Re:I interviewed in May
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Please tell us more about the ethics question they asked you at Microsoft;-)
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
You're very right. I recognize your story.
In fact it's more general. Different people solve problems in different ways. Or, different problems need different types of people to solve them.
That's my biggest fear with Google and their puzzles (if these are more than just a PR campaign). If they try to hire people of just one type they may end up with a very homogenous organization in which everyone thinks in the same direction.
To be truly good an organisation should be able to think in different directions...
But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.
You are aware that you could just have bought (or rented) a local SIM card and use it with your foreign phone? That's usually very easy to do (Thai phone companies used to block foreign phones from using their SIM's, but they changed their mind about that years ago).
I spend a year travelling in 2001/2002 and I had good results using a Nokia 9210 for mail and SSH world wide. The GPRS thing was just starting then so I used normal dialup with GRIC as a roeming dial in provider so I could dial in to the 'net locally.
The 9500 (big with Wifi & camera) has just arrived in the stores and the 9300 (smallet, more elegant, but without the former) will arrive this month. I'm probable going to get myself and my GF a 9300 later this year.
I wouldn't know about networks and prepaid stuff or the UK situation. Currently I use a Clie TG50 PDA with a SE T630 phone and I have been able to use SSH anywhere with my GPRS account (keyboard scuks, tho...). Since GPRS is usually billed by the MB, SSH tends to be very cheap even when I use it abroad.
This story suggests, as I have read before, that the big advantage of Suprnova was it's verification system to assure against pollution.
This advantage is also its achilles heel because it makes them vulnerable to attack.
I think it might be possible to use PGP-like technology to create an anonymous rating system. In such a system uploads would be digitally signed by one or more secret keys that vouch for its integrity.
The P2P software would be able to assess the reliability of the signer by checking his 'credibilty'. If you have downloaded something of value from him before or one of your other P2P friends has the torrent gets a high reliability value, otherwise it's more or less a gamble. If the download is good you automatically sign it with your own secret key as well.
Because of the signing system 'verifiers' could remain totally anonymous. Just made sure you burn your secret key when they start breaking down your door;-)
What we did was so that we did not have to pay high bandwith costs for people who are to lazy to type in the URL, as it only blocks the slashdot referers. That must be our fundamental disagreement then. I happen to think clicking on links is normal behaviour on the web. I understand that you had to do something, but I'm offended when you start using the word 'abuse' when someone links to your site or just clicks on a links.
You're not the only one who works for free here. Just host your stuff on sourceforge if you can't handle the attention. SF can handle slashdotting perfectly, that's why I hosted my own project there before it was 'slashdotted'. No problems, of course.
Slashdot Has Been Blocked Due To Abuse Donate The best way to show your appreciation for the project is to make a donation. Funds are used to purchase newer iPods for the development team to port linux onto. Your contributions will help expand ipodlinux onto Apple's latest innovations such as the iPod mini, the click wheel iPod (4th gen) and iPod photo.
Please try again later.
If your servers can't handle the load, say so. Don't accuse newssites and innocent surfers of being 'abusers'...
Well here in Europe CNN have been running this story almost continuously since I turned on my TV ~9 hours ago. I think CNN have different 'versions' world wide.
You're lucky then that some of us do and could warn the others. I remember having breakfast in a Krabi place with CNN on in a corner of the room.
I usually take long holidays especially to American standards and I do like to keep an eye on what's going on in the world. CNN or BBC world are available in most tourist places in Asia, most other stations are in the local language so it's an easy choice.
Phuket, Krabi and Koh Phi Phi have plenty of higher altitude locations so even a 30 minute advance warning could have made a huge difference if only to clear the beaches. The maldives may well be a different story. I've never been there, but I hear it's quite flat, I also heard it wasn't hit that badly.
I've looked it up on a map and it seems like the vulnerable part is somewhat shielded against a wave coming in from the east. Not that it looks anywhere near safe...
Every country on earth has radio and TV, if you call them and let them broadcast a warning it will be heard. Hell, many people (tourists, expats) watch CNN via satellite so even that might work.
OTOH I don't think Tsunami's are a common event in this region so no one is prepared. If these things travel as fast as they say you're pretty much SOL.
