Does anyone but me find it really, really funny that the poster is a grad student in Human Computer Interaction, but can't work in teams and has admittedly bad social skills?
Not really trying to flame here, I just have always considered most elements of HCI to be very oriented toward teamwork and personal communication.
Actually, while I think this letter is bogus, I will admit to one point, it really isn't that odd for members of a company to have no clue at all who is and isn't a member of the board. This can also get confusing, because some companies have a title of director, which is a management position and board members can use the same title but in many, if not most cases, won't have interaction with anyone in the comapny with the exception of the officers.
I seriously suspect this is what happened in this case. Is IL probably bogus and Tim a doof? Most likely in my opinion. And do I think HardOCP should retract the article? No. But this is one of a handfull of points here that was actually not on crack.
Okay, this is where I suspected this was going. The Glenrose, Texas "issue" is one of misidentification of a series of therapod tracks as human prints by a group of people who really, really want to believe that man and dinosaurs existed at the same time because it bolsters their biblical belief that the earth is five to seven thousand years old.
A lot of strange information doubting the physics of nuclear decay, even tho we have plenty of lab and theoretical basis for same, because once again, decay issues shoot down the idea that the earth is a few thousand years old as the bible is interpreted to say by some sects, as opposed to around 4.5 billion years old it is.
While you have a point, there are a number of other reasons we have to believe that decay rates don't just randomly change over time. One is that we _do_ have other means of comparison, such as sedimentary evidence. And when these consitently match our decay rate data, that bolsters the decay rate data. Doesn't mean that both might not be off, but it does start to give confirmation. Then we can also measure decay rates in samples newly created through bombardment processes and see that those appear to decay at the same rate as the samples we have found backed up by sedimentary and other means. Further bolstering our assumptions.
This doesn't negate your argument, but does tend to add some support for a slightly longer time period to our assumptions of a steady rate of decay.
I also am guessing that the measure of parent and daughter products found on average in the earth's crust would tend to support some of these assumptions as well. But you might very well know more about that than I do if you are physicist (tho you don't say if you graduated and work in the field, or just started classes 14 years ago).
While various anomolous data in very specific circumstances has been found to decay process dating methods (normally due to variations in initial daughter element conditions in a specific area), none of it invalidates the underlying theory and the only place I see anyone taking it seriously is hard-core christian theory sites.
Your points are well taken, and I have reached that level in some companies. And for the sort of thing the original post is about, this would have definitely applied to me at those points in life. There was no option for me to be working in my field, or even doing high level work at all, outside of the company I was working for.
However, I might make the caveat that I have had, as another poster states, ongoing projects that existed prior to my employment exempted where they had no bearing on the employer's area of operations. Further, I have had entire areas of endeavor exempted as well, specifically, my writing unless it relates to products produced by the company.
Personally, I was writing a long time before I did anything else, and the "you do NOT want to work there" would apply if an employer tried to stop that. On the other hand, this is more an ethical point than a realistic one, since I never have time to write when I am in a higher executive position anyway.
"In the article it rather sounds like they just assumed Python performance would be an indicator of performance for interpreted languages generally, but is there anything to back this up?"
No, there isn't. I will say upfront that I am heavily baised for Python, and do everything I can in it, but when it comes to raw speed, the last numbers I saw show that Perl is about twice as fast. Those benches are for python 2.1 tho, which is quite a ways out of date.
However, I don't code in Python for raw speed, I code in it for productivity and maintainablity, and there it saves me a tremendous amount of time over most everything else, but your milage may vary. For the kind of stuff I do, I swig out to native C once in a blue moon, but mostly the speed thing isn't an issue for me.
"It's a good rant but it's not really very relevent - writing your app in python (at least in the way he describes) simply isn't plausible if you're writing an app for commercial or even mass distribution - you can't rely on an existing Python installation and if you've got to package one with your installer then theres hardly any more work to embed an interperter instead."
This is old enough it will probably never be read, but that isn't true. There are utilites that do this in a snap, in addition to finding any extension package or dll deps that your python is using automagically in almost all cases. Just today I took a small app written in python using WxWindows ran it through py2exe and it runs on all flavors of windows, without python or wxWindows libs installed on either one. Took me about ten minutes.
McMillian Installer will do the same trick, tho I haven't used it recently. Mcmillan also does the same thing for Linux, where I wish a lot more people were making packages available as no dep binaries as well as more traditional source packages, but that is just me.
Now, as for your other points, if you happen to want to write your code in Python, well, that is a different matter. But if you choose to, it is very easy and fast to distibute your program binary without deps.
