Glad to hear back from you. While I fully agree that having equally great minds on a task is ideal (for the same reason that you don't let programmers QA their own work: you need different yet equally valuable perspectives); it sounds like the immediate problem your facing in the less-than-ideal situation of not having that stems from the attitude of those who must eventually give ground.
My personal attitude when someone else must call the shots, set the agenda or whatever - regardless of how I feel about their decisions, is feel confident I've done my best to give them the benefit of my experience, and then follow that up by using my experience to carry out their agenda to the best of my ability. Again, whether I think that's the best approach or not. I do this because a)I recognize I may not all the "big picture" information the leader has and b)either way, you cross the finish line faster when everyone is pulling in the same direction.
If that's not the attitude your seeing in that type of situation, here's an article my friend wrote that I thought put things in perspective, whether you want to try to hire people with better attitudes, or improve the outlook of those already on a team.
Hopefully, if you can improve your approach to these problems, not only will you wind up with better prepared teams, but you won't find yourself feeling so frustrated that you rub people the wrong way socially. The women who wrote the article btw is one of the best project managers I know, but when she was overwhelmed, behaved in a way that made me want to quit my job - something I've never done. She recognized this and quit the company first, and we're both now very happy in our jobs.
Foreign governments will hire hot chicks to do you just for a Blackberry? If I was a target, I'd get myself of whole box of fake Blackberries and go around pretending to use them at discos. At least until my agency sprung for counter-espionage fake Blackberries that *looked* like they had encrypted state secrets on them, but were really just surveillance devices so they could GPS exactly where they wound up, and eaves-drop on their decryption techniques.
Unfortunately, no government cares enough about what's on my PDA to hire hotties to boost it, and even if they did, you couldn't pay me enough to go freakin' disco.
If you'd like to be able to be an effective leader even in situations where you're clearly the best, but you feel the need to have some push-back in order to do that - why not try second-guessing yourself? Surely you've programmed something single-handedly at some point - were you able to be an effective one-man "team" even though you had no equals? Of course, because you come up with a plan and then think it over, look for holes, better approaches, etc - and can usually give your first attempts a run for their money.
If you treat those with less skill, experience, or talent than you badly; not only do you create a poor working environment, you also pass up to opportunity to benefit from the things they may be better at than you.
A good team leader should inspire, not annoy. And if you're the top banana and you find your team annoying you, make sure you've let them know before hand that you feel personally responsible for the end result of *everyone's* work. They'll be more likely to cut you some slack if you seemed stressed by their short-comings - if they remember it's mostly your butt on the line if they screw up.
You sound like you're satisfied with your current situation - I only offer this advice in case you'd like to try having the same level of success in any team make-up, and without being perceived as a jerk by your co-workers.
I totally agree, there *are* more stable ways of verifying a possibly spoofed "From" or "Reply" to address that simply using it and giving up if a response is not received in X # of days. Mark Perkel has some excellent techniques in this regard. And yes, doing something disruptive on a small scale (be it handling spam filter clumsily, or littering) does beg the question, "What if everyone did this?". However, I face two challenges in getting there.
1. The "after-the-fact" method I use results in an annoying situation where email clients see an email and notify the user, only minutes later to have the spam removed from the stream and the email not being there. Email clients don't tend to remove the notification once an email has been removed. This will be an even bigger aggravation for push clients. My challenges in preventing this are first, dealing with instabilities of the box it's running - where critical functions are frequently unavailable and second, the techniques I've seen other use require a much higher level of expertise for users of the so-called "Grandma Demographic". I may be able to solve the problem by moving this to a dedicated server - but that's a pricey solution that would be premature at this point in development.
2. To do this, I need to manipulate the stream myself. The only thing stopping me from doing that so far is the research. It's quite simple to use PHP built in mail functions, but by-passing all that encapsulation for a stream based approach (with the same degree of reliability I get using pre-made libraries) is going to take significantly more time.
They say the road to failure is paved with perfection, and the road to failure is paved with "Good Enough". For me, getting around #1 will constitute "Good Enough" - though frankly it's pretty damn good already other than having to wait up to 3 minutes between getting a "New Mail" notification and being able to check for email. Perfection is a 100% protection against false positives, accommodation of clumsily configured mail servers, complete ease of use for users, and lastly, making a program which is an ideal netizen itself. To achieve all that, I've got to read several books, and then rent a dedicated server where I can put I'll I've learned to use. Or just hire someone to assist me with that. Either way, it's going to take more money and time than I can currently devote the the problem. The "Not quite good enough" version I've been running for the past 2 years has at least saved me from being swamped with spam, and I am saving up both money and time to devote towards progressing towards a more perfect system.
But I hope I'm confident enough to launch something sometime in between the "Good Enough" milestone and the "Perfection" milestone. If there's anything that I've learned in the last 2 decades, it's that those who succeed in software don't wait until "Perfection" before going to market. Truly, I have yet to ever see a piece of perfect software even make it to production. For all it's flaws, I wouldn't shut off my clunky little program for my accounts for anything. Nor would I swap it for any other the other products or services I researched before reluctantly concluding I'd have to build something myself.
If you like, I'll let you know when I've got something more robust online and tell you what techniques I'm using to see if I've made any stupid mistakes.
Nope, you're not misreading. I take the reply to addresses at their word. If it bounces, it goes to a black hole set up for precisely that purpose (though yes, this is a lot unpleasant backscatter). The reason I took this approach was an experience I had setting up this one companies marketing system. Their previous system had been a sort of jury-rigged exchange box; but all their client's spam filters were set up to accept emails from it as legit. When we gave them a real email server, about 1/3 of all their communications were getting sucked up into spam filters because of tiny differences in the headers - we had to adjust it to spoof the old, goofy, headers from their previous system to get their invoices and stuff out. What that experience (and others) taught me is that a lot of small and medium size business simply don't have their email servers set up as well as spammers do; because email is not their core strength. And if you set up a spam trap that runs all those tests that a badly set up email server will fail - you're way to many risking false positives. The only way to perform a challenge response that avoids that is to, unfortunately, challenge. I'm sure there are ways to do that that would be more amenable to mail server operators and domain owners everywhere; but I haven't gotten to that stage yet. The primary purpose of the filter to completely eliminate false positives while still blocking the true positives - not eliminate backscatter. When the first problem is solved, then resources can be directed towards achieving secondary objectives.
Does that seem unethical to you? It's only running on 2 test accounts right now, unlike boxtrap which runs on hundreds of thousands. I can hardly afford to solve other people's problems for free if I don't solve any problems for hire first. Couldn't mail server software address spoofing more efficiently than filtering software? It wouldn't need to be filtered at all if it hadn't been accepted as legit in the first place. That's my thinking right now at least - but there's a lot about this stuff I don't know yet so please feel free to point my in the right direction if I've made a fundamental blunder here somewhere.
They don't do it because they're not paid to do it. They're paid to make the website look and work the way the client wants. If the client also wants it to be nicely search-able... well that's SEO, an additional service they're happy to provide for a small fee.
