Slashdot Mirror


User: bigbird

bigbird's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
179
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 179

  1. Re:As the economy improves??? on Flat Pay Prompts 1 In 3 In IT To Consider Jump · · Score: 1

    It always surprises me that you *can* walk away from a mortgage that is underwater in the US.

    You certainly can't just hand over the keys in Australia - you'll still get pursued for the remaining debt after the house is sold by the bank.

  2. Re:Bosses earn too much on High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay · · Score: 1

    Actually insuring debt (e.g. against bond defaults) is an important component of investment banking. Look up credit default swaps for example (obviously in need of regulation!).

    Frequent trading is very important in helping to make markets liquid. That's why market makers are very useful. Without liquidity, no-one knows what anything is worth.

    So yes, there is a lot of automated trading machines around, but they still do make a useful contribution to market liquidity.

  3. Re:Bosses earn too much on High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay · · Score: 1

    Dick Fuld may have taken a lot of money out of Lehman Brothers over the last decade ($500 million?) but I'd still rather have my life than his life nowadays.

  4. Re:Bosses earn too much on High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay · · Score: 1

    But here's the thing.. The money is circulating for no particular reason. There are not goods and services being exchanged in the frequent trading financial sector.

    The money is circulating for very good reasons. Companies with revenue in one currency are hedging against expenditure in another, insuring debt, hedging fixed term interest rates against floating rates, primary producers are hedging their crop prices, miners are hedging the price they receive for what they mine and so on.

    Granted, there are a lot of speculators out there. But most financial instruments out there were invented to mitigate risk and for hedging (ok, maybe CDOs were just invented to make money!).

  5. Re:DMCA? on What To Do About CC License Violations? · · Score: 1

    Oh I see. It is ok to infringe to *avoid* paying money, but not so when it comes to *making* money. Right.

  6. Re:Keep in mind on Physicists Do What Einstein Thought Impossible · · Score: 1

    The church (Galileo's main sponsor) was surely wrong to place Galileo under house arrest, but it's a myth that Galileo was tortured, and his treatment (apart from house arrest) was never vile - in fact he was permitted to continue to publish while under house arrest.

    Galileo was charged with teaching heliocentrism when he had promised not to do so. He didn't help himself by deliberating insulting the pope, his sponsor, and by claiming in court that his Dialogue on the Two World Systems did not advocate heliocentrism when it clearly did.

  7. Re:what a great idea on House Proposes Legalizing, Taxing Online Gambling · · Score: 0

    Prostitution is rarely a victimless crime.

  8. Re:Hmm... on Federal Appeals Court Says Sex Offender's Computer Ban Unfair · · Score: 1

    I'm not convinced that a 17 year old who goes around shooting & robbing people doesn't deserve a tough sentence. But a 17 year old certainly isn't an adult either. I don't know what the solution is. Have you any better suggestions based on your experience?

    But anyway congratulations on making something of yourself after such a poor start, and good luck for the future.

  9. Re:Testing is a bad path on Best Way To Land Entry-Level Job? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or they just want people who love what they do.

  10. Re:More Importantly on Simon Singh To Appeal In UK Court Today · · Score: 1

    You've got to be kidding. You read the book & you don't know what Fermat's last theorem is?? How is that possible?

  11. The basics on Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company? · · Score: 1

    Your hosting company must offer 24x 7 telephone support. If they do not, go elsewhere.

    They must offer full access via SSH. Obviously PHP, MySQL, unlimited email accounts and as much bandwith as possible is also required.

    I'd also recommend you register your domain names with a registrar unrelated to your hosting provider, so you can quickly and easily swap hosts.

    I use godaddy for domain names, and liquidweb for hosting. Both are large enough not to disappear overnight, and are very responsive to queries.

  12. Re:Shock news! high income tempts youth into crime on Interview With a Convicted 419 Scammer · · Score: 1

    Which is why most folks don't own Ferraris, and most Ferrari owners have some pretty questionable behaviour in their past. You don't get that kind of money without doing something pretty slimey for a living, like being a bank executive or otherwise participating in the amoral circus that is the American financial system.

    Or you could be a successful athlete, business owner, doctor, dentist, .... and not all bankers are immoral y'know.

    Sounds like envy to me. In my experience of knowing quite a few rich people, they are no different to anyone else in their morals. Perhaps you're thinking of Russian oligarchs or the mafia.

  13. Re:Not again on New Theory of Gravity Decouples Space & Time · · Score: 1

    You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future.

