This year I'm getting 10% of my salary -- as is every other member of the company, plus I'm getting an extra $5K for some reason -- my boss said that he went to the board and had extra bonus funds released to several people as a "thank you" but I'm not sure what the thank you was for.
So I'll clear about $20K when the dust settles...if it isn't the best Xmas bonus I have rec'd, it's close.
I'm from NYC, but I lived in London for a year and change around the time there were planes knocking shit over Stateside.
First time in London I get *lost*[0] both well and thoroughly looking for my office[1] and asked for directions several times. A couple of those times I was told "You should ask a cabbie." I honestly thought that this was a creative local way of saying "Fuck right off and leave me alone."
Wasn't until several days later that I realized they were being serious...
--
[0] Some Manahttan residents falsely believe that they are good navigators because they never get lost at home, if any of you are reading this: it's the *numbered streets*, it's not you -- go to a major European city without a map and you'll starve to death before you ever find your hotel again.
[1] For those of you keeping score, it was Southampton Street...NOT in fact the Southampton Buildings, nor Southampton Place, nor even Southampton Row -- all of which are in the same general area and all of which I was directed to at some point.
I have a diagnosed "sleep disorder", but the actual root cause is my job -- I run an OPS group, so insanely long and/or irregular hours are the norm ( guaranteed to have to work 48 hours straight about once every three months, and have to run on 2-3 hours of sleep pretty regularly ).
To "manage" this, I have a perscription for Ambien ( just switched to CR, `cause it makes it easier to go back to sleep after having to wake up and work for two hours in the middle of the night ) and a perscription for Provigil ( 400 mg/dy ). The pharma is what lets me cope with this schedule when I need to, otherwise I'd be jello.
I have nothing but good things to say about Provigil, it lets me do what I need to do without worrying about whether or not my body can keep up. Not to mention the newfound ability to drive from NYC to Miami with nothing but gas an bathroom breaks.
However, there are a couple big things that get overrepresented, or that don't get considered:
1) This stuff lets you operate for long periods of time without sleep and more-or-less without accruing sleep debt, and it lets you function semi-normally on very little sleep. However, it does not keep extended periods of sleeplessness from taking a mental toll -- the longer you go without sleep the more your cognitive ability and short-term memory suffer, modafinil doesn't change that. So yeah, I can run 40 hours straight no problem taking 400 mg of this shit every 12-14 hours, but you get gradually dumber over that span even though you can stay alert and responsive. By the end of a 40-hour run I'm functioning at low-normal to low intelligence, my short term memory is basically nonexistant, and I'm extremely distractable...to the point where sometimes I trail off in the middle of a sentence. So if you do anything other than long-haul trucking, your work will suffer as time goes on.
2) Potential for psychological dependency is very high among the subset of the population likely to use it for its "lifestyle" effects. It improves your concentration by orders of magnitude and lets you run at that high level for quite a while before secondary fatigue effects (see above) start taking a bite out of your performance. For people who derive large portions of their self-worth from their mental abilities, this shit is anabolic steroids -- won't hook you physically, but it makes you *way* better at what you do. And you start to miss it if it isn't there.
3) It gives you headaches -- not all the time, but often enough. Since I started regular use, I get headaches at least 30% more than I used to. Also it can make you really nauseous -- although it also seems to have an appetite supressant effect, and an empty stomach combined with coffee consumption and smoking more heavily than normal could explain the nausea. Also, it makes your urine smell really bad, which has a nice synergistic thing with the nausea...
Seems similar to mine -- I dropped out of HS on my 16th birthday and was nonetheless accepted into a nearby university. I attended college for about four years, racked up tons of credits in widely disparate subjects, realized I was going to have to take main track courses with morons in order to earn a degree and decided that it probably wasn't worth it. I went and got a job in phone tech support, got promoted to junior programmer about six month later, etc. Changed companies several times around the expansion phase of the bubble, and ended up where I am now, running Operations for a good sized tech company.