This is not a knock on web designers, I work with them and (at least in this studio) they give the clients far more than they deserve as it is. If a client's cool and doesn't waste their time with ridiculous requests "Make it pinker", etc - the people here will make sure it it's more search-able, QA it on every browser and platform, pour over the design to make it even better - you name it. But all that extra service isn't promised up front so they have some wiggle room with time-wasting or after-the-fact penny pinchers.
The "From" and "Reply To" fields of spam are invariably fake, or spoofed. If two people use a program like BoxTrap, and one of them gets a spam using the other's email address, they'll either automatically white list each other, or create an endless challenge response loop.
I wrote a program which replies to all suspected spam (modified challenge-response), and the only thing that happened was I got my webhost black listed and they temporarily suspended the account. I dropped it to 2 accounts, and reset the chron job to run every 5 minutes instead of every 1 minute, and there hasn't been a problem since.
Though looking at the spam trap, I am still getting a good 400 spams a day. The only way I've found to reduce it is to send a bounce *and* a challenge response. Spammers will knock off bounces, but real people will ignore them if there's also a challenge response. But I haven't taken the time to figure out how to do that with PHP on a reseller account yet.
Sure, every girl says to herself, "Ya know, I wish I could somehow combine the boredom of computers, with the terror of snakes". This is as thinly a veiled marketing gimmick as "The back massager" or "T.A.T.U".
Still though, gotta give 'em props. I'm sure my girlfriend would have been pretty pleased if I got a grant to make robotic "snakes". Though I might feel a little inadequate if she requested it use "D-Cell" size batteries. I'm no C-Cell, but I don't think I'm quite a D-cell. Call it 3 cells, and a then a D-cell. Ok, if I'm in the pool we might be talking double A's.
I know, that's kind of is sophomoric. But then again I'm not the one who posted an article about robotic "snakes", am I.
When informed that the public had wanted him to "keep his hands *off* the interns, not *of* the interns", President Bush exclaimed, "What? Well no wonder Mark Foley resigned but I've only got a 25% approval rating!".
Vice President Dick Cheney blamed the mix-up on a few bad Apples (which lacked the grammar correction of Office XP), and reluctantly accepted the resignation of White House Stenographer Phil "Lefty" Johnson after the request for an independent inquiry was voted down by a show of hands.
Why is it cheaper to have work done overseas, even adding in the "shipping costs"? Because people in other countries can work cheaper than us. Why could they work cheaper than us? Because they could be paid less, and their countries cost less to live in to begin with.
During the outsourcing craze, I worked out that the highest paid programmer in India wouldn't qualify for a lease in a studio apartment anywhere in New York City, even if they walked to work, ate nothing but Ramen, purchased nothing *but* that Ramen, and never saw a doctor of any sort. So why, I asked myself, could they do it in India?
Rent was cheaper, because there were no building codes making houses safe, or guarantees of consistent electricity, drinkable water, or sewage or trash removal. Taxes (which also contribute to all costs) were lower because they didn't have luxuries like our FDA making food safe, reliable fire or police departments, mail delivery, etc. And of course, no pricey labour laws, worker safety standards, health care, wage standards, unions, etc.
But then companies started outsourcing to Canada, because they saved a bundle not having to provide health insurance. Then companies shifted from China and India to Viet Nam, because the value of the dollar had dropped in relation to their currencies too much.
And now, the cost of oil is bringing back those good ol' American jobs.
Say what you will about the current Administration - but you gotta give them credit for making great strides at turning America into the type of 3rd world nation where people go for cheap labour. If we elect McCain (or the OPEC stops pricing oil in greenbacks), it won't be long before "Made in USA" will replace the "Made in China" on all the cheap, lead-tainted, salmonella laden, useless crap other the rest of the world can afford to buy at predatory super-stores. Yay! Plus, our new standard of living will really take a bite out of the pesky "urban sprawl" problem.
But hey, we'll always have Paris... Hilton. We can't risk developing a Spoiled Brat Gap.
John McCain says he's completely computer illiterate, and has to rely on other people to do anything on the computer for him. Now, given that George W. Bush has said that "doesn't read newspapers" - what're the odds *he's* computer literate? Or that either of them would hire (or keep) people who felt that skill was far more important than they did?
Whether you think this is genuine incompetence or just plausible deniability - the fact remains that we collectively "hired" someone who said he lacked a vital skill for the job, and a fair portion of Americans are seriously considering hiring another one.
If you were willfully ignorant, and had to rely exclusively on the caliber of people a willfully ignorant person would hire as advisers - you too would end up having to:
-Say things like "$4.00 a gallon gas? I hadn't heard about that". -Wait until your staff put together a DVD for you to illustrate what a "heckuva" job that ex-Head of an Equestrian club manager you hired to run FEMA was doing responding to a Category 5 hurricane that hit a below sea level city. -Claim that "Everyone thought he had Weapons of Mass Destruction". -Respond that "No one could have predicted" terrorists would fly highjacked jumbo jets into the building they previously tried to blow up with a truck bomb. -Assume that promising to "Protect and Uphold the Constitution" consisted primarily of keeping your hands of the interns, and doing a lot of bicycling.
So let's not complain about this too much folks. We hired an incurious idiot to run the company. Just be thankful the company didn't go completely bankrupt before we started paying more attention to applicant's resumes.
I'm actually far more surprised than thankful. If we make it to 2009 without China foreclosing on us, it's going to feel the way it does to wake up safe in bed when you have no memory of how you got home from the previous night's party: thankful you got home alive but still worried about kind of damage you've done to your car, credit line, or reputation in the process.
Working for both small and large companies over the last 20 years, I've noticed that the first victim of any project is proper project management (the second being proper QA). As a coder who frequently finds them self in this situation, I marked down the 12 steps that *every* software project will go through one way or the other. The difference between a successful project and a clusterfuck - usually boils down to doing them in the correct order the first time. They *will* be done in this order eventually; but you can save a lot of time and aggravation by doing them in this order to begin with.
Consider this the "cheat sheet" for projects with inadequate management: 1. Define the purpose of the application. 2. Define the functions a features of the application. 3. Develop a top level plan for developing it. 4. Create the database schema for storing the necessary data. 5. Create detailed mock-ups of the finished application. 6. Have those mock-ups approved by the people who will be using it. 7. Develop the exact interfaces that will be needed for all objects used in the application. 8. *Then* code the classes for the objects (this is the part we always like to start with) 9. Code the classes into the GUI. 10. Test and debug. 11. Have your QA process approved and signed off on by the client/users. 12. Deploy.
I know this seems simple, but seriously, try to think of any scenario where you could switch *any* two of these steps around and not risk wasting time and effort. It can't be done. I know - I seen very, very talented people try. Look at any successful project you've ever been on, and you'll see that - while there may have been valient attempts to do these things in different orders, or skip steps - in the end a successful project will have gone through all these steps, in this exact order. Even if things steps had to be repeated because they were taken prematurely.
