I would be rereading the contract, fighting to get my money back, and think hard about suing for damages.
Does the manufacturer really have no responsibility for these costs at all? $3 million is a friggin' lot of money for tax payers to spend for something UniLect screwed up.
This blows my mind. Yes, an error message "sort of" pops up in among all the other commands. And here I am worried that I'd better make it super-obvious when an error might cause a score to be lost in an educational training drill. AARGH!
From the article:
The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes. If the machine worked during early voting as it did on Tuesday, the message could have appeared hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.
L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up.
Architecturally, it is generally accepted that the security of a building is opposed to it's accessibility. [...] However, usability overcomes some of these problems by making entrances obvious, door opening automatic, lighting bright, etc.
Even accessibility is not always opposed to security. If you want to rob a store, you have a few requirements that are different from those of the "shopper" user: ideally, you want to enter, take what you want, and leave quickly with as little resistance and recognition as possible.
Good lighting impedes the thief/robber, and helps the shopper find what they want and feel safe. A height measurement sticker and a camera by the door discourages robbers without impeding a shopper. Automatic doors are designed to open in time for a walking person, not a running person. Cash registers are frequently cleared to put most cash in a hard-to-reach location (sometimes offsite), which has a business cost without affecting the shopper.
Software usability, accessibility, and security must be considered in the same way -- some changes will improve all aspects, some will improve one at the cost of another. More changes will be at odds, because the computer is such a flexible tool (crackers have different "requirements" than other users... but not all that different from some developers and power users), but this is still the same balancing act we've always been doing... we just know now that the risks of poor security are huge.
The key thing is to figure out where the joints are. Find the interfaces, the ways different peices talk to each other. Understanding this is usually the key to how the whole code is organized. It tells you how the authors thought about it. And it also tells you what parts can be incrementally replaced without having to throw out the whole shebang.
That's great advice -- right, once you have control over the interfaces you can do lots of things. You can put a good-interface wrapper around a clump of spaghetti code with a poor interface, then replace that whole section at your leisure. Etc. etc. Make sure you have good tests written, and you can just *drop* those 1500 lines of code that you suspect aren't doing anything -- if your tests are good and they pass, you were right. This is where a good IDE really shines as well -- it can tell you what methods are never called, what parameters are never used, and so on; just cleaning out that junk makes any code much more manageable.
Good reading suggestion for those interested in this: Martin Fowler's Refactoring.com. All of these refactoring patterns have names that I don't remember, and there are plenty more strategies discussed there that'll make your eyes light up if you've been in this situation before.
I always wonder about the code quality I'd get out of developers who make these comments...
Source code *can* be worthless, and it *can* be extremely valuable. It all depends on the talent and good sense of the developers who came before. If the code is well-organized (even if it's not well-commented!), it's probably well worth it to keep it. Even if moderately heavy refactoring is required, you're still starting with a WORKING product. [I think -- hard to tell from the description]
In a business environment, that is *way* better than starting off with nothing. Look at Mozilla -- sure they got a sweet browser out eventually, years and years after scrapping the original Netscape browser and starting from scratch. But if they'd been a real company selling a line of browsers as their business, that decision would have destroyed them.
If you inherit good code, celebrate and learn. If you inherit bad code, write automated tests and refactor until you can understand what's going on. It'll be painful for a bit, but you'll be better off. Only if you inherit really abhorrent, non-functional software is a ground-up rewrite really the best choice.
Obviously I don't know the particulars of this project, but I've been in similar situations before.
My advice: don't worry about most of it. Don't throw it away(!), but don't go loading every revision from the past 3 years into CVS and converting every document to a readable, searchable format.
If the project was at a milestone (and the last code snapshot you have was fully tested), just load that into CVS and work from there. If it was in active development, maybe take a 5 snapshots and commit them in order, reviewing the diffs to get a sense for the direction things were heading.
If you can also get some tips for where to find the details on the features/changes that were "next up", that's also good -- but DO NOT take the time to read through the earlier documents and discussions. All that has changed by now; you'll just get confused. 99% of those docs are talking about software or features that didn't exist yet, and probably doesn't exist in the same form now, either. Do you have real changedates on the files? If you do that helps -- there may be a few documents that were actively updated and used (risk assessments, to-do lists, etc.) that might be nice to skim over. But software dev is a ceaseless process of change, so anything older than a few months is basically guaranteed to be obsolete and useless. Developers and managers keep this stuff as a CYA measure, or because "one of these days" they are going to update them and make them useful again.
Going forward, your best way to understand what the software does now is by talking through it with the people you have access to, and using it (reading and commenting the code when you aren't sure what's going on). Your best way to understand what functionality should be added next depends on where your company wants to go with it (which may not match up with the other company's plans...).
