I see a lot of posts suggesting that he start writing real programs. That's good advice, but it might not answer the question. The submitter says he works as a security guard. As such, sitting focused at a laptop writing code might not be an option. He seems to just want suggestions for books to read. As such, I reckon a book on algorithms wouldn't be a bad direction to head (provided he's got enough math to follow along).
I can recommend the O'Reilly Java Examples nutshell book (especially if you try to understand why the examples work) and Mark Grand's books on Software Patterns in Java.
After that, well, you're at about the point where your best approach involves getting practice trying to do real things (or at least solving problems somewhere like RosettaCode, where many of the problems don't yet have Java solutions). I don't know how well that sort/depth of study mixes with a job as a security guard.
The reality here is this: if you try to put engineers (especially software engineers) into a situation where every line of code they produce might put them in court, you're going to find yourself with a severe shortage of engineers.
Actually, you're going to end up paying a fortune for software in order to cover the developers' litigation insurance premiums. Most customers prefer to have cheaper software and carry the risk themselves.
I'm sure that they can deny the existence of global warming. I'm also equally sure that global warming is not worried about their denial. They might as well have tried to legislate about the ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. But seriously, what are the consequences of this vote? Well, apart from making the Utah state legislature look silly.
I expect most all of us would break almost any law if the life of someone we cared about was on the line. So, now that we've established that we're all criminals,...
You've only established the potential for criminality there. So you're capable of committing crimes, and it is possible that there are situations where you would indeed do so. What does that prove?
People have free will (or a damn good simulacrum of it) and so can choose to break the law or not. Even if a recession increases the overall probability of crime, that does not lessen individual responsibility. (To argue otherwise is to argue that all life is just a ghastly puppet show, and that's just too depressing.)
The process side of [running a PKI] - making it auditably secure - is really quite hard. You've got the crown jewels -- the CA private key -- on a server. How do you make that absolutely safe? Bearing in mind that there are corruptible humans in the equation.
Actually, it's not that hard in practice. You have two keys. The top master key, the trust root, you keep on a normally-powered-down machine in a secured area, and that machine is to have no networking. The main purpose of the master key is to sign the production key, and that you leave in the charge of some techie who is good at being an officious prick. Every organization of any size has a few of those, and in this case their anal-retentive rule following is exactly what you want. Moreover, if they slip up you've still got the master key and can rebuild the whole system of trust without too much work.
If you recognize yourself in that description, I apologize and note that you'd do the job well.
A real, experienced genius would leave it in a state where it could be maintained by a lesser mortal, even with all the other constraints on geniosity.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that make any kind of internet based application a form of virtual reality? Are we not participating in such a phenomenon already?
If Google or Mozilla would spend some time/money on re-architecting their patching model and their deployment of settings they would be very viable in the corporate space.
Have you offered to help them do that? Or are you just going to sit on your ass and bitch about it without doing anything at all to deal with it? (No, coding is not the only thing that would need to be done so protesting that you're not a programmer is no excuse!) That's the thing about open source software; if it's wrong for what you care about then help make it right.
(Me? I work at a place where using non-IE is fully viable anyway due to different installation rules.)
strange, ibm surely has it's own supercomputers to do this stuff.
While IBM does have their own equipment, it's typically being used for serving customers. Why would they have loads of processors sitting around doing nothing? OTOH, IBM build big machines so what they can do is offer to make the machine for less if they get some of the cycles in return. Like that, someone else pays for a lot of the infrastructure and IBM gets access to kit that it wouldn't make business sense for them to build on their own. Win-win.
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer".
I somewhat agree. Some of the content of the "news" is what I'd call genuine news; things that everyone ought to be told about. Examples are the earthquake in Haiti (though really only on the day it happened) or the conviction of a politician on charges of corruption. Everything else is interesting to some and dross to others, and so could be personalized.
The problem is the definition of news. There's an incentive for sleazy marketers to get their infomercials classified as news, and there's an incentive for sleazy bigwigs to get their shenanigans classified as non-news. Honest news is assaulted from both ends, by crap and by censorship. That's why it's important to support good newspapers (or other news media; the fact that it is on dead tree is the least important part) have good journalists: they keep the crap out while reporting the things that you should know for the good of everyone. It's a tough line to walk and we should laud those who are good at walking it...
I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
With a big multi-year project, #5 is at least as important. Things will change because nobody can accurately predict what will happen in the future. But if there's no way to manage the inevitable changes, everything will go badly wrong and in unexpected ways.
It's hard to imagine how Rogers could have made this process worse.
Maybe the SD card will try to install leaching viruses on your phone, and yet won't actually fix the issue due to having the wrong version. Which would help with the viruses I suppose; you still won't have data service...