BTW, this is a very, very boring way of approaching development. Nothing exciting happens until step 7, and by that point it's so obvious what should be done that there's no sense of adventure left. I rarely concede this fact myself unless I have a mission critical project with an unmovable deadline.
A good project manager knows how to get a client to focus and communicate (when they'd rather talk about their "vision"), limit the scope of each phase of development, work with clients to help them fully understand their options and the ramifications of each one, and to keep moral and enthusiasm high during the boring or tedious bits. But follow these steps even without proper management, and you will at least be assured of not wasting time in any aspect of the development process.
There are 3 debated OS's: Windows, Mac, and 'Nix. There's plenty of objective and subjective discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each. But here's a simple principle that cuts through the confusion:
"A group of people who *try* to accomplish something, will succeed at a higher rate than a group that doesn't"
Just look at what the people behind each OS have *tried* to do, and you'll see that they've succeeded more in that area.
The 'Nix developers *tried* to develop a secure, scalable OS - because that was what their market required. Not surprisingly, 'Nix is the most secure and scalable. They didn't really try to make it something Grandma could find her way around in easily, or that could play bleeding edge video games, or win beauty contests. Not surprisingly, they didn't succeed at doing any of those things with the OS compared to the alternatives.
The people behind Windows (pick any version you like), tried to make it something that appealed to office workers who had IT guys around to help out, encouraged third party hardware and all the software that that enabled (like video games that needed fast but cheap sound and graphic cards), and a small learning curve to develop basic business apps - because riding into the corporate world on IBM's coat-tails, that was their market. Not surprisingly, they succeeded in these areas. They didn't try to make it stable enough to use without an IT staff, as secure as a financial services data center would need to be, or the tool of choice for artistic types - because that wasn't their market until much later. So no big surprise they didn't beat the groups that had been trying to do nothing but that for much longer.
Apple tried to make truly personal computers. Easy enough to use, and stable enough to trust, without the aid of an IT staff. Not a lot people wanted personal computers to run spreadsheets at home, but they did want to use them for more creative projects. And, no surprise again, that's what Mac's are still good at.
Of course, eventually computers became too important in the world for any OS to be exceptionally weak in any area even for the original market, so all three groups started trying to address their weaknesses. 'Nix got a couple of GUI shells, and easier to install packages. Windows made a stab and running more stable servers, supporting multimedia, introducing the concept of security to office workers, and spawning a whole anti-virus industry. And Mac ran office programs, started playing nicer with Windows networks, and took on BSD core to maintain security and stability. They'd probably also have addressed their gaming short-comings if consoles hadn't pretty much reduced gaming on personal computers to a small hard-core niche of users who cheerfully pay more for a video card upgrade than what a whole next-gen console costs.
But the trajectories stay the same. 'Nix has to please the "We don't care what it looks like, it has be secure and scalable" crowd, Windows has to please the "I just need to finish this spreadsheet, so put my 'password' on a post it note on my monitor and tell the IT guys to fix the virus I just downloaded" crowd, and Mac has to please the "I'm here to make music, art, and email Grandma; not get a CS degree" crowd.
As I've seen written on Slashdot before - the road to failure is paved with perfection, the road to success is paved with "Good Enough". No OS will ever be perfect, but they'll survive by being the best for their target market's primary needs, and "good enough" for the other needs that market has.
The reason Microsoft is losing market share, is that it's simply trying to serve too many markets, and losing out in the secondary "Good Enough" areas. It spent too much time trying to catch up to 'nix on server needs, and Mac on multimedia needs, and wound up not being quite "good enough" with security, stability, and ease of use for the spreadsheet crowd. It's still the best option for someone who needs to keep doing the same spreadsheets, word documents, and power po
If we talk about our jobs to anyone who doesn't have the exact same job, it only takes like 5 minutes before their eyes glaze over. Even if they used to have the same job. That's why we make the big bucks - a very, very small percentage of the population find the details of our industry interesting enough to simply stay awake through, let alone learn.
Same goes for me. If I'm too pumped up from a programming breakthrough to get to sleep, I'll ask my Engineer or Project Manager friend what they did that day. Zzzzzz.
The only people who could successfully tap our phones would be people who *wanted* to do our jobs, but weren't good enough at them and had to settle for eavesdropping in on us. My guess is, even though they could stay awake for it, the bulk of it would be way over their heads.
It's the equivalent of having horrible credit and no money to protect yourself against identity theft. Just make all your phone conversations lethally boring. I'd bet that Al Quida could probably get away with anything over the phone if they only recruited people at Star Trek conventions and Hannah Montana concerts. But no one's written an Arabic to Klingon translation dictionary.
Why would that be MORE awesome? A Roomba could only kill me by waiting until I was rich enough to afford a place with stairs, *and* a Roomba - so that I could trip over it. And a Japanese Vending Machine could only kill me by tricking me into purchasing the "Happy Lucky Sushi Pack" that was actually 5 months old and crawling with Salmonella.
There's a *reason* nobody ever used either of those two plot devices in movie. I do hope you're not wasting your time shopping around a movie script based on the things *you* think would be awesome to see. It'd probably make you asocial and bitter after awhile.
#1. Start a punk band #2. Wear ThinkGeek T-Shirts during gigs #3. Hit on the girls who laugh at the joke on your T-Shirt. #4. Collect Underpants (behind the couch, wedged behind the bed, etc).
Of course, perhaps part of why this works for me is that... I apparently code like a girl. No one ever gives me time to do proper documentation, and when you're in a punk band you tend to drink a lot - so if I didn't leave blog-sized comments in my code; I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it then next time I came in hungover. Plus, I've had to clean up after show-offs who don't comment or document their code, and use single letter variable names for everything. And then leave when their code doesn't work.
Ever try to debug a function that neither works, nor gives any indication of what it would it would do if it *did* work? Oh boy, that's fun, eh?
Being considerate in general makes you a better coder, *and* a better catch. Give it shot.
being killed by a super-intelligent robot, if I had some hand in creating it? Think how awesome that would be - you build something intelligent enough to not only not need you anymore, but that also determines the world is actually better off without you. Maybe it's just because I figure, if I helped create it, I'd be pretty damn far down on the list of people the robots figured the world would be better off without.
And don't give me any of that, "Oh, it'll kill coders *first* because they represent the biggest threat" nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to exhibit anything *remotely* resembling intelligence? If you created something capable of even *reasoning* that you were a threat, you'd have created something smart enough to deal with that deduction in better ways than killing you. And if it's not really smarter than you, but just more dangerous - like those automated border guard robots they had to turn off because they turned their guns on the engineers during the demo - well, the world probably *is* better off without you. *First* you make it intelligent, *then* you install the guns. Jeez - how hard is that to figure out?
Or maybe it's just that running from Terminator style robots would be far more exciting that sitting at this freakin' desk all day. But to me, dying at the hands of creation that surpassed your intelligence would be right up there with dying of a heart attack during your honeymoon with Jessica Alba. The kind of death where the epitaph on your tombstone could be: "My work here is done!"