This post is too old right now for anyone to ever see this, but...
I wrote some of these apps a few years ago. They are , basically, part of the windows scripting host technology and allow you to break HTA's out of the browser and have them running on the system. This is the same basic technology that gave us the first round of "view and screw" html outlook email worms that would hose your machine if you only opened the email, since script host attachments would run automatically for you. It was a Feature.
This tech is basically dead. MS doesn't seem to be using it for much and not expanding it. This is much ado about nothing. Most of the functionality of it is disabled due to security patches at this point, because it was a Bad Idea.
This isn't the opening salvo in some kind of evil empire plan here, this is a leftover from an evil plan that never worked. They processed the patent and it is just now being granted, and it isn't going to be used because it backfired and wasn't workable.
Actually, the newest rev of Macromedia's Firewworks mixes raster and vector graphics quite well.
That program is the one reason I have to boot a Windows machine now and then. There is nothing I have found that is faster for producing web interface mock-ups. It doesn't have the same range of power as Photoshop + Illustrator, or for raster even The Gimp, but I can do basic work, and 90% of non-print stuff is basic work, in about 1/10th the time.
If The Gimp gets decent vector editing capabilities, I can finally get rid of the annoying Windows machine I keep around just for this.
The new guidelines let victims tally financial loss based on the costs of restoring data, fixing security holes, conducting damage assessments and lost revenue.
Now, I don't know about you, but fixing security holes is one of my jobs for systems I am involved with, not something I do just to rack up penalties in a trial.
Jounalists can collect people's stories, told to them freely, because sources rely on the protection granted by the shield of the first amendment. Some of these stories or details of them that were left out of print, might be facts that the FBI can't find.
I have personally watched black hats working while writing pieces on security. These sources were willing to commit crimes in front of me because they knew that I wasn't going to turn them over, and that the court wasn't going to be able to make me do so (this was pre PATRIOT). In the case of one of these stories, it changed security policies and proceedures at a large university that up to that point was denying that systems were vulnerable at all. The net result of the piece, in my mind, was good, even tho the action of the sources I was using were undeniably criminal and ethically indefensible in my opinion.
While journalism in this country isn't at a high point, the importance of the first amendment is hard to underestimate to a democracy. Without freedom of the press, it is impossible to get the kind of information you need about how your government is running.
As for examples, whistleblowers are the prime example. If someone wants to stay off the record, and the FBI can take a journalist's records, then you end up squelching the flow of information that might be critical of government policies or actions.
As for a concrete example, Deepthroat, the source that was the key of the Watergate investigation, was never revealed (though most knowledgable observers believe it was Al Haig).
Seriously obese people are seriously obese for a reason, and it's not lack of self control. It's because their urge to eat is stronger than yours. It's genetic. It takes far more willpower for them to stop dinner early than I'd wager it takes for others to quit smoking. One person I know who weighs >300lbs compared the willpower required as being in the same league with the willpower required to voluntarily stop breathing until you black out from lack of oxygen. Not strangling or hanging yourself, just keeping your mouth closed of your own free will. Not so easy, is it?
Maybe you are right there. But I also happen to have a number of people in my peer group who are ex-junkies, which is not a particularly easy thing to kick. And they did.
It isn't like you can't change. "Oh, but it is hard". Yep, stuff is hard. And sometimes it takes a lot more than willpower alone, but there are strategies for dealing with these issues.
Personally, I have dealt with some tremendously difficult things in my life. And I did these things by not taking the attitude that they were impossible to do just because they were very, very difficult and instead found people who had coped with the same problems and got the same kind of help they did. Wanting to do something and being willing to take action goes a long way. Lamenting that something is hard and almost impossible pretty much insures that you aren't going to beat an ingrained pattern or addiction.
The word "crude" has no place around atomic weapons. You've got to line up the atoms exactly, or almost nothing happens.
With enriched uranimum or plutonium, you are correct. There is all kinds of complex implosion trickiness involved.
However, highly enriched uranium (HEU) doesn't follow the rules. You slap together a couple of bits of it at the speed of a good MLB fastball and you are going to get a low-yeild sustained chain reaction.
This is the stuff that is really scaring the daylights out of thinktank folks who are pondering nuclear terrorism right now.
I beg to differ. A lot of the stuff he was talking about that in that article in the detailed examples strikes me as pretty good stuff. BSD solutions, needs anaylsis for mixed platform shops, what to put in the network DMZ, rebuilding mail servers and a host of other crap, including a very simple but often neglected point about changing critical passwords on a regular basis. I mean, none of that is necessarily rocket science, but is sure is the kind of thing I look for in an admin/tech and often find woefully inadequate in people passing themselves off as experienced.
