think that, by magic, if enough people would just vote, somehow the "correct" decision or candidate will prevail. How hopelessly wrong!
Intentionally or not, you are a role model for a certain type of kid/teen-ager -- the kind of kid who prefers to write code than to watch TV or play football. [Fifteen years ago, when I was in that stage, it wasn't chic to be a geek and there really weren't contemporary role models...]
Do you get contacted by young people looking for guidance / validation / advice? What's your reaction? Give us some interesting anecdotes. Also, do you have any sort of general words of advice for the young programmers of today? (go ahead, pontificate, here's an excellent opportunity)
Au contraire.
.DLLs it relies on for system information!
As a previous poster said, ANYTHING can be made more-or less "invisible", simply by hard-coding a hack into the tool that you use to "see" with. In *nix, you might recompile ps to that 'my_superroot' never shows up in the output.
Then replace the real ps with it, set its timestamp back, and viola. Hell, you can even hack 'ls' so that it always reports the right size and timestamp for the 'ps' program (and ls itself, of course). The above examples are not *nix-specific, the same method applies to process viewer -- or, hell, the
MORAL: Once someone has "administrator" (root) on your system, it's only a matter of how bad they want to f&*% you.
> There's no reason for anyone to work 50-60 hours per week, unless they own the business they're
... the people working 50+ hours a week really believe in what they are doing. And / or,
> building up. Programmers who work insane hours week after week are simply helping their
> employer get away with not hiring the true number of people required to do the work
> assigned.
Or.. gasp!
they (okay, *we*) really enjoy coding for its own sake.
Sure, I could make tons more money (like: double my salary) if I wanted to get paid by the hour.
If I wanted to let someone else tell me what to code. Most people make a (possibly unconcious)
minimax calculation involving $$ income, freedom of what to work on, creative input, and how fast
the computers will be (I probably would not be using Sun Ultra Enterprise E4000 servers if I
worked for a 6-person startup).
If you are writing software in exchange for money but don't totally love what you're doing: duh,
find a new job, one you *do* love.
I'd be working at least 60 hours a week even if I won $100 million in the lottery tomorrow. Granted,
I might or might not work for a salary at that point. But I *would* be doing what I love.
Programming. Software Engineering. Designing. And if it happens to be the case that an already- existing company is working on what I am most interested in working on -- I'm there!
Amen.
Even among those of us who do code (for a living,
even) some people have extra experience with,
say, documentation or testing issues, which can
also be lent toward the 'free-source' project of
your choice.
Just answering posts on usenet is a big help to
the community - provided they are clear, concise,
well-researched posts. Things like, "yeah, I had
that problem too, and doing this fixed it".
I can certainly vouch that lots of people here :-)
(I work at Oracle) run Linux. 1400 machines, in
my completely unofficial personal opinion, is
probably all that they had "officially" found,
not at all the actual number!