Or perhaps the SD card will be formatted with a filesystem that's only understood by AIX.
The biggest problem with Windows is that there is no central update system.
The biggest problem with Linux is that it's comparatively hard for third-party software providers to plug into the central update system. It'd be really nice to be able to say that a particular website is definitive for a certain set of components; most software providers don't want to have to maintain a whole distro just for the purpose of supporting their own software!
They should just do away with laptops. They are unsecure by definition, and shouldn't be allowed on the network or even inside the building...
That's an example of a case where business flexibility trumps security. You might not like it, but making everything perfectly secure just guarantees that the company goes down the pan and you find yourself securely out of a job...
POSIX support is easy if you use the new generic getaddrinfo and getnameinfo. Code needs to be ported from the old way which hardcoded IPv4 addresses (AF_INET). A properly written program will support both IPv4 and IPv6 and will use the right one based on network interfaces and DNS.
Pure client software is easy to adapt, as you note. Software that opens server sockets is slightly more complex as it may need to open two sockets (one for v4, one for v6) where it previously only opened one. There's also questions relating to what happens when a v6 address hits higher-level software due to their no longer using just digits and dots. (Yes, that sounds silly but it's probably the single biggest software issue left: working out where people have done silly things with assumptions and used discovered addresses in odd ways.)
Think of Sweden as the 'Apple' of nations, versus the 'Windows Me' of the USA.
Well, that's better than being the Bob of nations. (But honestly, it would probably have been better to have said the 'Windows Vista' of nations. The USA isn't as backward as Me.)
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I see a lot of posts suggesting that he start writing real programs. That's good advice, but it might not answer the question. The submitter says he works as a security guard. As such, sitting focused at a laptop writing code might not be an option. He seems to just want suggestions for books to read. As such, I reckon a book on algorithms wouldn't be a bad direction to head (provided he's got enough math to follow along).
I can recommend the O'Reilly Java Examples nutshell book (especially if you try to understand why the examples work) and Mark Grand's books on Software Patterns in Java.
After that, well, you're at about the point where your best approach involves getting practice trying to do real things (or at least solving problems somewhere like RosettaCode, where many of the problems don't yet have Java solutions). I don't know how well that sort/depth of study mixes with a job as a security guard.
I lived in Europe for 3 years. Other than the beer and hoards of much skinnier women (than the US) I didn't see much else to be impressed with.
There's a more relaxed attitude towards gambling too. That gives you booze, pretty women and blackjack. What else were you looking for again?
I believe he was referencing the number of weapons eaten by beavers. A serious problem.
What do you expect if you make the guns out of freaking wood?
The true test of her addiction: will this news convince her to delay plans for our first pregnancy?
That's what maternity leave is for.
How many clients have you ever met that actually ~know~ what they want? :-)
They know they want you to read their mind, stop asking questions, and have it all built already. For free.
The reality here is this: if you try to put engineers (especially software engineers) into a situation where every line of code they produce might put them in court, you're going to find yourself with a severe shortage of engineers.
Actually, you're going to end up paying a fortune for software in order to cover the developers' litigation insurance premiums. Most customers prefer to have cheaper software and carry the risk themselves.
I'm sure that they can deny the existence of global warming. I'm also equally sure that global warming is not worried about their denial. They might as well have tried to legislate about the ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. But seriously, what are the consequences of this vote? Well, apart from making the Utah state legislature look silly.
I expect most all of us would break almost any law if the life of someone we cared about was on the line. So, now that we've established that we're all criminals, ...
You've only established the potential for criminality there. So you're capable of committing crimes, and it is possible that there are situations where you would indeed do so. What does that prove?
People have free will (or a damn good simulacrum of it) and so can choose to break the law or not. Even if a recession increases the overall probability of crime, that does not lessen individual responsibility. (To argue otherwise is to argue that all life is just a ghastly puppet show, and that's just too depressing.)
The process side of [running a PKI] - making it auditably secure - is really quite hard. You've got the crown jewels -- the CA private key -- on a server. How do you make that absolutely safe? Bearing in mind that there are corruptible humans in the equation.
Actually, it's not that hard in practice. You have two keys. The top master key, the trust root, you keep on a normally-powered-down machine in a secured area, and that machine is to have no networking. The main purpose of the master key is to sign the production key, and that you leave in the charge of some techie who is good at being an officious prick. Every organization of any size has a few of those, and in this case their anal-retentive rule following is exactly what you want. Moreover, if they slip up you've still got the master key and can rebuild the whole system of trust without too much work.
If you recognize yourself in that description, I apologize and note that you'd do the job well.
