You must be a newbie. I've been a respected member of the Slashdot community for close to a decade now. As a long time developer and community leader it's unfortunate that I haven't had much time to post lately.
I like the whole identity theft angle, why can't we go after all the spammers with this?
After all, the main problem I have with spammers is the fact that they forge headers and put a fake return email adr in the mail. I don't mind so much getting the occasional advertisement, that's the way the capitalist world turns, as it were, it's the fact that they hide behind bogus info and drag innocent people into the whole by doing so that really hacks my gord.
The want to actually make money and get paid for their work??? And that's bait-n-switch??? Welcome to the real world, free is nice but it won't pay the rent. Why would anyone begrudge them making money if you like their software???
I'm generally not a tin-foil-hat kinda guy, but I'm starting to connect the dots here.
I did some consulting work for a company called "One Eyed Jack" which it turns out is a subsidary of Sony, although I didn't know it at the time. They were looking for a method for embedding information into ipV6 packets in the unused header fields. Since I've done this sort of work for the BSD folks which implementing hidden backdoors using the Leibnitz algorithim for Olog(n) packet encryption for them on several projects, this sort of thing was right up my alley.
Well, after being well paid, almost too well paid, for a couple monts work I signed off on the code and went on my way. Then, when I say they were launching this music service I started to put one and one together. Well, bottom line here, if you think running a packet sniffer will protect you from spyware with the new Sony music service you better thing again.
Those blokes over there at Microsoft are bloody smart. They've been trying to fend off the Linux attack with their traditional business strategies and it's obviously not working, so they're going to the next level.
As a Microsoft shareholder I'm very happy to read about this. As a leading independant consultant in the IT industry I'm disgusted by this.
Lets face it, nobody wants to look at an ad, but companies blast them out for a reason. It's the seed that drives the revenue that makes the giant capitalist machine plod onward. You need look no further than the former communist Russia if you want a failed model for how to do commerce, why do you think they never had a spam problem in Russia???
Sure the ad system isn't the best but it's functional and beats having to wait in line for 45 minutes to buy a pack of $20 ciggarettes in a Socialist/Communist society.
You can't have your cake and eat it too I'm afraid.
Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer.
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
There are over two million Americans who will go to sleep hungry tonight.
Why is it that we can brainwash the masses into thinking that it's okay for us to spend billions on space crap while ignoring the homeless people living in the streets and at the YMCA?
I'll never understand a society that says it's okay to blow billions on meaningless stuff in the name of science while ignoring all the social issues that plague us.
How many lean cuisines can you buy with the money we've spent on Voyager? How much beef jerky could you purchase with the billins we spend on the space shuttle?
I have to wonder what sort of negative influences todays youth get from these things.
In the olden days we had cartoons that taught us lessons, taught us right from wrong, using American standards and American morals. This was the mindset that drove the industrial revolution and pushed the USA to the top of the super power food chain.
The youth of today watches these Japanes cartoons and can only get confused by it all. The Japanese mindset is totally different from the USian mindset, which serves to water down the American youth and poisen them with bad values and habits. It's no wonder we are becoming a service industry while the JApanese and Chinese produce all the goods. Is it a coincidence that they have stolen our business in this manner? Hardly.
Lets look at some of the greatest Japanese companies at this point in time, Honda, Nikon, Qualcom, etc. How do you think they gained so much market share in such little time? Because we gave it to them because our youth has no drive or motivation to innovate. They simply think they can rest on the laurels of the great men who went before them, the Henry Fords and Rockifelers, etc.
I think we should outlaw all this crap and make kids go back to watching quality cartoons before we're all forced to speak Japanese, if you know what I mean.
As one of the more well known Open Source pundits you seem to have a pretty good handle on the main issues, from both a corporate and a hacker standpoint.
It seems to me that what we are seeing more of is a battle between pure capitalism (Microsoft, SCO, etc) and socialism (the open source method of making software) and history has proven that capitalism usually wins this war. Do you feel that, given you have been on both sides of the fence, in the long run this will be the case or do you feel that there will be a paradigm shift that will allow the open source software movement to overcome historical odds and succeed?
As a law-abiding citizen and one who not only supports IP, but who makes a living off of it, I think this is a great idea. It's fairly well documented that most adolescents have little regard for the law and perhaps if enough of them are forced to move into the YMCA, homeless and hungry, where they will be at high risk of forced sodomy and other vile disgusting acts, all because their parents are imprisoned, well, this might be just the ticket to wake all these kids up.
I've gone as far as to build back doors into some of my networking products that gather and track information straight from the level II socket upstream layer and although I've yet to use this information in any way, it would be real easy for me to bring some lawsuits against some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the US. You guys would be shocked by the amount of IP theft that goes on by large multi billion dollar companies.
