That brings to mind exploits for very common distributions that I've seen in the past.
But, in reality there have been some nasty ones. How many versions of OpenSSH were exploitable? I remember having the exploit, and running it against our own equipment to see what it would break. I love trying to break my own equipment. If I use the same script kiddie code, and I can't get in, neither can they.
Of course, it helps to have many things protected. I prefer to have SSH on a different port, with the firewall rules disallowing anyone to connect from anything but an authorized network (I love default DROP rules). Most exploitable things have only been available to my authorized networks, and only if they knew our port scheme.
The bigger April Fools joke will be if it *does* do something. I forget the name of the virus, but it was wide spread, that sent a copy of files in the "My Documents" folder out to everyone in your address book. That wasn't a well thought out plan, as there's a lot of crap in most people's "My Documents" folder, that even the original author doesn't care about. It also consumed a lot of bandwidth and server time.
My guess would be that they'll simply pop up a "April Fools, your machine has been owned", with no recourse but to reinstall the OS. Thank god I use Linux.:)
"'The fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable' Troi says as she lifts Picard's clear glass cup filled with coffee from his desk. 'We are stranded on a planet. No language in common but I want to teach you mine.' Troi points to the cup and says 'S'smarith... what did I just say?' Picard answers 'Cup? Glass?' Troi asks 'Are you sure? I might have meant liquid, clear, brown, hot. And we conceptualize the universe in the same way.'" (Communication is much harder when the two parties do not - EM)
- Troi to Picard ("Star Trek: Next Generation")
Really, it is an amazingly factual commentary though.
I have a 2 year old daughter. She's just learning to talk. Well, she's been saying words, but now she's trying to form cohesive ideas with those words. She likes car washes. She knows me (da da). She knows my car (da da car). She also knows when she gets clean it's a shower (shouw meaning shower). If we have no intention of going anywhere, she'll say "bye bye", meaning she wants to go somewhere. She knows clean, which she pronounces pretty well. She also knows "fall", which means anything going down.
So, a conversation may start with her sitting in a chair she can't get out of (like a kitchen chair pushed up to the table so she can reach to eat).
"Fall."
"You want to get down?"
She knods. "Fall."
So, we help her out of the chair.
"Bye bye"
"Where are we going?"
"Car shouw. Da da car shouw."
"Oh you want to get the car washed?"
"Car shouw clean" meaning she wants to make the car clean in the car shower... err.. car wash.
After the car wash, she'll say something like "car shouw done. da da car clean."
Now, this is a small human, as I said 2 years old, who is attempting to construct the words that she has learned into spoken thoughts, requests, or ideas.
She hasn't grasp some words yet. She'll ask for a drink of soda by saying "So". She won't say "da" until after she's been given some. so it's "so" (then drinks some) "da!"
Now, how does this small human put these words together? She's come out with some that I have no idea where she learned the word. She knows body parts (eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, hands, feet, arms, legs). She touched my glasses and said "glasses". I'm the only one who wears glasses, and I don't reference them much. They go on in the morning, and off at night. Other than that, they're a forgotten fixture on my head.:)
She doesn't watch TV, and hasn't had a lot of opportunity to socialize with other children yet (nope, not in daycare), so her language skills have been acquired by observing the interaction of the older humans only. Maybe we have an instinctual ability to adapt to language, and if we do preserve information well enough, in a simplified enough language, that language will be understood by others in the distant future. Sure as hell it won't be any language we're using today.
Each and every item was worked on with global agreement.
Smog was reduced by making cleaner running vehicles and cleaner industry.
The ozone layer reduction was helped by virtually outlawing CFC's.
Acid rain, again was reduced by the work done with vehicles and industry.
And global warming will have a man made reduction, or else we'll reap the benefits of it. Once humanity is decimated, it's effects will be mitigated. Either that, or we'll do something about it.
The whole argument of is there or isn't there is irrelevant. The end result by treating global warming as a problem is a good one, regardless of if you believe in the reason or not. We will have a cleaner environment, which is something I wouldn't mind at all. But hey, if you love pollution, fire up a nice smokey fire in your fireplace with the flue shut, and start up your car with the garage door shut. You'll have plenty of pollution in no time, in the comfort of your own home. Light up a nice fat cigar, and take a few deep breaths. Ahhh.. Nirvana.. right?
Say you disperse a hurricane. That means the rainfall in that area will have been dramatically reduced. When you push the humidity elsewhere, now it's going to rain more there. Maybe it could have good consequences for one area, but it may not be quite so good for the other areas.
Hell, even hurricanes are good. Sure, they're not exactly comfortable, and do damage to the things we want, but they clean the air, prune trees, and bring fresh life to areas.
Enough on my theories of weather control, back to linguistics.:)
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
There are many things that we could note that would be very worthwhile for the future to know. What if we discovered a way to split the atom, and make a clean viable power source, but it was found that we could also use it as the most destructive weapon that man kind has ever known? Then again, with such historical knowledge, what would be done with it? Some would use it as a warning to avoid making such a power source, as it would destroy humanity again. Some would be determined to find how to do it, to make their own group (clan, tribe, culture, etc) the more powerful and oppress the weaker.
