Those passenger screenings are as we all know a big charade. Here's an anecdote of Munich Airport in Germany - probably the most idiotic airport in Germany I had to travel through.
While most airports in Germany don't care about cameras, Munich airport has a special fetish for controlling cameras. 2 times out of 3 they want me to take my dSLR out of my Backpack to finger it. Usually they want me to turn it on and look through it, but my friendly offers to take an image to prove it works usually ends it panicky horror. Whatever.
So I got a little pissed of and decided the next time to take out the battery of the camera. And sure enough they wanted to to search it again and asked me to turn it on. As usual, I turned the Power switch to on, but without battery nothing happened, and handed the camera to the goon. I don't know what he ascertained with his ritual, but after looking through it, he was happy the camera without power is real.
As at that time I was playing around with long-exposures during daytime, I carried with me an ND1000 filter. This is basically a piece of black glass that lets through only minimal light. It's about as dark as welders glasses or those things you used to observer the sun during an eclipse. In the rather low light at the airport, you don't see anything through that filter. So evil me removed the battery again and screwed that filter on in front the next times I flew out of Munich. Out of about 5 manual checks, here's the breakdown:
2 checked the camera after the power-up without battery and the black glass in front of the lens the usual way by looking through it and doing their magic ritual. The fact that the camera was dead as a brick and the didn't see anything didn't faze them to hand it back satisfied without comment.
2 wondered why the didn't see anything and looked if the lens-cap was still on. After they saw that no it isn't on and the front is some kind of glass, they relooked through the camera - without seining anything more - and were happy with the results.
Only one out if the 5 asked why he can't see anything and when I told him, that this is a special filter for long exposure was also happy to let me pass. Asking to remove it for the check wasn't in his book.
So 5 out of 5 weren't bothered by the fact that turning the camera on has no visible effect and the same 5 in the end were also happy that they didn't see anything when they looked through the camera.
It makes sense, that the IRS takes a close look at open source software organisations claiming exempt status.
Software is usually a very commercial thing and a big business. So if someone makes software for free, the idea isn't far behind for some evil people to use this to optimise taxes: Create an Open Source foundation to build some very limited distribution open source and reaping all benefits of the tax exemption, then sell the software. This kind of scam looks pretty obvious.
So it's only natural, that the IRS looks at those organisations a lot more closely to figure out whether they're legit or just another tax fraud. So this wasn't directed against the Linux or Apache foundation, but more against the shady organisations claiming to produce open source of which nobody except the tax-man ever heard.
As if it was so simple, record everything and nothing will be forgotten. Even assuming that recording everything is technically possible and legally or morally acceptable, how are you going to find the moments you cherish? Was it two months ago or five, that you had this wonderful sex ending in some earth-shattering climax? Or was that last year? Was little Timmy 3 or 5 when he was so cute losing the fight against a roll of toilet paper, and was that in that motel in Lake Tahoe or in Chattanooga? Anyone having a huge collection of pictures will attest, that finding one specific one you can dimly recollect is a huge task.
And then, even if you manage to find that even, times over times it has been proven, that people photographing or videotaping some event are later disappointed how bland the recording was and not matching the remembered reality. The brain is constantly editing and enhancing impression to create memories, but who's going to do that with your life recording? Taking good still-photographs that are emotionally gripping is already hard enough and needs training and experience - flickr is a testimony on what doesn't work for most part - video is even worse, not even counting cutting and post production. A life-recording that isn't edited will be of horribly low quality and have nearly no value watching.
If you want to show your future loved ones how you were in college, don't clobber them with 1200 days of 24 hour recording. Make the effort and get a few representative images or short videos which communicate the essence of this time.
As to how I feel if someone recorded his whole day including the time we spend in bed together? I couldn't care less.
No, I'm not Wally, but he's my hero. From the whole Dilbert comics, Wally's attitude is the most practical, although Alice's with her unrandom violence has also lots of appeal. Unfortunately, this tends to be too much physical work to implement.
This might be a difference in work-place culture, but whenever I choose a job I always only considered the fixed salary part for comparison. If I was happy with that, the job is ok. If I need some bonuses to make a decent living, it was re-negotiation time. The nice consequence of this is, that I don't care much about the rigmaroles with performance reviews to decide on the bonus. That makes me very relaxed and whatever comes in is just a nice bonus and nothing I really need. In the end by not caring, I swim along with the average, but I still can tell them to get stuffed if the idiocy becomes too rampart. And being the one to stand up and voice what everyone is thinking sometimes makes you popular or someone to be consulted beforehand.
In the companies I worked for, the more formal and stupid the system was, the easier it was to gamble. I liked best the system with self-defined yearly goals, where the road to success was in the skill to formulate impressive sounding goals where the non-performance was hard to verify. Or to be part in projects that get shut down because of reorganisation before being delivered. That never got me top rates, but before going through the hassle of digging through the bones for some real data average success and bonus (or slightly above average, if I bickered too much about my valuable contributions) was assumed independent of the actual performance.
