I have worked as a short term contractor at one of the "Big 3" credit agencies, and was responsible for adding code to the Mexico codebase that added credit "scoring" to the list of items tracked. It was a 3-month contract where I, coming in off the street, had basically root access to the worldwide databases of this particular credit agencies customer database. It was necessary for my testing that, after I ran my modifications on a test dataset, which I got to expose my changes to a development mirror of the actual database before checking the code into the build tree.
Thinking about it, there was really no way to deny me access to that database, for without the ability to test against live data, there would be no way to verify that my code would not cause someone else huge headaches if it did not work properly.
My point is this...as long as programmers exist they will HAVE to have access to sensitive customer data. It really come down to a typical employer-employee trust issue, and this problem as been with us since the development of merchant/consumer transactions. The idea that sensitive data can be protected in this day and age is as silly as thinking State secrets are safe.
It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event...and we all know that terrorists would *never* consider wearing a wig when they decide to poison our water supply.
I think the easy answer to this in that "open content" is its own reward...kinda like playing music. The act of creating something carries with it enough personal satisfaction to keep us doing it, without any need for others to comment.
However, we all should know that plenty of Big Corporate Interests will soon start trying to eliminate "open content" from the table. DRM and legal challenges will soon start working together to eliminate what-they-will-call unregulated content, of course, to protect us from some imaginary threat to our safty/children and/or security, and to control the distribution of products and threatening memes that the internet allow to run unfettered.
We must all be vigilant to protect this bastion of free speech, for powerful forces are combining to reshape it into there restrictive image....
Come on, now, how hard is most of the information that was supposed to be mined for TIA that hard to get anyway?? For $35US you can look in the yellow pages (or, of course, log into a web site), punch in some data, and get a background check of anyone anyway. This includes
1. Credit statements 2. Job histories 3. Criminal records. 4. Tax records....and so on. Corporations wanting to know everything about employees have already created the tools to mine our personal information anyway...do you really thing the gov't can't?
Just because the funding is gone, do you really thing the gov't has given up on this? Bad press killed this "initiative" long before this Congress did...but don't worry, they have wizened up. Next time they just won't mention to us that they are doing it...
So perhaps this *may* mean that only 3-12% of the people feel that what is contained in their email is important enough to encrypt. Why does this article assume that VPNs are necessary in every case?
You know, it is sometimes good to be "paranoid", but often it is just that, paranoia. Do I care if someone sniffs my unencrypted "penis enlargement NOW!" emails? Security is not always the primary design factor, and sometimes is disregarded altogether in the face of getting things done.
I can't help when I think of "security" of the push/pull battle that the U.S. Army had with the Manhattan Project personal. The Army, of course, say bogeymen under every rock at Los Alamos, but the scientists soon discovered that to aid in the project, many "security" concerns had to be circumvented...
I got my B.S. in Computer Engineering in 1987 at a small private engineering school here in Florida, and did so because of my love of computing, hardware and software. Over the past 14 years, programming (my first love) lost its allure for several reasons...
1. Developing software for large corporations that was never actually used for anything due to project cancellations, modifications etc made by mostly bozo-level managers.
2. Developing software for small companies that were inadequately financed, thereby ending project development before fruition.
3. Dealing with the "techie" (ie geek) mindset 24/7. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux as much as the next guy, but it gets old talking "bits" all the time.
I think enrollment is C.S. is down for many of these same reasons. I am glad that people are no longer entering C.S. for "the money", I think it insures a higher level of quality for the industry over the long run.
And so now I own a florist and could not be happier (no I am not gay). I still get plenty of I.T. related work, but also get to hone my sales and "soft" skills, interacting with a wide variety of people.
Microsoft is dead, they just haven't smelled themselves lately...hasn't anyone told Big Steve that it is impossible to compete with FREE?
$42.3bUS (or whatever)...wow, that's a lot of money, but not even close to enough to compete, in the long run, with OSS. It's inevitable that MS closed-loop model will go the way of the Wooly Mammoth. Linux is the disruptive technology that will bring Microsoft to its knees.
sounds a lot like good 'ole fashioned SMP to me, with a lot more disk space. As we all here know, not all computer-related tasks work well in a multi-processor platform, and as someone who has played with SMP programming, it certainly adds an order-of-magnitude level of complexity to try to harness the full power of SMP in your code. Compilers help, but not much...