I heard that in Krabi (Thailand) people notice the sea withdrawing uncharacteristically about 5 minutes before the first wave hit. Anyone can explain that?
6. Must have an FM tuner, since people buy Mp3 players to listen to the radio, not their music files.
Don't project your limited requirements on the rest of the population. True, when I bought my iRiver H140 (40G HD player), I didn't buy it for the radio. But now I have it I find I use it regularly especially to listen to news and talk radio (non US) while I'm in the gym which make a nice change from listening to the same 10.000 songs all the time;-) At least I can exercise my brain at the same time.
Voice recording directly to MP3 is excellent too, I use that a lot as well. I imagine it would be a lot more useful than the calendar on the iPods, but I don't want to make the same mistake as you. Different strokes for different folks.
I resent your suggestion that anyone critical of Apple is automatically a MS fanboy. Since when is this an MS vs. Apple forum?
My take on this is that Apple sucks as badly as MS does, they're just not as successful. The main (and annoying) difference is that Apple seems to have perfected the fanboy weapon.
Don't be silly. The guy actualy comes up with some good arguments. I use both Perl & PHP and I happen to agree with them. I'll keep using PHP, tho...
As for the 'more than one way' argument, I've never met a programming language yet in which there wasn't more than one way to do things. There's more than one way to do things in PHP (thankfully).
I think you guys are confusing programming with bookkeeping. You're wrong. Programming is an art and in art there's always another way...
The agnostic might also consider that the chances of any believer being right to the extent that the god in question would be offended would be very remote, whereas the risk of religious strife would be (and has always been) very real.
As an agnostics I also deny that the question if there is a higher superior being has any real meaning to us humans. If other agnostics agree (dunno about that) they would have no problem banning religious displays.
That's purely looking at the matter from an agnostic point of view of course. I'm sure most agnostics would be against such a ban for other reasons.
On the off chance that the guy's actually going to read this I'd suggest using a bluetooth mouse for setting the pace. Maybe even with a scroll wheel if the PB can handle that.
If you use vanilla qmail you have no choice but to accept these e-mails and process them through the queue. In order to avoid sending bounces to spoofed addresses (bad for others) you also have to feed them through spam and virus detectors which adds load to the system.
These problems could be avoided if you could tell qmail-smtpd to refuse mail to unknown addresses at the frontdoor. I know that there are patches to fix this and disadvantages to this approach, but I still think it's a bad idea to not give the administrator the choice of how to handle this.
All in all I'm pretty happy with my own automatic blacklisting which keeps the load down without betraying what addresses are in use to the attacker.
Don't forget that Thunderbird suppports s/Mime encryption and signatures out of the box. So do Outlook (Express), Netscape & Mozilla.
So if you want to keep compatibility with friends using 'that other product' that doesn't have a PGP plugin, s/Mime might not be a bad idea. AFAIK it's as secure as SSL.
You need a signed certificate that can be obtained free of charge from Thawte:
Qmail users never complain about dictionary attacks because they're never subjected to them.
That's plain wrong. I'm sorry to tell you that two of my qmail installations have been regular victims of spammers using dictionary attacks. Apparently when they figure your domain to be big enough they don't mind not getting bounces.
Anyway, I had to modify the installations so that IP addresses sending to a large number of non existant addresses are automatically blocked to keep system load down. Everything that comes in has to be scanned for spam and viruses these days, so it tends to put quite a load on the system when spamzombies start pushing 10s of thousands of mails into qmail-smtpd.
I like qmail, but I think that the fact that DJB sits on it is becoming a big liability. We haven't seen a new release for ages and the patch collections needed to get basic functionality are getting bigger and bigger....
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell us more about the ethics question they asked you at Microsoft ;-)
You're very right. I recognize your story.
In fact it's more general. Different people solve problems in different ways. Or, different problems need different types of people to solve them.
That's my biggest fear with Google and their puzzles (if these are more than just a PR campaign). If they try to hire people of just one type they may end up with a very homogenous organization in which everyone thinks in the same direction.
To be truly good an organisation should be able to think in different directions...
But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.
You are aware that you could just have bought (or rented) a local SIM card and use it with your foreign phone? That's usually very easy to do (Thai phone companies used to block foreign phones from using their SIM's, but they changed their mind about that years ago).