Ya gotta be pretty smart to live through being raised by them. Fortunately my mum was - hence me being here.
Funny story - although Grandpa walked around with club feet his whole life (praying that condition away apparently takes a very long time); something did happen that finally convinced them to see a doctor. My uncle (who was about 15 at the time) went from being irrational, to disturbed, to homicidal. I guess when you've got a homicidal 15 year old male in the house, and you can't out run him because your "please fix my damn club feet" prayer hasn't kicked in yet - self-interest makes you do crazy things - like call the nice men in the white coats. But as with many things, if you wait until something is life threating before changing your approach - it's usually a bit too late. No, he didn't kill my grandparents or anything - he got the typical "locked up and shocked up" treatment most people in his condition got back in the '50s. I don't know if Granpa asked if he was also too late to get his feet fixed, or just kinda figured it out on his own. The whole experience did cure them of their religion though.
Again, a bit late. The story losses it's "funny" status around the time my uncle escaped from the hospital. He burned down a block of flats for some reason, then later beat an old lady to death with a skillet because he thought she was trying to kill his children (he didn't actually have any children). Later he escaped from prison and showed up at my house with 2 other convicts, and car full of guns (no easy trick in England). My mum set them up and got them caught with no harm done to us (told ya she was smart).
So, to get back to the "Christian Scientists only hurt themselves" question - no, they don't. They can get other people killed at the same time. My uncle could have just as easily been afflicted with typhoid and sent off to school with nothing but prayer just as easily as he was sent into society with severe mental illness (which may or may not have been the result of some other untreated medical condition).
No one likes to take away something that makes people happy (like faith) - but until people take responsibility for their actions, it's the burden of others to deal with the mess. I think it's OK to argue that people should take responsibility for their actions - even if there's no way of doing it that won't offend them.
And while I don't want to see religious discrimination anymore than anyone else here does - I recognize that there's a world of difference between *offending* someone and discriminating or persecuting them. It's OK, when necessary, to offend.
I'm not going to bother getting into the specifics again, but if you want no spam and no lost email - just write a program that does the same thing with your email that you do. It's really not that hard, you can even do with using just a series of cascading filters. The only spam I've gotten in the last *decade* was 2 instances of a clueless spammer who was manually verifying himself to my system. And I've never had anyone tell me they sent me an email that I didn't get.
Spam is a *very* easy problem to fix, because all spammers know about you is your email address - whereas anyone you'd actually want to hear from either knows a wee bit more, or can pass a simple challenge-response sent to the reply to address(because real people don't use fake ones).
The only pisser is that automating it ain't cheap, because you have to do a lot of processing to really simulate how you do things. Oh, and you can get your web host black listed if you try to process more than 2 high spam accounts because it sends out so many non-deliverable challenge response emails. You won't have the problem if you write it on the client side though - and trust me, it takes less time than dealing with spam.
So Western Union is kind of like whichever company it is that makes those tiny zip lock bags? You know, the ones that are only large enough to hold either a 1/4" square sandwich, or disc drive screws - but did a booming business long before they sold disc drive upgrade kits or very tiny sandwiches.
As my primary interest in ebooks was portability (and having them as a sound file does make them more portable) I did look into this. The blind have 2 options, last I checked.
1. Free books on tape for the blind. They send you a special player (in the 90's it was the huge yellow tape player) and all the books you want, free of charge, and no postage. I stopped using it because first, I really did feel bad utilizing this resource when for me it was mere convenience and second, they don't hire professional book readers to narrate them so the quality is pretty lackluster. 2. Microsoft's various PDA OS's have text to speech for ebooks built in. I didn't go this route because I long since learned there's *always* an easier way than using anything Microsoft makes.
E-Books *should* have been the first victims of internet piracy, simply because they were the smallest, and all the content was just good ol' plain text. Ever wonder why it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pirate copy of a whole DVD than it is to get one of a non-Guttenberged E-Book?
One reason may be the incredibly elegant system of copy protection they used. You unlock the book with 2 pieces of information - the name and credit card number you used to buy the book. Now... someone might not think twice about throwing up a bunch of serialz out to the general public; but publishing their name and credit card number to a site that caters to thieves? Kinda loses it's appeal.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe people don't mind that e-books cost just the same as their paper counterparts. Maybe computer geeks would rather lug around paper versions of Cryptonomicon than read it off their PDA's, or iPhones. Maybe someone's already cracked the.pdb e-book format, and I just haven't run across it despite having found dozens of ways of cracking movies and software.
If so - let me know. I'd love to transfer my existing e-book collection into plain text, or possibly loan copies of some titles to people I wouldn't necessarily trust my credit card number with. I can give copies to my mum, and she could give the same copy to someone else - but she'd have to give them all my credit card info for them to read it which makes her much more discerning.
There are other little aspects to it as well - take a look at how e-books are sold to see why they aren't pirated and see if you think it could be applied to larger software offerings.
A)A gorgeous airhead blonde who won't know that fake diamonds exist. B)A classy girl who knows that buying real diamonds hurts lots of people and wouldn't want one. C)Someone in between, who has me so whipped that I'd buy her a ring made out of my own spleen, and Microsoft Quality Assurance Licence (40 seat Enterprise version) to boot.
With any luck, constant programming will either ruin my eyesight to the point where option B becomes realistic, or result in the creation of a real holo-deck, making the whole issue mute.
The basic premise of the article is that we rely on a technology instead of our memories, and that makes us stupid. I say it just gives us the choice to remember less, and many have taken that choice.
As I got better and better and programming, I noticed I got worse at doing math in my head. Yes, I still *can* - but when faced with a match problem, my brain reminds me of the several devices just in my jacket that can do that calculation for me - and it's really hard to chose to do it the hard way.
But there's a balance we must each find when given new "powers". Do we use them to do more, or do less with the same effort? I'm also a musician, and long before the internet saw music technology like sequencers allow people to compose much better music than they could have without them. Some of us wrote better music, some of us just wrote more crappy music in less time. OK... most of us.
The trick to not giving in to the temptation of new power too much, is to recognize that it's never *quite* as good as the old power - it's just a bit easier. We have pills that can make us "happy" much easier than living a truly fulfilling life; but they don't make us quite as happy as doing it the hard way.
Google is a good way of find information quickly; but it's not as good as simply being knowledgeable. If you ever doubt this, ask your Grandma to use Google to find out something she knows nothing about. The results will help you put this trade off in perspective very quickly.
Wait a minute... Western Union has absolutely nothing in place to flag illegal payments? You can't fill out the form saying the money is for blackmail?
Jeez. If not - I'd fill out the form saying the payment was to help Osama Bin Laden buy some Yellow Cake Uranium-flavoured rolling papers that had pictures of Child Porn on ons side, and copy written Metallica lyrics and Vista Activation codes on the other. Surely one of our many country's many Big Brother Agency would ensure the black mailer had a quick career change.