High school dropout, college dropout, totally self-taught as far as industry expertise, extremely successful.
When I hire people now, I don't even really look at the education stuff -- IMO it doesn't signify anything at all.
A few years ago while working a contract doing security software, I found myself in possession of several exciting pieces of tech, including a mag strip reader/writer and a stack of blanks -- actual blanks, totally white on both sides except for the mag strip itself, no numeric impressions. Bored one Saturday, I cloned one of the credit cards in my pocket and walked around the corner to a bodega, got a pack of cigarettes and a coke, and attempted to pay with the totally unmarked card. The guy took it -- looked at it for a second, apparently just to make sure he was swiping it in the right direction -- swiped it and handed it back. No muss, no fuss. I suppose that if I had been stopped and searched at any point during that process, I would have been in possession of a "fake credit card", and I imagine that the excercise would have been seriously frowned upon despite the fact that I was also in the possession of the card that the fake had ben cloned from as well as identification proving that it was mine.
**Disclaimer: the bodega in question was on Bergenline Ave. If you are familiar with it, you'll understand.
In 2002, 11.1% of American households were "food insecure" every single day of the year -- meaning basically they didn't have enough money to buy all food needed to sustain the household. In the same year 3.5% of households were "hungry" meaning that not only could they not healthily sustain, they couldn't meet their energy budgets.
So it's clear to me that not only am I willing to let Caucasians starve to death, I'm willing to let my figurative and perhaps indeed even literal ( I live in Manhattan ) *neighbors* starve to death, regardless of their color.
I agree with you, but I think there are mutiple usibility models here. We subscribe to the "pull your iPod out of its computer dock , walk to the car, drop it in the car dock, get where you are going and either plug headphones into it and go, or walk into the office and drop it into another computer dock."
The glove compartment hookups are more for people who use their iPods as honkin'-big CD changeers for their cars...or so I suspect.
If you don't do too much research, it looks good, but the truth is it's got some pretty serious problems -- they are in dire need of tax reform, they have some nice corruption issues in their executive ( couple of presidents arrested for corruption in the past five years or so ). Plus they have a big drug transshipment thing going, and domestic production is quite the cottage industry as well -- if they don't do anything effective about it, they're gonna be another Columbia.
Plus, the high tech sector is *electronics manufacturing*, mostly microprocessors...and it's only there because chip fab is so hellishly toxic, and what the hell, it's the third world...
Oh *and* IIRC if you want good Internet connectivity ( if you work on the wire, it's more of a need than a want ), you're pretty much stuck in San Jose -- so tack a couple of active volcanoes and a growing crack problem onto the list.
With the help of a whiteboard (!) I explained to about half a dozen ( okay, mostly junior ) developers and -- here's the real kicker for me -- *the three most senior members of out QA department, including the department head* that you could use the password
' or 1 = 1 --
for many, many sites on the Internet, regardless of user name.
The whiteboard came in when I had to explain *why it worked*...
Troubleshooting. Same reason you can store CVV2 codes, even though CISP says *never* store CCV2 codes. You'd be surprised how often this shit comees in handy when you are trying to figure out why a series of transactions failed. It's way easier to figure out what is fucked-up with a transaction if you can see all the data. Businesses ( and customers too, actually ) don't like to hear "Well it failed, but we don't keep data for that stuff, so that's all I can tell you." They are very into the why, and sometimes without that data there just is no why.
Not to say that you should do it, you'll *take it in the shorts* for doing this in a prod environment, it is stupidly dangerous...but everybody thinks their systems are secure, right?
I can only speak from personal experience -- I have owned a couple of Windows smartphones and they really, really sucked. They were bad phones, bad messaging devices, bad music players...you name it, they sucked at it.