A few other commenters seem to have found the answer for you already... but if this were a totally non-standard, proprietary format that was impossible to view on anything but Windows, I can still think of possible solutions. E.g., from what I understand Windows is becoming a fairly widespread operating system nowadays; perhaps you have a neighbor, or a friend, or a relative, or a coworker, who has one of these unusual machines?:)
Seriously, though, you should complain. All they have to do is include a readme file that says "Users of other operating systems can open these images using any image viewer with DICOMM support" or something along those lines. It's not hard -- but they may not have bothered yet simply because they aren't getting any real complaints. It's like all of the websites out there that are only tested on IE. No complaints, so why change?
Fortunately, as more people use Firefox, and (possibly?) more people use Macs, the common understanding that you're "safe" to only include support for Windows and IE will start to disappear.
Radio Shack asks... even Toys 'R' Us recently asked me for my phone number (I don't spend much time there, so I don't know if this is a chain-wide practice of theirs).
If you're prepared (and not surprised into thinking there's no other option than to comply...), this is *very* easy to avoid.
I just smile and say, "Oh, I don't give out my phone number. Thanks!" They finish ringing me up, and I leave. I've never even gotten a "why not?", or assurance that it won't be called -- but if I did, I'd just say "I understand, I just never give out my phone number". And smile again, and look at the cash register. You don't need to provide an explanation.
It's not a big deal, but it's like a lot of other things; you have to know what to say, or you'll be caught off-guard and the simplest response will be to provide the information (which is what they're depending on).
It's like dealing with sales spiels on the phone (my credit cards sometimes try to sell me on something after a support call); I *do* feel rude just hanging up, but waiting to the end leaves me with a sense of owing them something... which of course is how they work. So I interrupt with "sorry, I don't want to waste your time; I never buy things over the phone. Thanks, and have a nice day!" Then I can hang up without feeling like I've just made someone shitty day a little shittier. You can also interrupt and say "I don't want to be rude, but I have to run".
There's definitely a place in this world for both open and closed source software, and I work on both. I get different rewards out of open vs. closed source projects... though at the moment I pay my rent with closed source work. Because I need to be able to do that, I feel pretty strongly that I should be able to make the choice of whether my work will be open or closed.
Interestingly, a good obfuscator is a pretty obvious open source project (and there are more than the one I mentioned). Why? Because it's a fairly common need for many professional developers using Java, and a major part of open source development is scratching that itch. When enough people have the same itch, it makes more sense for them to work together and make it open source, than it does for them to work separately, then try to sell many competing (and lower-quality) implementations.
Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
Ironically, Bush and Kerry have (as far as I can tell) identical stands on gay marriage. They are both against gay marriage, and for civil unions.
The Republican party's official stance is against recognition of any kind, but Bush said recently on Good Morning America that he felt civil unions should be allowed.
And yet people are deciding how to vote based on this issue, when we're at war and the economy is still in trouble? I don't get it. The abortion issue I understand slightly more, for people who are very religious... but the fact is that this is an issue almost totally in the hands of the courts. Bush didn't get anything significant done re abortion during the last 4 years (and he stated during the 2000 campaign and again after the "partial birth" abortion ban that he would not seek a total ban on abortion), and Kerry has already stated that he has no plans to do anything. Again, this is a top priority to voters? Boggles my mind.
I'd agree with you that no obfuscator could really make it impossible to recreate a piece of software from the bytecode... but of course the only real aim is to make it hard enough so that it would be easier to simply purchase the software.
Though obfuscation comes with its own array of potential issues, especially in remote applications or those that rely on reflection
Obfuscators pretty much all offer you enough flexibility to exclude classes that will need to be used via reflection or with RMI... or to even save the map of random method names, etc. so that you can make updates to the source then come out with an obfuscated result that is compatible. I'd usually handle this just by NOT obfuscating method names in public interfaces... you can still obfuscate everything else, including instance variables, local variables, and all method code.
Obfuscators DO work. They're certainly not foolproof, but they definitely make it more difficult to crack a program of any size.
I'm not talking about tiny programs; but who even bothers decompiling tiny midlets? Isn't it obvious what they're doing? With tiny programs, if you know enough to be cracking Java programs, you might as well just write the thing out yourself. It's not magic.
But for larger applications, any decent obfuscator can make it very time-consuming to decompile and edit the programs. I posted more on this in another thread, so let me just say you really have to try it out before you say obfuscators don't work. They definitely DO work at foiling the average cracker who won't spend hours and hours reconstructing a $100 piece of software.
Good obfuscation WORKS
on
Decompiling Java
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· Score: 3, Informative
The simplest version of cracking a Java program is using JAD to decompile the source, making a few changes in source (like changing the license check to always return "full enterprise version" instead of "time-limited demo"), compiling your altered class, replacing it the JAR, and running the app.
Most obfuscators will make this track impossible, by doing things like using language keywords (while, for, if, and so on) for class/method/variable names, so that when you decompile the thing it cannot be recompiled. They also mix stuff around in the classfile enough so that figuring out what method is doing what becomes non-trivial -- stupid things mostly (like naming methods l1(), ll(), I1(), Il(), etc.), plus a few tricks to stop JAD from fully decompiling the class.