For me that gives the best results for a minimum of exposure to the whole idiocy.
Does anyone have some link how the system is supposed to work?
It's all nice and fine to have the back-end sorted out, but what about the data gathering about what people really eat? Do the propose to have everyone implanted with an oesophageal monitor to detect evil burgers or chocolate input?
First, if your employer starts to play such silly games, you have a problem. If you're already I trouble with them anyway, the only reasonable thing to do is to consult a lawyer familiar with such matters and follow his advice.
In case you don't want to sue them and leave the company anyway, the only reasonable position is to let them have whatever they already have in hand. You can't take it from them anyway. Now to get back at them, produce some legalese statement that the code has been produced as ad-hoc tools for personal use of the creator and as a proof of concept. That those tools haven't be developed adhering to the relevant coding standards and not ready for productive use. Whatever the company does with that, they accept them as is and won't hold you liable for any thing bad happening as a result from using those tools in any way and that they will protect you from any liability claims resulting from any of your involvement with this software. Also add that this software needs to be reviewed and made ready for commercial use by qualified software engineers - which by coincidence you aren't, you're just a dumb L3 admin. If you feel nasty, add a NDA for good measure too. That won't help you, but is another hassle they'll have to resolve.
Make those statements broad enough, mention liability often enough and require a legal binding signature from the company on the contract. That will make sure that the legal department will get hold of the document and you won't have to hand over the code any time soon now. Even worse, any action in the matter on their side might be considered affecting the negotiations and review of the legal department. If they try to pressure you, write a naive question to legal asking about the progress. Bosses really hate to involve the legal department when they try to get things done.
With this, you won't get any money for the time already spent, but the company won't get the code either. You're in the comfortable position that you're cooperative and just want to handle this properly and protect you from claims. Nobody can fault you for not helping them and still, they don't get anything useful.
If they're really stupid enough to sign the document, you hand over those parts they don't have yet. Make sure you strip all useful structure, variable names and comment from it and run it afterwards through a code beautifier to make it look structured again. It's important that you don't touch files they already have, changing those would be obvious bad faith.
Now, things like those work in reality only when someone is maintaining the system. With the signed document, you as a L3 can't really be involved with that tool in any way in the future, you officially lack the skill. This has to go via software development. If the don't have any of those or can't bother them, you might want to suggest that a freelancing friend might provide the necessary skills - at slightly above the the going market rates for software consulting. I'm certain, you'll find a way of handling the doing in the future.
All in all, a company playing such silly games must be pretty stupid.
The It business is small, so try to avoid burning bridges. Leave a good impression behind.
In your case I would take the new job, but discuss with your new employer that you will have slow start (4 days a week for 3 months) and offer your old employer to act for those 3 months as a consultant for one day per week. Then make the damn sure your spend the rest of your time in getting your replacements up to speed.
When working with reasonable people a reasonable solution can be found.
As to asking your current employer for a raise, I doubt that will help much and you won't get the improved quality of life with the short commute to work.
Yes, they have twice as much RAM and the same processing speed. The Ardiuno Mega are the way to go if you run out of I/O ports. If you run out of processing power or memory as you do if you want to process audio or video data, do any but the most basic networking, the whole Arduino platform is the wrong solution to your problem. You need something bigger, like a solution based on an ARM processor or the Microsoft gimmick.
There's even ARM boards which are compatible with Arduino shields, etc.
The're also the NetDuino which is pin-compatible and can be programmed in C# and the.net environment. The pin-compatibility with Arduino-shields isn't that much of an advantage. It's just a bunch of TTL signals going from the processor directly to the pin on the connector. With only few wires and no other components, those shields can be connected to most other platforms. And many of the really interesting things come as break-out boards, where you need the wires anyway.
If the low-powered Arduinos are so popular it's probably because people figured out you don't need much RAM or processing power to do what people are using them for.
Exactly. The Arduino is competing with the PIC and the small TI processors. Compared to those, getting stared and having first successes is far easier and the Arduino community provides lot of support for beginners.. Just plunk down $30, download and the software, connect te board with a vanilla USB cable and try the hello world blinking program.
The Microsoft thing doesn't play in that niche. It's more for small web-appliances, goofing around with audio or video displays or autonomous robotics that need more processing power than the Arduino can provide. And for those applications, it could become a success if the whole solution provides enough benefits for the costs and Microsoft manages to get the community going. Both things that Microsoft hasn't been very good at in the past, but they might get it right this time.
From the image of the breakout-board, they seem to mostly use standard ports which makes adding your own beak-out modules cheap and easy.
Yeh, it's an "arduino killer", why else would it have been made? Stop playing fucking semantics to ignore the truth of the situation.
Going by above statements, you probably don't know anything about the Arduino except the the name. The Arduino is a simple cheap and very limited 8-bit micro-controller, where important part is the limited costs (below $30 to get started) an easy way to hook it up to the computer and a moderately useful development environment where even hobbyists can switch things easily. The big limitations of the Arduino is very little RAM and very little processing power.