It's a shame that most of these kids can't see that if they were out there busting their hump and trying to make a living on their own and millions of people were stealing their IP they would be as angry as Metallica or any of the other people who back the RIAA.
This is something that is such a black plague on the IT industry and it just amazes me that we're supposed to take it in stride. The problem here is that we continue to use tools that are not mature.
During these difficult economic times I've had to branch out and do some "web programming" along with my real programming contract work (mostly low level 4Q multi-threaded kernel hacking, etc.) and after doing some cursory studying and testing of various techniques I'm amazed at how badly most of the sites on the web are designed and how most of them use the wrong tool for the job.
For instance I was able to reduce the load time of a very well known and heavily traveled Fortune 500 website by moving all the graphics to black and white only, as they load on an average of Olog(n) faster than color graphics (where n is the number of pixels in the color graphic) thusly improving their UHCRF (unique hit customer retention factor) ratio by 35%!! I won't brag about the $10,000 bonus check I received from hitting that benchmark... heh. Other simple techniques like removing all interpreted languages (java, Visual Basic, c# etc.) and replacing them with low level compiled code (C, of course) has generated speed increases upwards of 25% and also increase the security of the site as a side effect.
It's a shame we don't teach IT people to spend some time to learn their trade inside and out instead of always forcing them to jump on the "flavour of the month" and use abstracted high level tools. As Leon Brooks sums it up in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" - You'll never properly solve a programming problem by using tools that are not mature. Leon hit's the nail right on the head with that one.
I can't, in good faith, offer slackwear up as an option to any of my clients though. They need a world class installation and they need cutting edge features like Gnome 2.2 and Mozilla 1.4.
Sure, slack is fun to dink around with and it's nice for a sense of history and all that but today as a business about the only distro I can quote out is Linux 9.0. In todays market customers want support and they want to see a product comes in a box with decals and installation books. Fortuen 500 companies don't really care about the "cool" factor.
I'm completely disgusted by all the money the US Government plans on wasting on this whole "War on Terra." I for one feel just as safe as I did prior to 9/11 and I felt completely safe back then. This is just another way for the government to waste the tax payers money.
If you really want to make the Country safe then you should get rid of all the H1B visas in the country as they are the real threat to us. If you don't think the next terra attack is going to come from the high tech crowd then you better think again mister.
As a long time IT professional I recommend FreeBSD all the time. I'll go into meetings where people are just crying for me to help them gain synergy by decreasing their TCO while at the same time increasing their ROI, yet these people look like a deer caught in the headlights when I flat out tell them that the only way to do that is by looking at taking the next step to the next level by integrating their asset management supply side relationships into leveraged content delivery paradigms, with an eye towards aligning their collaborative relationship initiatives towards common goals and the first step in that direction is to move to an OS that has Olog(n)performance, namely FreeBSD.
I've been able to do this in the past with a a few Fortune 500 companies by implementing a strict B2C affinity marketing plan which relies heavily on E-mediation performance metrics, something that not everyone is willing to go through.
In short, don't even come to me with questions about your Value chain collaborative commerce unless you're willing to pay the piper and upgrade to FreeBSD because this is not your daddy's economy and you'll get nowhere by running legacy operating systems. Times have changed and unless you're willing to change with them you'll be left behind wondering what the hell happened to all your profits.
Lets face it, all one has to do is take a quick look at the demand for certain skill sets on the net to get a pretty good feel for what's relevant today and I'm not sure c++ is anywhere on that radar screen. Most of my work as of late has been all Java and c#, with some legacy C programming done (on low level systems only of course, nobody would pay someone by the hour to have app level work done in C these days)
Sometimes I wonder when I hear people complain about how the CS industry tends to shun the old timers when the truth is that a lot of these old timers are trying to hang on to legacy technology like C++ or perl when the industry has moved onto bigger and better things.
If I've learned one thing it's that in IS/IT/CS you either adapt and move on or you end up doing tech support on the midnight shift. Plain and simple. I think Fred Brooks touched on this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" when he said that computer programming will never be a mature field because to excel in it you must always be changing your language focus.
As an independent consultant if I don't have the ability to patent my work then I lose my ability to compete in the workplace. There is no way for me to go up against all these major corporations unless I can patent my innovations and leverage that patent in a court of law.