What he seems to be admitting is that he didn't know all this when he started, and learned it by doing it, which says to me that he can tackle new problems on the fly and find solutions. Another thing I always want to see.
I think people are missing that MS doesn't have to have a real case, and they don't have to win in court for a litigation strategy to be advantageous to them.
On a code basis, they aren't going to have a leg, but they just need to press on their patent portfolio. The two points of real weakness probably being Samba and Apache as another poster pointed out.
Hit these two projects with some trumped up patent case that is just strong enough to keep them from getting summarily dismissed, which isn't hard to avoid.
MS has something we don't, deep, deep pockets. All they have to do is spread fear and cost the projects enough money. A couple of years of that, and the show's over. IBM might step into all these cases and stop them, and they might not. Enough of it, and MS could make it pretty much a retarded move to adopt OSS from the PHB's point of view, and they would set us back years, even if they didn't win the cases.
Then, as another poster pointed out, Germany and some other countries would be our hope, but in the USA it would be enough to knee-cap us.
Then again, maybe I am overstating the case, but it looks like a very real and potentially terrifying strategy to me as an OSS coder working in the US.
No. Because Excocets don't have the kind of range you need to pull that off. First, Aegis' are pheonominally effective. Second, you have phallanx anti-missile systems on the carrier itself. Third, it takes multiple strikes of something like an Excocet to take out a carrier. Fourth, by the time you are ready to fire a second salvo, you are already a solution in the computers of the missiles we fired back through reverse target acquisition.
Very experienced people spent a lot of time thinking about just this issue, and designing a CBG around these kinds of problems. We don't let ships get close enough to a CBG to fire multiple exocets at us without having the time to shoot them down through countermeasures.
Exocets, Silkworms and such aren't the problem for CBG's. On the other hand, there is a solution for taking out a prepared carrier, and that is a nuclear weapon.
Yes modern carriers have thick hulls. One Exocet probably wouldn't do it. How about ten? They really aren't that expensive considering you get to sink one of the most expensive ships in history.
Re:But that already happens.
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Working Hard?
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As for moving a business, then I'll simply move. It'll happen, threat or not.
No, actually, if your workers are in the process of unionizing it won't. You legally can't move your business, nor can you scuttle it unless you can show you have to. While the laws governing labor are a bit less in force over the years, I am pretty sure those two still apply.
Unless I am missing something, the point of high occupancy lanes is to reduce the number of cars on the road in the first place, helping with congestion as well as environmental issues.
Wouldn't these functions be better served by encouraging more ride share pickup areas and public information about ride sharing?
Oh, wait, that wouldn't produce new income past the already outrageous taxes involved and that means no new campaign kickbacks. How silly of me.
I don't know about everyone else, but in the last 20 years I personally feel that ignoring established libraries and "gotta code it myself" thinking has dropped dramatically.
I was talking to a coder in my building who works in an all Java shop and his love of the language was specifically based around the large number included and pretested libraries in Sun's Java. Some of those libarary implementations I don't particularly like, but I see the guy's point.
Perl and Python, in different ways, are both creatures of their libaries. There are good things about both languages themselves, but CPAN is obviously one of the strongest things Perl has going for it, and Python's "Batteries Included" slogan is famous to any Pythonistas out there.
And using Visual Basic (*shudder*) is almost entirely a process of linking up premade objects.
Today, I see much more use of predefined libraries than there was in the infancy of widespread computing. How many people here have coded their own window managment lately? And while I know people still do their own, I am seeing a lot more off the shelf work in graphics as well. I haven't had to code my own 2d low to midlevel stuff in a long, long time. The various Canvas objects of the world are well optimized at this point and work well. And even for 3d work, much, much less coding by hand is necessary than just 6 years ago. I know game coders who are working with DirectX straight up, and not even tweeking the low level stuff anymore.
I think that some coders are lazy and they don't keep up with what is out there to help them with their projects as much as they could. I mean, I go through Fred Lund's python links every week, because I use Py more than anything else and want to know what is out there that will do me good. And I could spend a lot more time on this for other languages I know but use less frequently. Most of us probably could. But that doesn't change that my experience personally appears to be the general case, and coders as a class are relying on more prepackaged libraries as a group than ever before, and this trend doesn't look like it is going to stop anytime soon.
Look at the last three major langauges to hit my personal radar (there have been tons, I know, but I am just talking about the ones I have started using the most in the last decade), Java, Perl and Python. What do all have in common? Relatively large and useful included libraries (CPAN might as well be thought of as included in Perl).