This platform by Microsoft doesn't even play in the same league as the Arduino. It costs 5 times as much and can do many things the Arduino even can't dream about, things like handling audio or video data. This product should be seen more as a contender against the small ARM platforms, Propeller and similar. And then, it's similar priced than those.
Will it succeed? I hope so. Will it push out the Propeller or some ARM products? Perhaps Will it push out the Arduino? Definitively not.
Nothing really surprising in the article, but the best quote from it is this:
From the original article:
In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.
Unfortunately the author doesn't go into the consequences of this observation. If one person can become wildly more productive with some tool, his work will simply be devaluated so that his higher productivity doesn't earn him more than the stick gatherer.
It was this case with teamsters of old, who probably were able to do 30 to 50 km a day with an ox-cart. Now a lorry-drivers transports 100 times as much 20 times as far away in a day, but they still are paid as measly as teamsters of old. What was gained for those teamsters who figured out to become 2000 times as productive? Nothing. Same pay, work still sucks and they aren't better of after a day of work.
Same with most other businesses that improved due to technology. The first generation who figured out how to become more productive reap some benefits from it, but after that, the improved productivity becomes the norm and people will toil on as usual. At the end of the day, the time people spent at work is paid, not their productivity. If the produce much, the value of their product is just reduced proportionally.
Before people didn't meet face to face, communication will be inefficient due to cultural differences and the fact that it's a lot harder to relate to an email-address than to someone you spent an evening having beers. Even simple things like Yes or No have very different meaning in different countries.
What seems to work well is to have at least one big team meeting per year where everyone meets in one place. Even if the meeting itself might not be that productive, the face-to-face time is crucial. Also, if close cooperation on some topic is necessary, specially in the start-up phase, plan to send some team-members to other sites to work together for a week or two in the same office. This investment will prevent a lot of communication problems later on.
Next, make sure you have plenty of short time goals which can be easily tracked and checked. This makes it harder to get distracted and communication problems will be identified earlier on.
And if you're the team leader, make sure you have enough individual communication one on one with your team members. If you communicate with them only as a group, you start to see them just as interchangeable ants and they'll sense of this.
If a game makes practice easier or more enjoyable, why not use it? In the end, it's the acquired skill that counts, not the way you got it. And if the game teaches you a usable skill, it definitively isn't stupid.
The Wii and the various dance games started this trend by making players move and exercise. Now Ubisoft wants to introduce formal music teaching and practise via a game. Well it seems that simple games are getting too shallow and the game industry is poaching time honored ways to waste time from other domains, which have proven to offer more or less unlimited levelling capacity.
I just can't wait to hear people talk about how easy it was to beat the Bon Jovi level but that they're stuck on that evil Habanera Flameco boss before they can get to the Mariachi level.
What a piece of clueless high-school optimism this project is.
They wrap the innards of a netbook into the a casing regular size casing. Look at the space wasted on the fastenings for the screen bezel and the additional thickness added by all those thick plastic sheets between motherboard and keycaps. With that much space and weight wasted, at least they could have gone on the full eco-trip and made the casing out of cardboard or recycled wood. They totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.
At least the project leadress was blond and pleasant to look at. But to improve the video, they should have cut the scenes where the geek or the invention appeared.
To sum it up: rather worthless - except for blondie if one is attracted to the type.
To start off, here's the obligatory xkcd cartoon to go with the question: http://xkcd.com/538/
Having spent some time in those countries, you should be careful to also consider the social aspect of what you want to do. Encrypting data is all fine and dandy, but that will only help against snooping and in case you lose your phone. At a checkpoint full of burly men asking you to show them what's in the file myporn.secret or SoundOfMusic.avi, encryption wont help. You will hand over either your 25 character top secret password or your denture. For those situations, it's a lot preferable if no suspicion arousing files are found.
For safer surfing, a VPN connection - preferably one easily going through proxies is more useful. I would stay away from solutions like Tor, because they make you suspicious by default and go with a plain vanilla corporate VPN, one preferably landing in a legitimate corporate net from where you can connect to further machines containing the stuff that can lead you in trouble (eg Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts in some parts of the world).
Don't even think about doing this, there are many worthier subjects to demystify. You should stay away from this project not out of moral reason, but out of practical reasons.
Remember that teacher who gave the terror planing assignment recently? I think it was a very instructive idea, but he caught a lot of flack for it. Writing a virus is similar. Even if it has pedagogic merits, it looks really bad for you from the outside and it's very easy to condemn you for it. The risk isn't worth it.
On a technical side, writing a virus becomes very quickly very technical. You have to mess around with executable formats, hooking into loading procedures and many other internals of the target system. Add to that the who;le mess of payload, how to exploit systems etc. Those things are very boring and obscure to students who don't have some advanced understanding of the operating system. You're going to lose your students very quickly or spend an enormous amount of time to explain the basics for little gain. Better use the available time on better projects.