Then again, the creator MAY have been a genius.
A real, experienced genius would leave it in a state where it could be maintained by a lesser mortal, even with all the other constraints on geniosity.
everyone will get fed up and just use the next big thing instead.
I predict. lua.
That would be the next small thing; the reference Lua interpreter is only 153kB apparently...
Don't bet on it.
There are worse things. The Star Wars Holiday Special. Absolutely nothing in episodes I-III is as bad as that...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that make any kind of internet based application a form of virtual reality? Are we not participating in such a phenomenon already?
Yes. Prosaic, isn't it?
Everyone knows the real ultimate enterprise database is Access.
If by "ultimate" you mean "last because it killed the enterprise stone dead through sheer crap-ness" then yes, everyone does indeed know that.
If Google or Mozilla would spend some time/money on re-architecting their patching model and their deployment of settings they would be very viable in the corporate space.
Have you offered to help them do that? Or are you just going to sit on your ass and bitch about it without doing anything at all to deal with it? (No, coding is not the only thing that would need to be done so protesting that you're not a programmer is no excuse!) That's the thing about open source software; if it's wrong for what you care about then help make it right.
(Me? I work at a place where using non-IE is fully viable anyway due to different installation rules.)
Well, they say new state-of-the-art spaceport... its actually an abandoned Apollo third stage with a Starbucks and a chemical toilet...
At least they're big in recycling up there!
strange, ibm surely has it's own supercomputers to do this stuff.
While IBM does have their own equipment, it's typically being used for serving customers. Why would they have loads of processors sitting around doing nothing? OTOH, IBM build big machines so what they can do is offer to make the machine for less if they get some of the cycles in return. Like that, someone else pays for a lot of the infrastructure and IBM gets access to kit that it wouldn't make business sense for them to build on their own. Win-win.
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer".
I somewhat agree. Some of the content of the "news" is what I'd call genuine news; things that everyone ought to be told about. Examples are the earthquake in Haiti (though really only on the day it happened) or the conviction of a politician on charges of corruption. Everything else is interesting to some and dross to others, and so could be personalized.
The problem is the definition of news. There's an incentive for sleazy marketers to get their infomercials classified as news, and there's an incentive for sleazy bigwigs to get their shenanigans classified as non-news. Honest news is assaulted from both ends, by crap and by censorship. That's why it's important to support good newspapers (or other news media; the fact that it is on dead tree is the least important part) have good journalists: they keep the crap out while reporting the things that you should know for the good of everyone. It's a tough line to walk and we should laud those who are good at walking it...
I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
With a big multi-year project, #5 is at least as important. Things will change because nobody can accurately predict what will happen in the future. But if there's no way to manage the inevitable changes, everything will go badly wrong and in unexpected ways.
"Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice."
Really? There's a patch for that.
They could make it so that the iPhone will only execute javascript that has been signed by Apple. That would "enhance the usability" no end!!!
It's hard to imagine how Rogers could have made this process worse.
Maybe the SD card will try to install leaching viruses on your phone, and yet won't actually fix the issue due to having the wrong version. Which would help with the viruses I suppose; you still won't have data service...
Or perhaps the SD card will be formatted with a filesystem that's only understood by AIX.
The biggest problem with Windows is that there is no central update system.
The biggest problem with Linux is that it's comparatively hard for third-party software providers to plug into the central update system. It'd be really nice to be able to say that a particular website is definitive for a certain set of components; most software providers don't want to have to maintain a whole distro just for the purpose of supporting their own software!
They should just do away with laptops. They are unsecure by definition, and shouldn't be allowed on the network or even inside the building...
That's an example of a case where business flexibility trumps security. You might not like it, but making everything perfectly secure just guarantees that the company goes down the pan and you find yourself securely out of a job...
POSIX support is easy if you use the new generic getaddrinfo and getnameinfo. Code needs to be ported from the old way which hardcoded IPv4 addresses (AF_INET). A properly written program will support both IPv4 and IPv6 and will use the right one based on network interfaces and DNS.
Pure client software is easy to adapt, as you note. Software that opens server sockets is slightly more complex as it may need to open two sockets (one for v4, one for v6) where it previously only opened one. There's also questions relating to what happens when a v6 address hits higher-level software due to their no longer using just digits and dots. (Yes, that sounds silly but it's probably the single biggest software issue left: working out where people have done silly things with assumptions and used discovered addresses in odd ways.)
Think of Sweden as the 'Apple' of nations, versus the 'Windows Me' of the USA.
Well, that's better than being the Bob of nations. (But honestly, it would probably have been better to have said the 'Windows Vista' of nations. The USA isn't as backward as Me.)