Another poster pointed out that you can also look at patterns as filling this hole in some ways. Which I agree with. Who can't get by in production code today without at least understanding a few patterns?
So I am not really seeing the issue as clearly as the article suggests. I am seeing just the opposite.
If the RHCE tops out in the 6-figure realm I can theoretically hire me 3 MCSE to do the job to my servers, which by the way came equipped with the OS, thanks to the MS-TAX.
Which you will have to. That is the one of the points in a number of the various TCO studies that have been kicked around rather extensively here on slash in the last three months or so, a linux admin can maintain a stupidly high number of machines, where MCSE's tend to get really grumpy if you give them more than a few boxes to admin.
I haven't personally in situations where I have to run more than a handful of servers and a bunch of clients, so I don't know this from personal experience. I do know that I find it remarkably easy to maintain my systems and keep them in good shape compared to some of my MCSE counterparts, but that could just be me running into bad Microsoft admins.
I also have to wonder about that six figures for the RHCE in this economy, most folks I know aren't making that kind of money anymore, the ones who still have jobs, that is.
You are lucky to have a library that has up-to-date tech books at your disposal. The public library system in Berkeley CA does not offer this luxury. A couple of 6 year old books on making Dynamic Web Pages For Big Profit On Your Home Selling Web Site!!! seem to be the only technical books in the stacks.
I am not a big fan of ebooks in general, but I like the safari system for giving me up to date technical information on whatever I am working on for a yearly price equal to two books. If I am using a book very frequently for a long period as a reference, I want a dead tree copy of my own. But in most cases I am heavily into a tech book for about three weeks, learn the concepts and then the book becomes another dead weight on my shelves, useful mainly for flattening out my tournament vinyl chessboard when it starts rolling up too much at the edges.
First, I agree with you that we need more human intelligence on the ground. In the 70's we emasculated our spy agencies for what were pretty good reasons at the time, but we went too far. Pure elint is never going to replace human assests on the ground and we are paying the price for that.
But as for programs being only as bright as their programmers and a programmer having to predict all things in advance, I don't think you are hitting the nail there. Trying to find patterns that aren't already apparent to the coder is the point of datamining. And there are strategies for dealing with this domain. The various baysean algorithms come to mind right off. Then there is wolfram's work on alife/complexity that applies to this general area as well.
As for your theory that there were no markers for this going in, then why were various uncoordinated FBI reports going out of suspicious acitivty related to arab flight students and the other various unconnected flags going up in isolated sectors relating to immigration issues and terrorist intelligence traffic that we now know about from the 9/11 investigations? There were markers out there, because this was a planned and coordinated attack, we just weren't able to accurately interpret the information. Was there enough information to interpret in the first place? I have no clue. But someone, somewhere, apparently thinks there is a chance that there is going to be enough in the future.
I completely agree with you that human intelligence assets are critical. But discounting the possiblity that datamining can help provide clues where to look strikes me as close minded, especially when I doubt that you have any more idea than I what exact strategy the folks who have the whole picture are planning on.
And the idea that once terrorists know that they fit the sifting mechnasim that is going to be used is wanting it both ways. First the argument is that you are dealing with a non-technical population and that for some reason this leaves them immune from leaving clues that might be sifted, and then they are technical experts who can, if the profile mechnaisms work, figure out the statistical limits of that profile and stay off the radar.
The problem is that when you use technology to figure out profiles, it assumes that others are using technology as well.
What are you talking about? When I use technology to figure out the 'profile' of probable weather patterns, am I assuming that the weather is using technology as well? Am I not allowed to use gun "technology" to shoot someone with a knife?
There are patterns in many otherwise mundane details, analyizing those patterns has dick to do with the techological prowness of the details themselves. If that were the case, I couldn't do market studies of food buying patterns because a lot of the people who buy food don't use computers.
Only a person unversed in tactics, military history or serious common sense will confuse a lack of sophisticated weaponry with a lack of planning. There was a load of planning that went into these attacks, including training pilots, getting people into the country, setting time-tables. You make it sound like a group of people just randomly decided to jump up, weild some box cutters and ram airplanes into buildings on the spur of the moment. Surprise and planning, in the sense of a tactical operation, go together, you don't get suprise without careful planning and logisitcal moves.
And planning and logisitcal operations create patterns. Whether we are going to be able to see them in passenger manifests and information of that type is another matter, apparently someone thinks or hopes we are going to be able to. If this is an appropriate use of the information, I leave for others to debate.
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Does anyone but me find it really, really funny that the poster is a grad student in Human Computer Interaction, but can't work in teams and has admittedly bad social skills?