    And furthermore, you cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in one tiny part of the universe is any indication that it will hold anywhere else in the 99.999999999% (and more) of the remainder of the universe.

  14. Re:I have prior work on Microsoft Patents Sudo's Behavior · · Score: 1

    What, with a user id > 500,000? Where were you in the 1990's? :)

  15. Re:US vs UK... on Plug vs. Plug — Which Nation's Socket Is Best? · · Score: 1

    The reason why 110V is safer is that V = IR. Given the resistance of the human body as a constant, then with half the voltage, you receive half the current through your body. It is the current that kills you rather than the voltage. Of course, if you dramatically lower your resistance by being dripping wet, it probably won't matter if you have 110V or 220V.

  16. Getting paid to play on Has the Glory Gone Out of Working In IT? · · Score: 1

    I don't know about glory, but for me IT for the last 18 years has involved getting paid lots of money for stuff I'd mostly do for free if I could. Sure, there's been the odd banal job or two, but I've tended to move on from those quite quickly - even if some of them were very well paid.

    I find it hard to imagine what else I'd do.

  17. Re:I don't get it on StackOverflow For Any Topic · · Score: 1

    Yes, it's popular, and yes, you must be out of the loop.

    Post any technical question and you'll normally get a number of very useful replies within 24 hours.

  18. Re:The Christians are just pissed because... on EA Comes Under Fire for Shady PR Stunts · · Score: 1

    Trying to ram one's morality down the throats of others is generally regarded as poor form.

    Ramming your morality down people's throats is a little extreme, but if you have a personal conviction that something in society is wrong, why shouldn't you do your best to spread that conviction around?

    Was William Wilberforce wrong to strongly oppose slavery in the British Empire, when most people thought he was a loony and virtually everyone in the empire thought slavery was fine?

  19. Re:1984 much? on The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen · · Score: 1

    So how did you get a userid less than 1,000,000 anyway?

    I shudder to think that even now there may be slashdot users who were born after I started reading it ...

  20. Re:Surprising on UK National ID Card Cloned In 12 Minutes · · Score: 1

    Just as a matter of interest, Adam Laurie is brother to Ben Laurie, one of the main OpenSSL developers (and now working for Google). If he's anything like Ben (who I worked with years ago), he's a very smart guy indeed. He certainly knows what he is doing re security.

  21. Re:Missing the point... on R.I.P. FTP · · Score: 1

    Secure-FTP (over SSL) is not sufficient as it only encrypts things without verifying the authenticity of the host you are connecting to.

    That's actually only the case if you switch off host verification.

    Normally with FTPS you would compare the certificate that the host sends you with your certificate store to either 1) verify you have that certificate already or 2) that the certificate is signed by a CA in your store and that its common name matches the domain name you are connecting to.

  22. Re:SFTP support is still spotty .... on R.I.P. FTP · · Score: 1

    Try CompleteFTP. It's a reasonably priced Windows server supporting FTP,FTP and SFTP (with SCP in the next release). (I'm one of the developers btw).

  23. Re:securing ftp on R.I.P. FTP · · Score: 1

    SFTP is nice but does not have as many features as fanilla FTP

    What features are missing?

  24. Re:FTPS on R.I.P. FTP · · Score: 1

    FTPS is basically the standard FTP protocol over SSL. So the same problem of a new connection being used for directory listings and file transfers still exists.

    As another poster notes, the problem can be exacerbated using FTPS - firewalls can read the control channel of ordinary FTP and when PORT or PASV commands are encountered, they can automatically open the port number that is referred to. Because the command channel is encrypted in FTPS, firewalls can't do this, and FTPS transfers (and listings) are much more likely to fail than FTP transfers.

    One solution is to switch back to an unencrypted control channel after authentication, although this of course complicates things for clients.

    Using SFTP is the best solution - only a single port is used for both commands and for data transfers. So as long as port 22 is open, SFTP will always work.

    The (slight) downside of SFTP is that it is a more complicated protocol and more difficult to implement.

  25. Re:...and the pursuit of happiness on Tech Or Management Beyond Age 39? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good advice. Spending 8+ hours getting paid for doing what you love will help your life to be a happy one. Doing stuff you don't like for half of your waking hours will make life a misery.

    And it is hard to succeed if you don't love what you are doing.

    If you love coding, stick with it - there will always be a job for you. I'm in my 40's and have been coding for many years. There's nothing like getting paid to play, and there's no end in sight yet!