Enough of these little things add up to make the work involved in altering the decompiled class excessive and difficult.
The more sophisticated Java cracker doesn't bother. They decompile enough source to get their bearings, then edit the appropriate bytecode directly, with a classfile editor. Fortunately, most people with this level of experience can just pay for the frickin software they want.
I'm actually not obfuscating my Java code yet, but I'm going to start... it's just too easy to crack Java code without it. yGuard obfuscator is pretty decent LGPL one, that can run as an Ant task.
I wouldn't make too much of the cousin relationship (honestly, if you're looking into this kind of thing, it's a lot more significant that they both went to Yale and were in Skull & Bones!), but the relationships are funny sometimes.
For example, Bush is actually more closely related to Gary Trudeau than he is to Kerry. (Trudeau is the author of Doonesbury... a political newspaper comic strip that's -- well -- not very Bush-friendly).
Bush is also a 9th cousin to John Edwards (though Kerry and Edwards are not related).
Bush is a 6th cousin (6 times removed) to Joseph Smith, Jr., who is a *very* interesting guy. He founded the Mormon faith in the 1820s after being visited by the angel "Moroni" and told about golden plates that had been hidden in a hill in upstate NY, by a race decended from the Jews who lived there 600-400 BC. He translated the text on the plates and returned them to the angel (so the plates are not available to be examined today). He and his followers moved west from NY gradually, in response to repeated episodes of mob violence until (led at this point by Brigham Young after Smith was killed) they eventually settled in Utah, which was then Mexican territory.
Okay, I read the transcript of the Senate testimony, though you were actually quoting from a "Meet the Press" interview.
The more I read, the more I'm disturbed by the amount of press coverage this received this year. It's a big stretch to find ways to interpret his testimony and other statements as a black mark against Kerry, especially when you consider that this all happened more than 30 years ago.
You didn't even finish his sentence in the quotation you made (from an interview before the Senate hearing), so here it is in better context: "There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals."
Apparently he now feels that he probably used stronger words than he should have (i.e., "atrocities" and "war criminals"), but he was presenting the best argument he could against the way the war was being fought. He was arguing directly for blaming the written, U.S. policy in this war for ordering the atrocities carried out.
So -- he was fighting to bring the soldiers back home, as they were in an unbearable (and illegal, he argued) situation. If his words had negative consequences on some POWs, that obviously wasn't his intention -- he was blaming the leadership, not the soldiers (who he explicitly included himself among).
I haven't seen much on the POW thing that even pretends to be even-handed, so I can't speak much on what negative consequences Kerry's words had. It doesn't make much sense to me, offhand -- were they using recordings of Kerry's speech (if so, how did they get it)? Basically, if they were using psyops-style methods on their prisoners, they could use almost anything to break them down -- if it hadn't been a Kerry soundbite it could have been almost anyone else (he wasn't the only one who wanted the war over, remember?), and obviously they had whatever leeway they wanted to take things out of context, or simply invent things.
It's possible to argue that working to end a war is "giving comfort and aid to the enemy", because of course if we go home, they have won. This is an extraordinarily un-american argument, though. We choose our leaders, and their actions are supposed to be answerable to us, the people. It's our responsibility to hold them accountable if we feel they aren't acting in our interests (i.e., some felt they were sending us off to kill and be killed in horrible ways, in a possibly unwinnable war). The first amendment is designed to make sure we can complain if we disagree (and people who feel the govt is doing just fine can also speak up). Here: Congress shall make no law [... religion bit...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In 1971-Kerry's case, he was speaking to Congress, and at the time they were keen to hear what he had to say (read the transcript). Somehow it's only now that people are saying he should have kept quiet.
Perhaps his testimony, that he is now backing away from...
This is the flip-flop thing, right? I'm the guy has been wishy-washy on other things, but here's the quot
I'm not disputing that there were American soldiers who committed war crimes. It's the fact that he felt he could speak for everyone instead of just himself. If anything I said is incoherent, it's because I'm telling you what you don't want to hear.
I'm not a Kerry supporter (though I will probably end up voting for him just because I only seem to have two choices, and I really don't like the other one). I still don't know very much about the man.
So you're not telling me what I don't want to hear -- you just aren't telling me anything I understand as "traitorous" yet. If Kerry did something really heinous I'd like to know. Hence the questions (a few other people same to have the same questions).
But so far most of what I've seen online are people just taking small bits of speeches he made out of context, then making lots of false conclusions (with lots of boldface type and exclamation points) based on that.
You seemed to be willing to talk about it in a fairly sensible way, so please explain what he did wrong, and how we know. What did he say that made him a traitor? If he said "there are a lot of war crimes being committed in Vietnam" as an argument for ending the war, well, it was true (Lt. Calley, etc.), and a good argument. I can't imagine he said "all soldiers in Vietnam are committing war crimes" because that's silly. Mentioning the massacres in Vietnam seems like a valid way to argue against the war -- those soldiers were being dropped into a hell where they were constantly under incredible stress in the heat, with often no way to tell the difference between friends and enemies, fighting against an enemy willing to do anything to harm them, and with insufficient supervision. That kind of situation breeds war crimes, and those soldiers should have been pulled out long before they finally were.