Not really trying to flame here, I just have always considered most elements of HCI to be very oriented toward teamwork and personal communication.
Actually, while I think this letter is bogus, I will admit to one point, it really isn't that odd for members of a company to have no clue at all who is and isn't a member of the board. This can also get confusing, because some companies have a title of director, which is a management position and board members can use the same title but in many, if not most cases, won't have interaction with anyone in the comapny with the exception of the officers.
I seriously suspect this is what happened in this case. Is IL probably bogus and Tim a doof? Most likely in my opinion. And do I think HardOCP should retract the article? No. But this is one of a handfull of points here that was actually not on crack.
Okay, this is where I suspected this was going. The Glenrose, Texas "issue" is one of misidentification of a series of therapod tracks as human prints by a group of people who really, really want to believe that man and dinosaurs existed at the same time because it bolsters their biblical belief that the earth is five to seven thousand years old.
A lot of strange information doubting the physics of nuclear decay, even tho we have plenty of lab and theoretical basis for same, because once again, decay issues shoot down the idea that the earth is a few thousand years old as the bible is interpreted to say by some sects, as opposed to around 4.5 billion years old it is.
While you have a point, there are a number of other reasons we have to believe that decay rates don't just randomly change over time. One is that we _do_ have other means of comparison, such as sedimentary evidence. And when these consitently match our decay rate data, that bolsters the decay rate data. Doesn't mean that both might not be off, but it does start to give confirmation. Then we can also measure decay rates in samples newly created through bombardment processes and see that those appear to decay at the same rate as the samples we have found backed up by sedimentary and other means. Further bolstering our assumptions.
This doesn't negate your argument, but does tend to add some support for a slightly longer time period to our assumptions of a steady rate of decay.
I also am guessing that the measure of parent and daughter products found on average in the earth's crust would tend to support some of these assumptions as well. But you might very well know more about that than I do if you are physicist (tho you don't say if you graduated and work in the field, or just started classes 14 years ago).
While various anomolous data in very specific circumstances has been found to decay process dating methods (normally due to variations in initial daughter element conditions in a specific area), none of it invalidates the underlying theory and the only place I see anyone taking it seriously is hard-core christian theory sites.
Your points are well taken, and I have reached that level in some companies. And for the sort of thing the original post is about, this would have definitely applied to me at those points in life. There was no option for me to be working in my field, or even doing high level work at all, outside of the company I was working for.
However, I might make the caveat that I have had, as another poster states, ongoing projects that existed prior to my employment exempted where they had no bearing on the employer's area of operations. Further, I have had entire areas of endeavor exempted as well, specifically, my writing unless it relates to products produced by the company.
Personally, I was writing a long time before I did anything else, and the "you do NOT want to work there" would apply if an employer tried to stop that. On the other hand, this is more an ethical point than a realistic one, since I never have time to write when I am in a higher executive position anyway.
"In the article it rather sounds like they just assumed Python performance would be an indicator of performance for interpreted languages generally, but is there anything to back this up?"
No, there isn't. I will say upfront that I am heavily baised for Python, and do everything I can in it, but when it comes to raw speed, the last numbers I saw show that Perl is about twice as fast. Those benches are for python 2.1 tho, which is quite a ways out of date.
Since then, python in 2.3 has gotten about 30% faster and apparently the devs think that it can take Parrot.
However, I don't code in Python for raw speed, I code in it for productivity and maintainablity, and there it saves me a tremendous amount of time over most everything else, but your milage may vary. For the kind of stuff I do, I swig out to native C once in a blue moon, but mostly the speed thing isn't an issue for me.
"It's a good rant but it's not really very relevent - writing your app in python (at least in the way he describes) simply isn't plausible if you're writing an app for commercial or even mass distribution - you can't rely on an existing Python installation and if you've got to package one with your installer then theres hardly any more work to embed an interperter instead."
This is old enough it will probably never be read, but that isn't true. There are utilites that do this in a snap, in addition to finding any extension package or dll deps that your python is using automagically in almost all cases. Just today I took a small app written in python using WxWindows ran it through py2exe and it runs on all flavors of windows, without python or wxWindows libs installed on either one. Took me about ten minutes.
McMillian Installer will do the same trick, tho I haven't used it recently. Mcmillan also does the same thing for Linux, where I wish a lot more people were making packages available as no dep binaries as well as more traditional source packages, but that is just me.
Now, as for your other points, if you happen to want to write your code in Python, well, that is a different matter. But if you choose to, it is very easy and fast to distibute your program binary without deps.
you might want to look at a mini-itx system. These units draw stupidly small amounts of power, but also aren't high horsepower machines.