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Glad to hear back from you. While I fully agree that having equally great minds on a task is ideal (for the same reason that you don't let programmers QA their own work: you need different yet equally valuable perspectives); it sounds like the immediate problem your facing in the less-than-ideal situation of not having that stems from the attitude of those who must eventually give ground.
My personal attitude when someone else must call the shots, set the agenda or whatever - regardless of how I feel about their decisions, is feel confident I've done my best to give them the benefit of my experience, and then follow that up by using my experience to carry out their agenda to the best of my ability. Again, whether I think that's the best approach or not. I do this because a)I recognize I may not all the "big picture" information the leader has and b)either way, you cross the finish line faster when everyone is pulling in the same direction.
If that's not the attitude your seeing in that type of situation, here's an article my friend wrote that I thought put things in perspective, whether you want to try to hire people with better attitudes, or improve the outlook of those already on a team.
http://www.perspectivepm.com/2007/10/10-reasons-your.html
Hopefully, if you can improve your approach to these problems, not only will you wind up with better prepared teams, but you won't find yourself feeling so frustrated that you rub people the wrong way socially. The women who wrote the article btw is one of the best project managers I know, but when she was overwhelmed, behaved in a way that made me want to quit my job - something I've never done. She recognized this and quit the company first, and we're both now very happy in our jobs.
Cheers,
-Rex
Foreign governments will hire hot chicks to do you just for a Blackberry? If I was a target, I'd get myself of whole box of fake Blackberries and go around pretending to use them at discos. At least until my agency sprung for counter-espionage fake Blackberries that *looked* like they had encrypted state secrets on them, but were really just surveillance devices so they could GPS exactly where they wound up, and eaves-drop on their decryption techniques.
Unfortunately, no government cares enough about what's on my PDA to hire hotties to boost it, and even if they did, you couldn't pay me enough to go freakin' disco.
If you'd like to be able to be an effective leader even in situations where you're clearly the best, but you feel the need to have some push-back in order to do that - why not try second-guessing yourself? Surely you've programmed something single-handedly at some point - were you able to be an effective one-man "team" even though you had no equals? Of course, because you come up with a plan and then think it over, look for holes, better approaches, etc - and can usually give your first attempts a run for their money.
If you treat those with less skill, experience, or talent than you badly; not only do you create a poor working environment, you also pass up to opportunity to benefit from the things they may be better at than you.
A good team leader should inspire, not annoy. And if you're the top banana and you find your team annoying you, make sure you've let them know before hand that you feel personally responsible for the end result of *everyone's* work. They'll be more likely to cut you some slack if you seemed stressed by their short-comings - if they remember it's mostly your butt on the line if they screw up.
You sound like you're satisfied with your current situation - I only offer this advice in case you'd like to try having the same level of success in any team make-up, and without being perceived as a jerk by your co-workers.
I totally agree, there *are* more stable ways of verifying a possibly spoofed "From" or "Reply" to address that simply using it and giving up if a response is not received in X # of days. Mark Perkel has some excellent techniques in this regard. And yes, doing something disruptive on a small scale (be it handling spam filter clumsily, or littering) does beg the question, "What if everyone did this?". However, I face two challenges in getting there.
1. The "after-the-fact" method I use results in an annoying situation where email clients see an email and notify the user, only minutes later to have the spam removed from the stream and the email not being there. Email clients don't tend to remove the notification once an email has been removed. This will be an even bigger aggravation for push clients. My challenges in preventing this are first, dealing with instabilities of the box it's running - where critical functions are frequently unavailable and second, the techniques I've seen other use require a much higher level of expertise for users of the so-called "Grandma Demographic". I may be able to solve the problem by moving this to a dedicated server - but that's a pricey solution that would be premature at this point in development.
2. To do this, I need to manipulate the stream myself. The only thing stopping me from doing that so far is the research. It's quite simple to use PHP built in mail functions, but by-passing all that encapsulation for a stream based approach (with the same degree of reliability I get using pre-made libraries) is going to take significantly more time.
They say the road to failure is paved with perfection, and the road to failure is paved with "Good Enough". For me, getting around #1 will constitute "Good Enough" - though frankly it's pretty damn good already other than having to wait up to 3 minutes between getting a "New Mail" notification and being able to check for email. Perfection is a 100% protection against false positives, accommodation of clumsily configured mail servers, complete ease of use for users, and lastly, making a program which is an ideal netizen itself. To achieve all that, I've got to read several books, and then rent a dedicated server where I can put I'll I've learned to use. Or just hire someone to assist me with that. Either way, it's going to take more money and time than I can currently devote the the problem. The "Not quite good enough" version I've been running for the past 2 years has at least saved me from being swamped with spam, and I am saving up both money and time to devote towards progressing towards a more perfect system.
But I hope I'm confident enough to launch something sometime in between the "Good Enough" milestone and the "Perfection" milestone. If there's anything that I've learned in the last 2 decades, it's that those who succeed in software don't wait until "Perfection" before going to market. Truly, I have yet to ever see a piece of perfect software even make it to production. For all it's flaws, I wouldn't shut off my clunky little program for my accounts for anything. Nor would I swap it for any other the other products or services I researched before reluctantly concluding I'd have to build something myself.
If you like, I'll let you know when I've got something more robust online and tell you what techniques I'm using to see if I've made any stupid mistakes.
Thanks for the advice.
Nope, you're not misreading. I take the reply to addresses at their word. If it bounces, it goes to a black hole set up for precisely that purpose (though yes, this is a lot unpleasant backscatter). The reason I took this approach was an experience I had setting up this one companies marketing system. Their previous system had been a sort of jury-rigged exchange box; but all their client's spam filters were set up to accept emails from it as legit. When we gave them a real email server, about 1/3 of all their communications were getting sucked up into spam filters because of tiny differences in the headers - we had to adjust it to spoof the old, goofy, headers from their previous system to get their invoices and stuff out. What that experience (and others) taught me is that a lot of small and medium size business simply don't have their email servers set up as well as spammers do; because email is not their core strength. And if you set up a spam trap that runs all those tests that a badly set up email server will fail - you're way to many risking false positives. The only way to perform a challenge response that avoids that is to, unfortunately, challenge. I'm sure there are ways to do that that would be more amenable to mail server operators and domain owners everywhere; but I haven't gotten to that stage yet. The primary purpose of the filter to completely eliminate false positives while still blocking the true positives - not eliminate backscatter. When the first problem is solved, then resources can be directed towards achieving secondary objectives.
Does that seem unethical to you? It's only running on 2 test accounts right now, unlike boxtrap which runs on hundreds of thousands. I can hardly afford to solve other people's problems for free if I don't solve any problems for hire first. Couldn't mail server software address spoofing more efficiently than filtering software? It wouldn't need to be filtered at all if it hadn't been accepted as legit in the first place. That's my thinking right now at least - but there's a lot about this stuff I don't know yet so please feel free to point my in the right direction if I've made a fundamental blunder here somewhere.
Thanks for the feedback.
They don't do it because they're not paid to do it. They're paid to make the website look and work the way the client wants. If the client also wants it to be nicely search-able... well that's SEO, an additional service they're happy to provide for a small fee.