No matter what we pass on, there's no way for us to ensure that information is used properly. But at least we can try. In 10,000 years, I guarantee humanity will be nothing like it is now. Maybe we'll be a bigger, stronger, unified race. Maybe we'll have brought ourselves to the bring of extinction, and only small tribes survive.
One this is sure. The writings from 10,000 years ago will look like the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. That knowledge was lost for centuries. It was through dumb luck that we rediscovered how to read it (finding the Rosetta stone), and even modern translations are hit and miss, and open to dispute.
If something was written in plain simple English now, what would they make of it? Scratches and symbols in stone? We have come to learn that the English language has 52 letters (26 upper and lower case) 10 numerals, and a whole variety of symbols indicating various things. When knowledge of the English language is long since dead, what is a comma or period? Just another character on the page (or stone)
It's optimistic to think that we could keep the knowledge alive. How many people today can read ancient Latin? I doubt more than a handful of people reading this could attempt it, and fewer could read it fluently. It's a scratched code. Now consider the English language. We have not only one script, but many. There are stylized scripts that even those familiar with the language have a hard time reading. How about cursive handwriting? English writing could be considered dozens if not hundreds of different "languages", each open for it's own deciphering.
I know I can't read hieroglyphs. I tried to learn. I haven't quite mastered it. I understand some concepts of the structure, but not enough to even attempt to form a single world or phrase. Could most people spot a cartouche, or understand it's special meaning? Sure, we have Wikipedia now, and I'm sure plenty of folks have gone there to see what it is, so they can reply "Oh, that's easy, it's a...." (no, I won't give the answer away)
So, even with the best attempts, it's virtually impossible to give them enough information to work with to translate everything with no knowledge of the language.
I, as a hopeful assistant to a future historian, put this picture with a word under it. This would hopefully assist the reader to understand our language. What was I trying to describe with the word? Man? Water? Wet? Carry? Transport? Labor? Maybe the word symbolizes slavery. The large man is our beast of burden, who must carry the water for... Maybe they'd reference the next picture and associate the two.
It's not an impossible game, just a very difficult one. How do you teach someone a language without having a frame of reference?
I saw it in a movie once. I can't remember which. He used a cup of black coffee in a white mug. He pointed at it and said "fervens". What does "fervens" mean? cup? coffee? liquid? water? fluid? black
I don't believe in commenting my **displayed code**. I do strongly believe in commenting my parsed code, so those never show to the users. In know in theory even comments can slow down the code as it's being parsed, but that's so trivial it doesn't matter.
I am lazy on rare occasions, and will temporarily comment out HTML in displayed code, but that's always a temporary thing. It always makes me laugh when I read the source of big sites, and they have comments still in there. News sites have been fun for it, where they say "story here" and "image here", and other crap like that.
In PHP, I may have "// story here" and "//image here", but those never show up to the user.:)
Since this conversation started with Facebook, I just went to their main page. it has these comments in it...
I won't even attempt to guess at all the javascript crap they have on the home page, but I'd guess its not necessary.:)
Nah, I just never converted the KB (Bytes) of file size and string size (8 bit characters are 1 byte), so I never converted it down to the Kb/s (kilobits per second) for bandwidth measurement.:)
This is a stupid exercise. Oh my gosh, there's an extra few characters wasted. They're talking about 150 characters, which would be 150 bytes, or (gasp) 0.150KB.
10 times the bandwidth could be saved by removing a 1.5KB image from the destination page, or doing a little added compression to the rest of the images. The same can be said for sending out the page itself gzipped.
We did this exercise at my old work. We had relatively small pages. 10 pictures per page, roughly 300x300, a logo, and a very few layout images. We saved a fortune in bandwidth by compressing the pictures just a very little bit more. Not a lot. Just enough to make a difference.
Consider taking 100,000,000 hits in a day. Bringing a 15KB image to 14KB would be.... wait for it.... 100GB per day saved in transfers.
The same can be said for conserving the size of the page itself. Badly written pages (and oh are there a lot of them out there) not only take up more bandwidth because they have a lot of crap code in them, but they also tend to take longer to render.
I took one huge badly written page, stripped out the crap content (like, do you need a font tag on every word?), cleaned up the table structure (this was pre-CSS), and the page loaded much faster. That wasn't just the bandwidth savings, that was a lot of overhead on the browser where it didn't have to parse all the extra crap in it.
I know they're talking about the inbound bandwidth (relative to the server), which is usually less than 10% of the traffic. Most of the bandwidth is wasted in the outbound bandwidth. That's all anyone really cares about. Server farms only look at outbound bandwidth, because that's always the higher number, and the driving factor of their 95th percentile. Home users all care about their download bandwidth, because that's what sucks up the most for them. Well, unless they're running P2P software. I know I was a rare (but not unique) exception, where I was frequently sending original graphics in huge formats, and ISO's to and from work.
If the numbers are anything like I've seen, for every wild eyed entrepreneur that has a project survive for even a couple years, that same entrepreneur has had dozens fail. For every entrepreneur like this, there are hundreds that throw everything they have into their "I'm going to make it with this!" project, and fail miserably.
A long time ago, I believed in a vision, and the talk. I was young and stupid. I still have tens of thousands of shares in that company. The company sold it's assets, and closed the doors long ago, but in theory if the company were to ever reorganize, those shares could be worth something.