This post is too old right now for anyone to ever see this, but...
I wrote some of these apps a few years ago. They are , basically, part of the windows scripting host technology and allow you to break HTA's out of the browser and have them running on the system. This is the same basic technology that gave us the first round of "view and screw" html outlook email worms that would hose your machine if you only opened the email, since script host attachments would run automatically for you. It was a Feature.
This tech is basically dead. MS doesn't seem to be using it for much and not expanding it. This is much ado about nothing. Most of the functionality of it is disabled due to security patches at this point, because it was a Bad Idea.
This isn't the opening salvo in some kind of evil empire plan here, this is a leftover from an evil plan that never worked. They processed the patent and it is just now being granted, and it isn't going to be used because it backfired and wasn't workable.
Actually, the newest rev of Macromedia's Firewworks mixes raster and vector graphics quite well.
That program is the one reason I have to boot a Windows machine now and then. There is nothing I have found that is faster for producing web interface mock-ups. It doesn't have the same range of power as Photoshop + Illustrator, or for raster even The Gimp, but I can do basic work, and 90% of non-print stuff is basic work, in about 1/10th the time.
If The Gimp gets decent vector editing capabilities, I can finally get rid of the annoying Windows machine I keep around just for this.
Anyone else notice this?
The new guidelines let victims tally financial loss based on the costs of restoring data, fixing security holes, conducting damage assessments and lost revenue.
Now, I don't know about you, but fixing security holes is one of my jobs for systems I am involved with, not something I do just to rack up penalties in a trial.
Jounalists can collect people's stories, told to them freely, because sources rely on the protection granted by the shield of the first amendment. Some of these stories or details of them that were left out of print, might be facts that the FBI can't find.
I have personally watched black hats working while writing pieces on security. These sources were willing to commit crimes in front of me because they knew that I wasn't going to turn them over, and that the court wasn't going to be able to make me do so (this was pre PATRIOT). In the case of one of these stories, it changed security policies and proceedures at a large university that up to that point was denying that systems were vulnerable at all. The net result of the piece, in my mind, was good, even tho the action of the sources I was using were undeniably criminal and ethically indefensible in my opinion.
While journalism in this country isn't at a high point, the importance of the first amendment is hard to underestimate to a democracy. Without freedom of the press, it is impossible to get the kind of information you need about how your government is running.
As for examples, whistleblowers are the prime example. If someone wants to stay off the record, and the FBI can take a journalist's records, then you end up squelching the flow of information that might be critical of government policies or actions.
As for a concrete example, Deepthroat, the source that was the key of the Watergate investigation, was never revealed (though most knowledgable observers believe it was Al Haig).
Seriously obese people are seriously obese for a reason, and it's not lack of self control. It's because their urge to eat is stronger than yours. It's genetic. It takes far more willpower for them to stop dinner early than I'd wager it takes for others to quit smoking. One person I know who weighs >300lbs compared the willpower required as being in the same league with the willpower required to voluntarily stop breathing until you black out from lack of oxygen. Not strangling or hanging yourself, just keeping your mouth closed of your own free will. Not so easy, is it?
Maybe you are right there. But I also happen to have a number of people in my peer group who are ex-junkies, which is not a particularly easy thing to kick. And they did.
It isn't like you can't change. "Oh, but it is hard". Yep, stuff is hard. And sometimes it takes a lot more than willpower alone, but there are strategies for dealing with these issues.
Personally, I have dealt with some tremendously difficult things in my life. And I did these things by not taking the attitude that they were impossible to do just because they were very, very difficult and instead found people who had coped with the same problems and got the same kind of help they did. Wanting to do something and being willing to take action goes a long way. Lamenting that something is hard and almost impossible pretty much insures that you aren't going to beat an ingrained pattern or addiction.
The word "crude" has no place around atomic weapons. You've got to line up the atoms exactly, or almost nothing happens.
With enriched uranimum or plutonium, you are correct. There is all kinds of complex implosion trickiness involved.
However, highly enriched uranium (HEU) doesn't follow the rules. You slap together a couple of bits of it at the speed of a good MLB fastball and you are going to get a low-yeild sustained chain reaction.
This is the stuff that is really scaring the daylights out of thinktank folks who are pondering nuclear terrorism right now.
I beg to differ. A lot of the stuff he was talking about that in that article in the detailed examples strikes me as pretty good stuff. BSD solutions, needs anaylsis for mixed platform shops, what to put in the network DMZ, rebuilding mail servers and a host of other crap, including a very simple but often neglected point about changing critical passwords on a regular basis. I mean, none of that is necessarily rocket science, but is sure is the kind of thing I look for in an admin/tech and often find woefully inadequate in people passing themselves off as experienced.