A virus is hard to contain. In the dark age of PC computing, a few virus escaped from lab settings exactly how you described them and became very widespread. Also, tracking how infection works isn't that easy either.
On the other hand, if your lab has proper security your virus might not make it far at all and fizzle at the first hurdle. Not very instructive either.
All in all this brings me to the conclusion, that your idea has more short comings than merits. If you want to have a project about computer security and malware, consider doing some network traffic snooping with Wireshark and what that stuff means. Looking at http packages compare with https, password logging, one time password systems with tokens, PIN-code skimming, password strength brute force attacks an etc. Add in a little data mining, social engineering and you're quickly in the domain of spooks and spies, but you still can safely declare it as instruction about security and privacy. There's a lot immediate hands on there which even your grand-mother understands.
And, more to the point, it's more likely that those terrorists got their engineering degrees as a result of their choice to be a terrorist, rather than the other way around.
I think it rather, that someone with an engineering degree or a background involving violence (cops, military etc) is more likely to become a terrorist than someone from other backgrounds. If they get really pissed about something - say the average "their family has been killed by the evil oppressor" - as an engineer they're more likely to do something about it and strike back simply because they have some knowledge about what works. So instead of facing a completely unknown task, they start with at least some idea what is necessary and what might work.
The evil terrorist enrolling in engineering school to become better is probably less common and those will take a lot more time and effort.
I would rather forget about radar and laser and go with a license plate reader. Install two of them between two spots and you get the average speed over this stretch of road. That's a lot worse than just measuring a single point on the way. Where I live they installed a few of those and as a customer, I must say I hate them worse then the radar boxes. Which means, they must be more efficient.
Also from a technical point of view, realising them is a lot cheaper and easier to do if you like to tinker. No need for radar, laser etc, you just a need a camera with decent optics, a computer and probably an infrared light source to illuminate the plates better - all of which is available for reasonable amount of money. The rest is software and can be done in your living room.
You will need to play around with image recognition, specially as the Hindi digits often found on Arabic license plates aren't often handled by standard OCR-readers. But that makes an interesting project. And the good part is, that you won't need 100% accuracy, any correct reading will be a success. I think they published a few years ago that the license-plate readers have a success-rate between 80% and 90%, which is good enough.
As to the accidents, a simple traffic camera will help catching resolving accidents and identify the involved parties.
This photographer doesn't just assert his right to take panoramic photos - he also asserts the right to completely override a person's wishes.
If someone registers NOT to have their home photographed, and he goes there taking photos and publishing them either way, is that the right way to deal with people?
We have here two opposite wishes, one of the photographer to make legal pictures in public places and the other of the owner of controlling photographers taking pictures. In Germany, the matter is pretty clear, the wish of not having the pictures taken is secondary to the one taking pictures as long as it's from eye level. Wanting greater control from the house owners is simply rude and impinges unreasonably on the photographer's freedom. The freedom of the house owner starts two foot higher, where the photographer will respect the wishes of the house owner. Google didn't.
Why does he do it? Probably because he's fed up as most photographers with the War on Photgraphy where their profession or hobby is made nearly impossible by random idiots illegally restricting their granted rights.
In Germany, there's the so-called freedom of the panorama, which means, that you're allowed to take pictures of the panorama in public places, which includes houses etc. However, that freedom is limited to a natural perspective, so you may take take the picture while walking down the street, but you may not use a stepladder or step on a car roof to get a higher vantage point. It's a very simple to understand and convenient rule about private space. If you don't want to be photographed in your garden, make the wall high enough that people passing-by can't see over it. If someone peeks over that wall and takes pictures, he's invading your privacy.
So what the photographer proposes to do is probably perfectly legal. With the Google streetview cars the problem is, they take the pictures from higher up than regular eye level, thus the freedom of the panorama doesn't apply to them and they get in all kind of trouble. There's another company (can't remember which one) taking pictures of streets, but they have mounted the cameras directly on the car roof, probably to avoid the problems Google has.
All in all, Google is in this mess in Germany because they didn't bother to check local laws and believed American rules apply everywhere.
They missed the best and most obvious way to improve support: Improve the quality of the products and make the use obvious enough so that support isn't necessary.
But that is a lot less sexy than self-healing robot avatars and not really worth an article.
Testing or any other way to make sure your code works correctly when it's delivered is boring - a bit like washing dishes or cleaning up your room. I can't see many ways around that or make it more stimulating. Testing becomes an attractive option only if the consequences of bugs and maintenance are more painful than the test themselves.
Lucky you, that you work in an environment, where you can get away with delivering untested stuff - savour it while you can.
In case you need to deliver better quality, I found that testing early and testing often makes testing almost bearable. Write some small functional unit - test it and don't move on to the next thing before it was tested successfully. It's a bit like tidying up after you when finished with one thing before getting out the next toys to play something else. It's not fun, but it makes the whole testing bearable because it goes fast enough every time. You will seem to go a little slower producing code, but the it will have the advantage, that it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Those passenger screenings are as we all know a big charade. Here's an anecdote of Munich Airport in Germany - probably the most idiotic airport in Germany I had to travel through.