There is, IMHO, a "holy grail" of handheld devices, and it would contain...
1. a cell-phone 2. 16-bit color Nintendo and/or Sega compatibility (maybe emulated MAME-like?) 3. embedded Linux 4. 80G hard drive ala I-pod. 5. Can easily fit in my pocket... 6. 802.11g
Build it, and I will come...nothing else makes sense to me
That there is no such thing as "bad" publicity, esp. in the adult industry...this is nothing more than a bunch of white noise to generate free advertisement for the guy.
The means to achieve GM babies are spreading, and if the practice ever catches on, it'll be because parents are trying to keep up with the Joneses.
This is exactly the problem. Their already exists among many "elites" an incredible competitive attitude in regards to their offspring. It is a well known fact that these people will compete furiously about which kindergarten their child will attend!
Does anyone here really think that people of this mindset and means will not be standing in line for a procedure that could guarantee a 30 point IQ boast??? And, of course, once one "parent" does it, all others in the same social circles will feel absolutely compelled to do the same in order to "keep up" with the perceived competition.
I really don't think legislation (or anything else of that matter) can keep this genie in the bottle; the idea of enhancing your offspring is just too seductive to be abandoned. I mean, how many of us here really would NOT want our daughter to look like Pamela Anderson and have the brains of Jane Goddard?
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower...
How many more time is the RIAA gonna try to stuff this crap down our throats and have us burp up sympathy?? Here are just a few of the reasons why a drop of sales in not at all necessarily due to downloaded music...
1. The most obvious of these is the drop in economy, with similar sales slumps in the last econo-drop of the early '90s.
2. Secondly, the increase in games and DVD sales is a contributing factor. With DVD's being, in many cases, cheaper than a music CD, their is much more value in a DVD than a typical CD.
3. Last, but not least, radio is highlighted as a problem due to its short play lists and the difficulty in getting playtime for new artists. Has anyone else noticed not that ClearChannel owns about everything, only about 20-30 bands ever get airplay??
I suppose EMI is stepping in the right direction, but IMHO its too little, too late. The future of music will probably have something to do with corporate sponserships, where hit songs are considered a form of advertising and bands are reduced to touring ad billboards where huge multinationals will "own" popular acts.
Even if they only end up being a paltry million times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially. Among other things, there will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code.
A million times faster??? Perhaps Win2.1K will finally be able to boot in less then 45 seconds...
It was fun to fiddle around with, but it took too long to get any useful information, and the tiny monochrome screen and "walled garden" web service didn't help. It was useful for monitoring a stock price, but not much else
I was an early adapter to AT&T's Wireless Web service, and have been using it quite successfully for about 2 years now. The problem the author mentions of the "walled garden" is real, but I found the real use of this service was as an email "article repository" for myself.
What I do is this...during the due course of the day I find many articles (slashdot included) that I do not have time to read. I set up my cell phone email account as a user on my home email program, and quickly send a copy to my phone account whenever I find something interesting.
This allows me to catch-up during down time, boring lunches, meetings with my project manager, etc. I have found this to be *very* useful in my day-to-day life.
Plus, how else could I catch up on/. while taking a crap???
Note that 20% profit rates are normally considered very good in most businesses
You, my friend, have quite obviously never run a business...a 20% margin will most definatly NOT keep a business afloat.
I have run a software company, a consulting business, and now a florist, and not one of them could ever, ever survive on a 20% margin. FYI, my typical markup on fresh cut flowers is in the neighborhood of 300-400%.
Well now that IBM is on the project, can we expect a developerWorks posting on getting it to run on my VIC 20 and TRS-80?? You know, the one with the cassette drive...
Slashdot Mirror
I have worked as a short term contractor at one of the "Big 3" credit agencies, and was responsible for adding code to the Mexico codebase that added credit "scoring" to the list of items tracked. It was a 3-month contract where I, coming in off the street, had basically root access to the worldwide databases of this particular credit agencies customer database. It was necessary for my testing that, after I ran my modifications on a test dataset, which I got to expose my changes to a development mirror of the actual database before checking the code into the build tree.