I used an earlier MS product that tried to do something similar ( OTA synch, something like that ) and it was pure ass -- required lightening security on the Exchange side in order to get it to work at all, and both the client and server had stability issues: device would simply stop getting mail, you wouldn't realize this until you hadn't rec'd anything for a couple hours...reboot and there are a dozen messages. It required dozens of hours from a network ops guy just to keep it working -- every 2K3 or Exchange patch would break it, and it would take hours of screwing around to get it working again.
Eventually I threw the fuckers in a drawer and replaced them with a Blackberry ( which is great at email ) a RAZR ( which is a passably decent phone ) and an iPod ( which plays music just fine, thanks ).
Now yeah, I have a bat belt, yes my wife laughs at me, but everything *works* and I don't have to fuck with any of it to keep it that way...
Illegal immigrants are what's going to fuck this program.
Please don't get the idea that I support this garbage, but follow me for a second.
What happens when you have a card that only a legal resident of the country can have? That card becomes a de facto proof of citizenship.
I actually know a good number of illegals, and some of these cats have serious money, and it's all cash.
So let's take my uncle "Juan", who came over "wet" from Mexico -- he's got a pretty good job, all cash, he's got a DL and a Social Security card he bought, some other guy's name but his picture on the license and all...
Now where did he get these things? Yes yes, *from the issuing authorities*. Thing is, you get some government drone who makes shit money at the DMV, and you offer him $1500 to print a one-off license out the back door, he doesn't say no.
Real ID will increase the value of possessing docs like this and do wonders for the market.
There's this belief that ID forgers operate out of little shitholes in Washington Heights, when in actuality they operate out of the same place you get your legit ID during business hours.
Reduce illegal immigration, my ass. This lines the pockets of some corrupt low-end government clerks. This does nothing to stop people coming over the border, and everything to further exploit them.
Re-reading my original post, I misspoke somewhat. I didn't mean to imply that Eschelon has value in this type of situation. Let me restate:
No-one, not even our current administration, is going to attempt to leverage Eschelon on a dataset as small as 500 people...it'd be a waste of time. The system wasn't designed to listen to me and your and your uncle Steve, it was designed to listen to me and you and your uncle Steve and *everybody else*, pretty much all at once. To do anything else with it is swatting flies with a sledgehammer. The reason these clowns went to the NSA in the first place was to get that big data hoover, it wasn't to get a way to sniff 500 people's traffic...the FBI has shit that can do that. They wouldn't have gone to the NSA if they didn't want that wholesale functionality.
The NSA does wholesale surveillance while the FBI does retail, so to speak. Is a wholesale surveillance organization going to be applied to like 500 people or whatever the original number was? C'mon, they could have used the FBI for that. Eschelon only really has value when you let it hoover as much data as it wants...
RNGs ( which are not RNGs but rather little keygen dongle type items ) don't address the class of issues that would result from -- say -- accessing your bank's site from an 0wned box...the 0wner can hijack an existing, authenticated connection.
Or for that matter a phishing site that passes through the authentication info that you type in, including the number from your dongle...which now that I think about it, is the more likely scenario.
The answer will never really be in authenticating the *person*, that crap can always be spoofed or stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
This year I'm getting 10% of my salary -- as is every other member of the company, plus I'm getting an extra $5K for some reason -- my boss said that he went to the board and had extra bonus funds released to several people as a "thank you" but I'm not sure what the thank you was for.
So I'll clear about $20K when the dust settles...if it isn't the best Xmas bonus I have rec'd, it's close.
I'm from NYC, but I lived in London for a year and change around the time there were planes knocking shit over Stateside.
First time in London I get *lost*[0] both well and thoroughly looking for my office[1] and asked for directions several times. A couple of those times I was told "You should ask a cabbie." I honestly thought that this was a creative local way of saying "Fuck right off and leave me alone."
Wasn't until several days later that I realized they were being serious...
--
[0] Some Manahttan residents falsely believe that they are good navigators because they never get lost at home, if any of you are reading this: it's the *numbered streets*, it's not you -- go to a major European city without a map and you'll starve to death before you ever find your hotel again.