I spend a year travelling in 2001/2002 and I had good results using a Nokia 9210 for mail and SSH world wide. The GPRS thing was just starting then so I used normal dialup with GRIC as a roeming dial in provider so I could dial in to the 'net locally.
X.
I bet you wouldn't want to run SSH on your desktop without a keyboard. So why would you want to on your phone?
IMO these devices are perfect for remote access:
http://www.nokia.com/phones/9300
http://www.nokia.com/phones/9500
The 9500 (big with Wifi & camera) has just arrived in the stores and the 9300 (smallet, more elegant, but without the former) will arrive this month. I'm probable going to get myself and my GF a 9300 later this year.
I wouldn't know about networks and prepaid stuff or the UK situation. Currently I use a Clie TG50 PDA with a SE T630 phone and I have been able to use SSH anywhere with my GPRS account (keyboard scuks, tho...). Since GPRS is usually billed by the MB, SSH tends to be very cheap even when I use it abroad.
X.
This story suggests, as I have read before, that the big advantage of Suprnova was it's verification system to assure against pollution.
;-)
This advantage is also its achilles heel because it makes them vulnerable to attack.
I think it might be possible to use PGP-like technology to create an anonymous rating system. In such a system uploads would be digitally signed by one or more secret keys that vouch for its integrity.
The P2P software would be able to assess the reliability of the signer by checking his 'credibilty'. If you have downloaded something of value from him before or one of your other P2P friends has the torrent gets a high reliability value, otherwise it's more or less a gamble. If the download is good you automatically sign it with your own secret key as well.
Because of the signing system 'verifiers' could remain totally anonymous. Just made sure you burn your secret key when they start breaking down your door
What we did was so that we did not have to pay high bandwith costs for people who are to lazy to type in the URL, as it only blocks the slashdot referers.
That must be our fundamental disagreement then. I happen to think clicking on links is normal behaviour on the web. I understand that you had to do something, but I'm offended when you start using the word 'abuse' when someone links to your site or just clicks on a links.
You're not the only one who works for free here. Just host your stuff on sourceforge if you can't handle the attention. SF can handle slashdotting perfectly, that's why I hosted my own project there before it was 'slashdotted'. No problems, of course.
Working for free is no excuse for being rude.
Slashdot Has Been Blocked Due To Abuse
Donate
The best way to show your appreciation for the project is to make a donation. Funds are used to purchase newer iPods for the development team to port linux onto. Your contributions will help expand ipodlinux onto Apple's latest innovations such as the iPod mini, the click wheel iPod (4th gen) and iPod photo.
Please try again later.
If your servers can't handle the load, say so.
Don't accuse newssites and innocent surfers of being 'abusers'...
Well here in Europe CNN have been running this story almost continuously since I turned on my TV ~9 hours ago. I think CNN have different 'versions' world wide.
You're lucky then that some of us do and could warn the others. I remember having breakfast in a Krabi place with CNN on in a corner of the room.
I usually take long holidays especially to American standards and I do like to keep an eye on what's going on in the world. CNN or BBC world are available in most tourist places in Asia, most other stations are in the local language so it's an easy choice.
Phuket, Krabi and Koh Phi Phi have plenty of higher altitude locations so even a 30 minute advance warning could have made a huge difference if only to clear the beaches. The maldives may well be a different story. I've never been there, but I hear it's quite flat, I also heard it wasn't hit that badly.
I've looked it up on a map and it seems like the vulnerable part is somewhat shielded against a wave coming in from the east. Not that it looks anywhere near safe...
http://perso.inooi.com/v2/fr/th/PhiPhi-map.gif
Thanks, I'll try to remember that next time I'm on a beach. I have been in Krabi and Phuket/Patong so it feels close to home in a way.
:(
I remember thinking about sudden huge waves while lying on beaches and how long it would take before you realized something was wrong.
Only this year in the South of France a sudden change in the weather killed 3 bathers right in front of our apartment.
Best be careful out there.
Every country on earth has radio and TV, if you call them and let them broadcast a warning it will be heard. Hell, many people (tourists, expats) watch CNN via satellite so even that might work.
OTOH I don't think Tsunami's are a common event in this region so no one is prepared. If these things travel as fast as they say you're pretty much SOL.
I heard that in Krabi (Thailand) people notice the sea withdrawing uncharacteristically about 5 minutes before the first wave hit. Anyone can explain that?