That's what I can figure out. What's the other side?
For starters, he's a traitor to those POWs who endured years of torture to get them to say they committed war crimes even if they didn't.
I still don't understand the whole traitor thing, but I haven't really heard it in a coherent way yet. What exactly are you accusing Kerry of?
From your post it sounds like you're saying he tortured POWs, to get war crime confessions out of them. Is that it? Or they were tortured while POWs, then later he somehow forced them to confess war crimes they didn't do? What exactly did Kerry do that made him a traitor?
Pointing out a website that at least tries to be fact-based on this issue would be helpful. Thanks.
Maybe you guys didn't catch this sure-fire sign of overly-academic writing (sometimes also found outside academia, alas):
The pomo coder stripe has evolved into something quite different than what it once may have been.
You probably thought that word was "porno" -- but no, it's short for post-modern, and it's thrown around all the time for no good reason in academia. I stopped reading the article after seeing that, and a smattering of insofars and posits when I flipped ahead to part 2. Oh yeah, and I ran into this:
But as we will see, the impact on the exogenous environment of remittable activities of autonomous agents can be profound indeed.
Indeed, indeed. That's a great sign that you are reading a paper that will take thousands and thousands of words to argue something that could have been said in three crisp, short paragraphs. Nothing against the writer -- he's got a great vocabulary, and he's using the words correctly... but you see this all the time in academic writing, because "it just doesn't sound right" without a few latin phrases and a "dialectic" or two, because everyone around you is writing like this, too. Sadly, it only complicates or even loses the real argument, and most of your readers who have never been force-fed this kind of fare and made to like it will also be lost. So, to the author: Fight the impulse!! Turn away from the dark side! Therein lies a twisty maze of passages, all alike....
The problem with votepact is that it's very, very simple to abuse. How you vote is private. It's far too easy for that person on the other side (say they're a Liberal, since you know those Liberals!) to just cross their fingers, smile, and pull the lever for Kerry anyway. Not only did they "take out" a would-be Bush voter, they also registered their own vote against Bush! That's, like, two votes for your enemy!
So, NO. That's not better. *Especially* since they're expecting you to trust someone you only know through a website, who is guaranteed to be at least nominally from the "other side".
VotePair cannot be abused like that. If EITHER person doesn't fulfill their part of the bargain, it won't make a difference in the election. Okay, so I vote for Kerry in MI (expecting you to vote Badnarik for me in NY). Whereas if we hadn't made this deal, I would have voted for... Kerry, because I don't want my Badnarik vote to keep Bush in office. Hopefully you'll fulfill your part of the bargain, but there's no way you can actively manipulate me into *not* voting Kerry.
The only changes that VotePair can cause are: * Someone in a non-swing state will not vote for their main-party candidate. This can't be usefully manipulated, because the vote won't affect the election either way. * Someone in a swing state will vote for the main-party candidate they prefer, instead of their ideal, 3rd-party candidate. This also can't be manipulated by the other side.
Get it? You always have to look for how a system might be abused, because it will be. There are *plenty* of unscrupulous people on both sides of the aisle.
Right, that's why I was saying your protection against a PayPal insolvency was NOT assured. They say "we believe that your funds will also be protected from any claims of PayPal's creditors and will be returned to you even in the unlikely event of a PayPal insolvency" but that'd definitely not a promise, so if you have some reason to keep lots of money with PayPal, I'd keep an eye on their finances.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like eBay/PayPal is disappearing anytime soon -- they survived the dot com crash without much trouble for a reason, after all. And they are NOT free to do whatever they want with your money; this is why they had to settle quite a lot of money on a class action lawsuit this summer. I've seen the horror stories; now I'm hoping they will behave better going forward.
(I'm hoping because they're the best option I've been able to find so far for accepting credit cards online w/o a merchant account...)
If you use their money market account option, your money isn't insured... but if you just have a regular PayPal balance, it actually is FDIC insured... in a way. Basically, they keep your money in a pooled account in a real bank, and you get "pass-through" FDIC insurance because of that, up to $100K.
It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be rereading the contract, fighting to get my money back, and think hard about suing for damages.
Does the manufacturer really have no responsibility for these costs at all? $3 million is a friggin' lot of money for tax payers to spend for something UniLect screwed up.
This blows my mind. Yes, an error message "sort of" pops up in among all the other commands. And here I am worried that I'd better make it super-obvious when an error might cause a score to be lost in an educational training drill. AARGH!
From the article:
The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes. If the machine worked during early voting as it did on Tuesday, the message could have appeared hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.
L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up.
Architecturally, it is generally accepted that the security of a building is opposed to it's accessibility. [...] However, usability overcomes some of these problems by making entrances obvious, door opening automatic, lighting bright, etc.