[1] For those of you keeping score, it was Southampton Street...NOT in fact the Southampton Buildings, nor Southampton Place, nor even Southampton Row -- all of which are in the same general area and all of which I was directed to at some point.
Yeah...PHP.
Don't worry about injection vulnerabilities in LAMP -- just don't forget to use mysql_real_escape_string() and not mysql_escape_string()!
The next rev will no doubt include mysql_really_real_escape_string().
I have a diagnosed "sleep disorder", but the actual root cause is my job -- I run an OPS group, so insanely long and/or irregular hours are the norm ( guaranteed to have to work 48 hours straight about once every three months, and have to run on 2-3 hours of sleep pretty regularly ).
To "manage" this, I have a perscription for Ambien ( just switched to CR, `cause it makes it easier to go back to sleep after having to wake up and work for two hours in the middle of the night ) and a perscription for Provigil ( 400 mg/dy ). The pharma is what lets me cope with this schedule when I need to, otherwise I'd be jello.
I have nothing but good things to say about Provigil, it lets me do what I need to do without worrying about whether or not my body can keep up. Not to mention the newfound ability to drive from NYC to Miami with nothing but gas an bathroom breaks. However, there are a couple big things that get overrepresented, or that don't get considered:
1) This stuff lets you operate for long periods of time without sleep and more-or-less without accruing sleep debt, and it lets you function semi-normally on very little sleep. However, it does not keep extended periods of sleeplessness from taking a mental toll -- the longer you go without sleep the more your cognitive ability and short-term memory suffer, modafinil doesn't change that. So yeah, I can run 40 hours straight no problem taking 400 mg of this shit every 12-14 hours, but you get gradually dumber over that span even though you can stay alert and responsive. By the end of a 40-hour run I'm functioning at low-normal to low intelligence, my short term memory is basically nonexistant, and I'm extremely distractable...to the point where sometimes I trail off in the middle of a sentence. So if you do anything other than long-haul trucking, your work will suffer as time goes on.
2) Potential for psychological dependency is very high among the subset of the population likely to use it for its "lifestyle" effects. It improves your concentration by orders of magnitude and lets you run at that high level for quite a while before secondary fatigue effects (see above) start taking a bite out of your performance. For people who derive large portions of their self-worth from their mental abilities, this shit is anabolic steroids -- won't hook you physically, but it makes you *way* better at what you do. And you start to miss it if it isn't there.
3) It gives you headaches -- not all the time, but often enough. Since I started regular use, I get headaches at least 30% more than I used to. Also it can make you really nauseous -- although it also seems to have an appetite supressant effect, and an empty stomach combined with coffee consumption and smoking more heavily than normal could explain the nausea. Also, it makes your urine smell really bad, which has a nice synergistic thing with the nausea...
Seems similar to mine -- I dropped out of HS on my 16th birthday and was nonetheless accepted into a nearby university. I attended college for about four years, racked up tons of credits in widely disparate subjects, realized I was going to have to take main track courses with morons in order to earn a degree and decided that it probably wasn't worth it.
I went and got a job in phone tech support, got promoted to junior programmer about six month later, etc. Changed companies several times around the expansion phase of the bubble, and ended up where I am now, running Operations for a good sized tech company.
High school dropout, college dropout, totally self-taught as far as industry expertise, extremely successful.
When I hire people now, I don't even really look at the education stuff -- IMO it doesn't signify anything at all.
Why you gotta be down on Hank Scorpio?
He destroyed the 59th street bridge, he strongly implies that he is going to destroy France, and he took over the East Coast.
Sure he has kind of a Larry Ellison/Richard Branson thing going on, but as a super-villian he was pretty effective.
A few years ago while working a contract doing security software, I found myself in possession of several exciting pieces of tech, including a mag strip reader/writer and a stack of blanks -- actual blanks, totally white on both sides except for the mag strip itself, no numeric impressions. Bored one Saturday, I cloned one of the credit cards in my pocket and walked around the corner to a bodega, got a pack of cigarettes and a coke, and attempted to pay with the totally unmarked card. The guy took it -- looked at it for a second, apparently just to make sure he was swiping it in the right direction -- swiped it and handed it back. No muss, no fuss.