6. Must have an FM tuner, since people buy Mp3 players to listen to the radio, not their music files.
;-) At least I can exercise my brain at the same time.
Don't project your limited requirements on the rest of the population. True, when I bought my iRiver H140 (40G HD player), I didn't buy it for the radio. But now I have it I find I use it regularly especially to listen to news and talk radio (non US) while I'm in the gym which make a nice change from listening to the same 10.000 songs all the time
Voice recording directly to MP3 is excellent too, I use that a lot as well. I imagine it would be a lot more useful than the calendar on the iPods, but I don't want to make the same mistake as you. Different strokes for different folks.
I resent your suggestion that anyone critical of Apple is automatically a MS fanboy. Since when is this an MS vs. Apple forum?
My take on this is that Apple sucks as badly as MS does, they're just not as successful. The main (and annoying) difference is that Apple seems to have perfected the fanboy weapon.
Shit, now I even have to be grateful to a fundamentalist. Didn't know that! Sigs block checked! Thnx.
Don't be silly. The guy actualy comes up with some good arguments. I use both Perl & PHP and I happen to agree with them. I'll keep using PHP, tho...
As for the 'more than one way' argument, I've never met a programming language yet in which there wasn't more than one way to do things. There's more than one way to do things in PHP (thankfully).
I think you guys are confusing programming with bookkeeping. You're wrong. Programming is an art and in art there's always another way...
X.
I normally don't support religious fundamentalists, but I'll have to say you're right there.
Nevertheless, I would appreciate it if you and the free ipod boys would go somewhere else with your silly sigs...
The agnostic might also consider that the chances of any believer being right to the extent that the god in question would be offended would be very remote, whereas the risk of religious strife would be (and has always been) very real.
As an agnostics I also deny that the question if there is a higher superior being has any real meaning to us humans. If other agnostics agree (dunno about that) they would have no problem banning religious displays.
That's purely looking at the matter from an agnostic point of view of course. I'm sure most agnostics would be against such a ban for other reasons.
Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism, an unfounded belief in the lack of any higher power.
No it doesn't. It might just as well establish agnosticism, which is a healthy scepticism against anyone claiming to know everything.
On the off chance that the guy's actually going to read this I'd suggest using a bluetooth mouse for setting the pace. Maybe even with a scroll wheel if the PB can handle that.
X.
If you use vanilla qmail you have no choice but to accept these e-mails and process them through the queue. In order to avoid sending bounces to spoofed addresses (bad for others) you also have to feed them through spam and virus detectors which adds load to the system.
These problems could be avoided if you could tell qmail-smtpd to refuse mail to unknown addresses at the frontdoor. I know that there are patches to fix this and disadvantages to this approach, but I still think it's a bad idea to not give the administrator the choice of how to handle this.
All in all I'm pretty happy with my own automatic blacklisting which keeps the load down without betraying what addresses are in use to the attacker.
X.
Don't forget that Thunderbird suppports s/Mime encryption and signatures out of the box. So do Outlook (Express), Netscape & Mozilla.
So if you want to keep compatibility with friends using 'that other product' that doesn't have a PGP plugin, s/Mime might not be a bad idea. AFAIK it's as secure as SSL.
You need a signed certificate that can be obtained free of charge from Thawte:
http://www.thawte.com/email/index.html
X.
Hi Russ,
:(
Qmail users never complain about dictionary attacks because they're never subjected to them.
That's plain wrong. I'm sorry to tell you that two of my qmail installations have been regular victims of spammers using dictionary attacks. Apparently when they figure your domain to be big enough they don't mind not getting bounces.
Anyway, I had to modify the installations so that IP addresses sending to a large number of non existant addresses are automatically blocked to keep system load down. Everything that comes in has to be scanned for spam and viruses these days, so it tends to put quite a load on the system when spamzombies start pushing 10s of thousands of mails into qmail-smtpd.
I like qmail, but I think that the fact that DJB sits on it is becoming a big liability. We haven't seen a new release for ages and the patch collections needed to get basic functionality are getting bigger and bigger....
I keep planning to look into Postfix
Same here. IP's that generate too many 'unknown users' are automatically blacklisted for 24 hours. Every cloud has a silver lining ;-)
X.