I keep them as a reminder, just because someone has a wild idea and hundreds (or even dozens) of people to follow them, it doesn't mean that they will thrive.
If the original poster has an idea, great. If he can prototype it, even better. If he can arrange for manufacturing, excellent.
Now, if he can take his killer product, get it to market *AND* the public want to buy it, now you're golden. Otherwise, you're just another guy with a dream of making it huge.
Lots of people have had killer products, that have gone nowhere. It can be the latest, greatest innovation that's ever existed, but when you can't get it to market, and/or you can't get the public to buy it, then all you have is a story to tell your grandkids (or the other old lonely single guys at the bar where you drown your sorrows every night.)
Not to shoot down a dream. Go for it. Just stay practical.
I've only been to one interview with a very large hosting company, where I was the oldest person in the room during the interviews (I was 34). Age was a factor there. The "interviewers" were kids who didn't have the skills I had, but liked to think they did. Ok, I'll say it. It was Rackspace. They were excited by my level of knowledge, but I was insulted by the position they were considering me for and the idle threat of a benefits package. The incentive bonus was a rough concept at best, that they were pushing me to consider as part of my salary. One person was honest with me, that I may see $0 in a quarter, but there is the possibility that the bonus could be large. While they were considering me for enterprise level support, it would put me in a call center, never having physical access to the servers, and sitting in a cube all day answering phone calls. Lots of aspects of it seemed very amateur at best. While touring, I realized I was older than any of my would-be peers.
The best interview I went to was with monster.com. Among the interviewers were a couple people younger than me, and one guy old enough to be my father. The were all well versed in the topics they were questioning on. I was very pleased with the caliber of the people I met during the interview. It would have been a great place to work, if it hadn't been so damned cold. My interview was immediately after a blizzard blew through, and the snow drifts were taller than the SUV I was driving.
So, at some places, yes, age will be a factor even though they won't officially admit to it. Those aren't places that you want to work. You'll find as you become the "older" staff, you'll be shuffled around until you want to quit. Good establishments will bring you in, and treat age, experience, and seniority properly.
Myself, if I hire someone, age isn't a concern. Ability is the most important thing. I may have second thoughts about hiring an 80 year old person, only because I know he is very likely to not stay with the company for the long term. In 10 years, can I expect him to still be working for me?
I find sexism to be a bigger problem. At one place that I worked, we put out an ad for assistant sysadmins. The resumes were filtered by someone else, and by the time the stack of over 100 resumes hit my desk, there wasn't one resume from a woman. I made some noise about that. My thoughts were, it's harder for women to get good work as a SysAdmin, so we're more likely to get a talented woman who would work for the pay we were offering. We did end up with a talented employee, but still, how many more talented candidates were excluded based on sex?
I learned to type and write properly. Oddly enough some of those lessons taught years ago stuck. I write for my own publication also, so it helps to appear to be somewhat literate to keep the respect of my readers.
But, your post is definitely a new spin on the grammar nazi.:)
I was wondering that too. What do you have to do for that kind of advertising? Actually, it was NRP who did it first, but still, either they dumb lucked into a lot of advertising, or they paid some decent money to advertise that they make ancient keyboards.
They've been making keyboards quieter because they used to be very loud and hard on your fingers. Then again, I learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, so for the first several years that I used PC's, I pounded on the keys, and went through a keyboard about every 6 months. If I start typing really fast (I'm usually somewhere just above 100wpm), I start pounding like I'm on the mechanical typewriter again. People usually laugh at me, and then I have to stop and ask why they're laughing.
Lately, I've been nice to my keyboards. The lettering wears off before the keyboard fails. Who needs lettering anyways? I've thrown a few away because the alignment marks on "F" and "J" have worn off. It's hard to touch type with a mouse, when you have to look to realign.:)
When I lived in Los Angeles county, filmings were fairly regular. I received notices on my door, or staff walking door to door notifying what would happen.
One in particular was to involve simulated gunfire (guns that go pop, but no bullet) and explosions, about a mile away. We were advised what time, what location, what vehicles would be involved, and that the area was closed to public viewing. They had set a perimeter up so people couldn't get into hazardous areas. I didn't attempt to see it, but I drove by on a close street later, and saw that they still had the road closed for the filming.
Most of the notices I received were fairly mundane. One was for an ad. They simply had one car driving up a side street, and a city bus driving down the main street. They'd shoot it, reset the vehicles, and shoot it again. I worked in the building that was the backdrop of the shot, so between shots, I went over, and talked to building security. He said they had been up to it all day. He told me where to get the best view, where I wouldn't be in the shot.:) It was funny seeing a NYC bus in Los Angeles driving up the road and backing up every couple minutes. There were no gunshots or explosions, it was a pretty simple scene, but I had been notified in person AND had signed the waiver permitting it. They needed some percentage of the neighborhood to sign off on it.
I can't believe the MythBusters crew would have overlooked the simple fact that you're suppose to notify people. They blew 500 pounds of explosives? Duh. Even for most fireworks shows, the general public are notified in some way. A lot of areas let it go with an announcement in the newspaper (come see the fireworks at ____), but I'm sure the neighboring few hundred feet from the launch area are notified, and the area is protected against unauthorized people.