I suppose that if I had been stopped and searched at any point during that process, I would have been in possession of a "fake credit card", and I imagine that the excercise would have been seriously frowned upon despite the fact that I was also in the possession of the card that the fake had ben cloned from as well as identification proving that it was mine.
**Disclaimer: the bodega in question was on Bergenline Ave. If you are familiar with it, you'll understand.
In 2002, 11.1% of American households were "food insecure" every single day of the year -- meaning basically they didn't have enough money to buy all food needed to sustain the household. In the same year 3.5% of households were "hungry" meaning that not only could they not healthily sustain, they couldn't meet their energy budgets.
So it's clear to me that not only am I willing to let Caucasians starve to death, I'm willing to let my figurative and perhaps indeed even literal ( I live in Manhattan ) *neighbors* starve to death, regardless of their color.
Thank you.
The subject of recommendation engines seems to come up pretty regularly, and no-one ever seems to give props to RINGO->HOMR->Firefly.
I suppose no-one mentions Tapestry when they wax rhapsodic about tagging, either...but then again it didn't really work very well.
I agree with you, but I think there are mutiple usibility models here. We subscribe to the "pull your iPod out of its computer dock , walk to the car, drop it in the car dock, get where you are going and either plug headphones into it and go, or walk into the office and drop it into another computer dock."
The glove compartment hookups are more for people who use their iPods as honkin'-big CD changeers for their cars...or so I suspect.
What is it with people and Costa Rica?
If you don't do too much research, it looks good, but the truth is it's got some pretty serious problems -- they are in dire need of tax reform, they have some nice corruption issues in their executive ( couple of presidents arrested for corruption in the past five years or so ). Plus they have a big drug transshipment thing going, and domestic production is quite the cottage industry as well -- if they don't do anything effective about it, they're gonna be another Columbia.
Plus, the high tech sector is *electronics manufacturing*, mostly microprocessors...and it's only there because chip fab is so hellishly toxic, and what the hell, it's the third world...
Oh *and* IIRC if you want good Internet connectivity ( if you work on the wire, it's more of a need than a want ), you're pretty much stuck in San Jose -- so tack a couple of active volcanoes and a growing crack problem onto the list.
Interesting time indeed.
>You never keep too much in the house because there's no need
Availability of options, my ass. My kitchen is the size of an airline lavatory, it'll only hold a day's worth of food at a time.
Come join me in lovely New York!
Uh huh, and all those other folks can be sued when their shit fails...read your software licenses.
Hold companies liable for their crap code and this, like many, many other security problems, will evaporate.
With the help of a whiteboard (!) I explained to about half a dozen ( okay, mostly junior ) developers and -- here's the real kicker for me -- *the three most senior members of out QA department, including the department head* that you could use the password
' or 1 = 1 --
for many, many sites on the Internet, regardless of user name.
The whiteboard came in when I had to explain *why it worked*...
_shakes head_
Dude, *Atlantic City* is a dump. You don't have to go one street off of anything to see that...
Dr. Hibbert: "Well, only one in two million people has what we call the 'evil gene'. Hitler had it, Walt Disney had it, and Freddy Quimby has it."
> very time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another
Risk. RISK. Riiiiiiiisk.
How can you even take umbrage with that?
Any time you change a code base, you RISK introducing a new bug. You cannot, cannot argue with that.
Troubleshooting. Same reason you can store CVV2 codes, even though CISP says *never* store CCV2 codes. You'd be surprised how often this shit comees in handy when you are trying to figure out why a series of transactions failed. It's way easier to figure out what is fucked-up with a transaction if you can see all the data. Businesses ( and customers too, actually ) don't like to hear "Well it failed, but we don't keep data for that stuff, so that's all I can tell you." They are very into the why, and sometimes without that data there just is no why.