I've devised many algorithms that could save companies many man hours by speeding up their applications by Olog(n) however I refuse to use them unless I can be certain that they won't simply take the algorithm and use it elsewhere. I'm not talking about reverse engineering code mind you, I'm talking about the actual ideas that go into the code. For instance lets say, hypothetically, that I devise a sort routine that works anywhere from 35 - 40% faster than the quick sort in with all datasets. I would have to be a fool to just give this away after spending months of research on it when my time and my intelligence are the only things I have that I can charge for.
I think the patent system is pure capitalism at it's best and may the best and brightest and first to market be the guy who wins. Patents are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball as far as I'm concerned.
I've done a smattering amoung of work on mainframes and I always find it quite refreshing for myriad reasons. First and foremost I can charge premium bucks since it's all about supply and demand. Secondly, it's always a pleasure to get to work on a real computer since most of my work these days is spent on that heinous X86 scrap that society seems to think passes for computers these days.
Lets face it, working on a FreeBSD box after working on an old mainframe is like driving a VW bug with flowers all over it after driving a boss 69 camereo.
And finally since the skillset to work on these is above and beyond that which your average windows admin/coder has, I am fairly secure in my knowledge that I have job security.
It's like Rick Brooks said in the Mythical Man Month, if you are in the upper 5% of computer scientists you will always be employed making in the upper 1% wage group.
Neal's research staff contacted me two years ago and I did some minor work for him, via email (I never met him so don't go all crazy and ask for details) and was paid very well, considering it was research for a book.
Neal's a pretty sharp guy but he outsources a lot of his research to proffesionals (makes sense) and has several staff people help him put the pieces together, as it were.
I offered my services as part of the FTEST (final tech editing service team) but Neal didn't want a computer pundit as much as he was looking for science pundits. Ah well, at least now I'm in his rolodex and hopefully I'll get more chances to work with him.
I've found over the years that most new coders aren't taught the proper basics of coding because they focus on learning high level languages and arcane algorithms, instead of focusing on the art of computing, like Donald Knuth's books.
Only too often have I sat in on meetings with immature little dweebs who rant on and on about XML or the technolofy flavour of the month or hacking at code to achieve Olog(n) cahche hits instead of focusing on making proper underlying designs.
Frank Brooks talks quite a bit about this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" where he states that secure computing is getting worse on the level of one order per generation of new programming languages. That book should be required reading by all CS students.
And who are you to give opinions about this? Who do you think are?
See, it works from both sides.
Actually Bob Abooey is a longtime industry pundit who used to work for Apple back in the 80's in their two button mouse division. He's also been a major kernel hacker for FreeBSD and has generally been regarded as one of the best minds in the Computer Science field for years now.
I suggest you perform a little research next time before making an arse of yourself.
I actually was spearheading a project back before the dot com bubble burst to start building environmentally friendly chips out of a HeGi/plastic hybrid. We were attempting to get government funding for the project as we had proven that we could basically save the country billions of dollars over time by eliminating the costly need to dispose of these old silicon based chips once they outgrow their usefulness.
The process was very time consuming however we were running a FreeBSD optimized server farm with these chips when our funding ran out. You had to make some changes to the Level II bus speeds as you get a little more latency when using HiGe but one of the benefits of using FreeBSD is that we could tweak the code all we wanted.
This looks to be very Sparc specific to me. It's a well known fact that Intel proc's use a low grade silicon wafer for their on-board caches and Sparcs use the same commercial grade chip, which is why you'll always see better performance on a UltraSparc chip than an X86 chip. Plus Sparcs can handle bandwidth caching better because they follow the IEET network layer specs and X86 boxii don't.
Of course you would need to have two X86 boxii in order to handle a load like that anyways simply because of the horrendous implementation of Java on X86, but that's another story for another day.
Garth Brooks covers this in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" where he proves in a controled lab environment that Java under X86 runs on the order of Olog(n) slower than it does on a RISC chip like an UltraSparc.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be a newbie. I've been a respected member of the Slashdot community for close to a decade now. As a long time developer and community leader it's unfortunate that I haven't had much time to post lately.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I like the whole identity theft angle, why can't we go after all the spammers with this?
After all, the main problem I have with spammers is the fact that they forge headers and put a fake return email adr in the mail. I don't mind so much getting the occasional advertisement, that's the way the capitalist world turns, as it were, it's the fact that they hide behind bogus info and drag innocent people into the whole by doing so that really hacks my gord.
Warmest regardes,
--Jack
I did some consulting work for a company called "One Eyed Jack" which it turns out is a subsidary of Sony, although I didn't know it at the time. They were looking for a method for embedding information into ipV6 packets in the unused header fields. Since I've done this sort of work for the BSD folks which implementing hidden backdoors using the Leibnitz algorithim for Olog(n) packet encryption for them on several projects, this sort of thing was right up my alley.