Thinking about it, there was really no way to deny me access to that database, for without the ability to test against live data, there would be no way to verify that my code would not cause someone else huge headaches if it did not work properly.
My point is this...as long as programmers exist they will HAVE to have access to sensitive customer data. It really come down to a typical employer-employee trust issue, and this problem as been with us since the development of merchant/consumer transactions. The idea that sensitive data can be protected in this day and age is as silly as thinking State secrets are safe.
It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event ...and we all know that terrorists would *never* consider wearing a wig when they decide to poison our water supply.
I think the easy answer to this in that "open content" is its own reward...kinda like playing music. The act of creating something carries with it enough personal satisfaction to keep us doing it, without any need for others to comment.
However, we all should know that plenty of Big Corporate Interests will soon start trying to eliminate "open content" from the table. DRM and legal challenges will soon start working together to eliminate what-they-will-call unregulated content, of course, to protect us from some imaginary threat to our safty/children and/or security, and to control the distribution of products and threatening memes that the internet allow to run unfettered.
We must all be vigilant to protect this bastion of free speech, for powerful forces are combining to reshape it into there restrictive image....
Come on, now, how hard is most of the information that was supposed to be mined for TIA that hard to get anyway?? For $35US you can look in the yellow pages (or, of course, log into a web site), punch in some data, and get a background check of anyone anyway. This includes
...and so on. Corporations wanting to know everything about employees have already created the tools to mine our personal information anyway...do you really thing the gov't can't?
1. Credit statements
2. Job histories
3. Criminal records.
4. Tax records.
Just because the funding is gone, do you really thing the gov't has given up on this? Bad press killed this "initiative" long before this Congress did...but don't worry, they have wizened up. Next time they just won't mention to us that they are doing it...
So perhaps this *may* mean that only 3-12% of the people feel that what is contained in their email is important enough to encrypt. Why does this article assume that VPNs are necessary in every case?
You know, it is sometimes good to be "paranoid", but often it is just that, paranoia. Do I care if someone sniffs my unencrypted "penis enlargement NOW!" emails? Security is not always the primary design factor, and sometimes is disregarded altogether in the face of getting things done.
I can't help when I think of "security" of the push/pull battle that the U.S. Army had with the Manhattan Project personal. The Army, of course, say bogeymen under every rock at Los Alamos, but the scientists soon discovered that to aid in the project, many "security" concerns had to be circumvented...
Or is this just yet another way to force us into a new upgrade cycle?"
Short Answer: Yes.
But, hey, that keeps many of us employed...
The first time you dispose of a tedious backlog of e-mail while kicking back in your favorite lawn chair...
Just make sure that your kids don't decide to COWABUNGA all over you and your pricey laptop...
has been sponsered by Cisco and Nortel, makers of fine routers and hubs since...well, for a couple of years now.
I got my B.S. in Computer Engineering in 1987 at a small private engineering school here in Florida, and did so because of my love of computing, hardware and software. Over the past 14 years, programming (my first love) lost its allure for several reasons...
1. Developing software for large corporations that was never actually used for anything due to project cancellations, modifications etc made by mostly bozo-level managers.
2. Developing software for small companies that were inadequately financed, thereby ending project development before fruition.
3. Dealing with the "techie" (ie geek) mindset 24/7. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux as much as the next guy, but it gets old talking "bits" all the time.
I think enrollment is C.S. is down for many of these same reasons. I am glad that people are no longer entering C.S. for "the money", I think it insures a higher level of quality for the industry over the long run.
And so now I own a florist and could not be happier (no I am not gay). I still get plenty of I.T. related work, but also get to hone my sales and "soft" skills, interacting with a wide variety of people.
Microsoft is dead, they just haven't smelled themselves lately...hasn't anyone told Big Steve that it is impossible to compete with FREE?
$42.3bUS (or whatever)...wow, that's a lot of money, but not even close to enough to compete, in the long run, with OSS. It's inevitable that MS closed-loop model will go the way of the Wooly Mammoth. Linux is the disruptive technology that will bring Microsoft to its knees.
I heard Radio Shack's next special is to rid their inventory of those high-performance "cassette drives" used with the TRS-80...
sounds a lot like good 'ole fashioned SMP to me, with a lot more disk space. As we all here know, not all computer-related tasks work well in a multi-processor platform, and as someone who has played with SMP programming, it certainly adds an order-of-magnitude level of complexity to try to harness the full power of SMP in your code. Compilers help, but not much...