This is not a knock on web designers, I work with them and (at least in this studio) they give the clients far more than they deserve as it is. If a client's cool and doesn't waste their time with ridiculous requests "Make it pinker", etc - the people here will make sure it it's more search-able, QA it on every browser and platform, pour over the design to make it even better - you name it. But all that extra service isn't promised up front so they have some wiggle room with time-wasting or after-the-fact penny pinchers.
The "From" and "Reply To" fields of spam are invariably fake, or spoofed. If two people use a program like BoxTrap, and one of them gets a spam using the other's email address, they'll either automatically white list each other, or create an endless challenge response loop.
I wrote a program which replies to all suspected spam (modified challenge-response), and the only thing that happened was I got my webhost black listed and they temporarily suspended the account. I dropped it to 2 accounts, and reset the chron job to run every 5 minutes instead of every 1 minute, and there hasn't been a problem since.
Though looking at the spam trap, I am still getting a good 400 spams a day. The only way I've found to reduce it is to send a bounce *and* a challenge response. Spammers will knock off bounces, but real people will ignore them if there's also a challenge response. But I haven't taken the time to figure out how to do that with PHP on a reseller account yet.
Sure, every girl says to herself, "Ya know, I wish I could somehow combine the boredom of computers, with the terror of snakes". This is as thinly a veiled marketing gimmick as "The back massager" or "T.A.T.U".
Still though, gotta give 'em props. I'm sure my girlfriend would have been pretty pleased if I got a grant to make robotic "snakes". Though I might feel a little inadequate if she requested it use "D-Cell" size batteries. I'm no C-Cell, but I don't think I'm quite a D-cell. Call it 3 cells, and a then a D-cell. Ok, if I'm in the pool we might be talking double A's.
I know, that's kind of is sophomoric. But then again I'm not the one who posted an article about robotic "snakes", am I.
When informed that the public had wanted him to "keep his hands *off* the interns, not *of* the interns", President Bush exclaimed, "What? Well no wonder Mark Foley resigned but I've only got a 25% approval rating!".
Vice President Dick Cheney blamed the mix-up on a few bad Apples (which lacked the grammar correction of Office XP), and reluctantly accepted the resignation of White House Stenographer Phil "Lefty" Johnson after the request for an independent inquiry was voted down by a show of hands.
Why is it cheaper to have work done overseas, even adding in the "shipping costs"? Because people in other countries can work cheaper than us. Why could they work cheaper than us? Because they could be paid less, and their countries cost less to live in to begin with.
During the outsourcing craze, I worked out that the highest paid programmer in India wouldn't qualify for a lease in a studio apartment anywhere in New York City, even if they walked to work, ate nothing but Ramen, purchased nothing *but* that Ramen, and never saw a doctor of any sort. So why, I asked myself, could they do it in India?
Rent was cheaper, because there were no building codes making houses safe, or guarantees of consistent electricity, drinkable water, or sewage or trash removal. Taxes (which also contribute to all costs) were lower because they didn't have luxuries like our FDA making food safe, reliable fire or police departments, mail delivery, etc. And of course, no pricey labour laws, worker safety standards, health care, wage standards, unions, etc.
But then companies started outsourcing to Canada, because they saved a bundle not having to provide health insurance. Then companies shifted from China and India to Viet Nam, because the value of the dollar had dropped in relation to their currencies too much.
And now, the cost of oil is bringing back those good ol' American jobs.
Say what you will about the current Administration - but you gotta give them credit for making great strides at turning America into the type of 3rd world nation where people go for cheap labour. If we elect McCain (or the OPEC stops pricing oil in greenbacks), it won't be long before "Made in USA" will replace the "Made in China" on all the cheap, lead-tainted, salmonella laden, useless crap other the rest of the world can afford to buy at predatory super-stores. Yay! Plus, our new standard of living will really take a bite out of the pesky "urban sprawl" problem.
But hey, we'll always have Paris... Hilton. We can't risk developing a Spoiled Brat Gap.
John McCain says he's completely computer illiterate, and has to rely on other people to do anything on the computer for him. Now, given that George W. Bush has said that "doesn't read newspapers" - what're the odds *he's* computer literate? Or that either of them would hire (or keep) people who felt that skill was far more important than they did?
Whether you think this is genuine incompetence or just plausible deniability - the fact remains that we collectively "hired" someone who said he lacked a vital skill for the job, and a fair portion of Americans are seriously considering hiring another one.
If you were willfully ignorant, and had to rely exclusively on the caliber of people a willfully ignorant person would hire as advisers - you too would end up having to:
-Say things like "$4.00 a gallon gas? I hadn't heard about that".
-Wait until your staff put together a DVD for you to illustrate what a "heckuva" job that ex-Head of an Equestrian club manager you hired to run FEMA was doing responding to a Category 5 hurricane that hit a below sea level city.
-Claim that "Everyone thought he had Weapons of Mass Destruction".
-Respond that "No one could have predicted" terrorists would fly highjacked jumbo jets into the building they previously tried to blow up with a truck bomb.
-Assume that promising to "Protect and Uphold the Constitution" consisted primarily of keeping your hands of the interns, and doing a lot of bicycling.
So let's not complain about this too much folks. We hired an incurious idiot to run the company. Just be thankful the company didn't go completely bankrupt before we started paying more attention to applicant's resumes.
I'm actually far more surprised than thankful. If we make it to 2009 without China foreclosing on us, it's going to feel the way it does to wake up safe in bed when you have no memory of how you got home from the previous night's party: thankful you got home alive but still worried about kind of damage you've done to your car, credit line, or reputation in the process.
Working for both small and large companies over the last 20 years, I've noticed that the first victim of any project is proper project management (the second being proper QA). As a coder who frequently finds them self in this situation, I marked down the 12 steps that *every* software project will go through one way or the other. The difference between a successful project and a clusterfuck - usually boils down to doing them in the correct order the first time. They *will* be done in this order eventually; but you can save a lot of time and aggravation by doing them in this order to begin with.
Consider this the "cheat sheet" for projects with inadequate management:
1. Define the purpose of the application.
2. Define the functions a features of the application.
3. Develop a top level plan for developing it.
4. Create the database schema for storing the necessary data.
5. Create detailed mock-ups of the finished application.
6. Have those mock-ups approved by the people who will be using it.
7. Develop the exact interfaces that will be needed for all objects used in the application.
8. *Then* code the classes for the objects (this is the part we always like to start with)
9. Code the classes into the GUI.
10. Test and debug.
11. Have your QA process approved and signed off on by the client/users.
12. Deploy.
I know this seems simple, but seriously, try to think of any scenario where you could switch *any* two of these steps around and not risk wasting time and effort. It can't be done. I know - I seen very, very talented people try. Look at any successful project you've ever been on, and you'll see that - while there may have been valient attempts to do these things in different orders, or skip steps - in the end a successful project will have gone through all these steps, in this exact order. Even if things steps had to be repeated because they were taken prematurely.