I would guess that the MythBusters crew believed the fire department HAD handled the notification.
IQ testing is a crock. I've posted a few things on it recently. There are questions that are doomed for failure. My first IQ test, when I was about 5, consisted of pattern matching, math, word problems, and... wait for it... identification of world landmarks and famous art. At 5 years old, how was I suppose to know world landmarks that I had never seen before? It's not exactly like we had the history channel in the late 70's. TV was limited to the crap that we could get on our antenna in rural nowhere. Satellite TV didn't exist (for most people). As a kid, I did read encyclopedia's, but they were more entertaining to stack up as play forts.
With all that said, I score very high on IQ tests. I just don't agree with the methodology involved in them. They are extremely biased to what the test taker has been exposed to. You could have a brilliant child in an African village who has never seen a TV, read an encyclopedia, but has picked up knowledge from the tribe. He may understand flight by watching birds and butterflies, and how plants grow from watching them, and even pack tendencies of animals (and apply theories of that to why people live in tribes), but if you show him the Eiffel tower, or leaning tower if Pisa, he may say "oh those are neat", but not even be able to describe what part of the world they're in. He would likely fail miserably on an English based word comprehension test.
But, the more intelligent (not necessarily educated) person will frequently be able to come up with the better solutions to problems. With a question posed to two people of equal intelligence, the more educated one will likely come up with the better answer, but that's not necessarily true. With two people of the same intelligence in a combat situation, I'd prefer the poor country boy who's hunted his own food his whole life, than a guy with a doctorate in art history.
I don't have an MCSE, because I don't want one.:) I was talking to some folks who are experienced with the test side of that. From what I've been told, you're drilled on the test until there's no way you couldn't know the answers, and then you take the test. So, you're exactly right. Unless the real world problem arises from a test based problem, it's very likely they will have to call someone for help.
I won't say that's true of everyone though. Say I did do something silly like get an MCSE. I already have the real world experience to get myself through most problems, and the knowledge base (in my head, not the MS KB) to work through the rest.
I'm just particularly annoyed by MS servers in general. Lets take two recent examples.
In both examples, the hardware failed on the servers. One was a Win2k Server running MSSQL. The second was a Linux ingress mail filter.
On both, after determining the hardware failed, we were given the option of moving to another server. In both cases, we had similiar but not absolutely identical hardware available in house. Both were in production for quite a while, so there was no good option for obtaining identical hardware.
On the Win2k server, we moved the drive, and rebooted. The drive controller wasn't identical, so Windows would panic at boot time. The solution? An in-place upgrade of the OS with the original media, and then do all the updates to bring it back to current again. This took hours. And yes, I consulted the MS KB. I already knew the answer, I just was hoping there was a better way.
On the Linux server, I wasn't even present for it. I gave instructions to the site over the phone. "Move the drive to the other machine, and turn it on. Besides the time of physically moving the drive, it was up in a matter of minutes.
On both, I've been playing with the hardware to diagnose it down to the part since then. In both cases, it was the motherboard. The Win2k server is staying in it's new host, because we don't want to do another in place upgrade. The Linux server will be moved back to it's original machine when the new motherboard comes in. That will account for maybe 10 minutes of downtime.
Because of their duty, we have different windows to work in on each. The Win2k server, being a SQL server, has to be available. The Linux server as a mail ingress filter, can be down for a few minutes and people don't really notice. The mail will still be delivered, just with a bit of a pause for new inbound mail from outside. After hours, people will still be hitting the web sites that require the SQL server, but people won't notice that it took an extra 10 (or even 30) minutes to get their mail delivered.
Diagnosing is a lot different with both. The Windows event viewer doesn't give much useable information most of the time. The Linux system logs give a lot of information. In the specific case of the machine above, it never got to init, so syslogd never started, but I could see what it tripped up at during boot with the kernel messages.
If you're already a MS shop, sure you won't get fired for buying it. But, what happens when something breaks, you can't fix it, and when you call MS support (and pay for it), the solution takes hours.
Like, the old Exchange had a problem when it's mail database got too large. It simply wouldn't handle mail any more. The fix was to rebuild and recompress the database. On the little network that I had to work with it on, it took at least 8 hours. We made it mandatory for Friday night at about 7pm, and let it run through the morning. From what I hear, it's fixed in the newer versions, but what newer problems have sprung up?
Hey, I love single signon's. Make sure your email and bank account have the same password, so I can shoulder surf my way into your life. Oh wait, I don't even need to look, your machine already has a keystroke logger.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That brings to mind exploits for very common distributions that I've seen in the past.
But, in reality there have been some nasty ones. How many versions of OpenSSH were exploitable? I remember having the exploit, and running it against our own equipment to see what it would break. I love trying to break my own equipment. If I use the same script kiddie code, and I can't get in, neither can they.
Of course, it helps to have many things protected. I prefer to have SSH on a different port, with the firewall rules disallowing anyone to connect from anything but an authorized network (I love default DROP rules). Most exploitable things have only been available to my authorized networks, and only if they knew our port scheme.