While most airports in Germany don't care about cameras, Munich airport has a special fetish for controlling cameras. 2 times out of 3 they want me to take my dSLR out of my Backpack to finger it. Usually they want me to turn it on and look through it, but my friendly offers to take an image to prove it works usually ends it panicky horror. Whatever.
So I got a little pissed of and decided the next time to take out the battery of the camera. And sure enough they wanted to to search it again and asked me to turn it on. As usual, I turned the Power switch to on, but without battery nothing happened, and handed the camera to the goon. I don't know what he ascertained with his ritual, but after looking through it, he was happy the camera without power is real.
As at that time I was playing around with long-exposures during daytime, I carried with me an ND1000 filter. This is basically a piece of black glass that lets through only minimal light. It's about as dark as welders glasses or those things you used to observer the sun during an eclipse. In the rather low light at the airport, you don't see anything through that filter. So evil me removed the battery again and screwed that filter on in front the next times I flew out of Munich. Out of about 5 manual checks, here's the breakdown:
2 checked the camera after the power-up without battery and the black glass in front of the lens the usual way by looking through it and doing their magic ritual. The fact that the camera was dead as a brick and the didn't see anything didn't faze them to hand it back satisfied without comment.
2 wondered why the didn't see anything and looked if the lens-cap was still on. After they saw that no it isn't on and the front is some kind of glass, they relooked through the camera - without seining anything more - and were happy with the results.
Only one out if the 5 asked why he can't see anything and when I told him, that this is a special filter for long exposure was also happy to let me pass. Asking to remove it for the check wasn't in his book.
So 5 out of 5 weren't bothered by the fact that turning the camera on has no visible effect and the same 5 in the end were also happy that they didn't see anything when they looked through the camera.
What a strange world we live in!
It makes sense, that the IRS takes a close look at open source software organisations claiming exempt status.
Software is usually a very commercial thing and a big business. So if someone makes software for free, the idea isn't far behind for some evil people to use this to optimise taxes: Create an Open Source foundation to build some very limited distribution open source and reaping all benefits of the tax exemption, then sell the software. This kind of scam looks pretty obvious.
So it's only natural, that the IRS looks at those organisations a lot more closely to figure out whether they're legit or just another tax fraud. So this wasn't directed against the Linux or Apache foundation, but more against the shady organisations claiming to produce open source of which nobody except the tax-man ever heard.
As if it was so simple, record everything and nothing will be forgotten. Even assuming that recording everything is technically possible and legally or morally acceptable, how are you going to find the moments you cherish? Was it two months ago or five, that you had this wonderful sex ending in some earth-shattering climax? Or was that last year? Was little Timmy 3 or 5 when he was so cute losing the fight against a roll of toilet paper, and was that in that motel in Lake Tahoe or in Chattanooga? Anyone having a huge collection of pictures will attest, that finding one specific one you can dimly recollect is a huge task.
And then, even if you manage to find that even, times over times it has been proven, that people photographing or videotaping some event are later disappointed how bland the recording was and not matching the remembered reality. The brain is constantly editing and enhancing impression to create memories, but who's going to do that with your life recording? Taking good still-photographs that are emotionally gripping is already hard enough and needs training and experience - flickr is a testimony on what doesn't work for most part - video is even worse, not even counting cutting and post production. A life-recording that isn't edited will be of horribly low quality and have nearly no value watching.
If you want to show your future loved ones how you were in college, don't clobber them with 1200 days of 24 hour recording. Make the effort and get a few representative images or short videos which communicate the essence of this time.
As to how I feel if someone recorded his whole day including the time we spend in bed together? I couldn't care less.
No, I'm not Wally, but he's my hero. From the whole Dilbert comics, Wally's attitude is the most practical, although Alice's with her unrandom violence has also lots of appeal. Unfortunately, this tends to be too much physical work to implement.
This might be a difference in work-place culture, but whenever I choose a job I always only considered the fixed salary part for comparison. If I was happy with that, the job is ok. If I need some bonuses to make a decent living, it was re-negotiation time. The nice consequence of this is, that I don't care much about the rigmaroles with performance reviews to decide on the bonus. That makes me very relaxed and whatever comes in is just a nice bonus and nothing I really need. In the end by not caring, I swim along with the average, but I still can tell them to get stuffed if the idiocy becomes too rampart. And being the one to stand up and voice what everyone is thinking sometimes makes you popular or someone to be consulted beforehand.
In the companies I worked for, the more formal and stupid the system was, the easier it was to gamble. I liked best the system with self-defined yearly goals, where the road to success was in the skill to formulate impressive sounding goals where the non-performance was hard to verify. Or to be part in projects that get shut down because of reorganisation before being delivered. That never got me top rates, but before going through the hassle of digging through the bones for some real data average success and bonus (or slightly above average, if I bickered too much about my valuable contributions) was assumed independent of the actual performance.
For me that gives the best results for a minimum of exposure to the whole idiocy.