Not to say that you should do it, you'll *take it in the shorts* for doing this in a prod environment, it is stupidly dangerous...but everybody thinks their systems are secure, right?
Not so sure...
I can only speak from personal experience -- I have owned a couple of Windows smartphones and they really, really sucked. They were bad phones, bad messaging devices, bad music players...you name it, they sucked at it.
I used an earlier MS product that tried to do something similar ( OTA synch, something like that ) and it was pure ass -- required lightening security on the Exchange side in order to get it to work at all, and both the client and server had stability issues: device would simply stop getting mail, you wouldn't realize this until you hadn't rec'd anything for a couple hours...reboot and there are a dozen messages. It required dozens of hours from a network ops guy just to keep it working -- every 2K3 or Exchange patch would break it, and it would take hours of screwing around to get it working again.
Eventually I threw the fuckers in a drawer and replaced them with a Blackberry ( which is great at email ) a RAZR ( which is a passably decent phone ) and an iPod ( which plays music just fine, thanks ).
Now yeah, I have a bat belt, yes my wife laughs at me, but everything *works* and I don't have to fuck with any of it to keep it that way...
Not all at once, dummy.
They're going to generate a finite amount at any given point, it'll just add up to infinity *over time*, see?
Illegal immigrants are what's going to fuck this program.
Please don't get the idea that I support this garbage, but follow me for a second.
What happens when you have a card that only a legal resident of the country can have? That card becomes a de facto proof of citizenship.
I actually know a good number of illegals, and some of these cats have serious money, and it's all cash.
So let's take my uncle "Juan", who came over "wet" from Mexico -- he's got a pretty good job, all cash, he's got a DL and a Social Security card he bought, some other guy's name but his picture on the license and all...
Now where did he get these things? Yes yes, *from the issuing authorities*. Thing is, you get some government drone who makes shit money at the DMV, and you offer him $1500 to print a one-off license out the back door, he doesn't say no.
Real ID will increase the value of possessing docs like this and do wonders for the market.
There's this belief that ID forgers operate out of little shitholes in Washington Heights, when in actuality they operate out of the same place you get your legit ID during business hours.
Reduce illegal immigration, my ass. This lines the pockets of some corrupt low-end government clerks. This does nothing to stop people coming over the border, and everything to further exploit them.
Whoa there sport...
Re-reading my original post, I misspoke somewhat. I didn't mean to imply that Eschelon has value in this type of situation. Let me restate:
No-one, not even our current administration, is going to attempt to leverage Eschelon on a dataset as small as 500 people...it'd be a waste of time. The system wasn't designed to listen to me and your and your uncle Steve, it was designed to listen to me and you and your uncle Steve and *everybody else*, pretty much all at once. To do anything else with it is swatting flies with a sledgehammer. The reason these clowns went to the NSA in the first place was to get that big data hoover, it wasn't to get a way to sniff 500 people's traffic...the FBI has shit that can do that. They wouldn't have gone to the NSA if they didn't want that wholesale functionality.
My friends in Costa Rica say it's fast on it's way to becoming the next Columbia...not that I have any data to back that up.
Uraguay is your best bet...nice beaches and the strongest information economy in South America.
The NSA does wholesale surveillance while the FBI does retail, so to speak. Is a wholesale surveillance organization going to be applied to like 500 people or whatever the original number was? C'mon, they could have used the FBI for that. Eschelon only really has value when you let it hoover as much data as it wants ...
RNGs ( which are not RNGs but rather little keygen dongle type items ) don't address the class of issues that would result from -- say -- accessing your bank's site from an 0wned box...the 0wner can hijack an existing, authenticated connection.
Or for that matter a phishing site that passes through the authentication info that you type in, including the number from your dongle...which now that I think about it, is the more likely scenario.
The answer will never really be in authenticating the *person*, that crap can always be spoofed or stolen.