What he seems to be admitting is that he didn't know all this when he started, and learned it by doing it, which says to me that he can tackle new problems on the fly and find solutions. Another thing I always want to see.
I think people are missing that MS doesn't have to have a real case, and they don't have to win in court for a litigation strategy to be advantageous to them.
On a code basis, they aren't going to have a leg, but they just need to press on their patent portfolio. The two points of real weakness probably being Samba and Apache as another poster pointed out.
Hit these two projects with some trumped up patent case that is just strong enough to keep them from getting summarily dismissed, which isn't hard to avoid.
MS has something we don't, deep, deep pockets. All they have to do is spread fear and cost the projects enough money. A couple of years of that, and the show's over. IBM might step into all these cases and stop them, and they might not. Enough of it, and MS could make it pretty much a retarded move to adopt OSS from the PHB's point of view, and they would set us back years, even if they didn't win the cases.
Then, as another poster pointed out, Germany and some other countries would be our hope, but in the USA it would be enough to knee-cap us.
Then again, maybe I am overstating the case, but it looks like a very real and potentially terrifying strategy to me as an OSS coder working in the US.
No. Because Excocets don't have the kind of range you need to pull that off. First, Aegis' are pheonominally effective. Second, you have phallanx anti-missile systems on the carrier itself. Third, it takes multiple strikes of something like an Excocet to take out a carrier. Fourth, by the time you are ready to fire a second salvo, you are already a solution in the computers of the missiles we fired back through reverse target acquisition.
Very experienced people spent a lot of time thinking about just this issue, and designing a CBG around these kinds of problems. We don't let ships get close enough to a CBG to fire multiple exocets at us without having the time to shoot them down through countermeasures.
Exocets, Silkworms and such aren't the problem for CBG's. On the other hand, there is a solution for taking out a prepared carrier, and that is a nuclear weapon.
Yes modern carriers have thick hulls. One Exocet probably wouldn't do it. How about ten? They really aren't that expensive considering you get to sink one of the most expensive ships in history.
Two words: Ticonderoga Aegis
As for moving a business, then I'll simply move. It'll happen, threat or not.
No, actually, if your workers are in the process of unionizing it won't. You legally can't move your business, nor can you scuttle it unless you can show you have to. While the laws governing labor are a bit less in force over the years, I am pretty sure those two still apply.
Unless I am missing something, the point of high occupancy lanes is to reduce the number of cars on the road in the first place, helping with congestion as well as environmental issues.
Wouldn't these functions be better served by encouraging more ride share pickup areas and public information about ride sharing?
Oh, wait, that wouldn't produce new income past the already outrageous taxes involved and that means no new campaign kickbacks. How silly of me.
I don't know about everyone else, but in the last 20 years I personally feel that ignoring established libraries and "gotta code it myself" thinking has dropped dramatically.
I was talking to a coder in my building who works in an all Java shop and his love of the language was specifically based around the large number included and pretested libraries in Sun's Java. Some of those libarary implementations I don't particularly like, but I see the guy's point.
Perl and Python, in different ways, are both creatures of their libaries. There are good things about both languages themselves, but CPAN is obviously one of the strongest things Perl has going for it, and Python's "Batteries Included" slogan is famous to any Pythonistas out there.
And using Visual Basic (*shudder*) is almost entirely a process of linking up premade objects.
Today, I see much more use of predefined libraries than there was in the infancy of widespread computing. How many people here have coded their own window managment lately? And while I know people still do their own, I am seeing a lot more off the shelf work in graphics as well. I haven't had to code my own 2d low to midlevel stuff in a long, long time. The various Canvas objects of the world are well optimized at this point and work well. And even for 3d work, much, much less coding by hand is necessary than just 6 years ago. I know game coders who are working with DirectX straight up, and not even tweeking the low level stuff anymore.
I think that some coders are lazy and they don't keep up with what is out there to help them with their projects as much as they could. I mean, I go through Fred Lund's python links every week, because I use Py more than anything else and want to know what is out there that will do me good. And I could spend a lot more time on this for other languages I know but use less frequently. Most of us probably could. But that doesn't change that my experience personally appears to be the general case, and coders as a class are relying on more prepackaged libraries as a group than ever before, and this trend doesn't look like it is going to stop anytime soon.
Look at the last three major langauges to hit my personal radar (there have been tons, I know, but I am just talking about the ones I have started using the most in the last decade), Java, Perl and Python. What do all have in common? Relatively large and useful included libraries (CPAN might as well be thought of as included in Perl).