Does anyone have some link how the system is supposed to work?
It's all nice and fine to have the back-end sorted out, but what about the data gathering about what people really eat? Do the propose to have everyone implanted with an oesophageal monitor to detect evil burgers or chocolate input?
First, if your employer starts to play such silly games, you have a problem. If you're already I trouble with them anyway, the only reasonable thing to do is to consult a lawyer familiar with such matters and follow his advice.
In case you don't want to sue them and leave the company anyway, the only reasonable position is to let them have whatever they already have in hand. You can't take it from them anyway. Now to get back at them, produce some legalese statement that the code has been produced as ad-hoc tools for personal use of the creator and as a proof of concept. That those tools haven't be developed adhering to the relevant coding standards and not ready for productive use. Whatever the company does with that, they accept them as is and won't hold you liable for any thing bad happening as a result from using those tools in any way and that they will protect you from any liability claims resulting from any of your involvement with this software. Also add that this software needs to be reviewed and made ready for commercial use by qualified software engineers - which by coincidence you aren't, you're just a dumb L3 admin. If you feel nasty, add a NDA for good measure too. That won't help you, but is another hassle they'll have to resolve.
Make those statements broad enough, mention liability often enough and require a legal binding signature from the company on the contract. That will make sure that the legal department will get hold of the document and you won't have to hand over the code any time soon now. Even worse, any action in the matter on their side might be considered affecting the negotiations and review of the legal department. If they try to pressure you, write a naive question to legal asking about the progress. Bosses really hate to involve the legal department when they try to get things done.
With this, you won't get any money for the time already spent, but the company won't get the code either. You're in the comfortable position that you're cooperative and just want to handle this properly and protect you from claims. Nobody can fault you for not helping them and still, they don't get anything useful.
If they're really stupid enough to sign the document, you hand over those parts they don't have yet. Make sure you strip all useful structure, variable names and comment from it and run it afterwards through a code beautifier to make it look structured again. It's important that you don't touch files they already have, changing those would be obvious bad faith.
Now, things like those work in reality only when someone is maintaining the system. With the signed document, you as a L3 can't really be involved with that tool in any way in the future, you officially lack the skill. This has to go via software development. If the don't have any of those or can't bother them, you might want to suggest that a freelancing friend might provide the necessary skills - at slightly above the the going market rates for software consulting. I'm certain, you'll find a way of handling the doing in the future.
All in all, a company playing such silly games must be pretty stupid.
The It business is small, so try to avoid burning bridges. Leave a good impression behind.
In your case I would take the new job, but discuss with your new employer that you will have slow start (4 days a week for 3 months) and offer your old employer to act for those 3 months as a consultant for one day per week. Then make the damn sure your spend the rest of your time in getting your replacements up to speed.
When working with reasonable people a reasonable solution can be found.
As to asking your current employer for a raise, I doubt that will help much and you won't get the improved quality of life with the short commute to work.
The original blurb:
Black scientists, however, fair badly.
It might not be fair how blacks fare, but I'm certain, they're not getting faired
Yes, they have twice as much RAM and the same processing speed. The Ardiuno Mega are the way to go if you run out of I/O ports. If you run out of processing power or memory as you do if you want to process audio or video data, do any but the most basic networking, the whole Arduino platform is the wrong solution to your problem. You need something bigger, like a solution based on an ARM processor or the Microsoft gimmick.
The're also the NetDuino which is pin-compatible and can be programmed in C# and the .net environment. The pin-compatibility with Arduino-shields isn't that much of an advantage. It's just a bunch of TTL signals going from the processor directly to the pin on the connector. With only few wires and no other components, those shields can be connected to most other platforms. And many of the really interesting things come as break-out boards, where you need the wires anyway.
Exactly. The Arduino is competing with the PIC and the small TI processors. Compared to those, getting stared and having first successes is far easier and the Arduino community provides lot of support for beginners.. Just plunk down $30, download and the software, connect te board with a vanilla USB cable and try the hello world blinking program.
The Microsoft thing doesn't play in that niche. It's more for small web-appliances, goofing around with audio or video displays or autonomous robotics that need more processing power than the Arduino can provide. And for those applications, it could become a success if the whole solution provides enough benefits for the costs and Microsoft manages to get the community going. Both things that Microsoft hasn't been very good at in the past, but they might get it right this time.
From the image of the breakout-board, they seem to mostly use standard ports which makes adding your own beak-out modules cheap and easy.
Going by above statements, you probably don't know anything about the Arduino except the the name. The Arduino is a simple cheap and very limited 8-bit micro-controller, where important part is the limited costs (below $30 to get started) an easy way to hook it up to the computer and a moderately useful development environment where even hobbyists can switch things easily. The big limitations of the Arduino is very little RAM and very little processing power.
This platform by Microsoft doesn't even play in the same league as the Arduino. It costs 5 times as much and can do many things the Arduino even can't dream about, things like handling audio or video data. This product should be seen more as a contender against the small ARM platforms, Propeller and similar. And then, it's similar priced than those.