The bigger April Fools joke will be if it *does* do something. I forget the name of the virus, but it was wide spread, that sent a copy of files in the "My Documents" folder out to everyone in your address book. That wasn't a well thought out plan, as there's a lot of crap in most people's "My Documents" folder, that even the original author doesn't care about. It also consumed a lot of bandwidth and server time.
My guess would be that they'll simply pop up a "April Fools, your machine has been owned", with no recourse but to reinstall the OS. Thank god I use Linux. :)
That could have been it, I'm honestly not sure.
I did find the quote you're referencing though. Damn Star Trek and their social commentary. :)
http://www.healpastlives.com/pastlf/quote/qusociet.htm
"'The fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable' Troi says as she lifts Picard's clear glass cup filled with coffee from his desk. 'We are stranded on a planet. No language in common but I want to teach you mine.' Troi points to the cup and says 'S'smarith... what did I just say?' Picard answers 'Cup? Glass?' Troi asks 'Are you sure? I might have meant liquid, clear, brown, hot. And we conceptualize the universe in the same way.'" (Communication is much harder when the two parties do not - EM)
- Troi to Picard ("Star Trek: Next Generation")
Really, it is an amazingly factual commentary though.
I have a 2 year old daughter. She's just learning to talk. Well, she's been saying words, but now she's trying to form cohesive ideas with those words. She likes car washes. She knows me (da da). She knows my car (da da car). She also knows when she gets clean it's a shower (shouw meaning shower). If we have no intention of going anywhere, she'll say "bye bye", meaning she wants to go somewhere. She knows clean, which she pronounces pretty well. She also knows "fall", which means anything going down.
So, a conversation may start with her sitting in a chair she can't get out of (like a kitchen chair pushed up to the table so she can reach to eat).
"Fall."
"You want to get down?"
She knods. "Fall."
So, we help her out of the chair.
"Bye bye"
"Where are we going?"
"Car shouw. Da da car shouw."
"Oh you want to get the car washed?"
"Car shouw clean" meaning she wants to make the car clean in the car shower... err.. car wash.
After the car wash, she'll say something like "car shouw done. da da car clean."
Now, this is a small human, as I said 2 years old, who is attempting to construct the words that she has learned into spoken thoughts, requests, or ideas.
She hasn't grasp some words yet. She'll ask for a drink of soda by saying "So". She won't say "da" until after she's been given some. so it's "so" (then drinks some) "da!"
Now, how does this small human put these words together? She's come out with some that I have no idea where she learned the word. She knows body parts (eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, hands, feet, arms, legs). She touched my glasses and said "glasses". I'm the only one who wears glasses, and I don't reference them much. They go on in the morning, and off at night. Other than that, they're a forgotten fixture on my head. :)
She doesn't watch TV, and hasn't had a lot of opportunity to socialize with other children yet (nope, not in daycare), so her language skills have been acquired by observing the interaction of the older humans only. Maybe we have an instinctual ability to adapt to language, and if we do preserve information well enough, in a simplified enough language, that language will be understood by others in the distant future. Sure as hell it won't be any language we're using today.
But, your list is perfect.
Each and every item was worked on with global agreement.
Smog was reduced by making cleaner running vehicles and cleaner industry.
The ozone layer reduction was helped by virtually outlawing CFC's.
Acid rain, again was reduced by the work done with vehicles and industry.
And global warming will have a man made reduction, or else we'll reap the benefits of it. Once humanity is decimated, it's effects will be mitigated. Either that, or we'll do something about it.
The whole argument of is there or isn't there is irrelevant. The end result by treating global warming as a problem is a good one, regardless of if you believe in the reason or not. We will have a cleaner environment, which is something I wouldn't mind at all. But hey, if you love pollution, fire up a nice smokey fire in your fireplace with the flue shut, and start up your car with the garage door shut. You'll have plenty of pollution in no time, in the comfort of your own home. Light up a nice fat cigar, and take a few deep breaths. Ahhh.. Nirvana.. right?
Mmmm.. Tasty stuff, but I hear it's made out of something not quite so savory.
But every effect has an effect to something else.
Say you disperse a hurricane. That means the rainfall in that area will have been dramatically reduced. When you push the humidity elsewhere, now it's going to rain more there. Maybe it could have good consequences for one area, but it may not be quite so good for the other areas.
Hell, even hurricanes are good. Sure, they're not exactly comfortable, and do damage to the things we want, but they clean the air, prune trees, and bring fresh life to areas.
Enough on my theories of weather control, back to linguistics. :)
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
There are many things that we could note that would be very worthwhile for the future to know. What if we discovered a way to split the atom, and make a clean viable power source, but it was found that we could also use it as the most destructive weapon that man kind has ever known? Then again, with such historical knowledge, what would be done with it? Some would use it as a warning to avoid making such a power source, as it would destroy humanity again. Some would be determined to find how to do it, to make their own group (clan, tribe, culture, etc) the more powerful and oppress the weaker.
No matter what we pass on, there's no way for us to ensure that information is used properly. But at least we can try. In 10,000 years, I guarantee humanity will be nothing like it is now. Maybe we'll be a bigger, stronger, unified race. Maybe we'll have brought ourselves to the bring of extinction, and only small tribes survive.