Well, after being well paid, almost too well paid, for a couple monts work I signed off on the code and went on my way. Then, when I say they were launching this music service I started to put one and one together. Well, bottom line here, if you think running a packet sniffer will protect you from spyware with the new Sony music service you better thing again.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
As a Microsoft shareholder I'm very happy to read about this. As a leading independant consultant in the IT industry I'm disgusted by this.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Sure the ad system isn't the best but it's functional and beats having to wait in line for 45 minutes to buy a pack of $20 ciggarettes in a Socialist/Communist society.
You can't have your cake and eat it too I'm afraid.
Well, at least we've got the "free porn on the Internet" technology all worked out.
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
Warmest Regards,
--Jack
There are over two million Americans who will go to sleep hungry tonight.
Why is it that we can brainwash the masses into thinking that it's okay for us to spend billions on space crap while ignoring the homeless people living in the streets and at the YMCA?
I'll never understand a society that says it's okay to blow billions on meaningless stuff in the name of science while ignoring all the social issues that plague us.
How many lean cuisines can you buy with the money we've spent on Voyager? How much beef jerky could you purchase with the billins we spend on the space shuttle?
Gah.
I have to wonder what sort of negative influences todays youth get from these things.
In the olden days we had cartoons that taught us lessons, taught us right from wrong, using American standards and American morals. This was the mindset that drove the industrial revolution and pushed the USA to the top of the super power food chain.
The youth of today watches these Japanes cartoons and can only get confused by it all. The Japanese mindset is totally different from the USian mindset, which serves to water down the American youth and poisen them with bad values and habits. It's no wonder we are becoming a service industry while the JApanese and Chinese produce all the goods. Is it a coincidence that they have stolen our business in this manner? Hardly.
Lets look at some of the greatest Japanese companies at this point in time, Honda, Nikon, Qualcom, etc. How do you think they gained so much market share in such little time? Because we gave it to them because our youth has no drive or motivation to innovate. They simply think they can rest on the laurels of the great men who went before them, the Henry Fords and Rockifelers, etc.
I think we should outlaw all this crap and make kids go back to watching quality cartoons before we're all forced to speak Japanese, if you know what I mean.
As one of the more well known Open Source pundits you seem to have a pretty good handle on the main issues, from both a corporate and a hacker standpoint.
It seems to me that what we are seeing more of is a battle between pure capitalism (Microsoft, SCO, etc) and socialism (the open source method of making software) and history has proven that capitalism usually wins this war. Do you feel that, given you have been on both sides of the fence, in the long run this will be the case or do you feel that there will be a paradigm shift that will allow the open source software movement to overcome historical odds and succeed?
Warmest regards,
--Jack Wagner
As a law-abiding citizen and one who not only supports IP, but who makes a living off of it, I think this is a great idea. It's fairly well documented that most adolescents have little regard for the law and perhaps if enough of them are forced to move into the YMCA, homeless and hungry, where they will be at high risk of forced sodomy and other vile disgusting acts, all because their parents are imprisoned, well, this might be just the ticket to wake all these kids up.
I've gone as far as to build back doors into some of my networking products that gather and track information straight from the level II socket upstream layer and although I've yet to use this information in any way, it would be real easy for me to bring some lawsuits against some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the US. You guys would be shocked by the amount of IP theft that goes on by large multi billion dollar companies.
It's a shame that most of these kids can't see that if they were out there busting their hump and trying to make a living on their own and millions of people were stealing their IP they would be as angry as Metallica or any of the other people who back the RIAA.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
During these difficult economic times I've had to branch out and do some "web programming" along with my real programming contract work (mostly low level 4Q multi-threaded kernel hacking, etc.) and after doing some cursory studying and testing of various techniques I'm amazed at how badly most of the sites on the web are designed and how most of them use the wrong tool for the job.
For instance I was able to reduce the load time of a very well known and heavily traveled Fortune 500 website by moving all the graphics to black and white only, as they load on an average of Olog(n) faster than color graphics (where n is the number of pixels in the color graphic) thusly improving their UHCRF (unique hit customer retention factor) ratio by 35%!! I won't brag about the $10,000 bonus check I received from hitting that benchmark... heh. Other simple techniques like removing all interpreted languages (java, Visual Basic, c# etc.) and replacing them with low level compiled code (C, of course) has generated speed increases upwards of 25% and also increase the security of the site as a side effect.