There is, IMHO, a "holy grail" of handheld devices, and it would contain...
1. a cell-phone
2. 16-bit color Nintendo and/or Sega compatibility
(maybe emulated MAME-like?)
3. embedded Linux
4. 80G hard drive ala I-pod.
5. Can easily fit in my pocket...
6. 802.11g
Build it, and I will come...nothing else makes sense to me
That there is no such thing as "bad" publicity, esp. in the adult industry...this is nothing more than a bunch of white noise to generate free advertisement for the guy.
/.!
Wise up,
Boy, my dad would have kicked my ass if I pulled a stunt in college that cost him $12k...I was lucky to get $10/week for extra beer money.
I can't wait to make a network cluster of these things and call it MisterHouse's Neighborhood.
The means to achieve GM babies are spreading, and if the practice ever catches on, it'll be because parents are trying to keep up with the Joneses.
This is exactly the problem. Their already exists among many "elites" an incredible competitive attitude in regards to their offspring. It is a well known fact that these people will compete furiously about which kindergarten their child will attend!
Does anyone here really think that people of this mindset and means will not be standing in line for a procedure that could guarantee a 30 point IQ boast??? And, of course, once one "parent" does it, all others in the same social circles will feel absolutely compelled to do the same in order to "keep up" with the perceived competition.
I really don't think legislation (or anything else of that matter) can keep this genie in the bottle; the idea of enhancing your offspring is just too seductive to be abandoned. I mean, how many of us here really would NOT want our daughter to look like Pamela Anderson and have the brains of Jane Goddard?
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower...
How many more time is the RIAA gonna try to stuff this crap down our throats and have us burp up sympathy?? Here are just a few of the reasons why a drop of sales in not at all necessarily due to downloaded music...
1. The most obvious of these is the drop in economy, with similar sales slumps in the last econo-drop of the early '90s.
2. Secondly, the increase in games and DVD sales is a contributing factor. With DVD's being, in many cases, cheaper than a music CD, their is much more value in a DVD than a typical CD.
3. Last, but not least, radio is highlighted as a problem due to its short play lists and the difficulty in getting playtime for new artists. Has anyone else noticed not that ClearChannel owns about everything, only about 20-30 bands ever get airplay??
I suppose EMI is stepping in the right direction, but IMHO its too little, too late. The future of music will probably have something to do with corporate sponserships, where hit songs are considered a form of advertising and bands are reduced to touring ad billboards where huge multinationals will "own" popular acts.
Even if they only end up being a paltry million times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially. Among other things, there will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code.
A million times faster??? Perhaps Win2.1K will finally be able to boot in less then 45 seconds...
new life for Microsoft Bob...
It was fun to fiddle around with, but it took too long to get any useful information, and the tiny monochrome screen and "walled garden" web service didn't help. It was useful for monitoring a stock price, but not much else
/. while taking a crap???
I was an early adapter to AT&T's Wireless Web service, and have been using it quite successfully for about 2 years now. The problem the author mentions of the "walled garden" is real, but I found the real use of this service was as an email "article repository" for myself.
What I do is this...during the due course of the day I find many articles (slashdot included) that I do not have time to read. I set up my cell phone email account as a user on my home email program, and quickly send a copy to my phone account whenever I find something interesting.
This allows me to catch-up during down time, boring lunches, meetings with my project manager, etc. I have found this to be *very* useful in my day-to-day life.
Plus, how else could I catch up on
Note that 20% profit rates are normally considered very good in most businesses
You, my friend, have quite obviously never run a business...a 20% margin will most definatly NOT keep a business afloat.
I have run a software company, a consulting business, and now a florist, and not one of them could ever, ever survive on a 20% margin. FYI, my typical markup on fresh cut flowers is in the neighborhood of 300-400%.
Well now that IBM is on the project, can we expect a developerWorks posting on getting it to run on my VIC 20 and TRS-80?? You know, the one with the cassette drive...
..AOL is misleading people into thinking that it is actually a ISP.
I'll make sure I forward this message to bgates@microsoft.com and lellison@oracle.com