BTW, this is a very, very boring way of approaching development. Nothing exciting happens until step 7, and by that point it's so obvious what should be done that there's no sense of adventure left. I rarely concede this fact myself unless I have a mission critical project with an unmovable deadline.
A good project manager knows how to get a client to focus and communicate (when they'd rather talk about their "vision"), limit the scope of each phase of development, work with clients to help them fully understand their options and the ramifications of each one, and to keep moral and enthusiasm high during the boring or tedious bits. But follow these steps even without proper management, and you will at least be assured of not wasting time in any aspect of the development process.
Enjoy.
There are 3 debated OS's: Windows, Mac, and 'Nix. There's plenty of objective and subjective discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each. But here's a simple principle that cuts through the confusion:
"A group of people who *try* to accomplish something, will succeed at a higher rate than a group that doesn't"
Just look at what the people behind each OS have *tried* to do, and you'll see that they've succeeded more in that area.
The 'Nix developers *tried* to develop a secure, scalable OS - because that was what their market required. Not surprisingly, 'Nix is the most secure and scalable. They didn't really try to make it something Grandma could find her way around in easily, or that could play bleeding edge video games, or win beauty contests. Not surprisingly, they didn't succeed at doing any of those things with the OS compared to the alternatives.
The people behind Windows (pick any version you like), tried to make it something that appealed to office workers who had IT guys around to help out, encouraged third party hardware and all the software that that enabled (like video games that needed fast but cheap sound and graphic cards), and a small learning curve to develop basic business apps - because riding into the corporate world on IBM's coat-tails, that was their market. Not surprisingly, they succeeded in these areas. They didn't try to make it stable enough to use without an IT staff, as secure as a financial services data center would need to be, or the tool of choice for artistic types - because that wasn't their market until much later. So no big surprise they didn't beat the groups that had been trying to do nothing but that for much longer.
Apple tried to make truly personal computers. Easy enough to use, and stable enough to trust, without the aid of an IT staff. Not a lot people wanted personal computers to run spreadsheets at home, but they did want to use them for more creative projects. And, no surprise again, that's what Mac's are still good at.
Of course, eventually computers became too important in the world for any OS to be exceptionally weak in any area even for the original market, so all three groups started trying to address their weaknesses. 'Nix got a couple of GUI shells, and easier to install packages. Windows made a stab and running more stable servers, supporting multimedia, introducing the concept of security to office workers, and spawning a whole anti-virus industry. And Mac ran office programs, started playing nicer with Windows networks, and took on BSD core to maintain security and stability. They'd probably also have addressed their gaming short-comings if consoles hadn't pretty much reduced gaming on personal computers to a small hard-core niche of users who cheerfully pay more for a video card upgrade than what a whole next-gen console costs.
But the trajectories stay the same. 'Nix has to please the "We don't care what it looks like, it has be secure and scalable" crowd, Windows has to please the "I just need to finish this spreadsheet, so put my 'password' on a post it note on my monitor and tell the IT guys to fix the virus I just downloaded" crowd, and Mac has to please the "I'm here to make music, art, and email Grandma; not get a CS degree" crowd.
As I've seen written on Slashdot before - the road to failure is paved with perfection, the road to success is paved with "Good Enough". No OS will ever be perfect, but they'll survive by being the best for their target market's primary needs, and "good enough" for the other needs that market has.
The reason Microsoft is losing market share, is that it's simply trying to serve too many markets, and losing out in the secondary "Good Enough" areas. It spent too much time trying to catch up to 'nix on server needs, and Mac on multimedia needs, and wound up not being quite "good enough" with security, stability, and ease of use for the spreadsheet crowd. It's still the best option for someone who needs to keep doing the same spreadsheets, word documents, and power po
If we talk about our jobs to anyone who doesn't have the exact same job, it only takes like 5 minutes before their eyes glaze over. Even if they used to have the same job. That's why we make the big bucks - a very, very small percentage of the population find the details of our industry interesting enough to simply stay awake through, let alone learn.
Same goes for me. If I'm too pumped up from a programming breakthrough to get to sleep, I'll ask my Engineer or Project Manager friend what they did that day. Zzzzzz.
The only people who could successfully tap our phones would be people who *wanted* to do our jobs, but weren't good enough at them and had to settle for eavesdropping in on us. My guess is, even though they could stay awake for it, the bulk of it would be way over their heads.
It's the equivalent of having horrible credit and no money to protect yourself against identity theft. Just make all your phone conversations lethally boring. I'd bet that Al Quida could probably get away with anything over the phone if they only recruited people at Star Trek conventions and Hannah Montana concerts. But no one's written an Arabic to Klingon translation dictionary.
Why would that be MORE awesome? A Roomba could only kill me by waiting until I was rich enough to afford a place with stairs, *and* a Roomba - so that I could trip over it. And a Japanese Vending Machine could only kill me by tricking me into purchasing the "Happy Lucky Sushi Pack" that was actually 5 months old and crawling with Salmonella.
There's a *reason* nobody ever used either of those two plot devices in movie. I do hope you're not wasting your time shopping around a movie script based on the things *you* think would be awesome to see. It'd probably make you asocial and bitter after awhile.
Here's how:
#1. Start a punk band
#2. Wear ThinkGeek T-Shirts during gigs
#3. Hit on the girls who laugh at the joke on your T-Shirt.
#4. Collect Underpants (behind the couch, wedged behind the bed, etc).
Of course, perhaps part of why this works for me is that... I apparently code like a girl. No one ever gives me time to do proper documentation, and when you're in a punk band you tend to drink a lot - so if I didn't leave blog-sized comments in my code; I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it then next time I came in hungover. Plus, I've had to clean up after show-offs who don't comment or document their code, and use single letter variable names for everything. And then leave when their code doesn't work.
Ever try to debug a function that neither works, nor gives any indication of what it would it would do if it *did* work? Oh boy, that's fun, eh?
Being considerate in general makes you a better coder, *and* a better catch. Give it shot.
being killed by a super-intelligent robot, if I had some hand in creating it? Think how awesome that would be - you build something intelligent enough to not only not need you anymore, but that also determines the world is actually better off without you. Maybe it's just because I figure, if I helped create it, I'd be pretty damn far down on the list of people the robots figured the world would be better off without.
And don't give me any of that, "Oh, it'll kill coders *first* because they represent the biggest threat" nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to exhibit anything *remotely* resembling intelligence? If you created something capable of even *reasoning* that you were a threat, you'd have created something smart enough to deal with that deduction in better ways than killing you. And if it's not really smarter than you, but just more dangerous - like those automated border guard robots they had to turn off because they turned their guns on the engineers during the demo - well, the world probably *is* better off without you. *First* you make it intelligent, *then* you install the guns. Jeez - how hard is that to figure out?
Or maybe it's just that running from Terminator style robots would be far more exciting that sitting at this freakin' desk all day. But to me, dying at the hands of creation that surpassed your intelligence would be right up there with dying of a heart attack during your honeymoon with Jessica Alba. The kind of death where the epitaph on your tombstone could be: "My work here is done!"