Will it succeed? I hope so.
Will it push out the Propeller or some ARM products? Perhaps
Will it push out the Arduino? Definitively not.
Nothing really surprising in the article, but the best quote from it is this:
From the original article:
In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.
Unfortunately the author doesn't go into the consequences of this observation. If one person can become wildly more productive with some tool, his work will simply be devaluated so that his higher productivity doesn't earn him more than the stick gatherer.
It was this case with teamsters of old, who probably were able to do 30 to 50 km a day with an ox-cart. Now a lorry-drivers transports 100 times as much 20 times as far away in a day, but they still are paid as measly as teamsters of old. What was gained for those teamsters who figured out to become 2000 times as productive? Nothing. Same pay, work still sucks and they aren't better of after a day of work.
Same with most other businesses that improved due to technology. The first generation who figured out how to become more productive reap some benefits from it, but after that, the improved productivity becomes the norm and people will toil on as usual. At the end of the day, the time people spent at work is paid, not their productivity. If the produce much, the value of their product is just reduced proportionally.
Before people didn't meet face to face, communication will be inefficient due to cultural differences and the fact that it's a lot harder to relate to an email-address than to someone you spent an evening having beers. Even simple things like Yes or No have very different meaning in different countries.
What seems to work well is to have at least one big team meeting per year where everyone meets in one place. Even if the meeting itself might not be that productive, the face-to-face time is crucial. Also, if close cooperation on some topic is necessary, specially in the start-up phase, plan to send some team-members to other sites to work together for a week or two in the same office. This investment will prevent a lot of communication problems later on.
Next, make sure you have plenty of short time goals which can be easily tracked and checked. This makes it harder to get distracted and communication problems will be identified earlier on.
And if you're the team leader, make sure you have enough individual communication one on one with your team members. If you communicate with them only as a group, you start to see them just as interchangeable ants and they'll sense of this.
If a game makes practice easier or more enjoyable, why not use it? In the end, it's the acquired skill that counts, not the way you got it. And if the game teaches you a usable skill, it definitively isn't stupid.
The Wii and the various dance games started this trend by making players move and exercise. Now Ubisoft wants to introduce formal music teaching and practise via a game. Well it seems that simple games are getting too shallow and the game industry is poaching time honored ways to waste time from other domains, which have proven to offer more or less unlimited levelling capacity.
I just can't wait to hear people talk about how easy it was to beat the Bon Jovi level but that they're stuck on that evil Habanera Flameco boss before they can get to the Mariachi level.
What a piece of clueless high-school optimism this project is.
They wrap the innards of a netbook into the a casing regular size casing. Look at the space wasted on the fastenings for the screen bezel and the additional thickness added by all those thick plastic sheets between motherboard and keycaps. With that much space and weight wasted, at least they could have gone on the full eco-trip and made the casing out of cardboard or recycled wood. They totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.
At least the project leadress was blond and pleasant to look at. But to improve the video, they should have cut the scenes where the geek or the invention appeared.
To sum it up: rather worthless - except for blondie if one is attracted to the type.
To start off, here's the obligatory xkcd cartoon to go with the question: http://xkcd.com/538/
Having spent some time in those countries, you should be careful to also consider the social aspect of what you want to do. Encrypting data is all fine and dandy, but that will only help against snooping and in case you lose your phone. At a checkpoint full of burly men asking you to show them what's in the file myporn.secret or SoundOfMusic.avi, encryption wont help. You will hand over either your 25 character top secret password or your denture. For those situations, it's a lot preferable if no suspicion arousing files are found.
For safer surfing, a VPN connection - preferably one easily going through proxies is more useful. I would stay away from solutions like Tor, because they make you suspicious by default and go with a plain vanilla corporate VPN, one preferably landing in a legitimate corporate net from where you can connect to further machines containing the stuff that can lead you in trouble (eg Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts in some parts of the world).
Don't even think about doing this, there are many worthier subjects to demystify. You should stay away from this project not out of moral reason, but out of practical reasons.
Remember that teacher who gave the terror planing assignment recently? I think it was a very instructive idea, but he caught a lot of flack for it. Writing a virus is similar. Even if it has pedagogic merits, it looks really bad for you from the outside and it's very easy to condemn you for it. The risk isn't worth it.
On a technical side, writing a virus becomes very quickly very technical. You have to mess around with executable formats, hooking into loading procedures and many other internals of the target system. Add to that the who;le mess of payload, how to exploit systems etc. Those things are very boring and obscure to students who don't have some advanced understanding of the operating system. You're going to lose your students very quickly or spend an enormous amount of time to explain the basics for little gain. Better use the available time on better projects.
A virus is hard to contain. In the dark age of PC computing, a few virus escaped from lab settings exactly how you described them and became very widespread. Also, tracking how infection works isn't that easy either.
On the other hand, if your lab has proper security your virus might not make it far at all and fizzle at the first hurdle. Not very instructive either.