Even accessibility is not always opposed to security. If you want to rob a store, you have a few requirements that are different from those of the "shopper" user: ideally, you want to enter, take what you want, and leave quickly with as little resistance and recognition as possible.
Good lighting impedes the thief/robber, and helps the shopper find what they want and feel safe. A height measurement sticker and a camera by the door discourages robbers without impeding a shopper. Automatic doors are designed to open in time for a walking person, not a running person. Cash registers are frequently cleared to put most cash in a hard-to-reach location (sometimes offsite), which has a business cost without affecting the shopper.
Software usability, accessibility, and security must be considered in the same way -- some changes will improve all aspects, some will improve one at the cost of another. More changes will be at odds, because the computer is such a flexible tool (crackers have different "requirements" than other users... but not all that different from some developers and power users), but this is still the same balancing act we've always been doing... we just know now that the risks of poor security are huge.
Ok, I had to change my sig (since my birthday is now over). Now people reading your comment will be *so* confused.... Oh, well.
/pops champagne cork, hands over bottle
Anyway, happy birthday to you, today. And voila:
The key thing is to figure out where the joints are. Find the interfaces, the ways different peices talk to each other. Understanding this is usually the key to how the whole code is organized. It tells you how the authors thought about it. And it also tells you what parts can be incrementally replaced without having to throw out the whole shebang.
That's great advice -- right, once you have control over the interfaces you can do lots of things. You can put a good-interface wrapper around a clump of spaghetti code with a poor interface, then replace that whole section at your leisure. Etc. etc. Make sure you have good tests written, and you can just *drop* those 1500 lines of code that you suspect aren't doing anything -- if your tests are good and they pass, you were right. This is where a good IDE really shines as well -- it can tell you what methods are never called, what parameters are never used, and so on; just cleaning out that junk makes any code much more manageable.
Good reading suggestion for those interested in this: Martin Fowler's Refactoring.com. All of these refactoring patterns have names that I don't remember, and there are plenty more strategies discussed there that'll make your eyes light up if you've been in this situation before.
I always wonder about the code quality I'd get out of developers who make these comments...
Source code *can* be worthless, and it *can* be extremely valuable. It all depends on the talent and good sense of the developers who came before. If the code is well-organized (even if it's not well-commented!), it's probably well worth it to keep it. Even if moderately heavy refactoring is required, you're still starting with a WORKING product. [I think -- hard to tell from the description]
In a business environment, that is *way* better than starting off with nothing. Look at Mozilla -- sure they got a sweet browser out eventually, years and years after scrapping the original Netscape browser and starting from scratch. But if they'd been a real company selling a line of browsers as their business, that decision would have destroyed them.
If you inherit good code, celebrate and learn. If you inherit bad code, write automated tests and refactor until you can understand what's going on. It'll be painful for a bit, but you'll be better off. Only if you inherit really abhorrent, non-functional software is a ground-up rewrite really the best choice.
Obviously I don't know the particulars of this project, but I've been in similar situations before.
My advice: don't worry about most of it. Don't throw it away(!), but don't go loading every revision from the past 3 years into CVS and converting every document to a readable, searchable format.
If the project was at a milestone (and the last code snapshot you have was fully tested), just load that into CVS and work from there. If it was in active development, maybe take a 5 snapshots and commit them in order, reviewing the diffs to get a sense for the direction things were heading.
If you can also get some tips for where to find the details on the features/changes that were "next up", that's also good -- but DO NOT take the time to read through the earlier documents and discussions. All that has changed by now; you'll just get confused. 99% of those docs are talking about software or features that didn't exist yet, and probably doesn't exist in the same form now, either. Do you have real changedates on the files? If you do that helps -- there may be a few documents that were actively updated and used (risk assessments, to-do lists, etc.) that might be nice to skim over. But software dev is a ceaseless process of change, so anything older than a few months is basically guaranteed to be obsolete and useless. Developers and managers keep this stuff as a CYA measure, or because "one of these days" they are going to update them and make them useful again.
Going forward, your best way to understand what the software does now is by talking through it with the people you have access to, and using it (reading and commenting the code when you aren't sure what's going on). Your best way to understand what functionality should be added next depends on where your company wants to go with it (which may not match up with the other company's plans...).
A few other commenters seem to have found the answer for you already... but if this were a totally non-standard, proprietary format that was impossible to view on anything but Windows, I can still think of possible solutions. E.g., from what I understand Windows is becoming a fairly widespread operating system nowadays; perhaps you have a neighbor, or a friend, or a relative, or a coworker, who has one of these unusual machines? :)
Seriously, though, you should complain. All they have to do is include a readme file that says "Users of other operating systems can open these images using any image viewer with DICOMM support" or something along those lines. It's not hard -- but they may not have bothered yet simply because they aren't getting any real complaints. It's like all of the websites out there that are only tested on IE. No complaints, so why change?