One this is sure. The writings from 10,000 years ago will look like the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. That knowledge was lost for centuries. It was through dumb luck that we rediscovered how to read it (finding the Rosetta stone), and even modern translations are hit and miss, and open to dispute.
If something was written in plain simple English now, what would they make of it? Scratches and symbols in stone? We have come to learn that the English language has 52 letters (26 upper and lower case) 10 numerals, and a whole variety of symbols indicating various things. When knowledge of the English language is long since dead, what is a comma or period? Just another character on the page (or stone)
It's optimistic to think that we could keep the knowledge alive. How many people today can read ancient Latin? I doubt more than a handful of people reading this could attempt it, and fewer could read it fluently. It's a scratched code. Now consider the English language. We have not only one script, but many. There are stylized scripts that even those familiar with the language have a hard time reading. How about cursive handwriting? English writing could be considered dozens if not hundreds of different "languages", each open for it's own deciphering.
I know I can't read hieroglyphs. I tried to learn. I haven't quite mastered it. I understand some concepts of the structure, but not enough to even attempt to form a single world or phrase. Could most people spot a cartouche, or understand it's special meaning? Sure, we have Wikipedia now, and I'm sure plenty of folks have gone there to see what it is, so they can reply "Oh, that's easy, it's a...." (no, I won't give the answer away)
So, even with the best attempts, it's virtually impossible to give them enough information to work with to translate everything with no knowledge of the language.
Try this.
Look at this picture
I, as a hopeful assistant to a future historian, put this picture with a word under it. This would hopefully assist the reader to understand our language. What was I trying to describe with the word? Man? Water? Wet? Carry? Transport? Labor? Maybe the word symbolizes slavery. The large man is our beast of burden, who must carry the water for... Maybe they'd reference the next picture and associate the two.
It's not an impossible game, just a very difficult one. How do you teach someone a language without having a frame of reference?
I saw it in a movie once. I can't remember which. He used a cup of black coffee in a white mug. He pointed at it and said "fervens". What does "fervens" mean? cup? coffee? liquid? water? fluid? black
Actually, I think the original layout in that particular page was done in Macromedia Dreamweaver. But ya, a WYSIWYG editor.
I write my code by hand. It always comes out better, and it's easier to maintain.
I don't believe in commenting my **displayed code**. I do strongly believe in commenting my parsed code, so those never show to the users. In know in theory even comments can slow down the code as it's being parsed, but that's so trivial it doesn't matter.
I am lazy on rare occasions, and will temporarily comment out HTML in displayed code, but that's always a temporary thing. It always makes me laugh when I read the source of big sites, and they have comments still in there. News sites have been fun for it, where they say "story here" and "image here", and other crap like that.
In PHP, I may have "// story here" and "//image here", but those never show up to the user. :)
Since this conversation started with Facebook, I just went to their main page. it has these comments in it...
I won't even attempt to guess at all the javascript crap they have on the home page, but I'd guess its not necessary. :)
Naw, it's more like, I'd rather be poked with that blunt stick than shot with a cannon. :)
Nah, I just never converted the KB (Bytes) of file size and string size (8 bit characters are 1 byte), so I never converted it down to the Kb/s (kilobits per second) for bandwidth measurement. :)
This is a stupid exercise. Oh my gosh, there's an extra few characters wasted. They're talking about 150 characters, which would be 150 bytes, or (gasp) 0.150KB.
10 times the bandwidth could be saved by removing a 1.5KB image from the destination page, or doing a little added compression to the rest of the images. The same can be said for sending out the page itself gzipped.
We did this exercise at my old work. We had relatively small pages. 10 pictures per page, roughly 300x300, a logo, and a very few layout images. We saved a fortune in bandwidth by compressing the pictures just a very little bit more. Not a lot. Just enough to make a difference.
Consider taking 100,000,000 hits in a day. Bringing a 15KB image to 14KB would be .... wait for it .... 100GB per day saved in transfers.
The same can be said for conserving the size of the page itself. Badly written pages (and oh are there a lot of them out there) not only take up more bandwidth because they have a lot of crap code in them, but they also tend to take longer to render.
I took one huge badly written page, stripped out the crap content (like, do you need a font tag on every word?), cleaned up the table structure (this was pre-CSS), and the page loaded much faster. That wasn't just the bandwidth savings, that was a lot of overhead on the browser where it didn't have to parse all the extra crap in it.
I know they're talking about the inbound bandwidth (relative to the server), which is usually less than 10% of the traffic. Most of the bandwidth is wasted in the outbound bandwidth. That's all anyone really cares about. Server farms only look at outbound bandwidth, because that's always the higher number, and the driving factor of their 95th percentile. Home users all care about their download bandwidth, because that's what sucks up the most for them. Well, unless they're running P2P software. I know I was a rare (but not unique) exception, where I was frequently sending original graphics in huge formats, and ISO's to and from work.
The tool is only as smart as the operator.
The implication of bag of hammers would be a lack of operators for them, therefore, dumb as a bag of rocks. :)
I've seen a rock drive a car, but ... well ... you'll have to watch the video.
Actually, the machine that I had to swap drives from had totally failed.