All in all this brings me to the conclusion, that your idea has more short comings than merits. If you want to have a project about computer security and malware, consider doing some network traffic snooping with Wireshark and what that stuff means. Looking at http packages compare with https, password logging, one time password systems with tokens, PIN-code skimming, password strength brute force attacks an etc. Add in a little data mining, social engineering and you're quickly in the domain of spooks and spies, but you still can safely declare it as instruction about security and privacy. There's a lot immediate hands on there which even your grand-mother understands.
And, more to the point, it's more likely that those terrorists got their engineering degrees as a result of their choice to be a terrorist, rather than the other way around.
I think it rather, that someone with an engineering degree or a background involving violence (cops, military etc) is more likely to become a terrorist than someone from other backgrounds. If they get really pissed about something - say the average "their family has been killed by the evil oppressor" - as an engineer they're more likely to do something about it and strike back simply because they have some knowledge about what works. So instead of facing a completely unknown task, they start with at least some idea what is necessary and what might work.
The evil terrorist enrolling in engineering school to become better is probably less common and those will take a lot more time and effort.
They touched on that subject in their 2008 paper.
Look for something awful, lets say goatse.
On ImHalal Link #5 has the image.
The Christian search engine seekfind is totally safe because it crashed under the load.
Jewogle seems to be just google with safe-search enabled. I didn't find much difference between those two.
That sounds a lot like the traffic in Riyadh.
I would rather forget about radar and laser and go with a license plate reader. Install two of them between two spots and you get the average speed over this stretch of road. That's a lot worse than just measuring a single point on the way. Where I live they installed a few of those and as a customer, I must say I hate them worse then the radar boxes. Which means, they must be more efficient.
Also from a technical point of view, realising them is a lot cheaper and easier to do if you like to tinker. No need for radar, laser etc, you just a need a camera with decent optics, a computer and probably an infrared light source to illuminate the plates better - all of which is available for reasonable amount of money. The rest is software and can be done in your living room.
You will need to play around with image recognition, specially as the Hindi digits often found on Arabic license plates aren't often handled by standard OCR-readers. But that makes an interesting project. And the good part is, that you won't need 100% accuracy, any correct reading will be a success. I think they published a few years ago that the license-plate readers have a success-rate between 80% and 90%, which is good enough.
As to the accidents, a simple traffic camera will help catching resolving accidents and identify the involved parties.
This photographer doesn't just assert his right to take panoramic photos - he also asserts the right to completely override a person's wishes.
If someone registers NOT to have their home photographed, and he goes there taking photos and publishing them either way, is that the right way to deal with people?
We have here two opposite wishes, one of the photographer to make legal pictures in public places and the other of the owner of controlling photographers taking pictures. In Germany, the matter is pretty clear, the wish of not having the pictures taken is secondary to the one taking pictures as long as it's from eye level. Wanting greater control from the house owners is simply rude and impinges unreasonably on the photographer's freedom. The freedom of the house owner starts two foot higher, where the photographer will respect the wishes of the house owner. Google didn't.
Why does he do it? Probably because he's fed up as most photographers with the War on Photgraphy where their profession or hobby is made nearly impossible by random idiots illegally restricting their granted rights.
In Germany, there's the so-called freedom of the panorama, which means, that you're allowed to take pictures of the panorama in public places, which includes houses etc. However, that freedom is limited to a natural perspective, so you may take take the picture while walking down the street, but you may not use a stepladder or step on a car roof to get a higher vantage point. It's a very simple to understand and convenient rule about private space. If you don't want to be photographed in your garden, make the wall high enough that people passing-by can't see over it. If someone peeks over that wall and takes pictures, he's invading your privacy.
So what the photographer proposes to do is probably perfectly legal. With the Google streetview cars the problem is, they take the pictures from higher up than regular eye level, thus the freedom of the panorama doesn't apply to them and they get in all kind of trouble. There's another company (can't remember which one) taking pictures of streets, but they have mounted the cameras directly on the car roof, probably to avoid the problems Google has.
All in all, Google is in this mess in Germany because they didn't bother to check local laws and believed American rules apply everywhere.
They missed the best and most obvious way to improve support: Improve the quality of the products and make the use obvious enough so that support isn't necessary.
But that is a lot less sexy than self-healing robot avatars and not really worth an article.
Testing or any other way to make sure your code works correctly when it's delivered is boring - a bit like washing dishes or cleaning up your room. I can't see many ways around that or make it more stimulating. Testing becomes an attractive option only if the consequences of bugs and maintenance are more painful than the test themselves.
Lucky you, that you work in an environment, where you can get away with delivering untested stuff - savour it while you can.
In case you need to deliver better quality, I found that testing early and testing often makes testing almost bearable. Write some small functional unit - test it and don't move on to the next thing before it was tested successfully. It's a bit like tidying up after you when finished with one thing before getting out the next toys to play something else. It's not fun, but it makes the whole testing bearable because it goes fast enough every time. You will seem to go a little slower producing code, but the it will have the advantage, that it works.