It's a shame we don't teach IT people to spend some time to learn their trade inside and out instead of always forcing them to jump on the "flavour of the month" and use abstracted high level tools. As Leon Brooks sums it up in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" - You'll never properly solve a programming problem by using tools that are not mature. Leon hit's the nail right on the head with that one.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Sure, slack is fun to dink around with and it's nice for a sense of history and all that but today as a business about the only distro I can quote out is Linux 9.0. In todays market customers want support and they want to see a product comes in a box with decals and installation books. Fortuen 500 companies don't really care about the "cool" factor.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
If you really want to make the Country safe then you should get rid of all the H1B visas in the country as they are the real threat to us. If you don't think the next terra attack is going to come from the high tech crowd then you better think again mister.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I've been able to do this in the past with a a few Fortune 500 companies by implementing a strict B2C affinity marketing plan which relies heavily on E-mediation performance metrics, something that not everyone is willing to go through.
In short, don't even come to me with questions about your Value chain collaborative commerce unless you're willing to pay the piper and upgrade to FreeBSD because this is not your daddy's economy and you'll get nowhere by running legacy operating systems. Times have changed and unless you're willing to change with them you'll be left behind wondering what the hell happened to all your profits.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Sometimes I wonder when I hear people complain about how the CS industry tends to shun the old timers when the truth is that a lot of these old timers are trying to hang on to legacy technology like C++ or perl when the industry has moved onto bigger and better things.
If I've learned one thing it's that in IS/IT/CS you either adapt and move on or you end up doing tech support on the midnight shift. Plain and simple. I think Fred Brooks touched on this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" when he said that computer programming will never be a mature field because to excel in it you must always be changing your language focus.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I've devised many algorithms that could save companies many man hours by speeding up their applications by Olog(n) however I refuse to use them unless I can be certain that they won't simply take the algorithm and use it elsewhere. I'm not talking about reverse engineering code mind you, I'm talking about the actual ideas that go into the code. For instance lets say, hypothetically, that I devise a sort routine that works anywhere from 35 - 40% faster than the quick sort in with all datasets. I would have to be a fool to just give this away after spending months of research on it when my time and my intelligence are the only things I have that I can charge for.
I think the patent system is pure capitalism at it's best and may the best and brightest and first to market be the guy who wins. Patents are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball as far as I'm concerned.
I've done a smattering amoung of work on mainframes and I always find it quite refreshing for myriad reasons. First and foremost I can charge premium bucks since it's all about supply and demand. Secondly, it's always a pleasure to get to work on a real computer since most of my work these days is spent on that heinous X86 scrap that society seems to think passes for computers these days.
Lets face it, working on a FreeBSD box after working on an old mainframe is like driving a VW bug with flowers all over it after driving a boss 69 camereo.
And finally since the skillset to work on these is above and beyond that which your average windows admin/coder has, I am fairly secure in my knowledge that I have job security.
It's like Rick Brooks said in the Mythical Man Month, if you are in the upper 5% of computer scientists you will always be employed making in the upper 1% wage group.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Neal's a pretty sharp guy but he outsources a lot of his research to proffesionals (makes sense) and has several staff people help him put the pieces together, as it were.
I offered my services as part of the FTEST (final tech editing service team) but Neal didn't want a computer pundit as much as he was looking for science pundits. Ah well, at least now I'm in his rolodex and hopefully I'll get more chances to work with him.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I've found over the years that most new coders aren't taught the proper basics of coding because they focus on learning high level languages and arcane algorithms, instead of focusing on the art of computing, like Donald Knuth's books.
Only too often have I sat in on meetings with immature little dweebs who rant on and on about XML or the technolofy flavour of the month or hacking at code to achieve Olog(n) cahche hits instead of focusing on making proper underlying designs.
Frank Brooks talks quite a bit about this in his book "The Mythical Man Month" where he states that secure computing is getting worse on the level of one order per generation of new programming languages. That book should be required reading by all CS students.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
See, it works from both sides.
Actually Bob Abooey is a longtime industry pundit who used to work for Apple back in the 80's in their two button mouse division. He's also been a major kernel hacker for FreeBSD and has generally been regarded as one of the best minds in the Computer Science field for years now.
I suggest you perform a little research next time before making an arse of yourself.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
The process was very time consuming however we were running a FreeBSD optimized server farm with these chips when our funding ran out. You had to make some changes to the Level II bus speeds as you get a little more latency when using HiGe but one of the benefits of using FreeBSD is that we could tweak the code all we wanted.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Of course you would need to have two X86 boxii in order to handle a load like that anyways simply because of the horrendous implementation of Java on X86, but that's another story for another day.
Garth Brooks covers this in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" where he proves in a controled lab environment that Java under X86 runs on the order of Olog(n) slower than it does on a RISC chip like an UltraSparc.
Warmest regards,
--Jack