But where I thrive is in huge Linux farms. And yes, automation is my friend. :)
If the numbers are anything like I've seen, for every wild eyed entrepreneur that has a project survive for even a couple years, that same entrepreneur has had dozens fail. For every entrepreneur like this, there are hundreds that throw everything they have into their "I'm going to make it with this!" project, and fail miserably.
A long time ago, I believed in a vision, and the talk. I was young and stupid. I still have tens of thousands of shares in that company. The company sold it's assets, and closed the doors long ago, but in theory if the company were to ever reorganize, those shares could be worth something.
I keep them as a reminder, just because someone has a wild idea and hundreds (or even dozens) of people to follow them, it doesn't mean that they will thrive.
If the original poster has an idea, great. If he can prototype it, even better. If he can arrange for manufacturing, excellent.
Now, if he can take his killer product, get it to market *AND* the public want to buy it, now you're golden. Otherwise, you're just another guy with a dream of making it huge.
Lots of people have had killer products, that have gone nowhere. It can be the latest, greatest innovation that's ever existed, but when you can't get it to market, and/or you can't get the public to buy it, then all you have is a story to tell your grandkids (or the other old lonely single guys at the bar where you drown your sorrows every night.)
Not to shoot down a dream. Go for it. Just stay practical.
I've only been to one interview with a very large hosting company, where I was the oldest person in the room during the interviews (I was 34). Age was a factor there. The "interviewers" were kids who didn't have the skills I had, but liked to think they did. Ok, I'll say it. It was Rackspace. They were excited by my level of knowledge, but I was insulted by the position they were considering me for and the idle threat of a benefits package. The incentive bonus was a rough concept at best, that they were pushing me to consider as part of my salary. One person was honest with me, that I may see $0 in a quarter, but there is the possibility that the bonus could be large. While they were considering me for enterprise level support, it would put me in a call center, never having physical access to the servers, and sitting in a cube all day answering phone calls. Lots of aspects of it seemed very amateur at best. While touring, I realized I was older than any of my would-be peers.
The best interview I went to was with monster.com. Among the interviewers were a couple people younger than me, and one guy old enough to be my father. The were all well versed in the topics they were questioning on. I was very pleased with the caliber of the people I met during the interview. It would have been a great place to work, if it hadn't been so damned cold. My interview was immediately after a blizzard blew through, and the snow drifts were taller than the SUV I was driving.
So, at some places, yes, age will be a factor even though they won't officially admit to it. Those aren't places that you want to work. You'll find as you become the "older" staff, you'll be shuffled around until you want to quit. Good establishments will bring you in, and treat age, experience, and seniority properly.
Myself, if I hire someone, age isn't a concern. Ability is the most important thing. I may have second thoughts about hiring an 80 year old person, only because I know he is very likely to not stay with the company for the long term. In 10 years, can I expect him to still be working for me?
I find sexism to be a bigger problem. At one place that I worked, we put out an ad for assistant sysadmins. The resumes were filtered by someone else, and by the time the stack of over 100 resumes hit my desk, there wasn't one resume from a woman. I made some noise about that. My thoughts were, it's harder for women to get good work as a SysAdmin, so we're more likely to get a talented woman who would work for the pay we were offering. We did end up with a talented employee, but still, how many more talented candidates were excluded based on sex?
I learned to type and write properly. Oddly enough some of those lessons taught years ago stuck. I write for my own publication also, so it helps to appear to be somewhat literate to keep the respect of my readers.
But, your post is definitely a new spin on the grammar nazi. :)
I was wondering that too. What do you have to do for that kind of advertising? Actually, it was NRP who did it first, but still, either they dumb lucked into a lot of advertising, or they paid some decent money to advertise that they make ancient keyboards.
They've been making keyboards quieter because they used to be very loud and hard on your fingers. Then again, I learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, so for the first several years that I used PC's, I pounded on the keys, and went through a keyboard about every 6 months. If I start typing really fast (I'm usually somewhere just above 100wpm), I start pounding like I'm on the mechanical typewriter again. People usually laugh at me, and then I have to stop and ask why they're laughing.
Lately, I've been nice to my keyboards. The lettering wears off before the keyboard fails. Who needs lettering anyways? I've thrown a few away because the alignment marks on "F" and "J" have worn off. It's hard to touch type with a mouse, when you have to look to realign. :)
When I lived in Los Angeles county, filmings were fairly regular. I received notices on my door, or staff walking door to door notifying what would happen.
One in particular was to involve simulated gunfire (guns that go pop, but no bullet) and explosions, about a mile away. We were advised what time, what location, what vehicles would be involved, and that the area was closed to public viewing. They had set a perimeter up so people couldn't get into hazardous areas. I didn't attempt to see it, but I drove by on a close street later, and saw that they still had the road closed for the filming.
Most of the notices I received were fairly mundane. One was for an ad. They simply had one car driving up a side street, and a city bus driving down the main street. They'd shoot it, reset the vehicles, and shoot it again. I worked in the building that was the backdrop of the shot, so between shots, I went over, and talked to building security. He said they had been up to it all day. He told me where to get the best view, where I wouldn't be in the shot. :) It was funny seeing a NYC bus in Los Angeles driving up the road and backing up every couple minutes. There were no gunshots or explosions, it was a pretty simple scene, but I had been notified in person AND had signed the waiver permitting it. They needed some percentage of the neighborhood to sign off on it.