Fortunately, as more people use Firefox, and (possibly?) more people use Macs, the common understanding that you're "safe" to only include support for Windows and IE will start to disappear.
Is that Slashdot or Backslashdot?
That would be "Whackdot".
For the subversive: sorry, it's already registered...
Radio Shack asks... even Toys 'R' Us recently asked me for my phone number (I don't spend much time there, so I don't know if this is a chain-wide practice of theirs).
If you're prepared (and not surprised into thinking there's no other option than to comply...), this is *very* easy to avoid.
I just smile and say, "Oh, I don't give out my phone number. Thanks!" They finish ringing me up, and I leave. I've never even gotten a "why not?", or assurance that it won't be called -- but if I did, I'd just say "I understand, I just never give out my phone number". And smile again, and look at the cash register. You don't need to provide an explanation.
It's not a big deal, but it's like a lot of other things; you have to know what to say, or you'll be caught off-guard and the simplest response will be to provide the information (which is what they're depending on).
It's like dealing with sales spiels on the phone (my credit cards sometimes try to sell me on something after a support call); I *do* feel rude just hanging up, but waiting to the end leaves me with a sense of owing them something... which of course is how they work. So I interrupt with "sorry, I don't want to waste your time; I never buy things over the phone. Thanks, and have a nice day!" Then I can hang up without feeling like I've just made someone shitty day a little shittier. You can also interrupt and say "I don't want to be rude, but I have to run".
Are you sure that's "irony"?
There's definitely a place in this world for both open and closed source software, and I work on both. I get different rewards out of open vs. closed source projects... though at the moment I pay my rent with closed source work. Because I need to be able to do that, I feel pretty strongly that I should be able to make the choice of whether my work will be open or closed.
Interestingly, a good obfuscator is a pretty obvious open source project (and there are more than the one I mentioned). Why? Because it's a fairly common need for many professional developers using Java, and a major part of open source development is scratching that itch. When enough people have the same itch, it makes more sense for them to work together and make it open source, than it does for them to work separately, then try to sell many competing (and lower-quality) implementations.
Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
Ironically, Bush and Kerry have (as far as I can tell) identical stands on gay marriage. They are both against gay marriage, and for civil unions.
The Republican party's official stance is against recognition of any kind, but Bush said recently on Good Morning America that he felt civil unions should be allowed.
And yet people are deciding how to vote based on this issue, when we're at war and the economy is still in trouble? I don't get it. The abortion issue I understand slightly more, for people who are very religious... but the fact is that this is an issue almost totally in the hands of the courts. Bush didn't get anything significant done re abortion during the last 4 years (and he stated during the 2000 campaign and again after the "partial birth" abortion ban that he would not seek a total ban on abortion), and Kerry has already stated that he has no plans to do anything. Again, this is a top priority to voters? Boggles my mind.
I'd agree with you that no obfuscator could really make it impossible to recreate a piece of software from the bytecode... but of course the only real aim is to make it hard enough so that it would be easier to simply purchase the software.
Though obfuscation comes with its own array of potential issues, especially in remote applications or those that rely on reflection
Obfuscators pretty much all offer you enough flexibility to exclude classes that will need to be used via reflection or with RMI... or to even save the map of random method names, etc. so that you can make updates to the source then come out with an obfuscated result that is compatible. I'd usually handle this just by NOT obfuscating method names in public interfaces... you can still obfuscate everything else, including instance variables, local variables, and all method code.
Obfuscators DO work. They're certainly not foolproof, but they definitely make it more difficult to crack a program of any size.
I'm not talking about tiny programs; but who even bothers decompiling tiny midlets? Isn't it obvious what they're doing? With tiny programs, if you know enough to be cracking Java programs, you might as well just write the thing out yourself. It's not magic.
But for larger applications, any decent obfuscator can make it very time-consuming to decompile and edit the programs. I posted more on this in another thread, so let me just say you really have to try it out before you say obfuscators don't work. They definitely DO work at foiling the average cracker who won't spend hours and hours reconstructing a $100 piece of software.
The simplest version of cracking a Java program is using JAD to decompile the source, making a few changes in source (like changing the license check to always return "full enterprise version" instead of "time-limited demo"), compiling your altered class, replacing it the JAR, and running the app.
Most obfuscators will make this track impossible, by doing things like using language keywords (while, for, if, and so on) for class/method/variable names, so that when you decompile the thing it cannot be recompiled. They also mix stuff around in the classfile enough so that figuring out what method is doing what becomes non-trivial -- stupid things mostly (like naming methods l1(), ll(), I1(), Il(), etc.), plus a few tricks to stop JAD from fully decompiling the class.
Enough of these little things add up to make the work involved in altering the decompiled class excessive and difficult.
The more sophisticated Java cracker doesn't bother. They decompile enough source to get their bearings, then edit the appropriate bytecode directly, with a classfile editor. Fortunately, most people with this level of experience can just pay for the frickin software they want.