Ya gotta be pretty smart to live through being raised by them. Fortunately my mum was - hence me being here.
Funny story - although Grandpa walked around with club feet his whole life (praying that condition away apparently takes a very long time); something did happen that finally convinced them to see a doctor. My uncle (who was about 15 at the time) went from being irrational, to disturbed, to homicidal. I guess when you've got a homicidal 15 year old male in the house, and you can't out run him because your "please fix my damn club feet" prayer hasn't kicked in yet - self-interest makes you do crazy things - like call the nice men in the white coats. But as with many things, if you wait until something is life threating before changing your approach - it's usually a bit too late. No, he didn't kill my grandparents or anything - he got the typical "locked up and shocked up" treatment most people in his condition got back in the '50s. I don't know if Granpa asked if he was also too late to get his feet fixed, or just kinda figured it out on his own. The whole experience did cure them of their religion though.
Again, a bit late. The story losses it's "funny" status around the time my uncle escaped from the hospital. He burned down a block of flats for some reason, then later beat an old lady to death with a skillet because he thought she was trying to kill his children (he didn't actually have any children). Later he escaped from prison and showed up at my house with 2 other convicts, and car full of guns (no easy trick in England). My mum set them up and got them caught with no harm done to us (told ya she was smart).
So, to get back to the "Christian Scientists only hurt themselves" question - no, they don't. They can get other people killed at the same time. My uncle could have just as easily been afflicted with typhoid and sent off to school with nothing but prayer just as easily as he was sent into society with severe mental illness (which may or may not have been the result of some other untreated medical condition).
No one likes to take away something that makes people happy (like faith) - but until people take responsibility for their actions, it's the burden of others to deal with the mess. I think it's OK to argue that people should take responsibility for their actions - even if there's no way of doing it that won't offend them.
And while I don't want to see religious discrimination anymore than anyone else here does - I recognize that there's a world of difference between *offending* someone and discriminating or persecuting them. It's OK, when necessary, to offend.
and doesn't have to.
I'm not going to bother getting into the specifics again, but if you want no spam and no lost email - just write a program that does the same thing with your email that you do. It's really not that hard, you can even do with using just a series of cascading filters. The only spam I've gotten in the last *decade* was 2 instances of a clueless spammer who was manually verifying himself to my system. And I've never had anyone tell me they sent me an email that I didn't get.
Spam is a *very* easy problem to fix, because all spammers know about you is your email address - whereas anyone you'd actually want to hear from either knows a wee bit more, or can pass a simple challenge-response sent to the reply to address(because real people don't use fake ones).
The only pisser is that automating it ain't cheap, because you have to do a lot of processing to really simulate how you do things. Oh, and you can get your web host black listed if you try to process more than 2 high spam accounts because it sends out so many non-deliverable challenge response emails. You won't have the problem if you write it on the client side though - and trust me, it takes less time than dealing with spam.
So Western Union is kind of like whichever company it is that makes those tiny zip lock bags? You know, the ones that are only large enough to hold either a 1/4" square sandwich, or disc drive screws - but did a booming business long before they sold disc drive upgrade kits or very tiny sandwiches.
As my primary interest in ebooks was portability (and having them as a sound file does make them more portable) I did look into this. The blind have 2 options, last I checked.
1. Free books on tape for the blind. They send you a special player (in the 90's it was the huge yellow tape player) and all the books you want, free of charge, and no postage. I stopped using it because first, I really did feel bad utilizing this resource when for me it was mere convenience and second, they don't hire professional book readers to narrate them so the quality is pretty lackluster.
2. Microsoft's various PDA OS's have text to speech for ebooks built in. I didn't go this route because I long since learned there's *always* an easier way than using anything Microsoft makes.
E-Books *should* have been the first victims of internet piracy, simply because they were the smallest, and all the content was just good ol' plain text. Ever wonder why it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pirate copy of a whole DVD than it is to get one of a non-Guttenberged E-Book?
.pdb e-book format, and I just haven't run across it despite having found dozens of ways of cracking movies and software.
One reason may be the incredibly elegant system of copy protection they used. You unlock the book with 2 pieces of information - the name and credit card number you used to buy the book. Now... someone might not think twice about throwing up a bunch of serialz out to the general public; but publishing their name and credit card number to a site that caters to thieves? Kinda loses it's appeal.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe people don't mind that e-books cost just the same as their paper counterparts. Maybe computer geeks would rather lug around paper versions of Cryptonomicon than read it off their PDA's, or iPhones. Maybe someone's already cracked the
If so - let me know. I'd love to transfer my existing e-book collection into plain text, or possibly loan copies of some titles to people I wouldn't necessarily trust my credit card number with. I can give copies to my mum, and she could give the same copy to someone else - but she'd have to give them all my credit card info for them to read it which makes her much more discerning.
There are other little aspects to it as well - take a look at how e-books are sold to see why they aren't pirated and see if you think it could be applied to larger software offerings.
The girl I marry will either be:
A)A gorgeous airhead blonde who won't know that fake diamonds exist.
B)A classy girl who knows that buying real diamonds hurts lots of people and wouldn't want one.
C)Someone in between, who has me so whipped that I'd buy her a ring made out of my own spleen, and Microsoft Quality Assurance Licence (40 seat Enterprise version) to boot.
With any luck, constant programming will either ruin my eyesight to the point where option B becomes realistic, or result in the creation of a real holo-deck, making the whole issue mute.
The basic premise of the article is that we rely on a technology instead of our memories, and that makes us stupid. I say it just gives us the choice to remember less, and many have taken that choice.
As I got better and better and programming, I noticed I got worse at doing math in my head. Yes, I still *can* - but when faced with a match problem, my brain reminds me of the several devices just in my jacket that can do that calculation for me - and it's really hard to chose to do it the hard way.
But there's a balance we must each find when given new "powers". Do we use them to do more, or do less with the same effort? I'm also a musician, and long before the internet saw music technology like sequencers allow people to compose much better music than they could have without them. Some of us wrote better music, some of us just wrote more crappy music in less time. OK... most of us.
The trick to not giving in to the temptation of new power too much, is to recognize that it's never *quite* as good as the old power - it's just a bit easier. We have pills that can make us "happy" much easier than living a truly fulfilling life; but they don't make us quite as happy as doing it the hard way.
Google is a good way of find information quickly; but it's not as good as simply being knowledgeable. If you ever doubt this, ask your Grandma to use Google to find out something she knows nothing about. The results will help you put this trade off in perspective very quickly.
Wait a minute... Western Union has absolutely nothing in place to flag illegal payments? You can't fill out the form saying the money is for blackmail?
Jeez. If not - I'd fill out the form saying the payment was to help Osama Bin Laden buy some Yellow Cake Uranium-flavoured rolling papers that had pictures of Child Porn on ons side, and copy written Metallica lyrics and Vista Activation codes on the other. Surely one of our many country's many Big Brother Agency would ensure the black mailer had a quick career change.