Another poster pointed out that you can also look at patterns as filling this hole in some ways. Which I agree with. Who can't get by in production code today without at least understanding a few patterns?
So I am not really seeing the issue as clearly as the article suggests. I am seeing just the opposite.
If the RHCE tops out in the 6-figure realm I can theoretically hire me 3 MCSE to do the job to my servers, which by the way came equipped with the OS, thanks to the MS-TAX.
Which you will have to. That is the one of the points in a number of the various TCO studies that have been kicked around rather extensively here on slash in the last three months or so, a linux admin can maintain a stupidly high number of machines, where MCSE's tend to get really grumpy if you give them more than a few boxes to admin.
I haven't personally in situations where I have to run more than a handful of servers and a bunch of clients, so I don't know this from personal experience. I do know that I find it remarkably easy to maintain my systems and keep them in good shape compared to some of my MCSE counterparts, but that could just be me running into bad Microsoft admins.
I also have to wonder about that six figures for the RHCE in this economy, most folks I know aren't making that kind of money anymore, the ones who still have jobs, that is.
You are lucky to have a library that has up-to-date tech books at your disposal. The public library system in Berkeley CA does not offer this luxury. A couple of 6 year old books on making Dynamic Web Pages For Big Profit On Your Home Selling Web Site!!! seem to be the only technical books in the stacks.
I am not a big fan of ebooks in general, but I like the safari system for giving me up to date technical information on whatever I am working on for a yearly price equal to two books. If I am using a book very frequently for a long period as a reference, I want a dead tree copy of my own. But in most cases I am heavily into a tech book for about three weeks, learn the concepts and then the book becomes another dead weight on my shelves, useful mainly for flattening out my tournament vinyl chessboard when it starts rolling up too much at the edges.
First, I agree with you that we need more human intelligence on the ground. In the 70's we emasculated our spy agencies for what were pretty good reasons at the time, but we went too far. Pure elint is never going to replace human assests on the ground and we are paying the price for that.
But as for programs being only as bright as their programmers and a programmer having to predict all things in advance, I don't think you are hitting the nail there. Trying to find patterns that aren't already apparent to the coder is the point of datamining. And there are strategies for dealing with this domain. The various baysean algorithms come to mind right off. Then there is wolfram's work on alife/complexity that applies to this general area as well.
As for your theory that there were no markers for this going in, then why were various uncoordinated FBI reports going out of suspicious acitivty related to arab flight students and the other various unconnected flags going up in isolated sectors relating to immigration issues and terrorist intelligence traffic that we now know about from the 9/11 investigations? There were markers out there, because this was a planned and coordinated attack, we just weren't able to accurately interpret the information. Was there enough information to interpret in the first place? I have no clue. But someone, somewhere, apparently thinks there is a chance that there is going to be enough in the future.
I completely agree with you that human intelligence assets are critical. But discounting the possiblity that datamining can help provide clues where to look strikes me as close minded, especially when I doubt that you have any more idea than I what exact strategy the folks who have the whole picture are planning on.
And the idea that once terrorists know that they fit the sifting mechnasim that is going to be used is wanting it both ways. First the argument is that you are dealing with a non-technical population and that for some reason this leaves them immune from leaving clues that might be sifted, and then they are technical experts who can, if the profile mechnaisms work, figure out the statistical limits of that profile and stay off the radar.
The problem is that when you use technology to figure out profiles, it assumes that others are using technology as well.
What are you talking about? When I use technology to figure out the 'profile' of probable weather patterns, am I assuming that the weather is using technology as well? Am I not allowed to use gun "technology" to shoot someone with a knife?
There are patterns in many otherwise mundane details, analyizing those patterns has dick to do with the techological prowness of the details themselves. If that were the case, I couldn't do market studies of food buying patterns because a lot of the people who buy food don't use computers.
Only a person unversed in tactics, military history or serious common sense will confuse a lack of sophisticated weaponry with a lack of planning. There was a load of planning that went into these attacks, including training pilots, getting people into the country, setting time-tables. You make it sound like a group of people just randomly decided to jump up, weild some box cutters and ram airplanes into buildings on the spur of the moment. Surprise and planning, in the sense of a tactical operation, go together, you don't get suprise without careful planning and logisitcal moves.
And planning and logisitcal operations create patterns. Whether we are going to be able to see them in passenger manifests and information of that type is another matter, apparently someone thinks or hopes we are going to be able to. If this is an appropriate use of the information, I leave for others to debate.