I'm actually not obfuscating my Java code yet, but I'm going to start... it's just too easy to crack Java code without it. yGuard obfuscator is pretty decent LGPL one, that can run as an Ant task.
I'm still trying to imagine a tattoo of a... flag. Or an attractive woman (sorry, can't find the link) in a... flag costume.
Nope. Still no good.
I understand the reasoning behind making a blander, more corporate logo, but it's kind of a sad change, nonetheless.
I ran into this in Kerry's wikipedia article initially.
The source: FamilyForest
I wouldn't make too much of the cousin relationship (honestly, if you're looking into this kind of thing, it's a lot more significant that they both went to Yale and were in Skull & Bones!), but the relationships are funny sometimes.
For example, Bush is actually more closely related to Gary Trudeau than he is to Kerry. (Trudeau is the author of Doonesbury... a political newspaper comic strip that's -- well -- not very Bush-friendly).
Bush is also a 9th cousin to John Edwards (though Kerry and Edwards are not related).
Bush is a 6th cousin (6 times removed) to Joseph Smith, Jr., who is a *very* interesting guy. He founded the Mormon faith in the 1820s after being visited by the angel "Moroni" and told about golden plates that had been hidden in a hill in upstate NY, by a race decended from the Jews who lived there 600-400 BC. He translated the text on the plates and returned them to the angel (so the plates are not available to be examined today). He and his followers moved west from NY gradually, in response to repeated episodes of mob violence until (led at this point by Brigham Young after Smith was killed) they eventually settled in Utah, which was then Mexican territory.
More discussion is good. Any responses to the other posts (the less angry ones, at least)?
I just posted a long discussion in reponses to someone else also arguing that Kerry shouldn't have testified about atrocities in Vietnam.
Thoughts? I'd really like to see this one through if you have a few minutes.
Okay, I read the transcript of the Senate testimony, though you were actually quoting from a "Meet the Press" interview.
The more I read, the more I'm disturbed by the amount of press coverage this received this year. It's a big stretch to find ways to interpret his testimony and other statements as a black mark against Kerry, especially when you consider that this all happened more than 30 years ago.
You didn't even finish his sentence in the quotation you made (from an interview before the Senate hearing), so here it is in better context:
"There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals."
Apparently he now feels that he probably used stronger words than he should have (i.e., "atrocities" and "war criminals"), but he was presenting the best argument he could against the way the war was being fought. He was arguing directly for blaming the written, U.S. policy in this war for ordering the atrocities carried out.
So -- he was fighting to bring the soldiers back home, as they were in an unbearable (and illegal, he argued) situation. If his words had negative consequences on some POWs, that obviously wasn't his intention -- he was blaming the leadership, not the soldiers (who he explicitly included himself among).
I haven't seen much on the POW thing that even pretends to be even-handed, so I can't speak much on what negative consequences Kerry's words had. It doesn't make much sense to me, offhand -- were they using recordings of Kerry's speech (if so, how did they get it)? Basically, if they were using psyops-style methods on their prisoners, they could use almost anything to break them down -- if it hadn't been a Kerry soundbite it could have been almost anyone else (he wasn't the only one who wanted the war over, remember?), and obviously they had whatever leeway they wanted to take things out of context, or simply invent things.
It's possible to argue that working to end a war is "giving comfort and aid to the enemy", because of course if we go home, they have won. This is an extraordinarily un-american argument, though. We choose our leaders, and their actions are supposed to be answerable to us, the people. It's our responsibility to hold them accountable if we feel they aren't acting in our interests (i.e., some felt they were sending us off to kill and be killed in horrible ways, in a possibly unwinnable war). The first amendment is designed to make sure we can complain if we disagree (and people who feel the govt is doing just fine can also speak up).
Here:
Congress shall make no law [... religion bit...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In 1971-Kerry's case, he was speaking to Congress, and at the time they were keen to hear what he had to say (read the transcript). Somehow it's only now that people are saying he should have kept quiet.
Perhaps his testimony, that he is now backing away from...
This is the flip-flop thing, right? I'm the guy has been wishy-washy on other things, but here's the quot
I'm not disputing that there were American soldiers who committed war crimes. It's the fact that he felt he could speak for everyone instead of just himself. If anything I said is incoherent, it's because I'm telling you what you don't want to hear.
I'm not a Kerry supporter (though I will probably end up voting for him just because I only seem to have two choices, and I really don't like the other one). I still don't know very much about the man.
So you're not telling me what I don't want to hear -- you just aren't telling me anything I understand as "traitorous" yet. If Kerry did something really heinous I'd like to know. Hence the questions (a few other people same to have the same questions).
But so far most of what I've seen online are people just taking small bits of speeches he made out of context, then making lots of false conclusions (with lots of boldface type and exclamation points) based on that.