I can't believe the MythBusters crew would have overlooked the simple fact that you're suppose to notify people. They blew 500 pounds of explosives? Duh. Even for most fireworks shows, the general public are notified in some way. A lot of areas let it go with an announcement in the newspaper (come see the fireworks at ____), but I'm sure the neighboring few hundred feet from the launch area are notified, and the area is protected against unauthorized people.
I would guess that the MythBusters crew believed the fire department HAD handled the notification.
I agree and disagree with you.
IQ testing is a crock. I've posted a few things on it recently. There are questions that are doomed for failure. My first IQ test, when I was about 5, consisted of pattern matching, math, word problems, and ... wait for it ... identification of world landmarks and famous art. At 5 years old, how was I suppose to know world landmarks that I had never seen before? It's not exactly like we had the history channel in the late 70's. TV was limited to the crap that we could get on our antenna in rural nowhere. Satellite TV didn't exist (for most people). As a kid, I did read encyclopedia's, but they were more entertaining to stack up as play forts.
With all that said, I score very high on IQ tests. I just don't agree with the methodology involved in them. They are extremely biased to what the test taker has been exposed to. You could have a brilliant child in an African village who has never seen a TV, read an encyclopedia, but has picked up knowledge from the tribe. He may understand flight by watching birds and butterflies, and how plants grow from watching them, and even pack tendencies of animals (and apply theories of that to why people live in tribes), but if you show him the Eiffel tower, or leaning tower if Pisa, he may say "oh those are neat", but not even be able to describe what part of the world they're in. He would likely fail miserably on an English based word comprehension test.
But, the more intelligent (not necessarily educated) person will frequently be able to come up with the better solutions to problems. With a question posed to two people of equal intelligence, the more educated one will likely come up with the better answer, but that's not necessarily true. With two people of the same intelligence in a combat situation, I'd prefer the poor country boy who's hunted his own food his whole life, than a guy with a doctorate in art history.
Hehe.
I don't have an MCSE, because I don't want one. :) I was talking to some folks who are experienced with the test side of that. From what I've been told, you're drilled on the test until there's no way you couldn't know the answers, and then you take the test. So, you're exactly right. Unless the real world problem arises from a test based problem, it's very likely they will have to call someone for help.
I won't say that's true of everyone though. Say I did do something silly like get an MCSE. I already have the real world experience to get myself through most problems, and the knowledge base (in my head, not the MS KB) to work through the rest.
I'm just particularly annoyed by MS servers in general. Lets take two recent examples.
In both examples, the hardware failed on the servers. One was a Win2k Server running MSSQL. The second was a Linux ingress mail filter.
On both, after determining the hardware failed, we were given the option of moving to another server. In both cases, we had similiar but not absolutely identical hardware available in house. Both were in production for quite a while, so there was no good option for obtaining identical hardware.
On the Win2k server, we moved the drive, and rebooted. The drive controller wasn't identical, so Windows would panic at boot time. The solution? An in-place upgrade of the OS with the original media, and then do all the updates to bring it back to current again. This took hours. And yes, I consulted the MS KB. I already knew the answer, I just was hoping there was a better way.
On the Linux server, I wasn't even present for it. I gave instructions to the site over the phone. "Move the drive to the other machine, and turn it on. Besides the time of physically moving the drive, it was up in a matter of minutes.
On both, I've been playing with the hardware to diagnose it down to the part since then. In both cases, it was the motherboard. The Win2k server is staying in it's new host, because we don't want to do another in place upgrade. The Linux server will be moved back to it's original machine when the new motherboard comes in. That will account for maybe 10 minutes of downtime.
Because of their duty, we have different windows to work in on each. The Win2k server, being a SQL server, has to be available. The Linux server as a mail ingress filter, can be down for a few minutes and people don't really notice. The mail will still be delivered, just with a bit of a pause for new inbound mail from outside. After hours, people will still be hitting the web sites that require the SQL server, but people won't notice that it took an extra 10 (or even 30) minutes to get their mail delivered.
Diagnosing is a lot different with both. The Windows event viewer doesn't give much useable information most of the time. The Linux system logs give a lot of information. In the specific case of the machine above, it never got to init, so syslogd never started, but I could see what it tripped up at during boot with the kernel messages.
Aw, that was chill. :)
If you're already a MS shop, sure you won't get fired for buying it. But, what happens when something breaks, you can't fix it, and when you call MS support (and pay for it), the solution takes hours.
Like, the old Exchange had a problem when it's mail database got too large. It simply wouldn't handle mail any more. The fix was to rebuild and recompress the database. On the little network that I had to work with it on, it took at least 8 hours. We made it mandatory for Friday night at about 7pm, and let it run through the morning. From what I hear, it's fixed in the newer versions, but what newer problems have sprung up?
Sadly enough, I know some IBM employees. They're on their last weeks. Their jobs have been outsourced or eliminated.
Hey, I love single signon's. Make sure your email and bank account have the same password, so I can shoulder surf my way into your life. Oh wait, I don't even need to look, your machine already has a keystroke logger. :)