You seemed to be willing to talk about it in a fairly sensible way, so please explain what he did wrong, and how we know. What did he say that made him a traitor? If he said "there are a lot of war crimes being committed in Vietnam" as an argument for ending the war, well, it was true (Lt. Calley, etc.), and a good argument. I can't imagine he said "all soldiers in Vietnam are committing war crimes" because that's silly. Mentioning the massacres in Vietnam seems like a valid way to argue against the war -- those soldiers were being dropped into a hell where they were constantly under incredible stress in the heat, with often no way to tell the difference between friends and enemies, fighting against an enemy willing to do anything to harm them, and with insufficient supervision. That kind of situation breeds war crimes, and those soldiers should have been pulled out long before they finally were.
That's what I can figure out. What's the other side?
For starters, he's a traitor to those POWs who endured years of torture to get them to say they committed war crimes even if they didn't.
I still don't understand the whole traitor thing, but I haven't really heard it in a coherent way yet. What exactly are you accusing Kerry of?
From your post it sounds like you're saying he tortured POWs, to get war crime confessions out of them. Is that it? Or they were tortured while POWs, then later he somehow forced them to confess war crimes they didn't do? What exactly did Kerry do that made him a traitor?
Pointing out a website that at least tries to be fact-based on this issue would be helpful. Thanks.
Maybe you guys didn't catch this sure-fire sign of overly-academic writing (sometimes also found outside academia, alas):
The pomo coder stripe has evolved into something quite different than what it once may have been.
You probably thought that word was "porno" -- but no, it's short for post-modern, and it's thrown around all the time for no good reason in academia. I stopped reading the article after seeing that, and a smattering of insofars and posits when I flipped ahead to part 2. Oh yeah, and I ran into this:
But as we will see, the impact on the exogenous environment of remittable activities of autonomous agents can be profound indeed.
Indeed, indeed. That's a great sign that you are reading a paper that will take thousands and thousands of words to argue something that could have been said in three crisp, short paragraphs. Nothing against the writer -- he's got a great vocabulary, and he's using the words correctly... but you see this all the time in academic writing, because "it just doesn't sound right" without a few latin phrases and a "dialectic" or two, because everyone around you is writing like this, too. Sadly, it only complicates or even loses the real argument, and most of your readers who have never been force-fed this kind of fare and made to like it will also be lost. So, to the author: Fight the impulse!! Turn away from the dark side! Therein lies a twisty maze of passages, all alike....
The operating system is merely a tool that is used to complete your work, not a religion. Creative people see beyond linux vs win.
That said, I'm still awfully curious to know what languages they chose to answer each question: Java, C++, C#, or VB.net.
Yes, it wouldn't mean that language was *better*, or even better suited to real-world coding tasks... I'm just curious.
The problem with votepact is that it's very, very simple to abuse. How you vote is private. It's far too easy for that person on the other side (say they're a Liberal, since you know those Liberals!) to just cross their fingers, smile, and pull the lever for Kerry anyway. Not only did they "take out" a would-be Bush voter, they also registered their own vote against Bush! That's, like, two votes for your enemy!
So, NO. That's not better. *Especially* since they're expecting you to trust someone you only know through a website, who is guaranteed to be at least nominally from the "other side".
VotePair cannot be abused like that. If EITHER person doesn't fulfill their part of the bargain, it won't make a difference in the election. Okay, so I vote for Kerry in MI (expecting you to vote Badnarik for me in NY). Whereas if we hadn't made this deal, I would have voted for... Kerry, because I don't want my Badnarik vote to keep Bush in office. Hopefully you'll fulfill your part of the bargain, but there's no way you can actively manipulate me into *not* voting Kerry.
The only changes that VotePair can cause are:
* Someone in a non-swing state will not vote for their main-party candidate. This can't be usefully manipulated, because the vote won't affect the election either way.
* Someone in a swing state will vote for the main-party candidate they prefer, instead of their ideal, 3rd-party candidate. This also can't be manipulated by the other side.
Get it? You always have to look for how a system might be abused, because it will be. There are *plenty* of unscrupulous people on both sides of the aisle.
Right, that's why I was saying your protection against a PayPal insolvency was NOT assured. They say "we believe that your funds will also be protected from any claims of PayPal's creditors and will be returned to you even in the unlikely event of a PayPal insolvency" but that'd definitely not a promise, so if you have some reason to keep lots of money with PayPal, I'd keep an eye on their finances.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like eBay/PayPal is disappearing anytime soon -- they survived the dot com crash without much trouble for a reason, after all. And they are NOT free to do whatever they want with your money; this is why they had to settle quite a lot of money on a class action lawsuit this summer. I've seen the horror stories; now I'm hoping they will behave better going forward.
(I'm hoping because they're the best option I've been able to find so far for accepting credit cards online w/o a merchant account...)
If you use their money market account option, your money isn't insured... but if you just have a regular PayPal balance, it actually is FDIC insured... in a way. Basically, they keep your money in a pooled account in a real bank, and you get "pass-through" FDIC insurance because of that, up to $100K.
They explain this in detail in a link off the homepage.
It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected.