More likely it's a way to protect trolls and astroturfers; from what I see this is the huge growth market in internet advertising--especially for political candidates. Here's a few fun things you can try:
Google for bits of body text from astroturf trolls. See how often the same excact text shows up in other places.
If you have access to IP logs, note where your astroturf trolls come from. See any patterns?
Look at the posting time of day/speed of your astroturf trolls vs. regular comments. Who seems to work in shifts?
What are you going to say about yourself when your machine is zombied by someone that finds a hack that you and your antivirus company doesn't know about yet.
I monitor trafic patterns in and out of my home network just like any other net connected boxes. If a box starts acting oddly, it is disconnected until I figure out why.
Same thing with processes, on the *nix boxes. With ps, nstat, and some ruby glue code I have a pretty good idea what's running where, and who it's talking to.
We don't browse external sites with MS IE (though we do have it for testing), and we don't use MS Outlook on directly net-connected machines (the one running MS Outlook instance is on a machine that connects via a tunnel to a network managed by people who know what they are doing.
Both our MS Windows machines and all but two others are behind a firewall that only lets through known (and approved) traffic. Two linux boxes have special net access (but only what they need) managed by their own firewalls.
Given all this if I get zombied and don't realize it, then yes, I'm an idiot.
The sad thing is, this used to be just simple responsible net use. At the level of "make sure your breaks work before taking your car on the road, and always drive on the proper side of the road." Same deal as with firearms. Or airplanes. Or cranes, jack hammers, and x-ray machines. But somehow with computers (and thank god, only computers) we've drifted into the notion that it's permissible to operate much more complicated equipment with much less basic knowledge.
The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from...
Why didn't I think of that! That's 100,000 lusers that won't be getting infected again soon, unless they learn enough to reassemble their boxen, by which point...*sigh* What am I thinking? They'll probably just buy new systems and throw the piles of parts out. They'll be back on bot nets by this weekend.
He was looking for ways around the problem of office politics, not a beginers guide participating in them--and half your suggestions are just that. Specifically:
Don't lie. It will always bite you in the end.
Don't try to manipulate people. That just starts an arms race that ends in madness.
Don't think in terms of Alphas and all that crap. Figgure out what your goals are and focus on them. Unless "being the alpha" is your goal, in which case you shook seek help.
In other news, officals proudly announced a new line of "war causer" missles, capable of spreading fear, hate and missinformation to everyone on the planet in seconds.
They claimed that the new system, though quantitatively more expensive than the peacekeepers, was scrumulously cheaper. And that price didn't matter, since it could be paid for with an agressive series of tax cuts. And if it did turn out to be expensive, the blaim lay with state and local officials for not asking for the system sooner.
When asked how the news system differed from the existing network of communications satilites, a spokesperson wailed "Won't somebody think of the children?" while the reporter was dragged from the room by Homeland Security.
Patience. Let karma take its course. If present trends continue, they will find themselves locked for all eternity in an impenetrable vault with the most awful "music" you can imagine, and no one will care. I expect they will cackle with glee for almost twenty minutes when they pull the door closed and weld it shut--not that we will be able to hear them of course.
In general, the grief you can inflict on others is nothing compared to what they will do to themselves if you just stand back.
While many of us don't like Microsoft, for various reasons, we still use it, many of us exclusively.
On the other hand, many of us don't use it at all, and don't miss it. I've got 5 boxes on my KVM switcher here, and every one of them is running some flavour of *nix. There's no reason that I can see to use Windows; we have exactly one Windows box in the office and it is used for 1) testing web pages and 2) testing anti-virus software.
Reading the rest of your post (You're being paid to reduce uncertainty for the users. It's not fair to your users to increase that uncertainty by orders of magnitude unless there is a massive benefit to the users.) and (Feel free to ignore my advice, but you might want to update your resume if you do so.) and I almost begin to wonder if you've got a case of FUD. GNU/Linux et al work just as well and are a heck of a lot easier to administer, less random in their behaviour, and more reliable than Windows if the system administrator knows whats they are doing. The problem with Windows is that even if you know what you are doing you run a high risk of finding yourself in a can't-get-there-from-here situation with no way to find out what's happening or even start to fix it.
But many people are deathly afraid of the idea with good reason:
True. And that reason is the fact that for years the Oil/Coal Industry funded FUD against nuclear power, till it got to the point that people belive the most outlandish things about it.
when nuke plants fail they fail really, really badly.
No, when they fail they fail democratically. They don't just kill coal miners or the poor, the kill kill everybody equally. But that isn't really a concern because:
And the people who are telling us they're safe now told us the same things when they built the first generation of nuke plants.
Well, not exactly the same people; most of the originals have retired by now. But in any case, they were right to tell us that, because it's true. Per mega-watt-hour, nuclear is much safer that coal and/or oil. I know the hype says otherwise, but that's largely because:
Coal & Oil kill a large number of people scattered around through time and space, while nuclear (in theory) kills people in dramatic events (cf auto safety vs. comercial air travel).
Nuclear wastes are visible solids while (most) the waste from carbon-based fuels are invisible gasses
The waste "issue" has become so political that simple, technically sound answers aren't even considered.
People just don't think things through; for example, a typical coal fired plant releases far mor radioactivity than a nuclear plant would be allowed to.
So what I'm saying is: I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
So get busy. It won't be as much work as you think; the key is to focus on alternatives and not on absolutes. Don't say just "what are we going to do with nuclear waste" but rather "how could we handle the wastes from generating X-megawatt/hours using a) coal, b) oil, c) nuclear, d) solar...?"
Don't just worry about where we will burry things when we are done with them, but ask yourself where they would be if we never dug them up in the first place.
Pretty much across the board, nuclear or space-based solar would be cheaper, cleaner, safer (both politically and technically), better for the environment, last longer and be easier to scale as our needs grow.
However, on Europa, there could be bigger things
swimming around in the ocean under the ice.
Which Europa would that be? Are these things that might be swimming in it alive? Do they know they are swimming? Are they wearing swimming trunks, and if so where did they get them? What are they bigger than? Are they bigger than Europa? Or just bigger than each other? Are there more than two of them?
I'd love to reply, but your post brings so many questions to mind, I don't know where to start--or rather, where to stop. So I guess I'll just stop here.
--MarkusQ
P.S You asked for it (and I quote):
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
That's one reason I wish more projects would categorize themselves in the trove software map or something similar. It typically only takes a minute or two, and it's a nice break from coding (or something to do while you wait for a compile).
For that matter, writing up a few use-cases can help clarify your thinking, and posting them can help people find your project and decide if they want to use it. The problem with screen shots (which seem to be much more common) is that they aren't searchable.
No mod points at the moment, but you deserves some.
--MarkusQ
Is Cringely in cahoots with Roland?
on
Has Google Peaked?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Or better, are they the same person? Has anyone seen them in the same place at the same time (and survived with enough sanity intact to report the fact? I didn't think so). But both of them seem to subsist on pompously worded pointless "conventional wisdom challeging."
Is "T" actually a vowel? What if paper money was edible? Is it already? Dispite what most city dwellers think, most of the worlds buildings are still only one story tall! And made-up words--are they really neologisms, or is everyone just crumulous?
Is this tabloid journalism for the neo-technoploobi, or something...more sinister.
I prefer design by contract, with precondition and postcondition checks in place.
For what it's worth, Ruby supports both of those as well (e.g. with assert_* in:around methods, or in Rails with validates and/or before/after filters). I don't recall PHP having anything of the sort--or at least, I wasn't able to find it a few months ago when I was trying to shore up a badly compromised PHP application.
Oddly, they say that they require IE (or did, the last time I noticed), even though it works fine cross-browser.
I once wrote them about the fact that they were requiring the use (or at least claimed to be) of the products of one of the companies that were traded through their service in a way that might seem to be an endorsement. I also pointed out this was ironic in view of the fact that the company in question was a convicted monopolist with a history of just this sort of positioning. I also pointed out that, as far as I could tell, their site was reasonably cross-browser, which must have taken some work--so why weren't they admiting it?
I don't think I ever heard back, but I still use them.
It's also a good way to have somewhat of a "short list" pool for future relevant hiring. It could allow the company to easily assess the person's work, and the potential employee to already have a relationship (however small) with the company.
My boss was an easy sell, but I think it was basically this point that tipped her. Plus, we'd had reasonably good luck paying bounties and use a huge amount of GPL/MIT/etc licenced stuff around the office (gnu/linux, X, Apache, Mozilla/firefox, mySQL, Ruby, etc., etc.) so it wasn't a strange idea.
Basically, anything that doesn't incorporate confidential information, trade secrets, etc. is fair game to GPL where I work.
it's still a million times better than PHP, which is just about the worst language in general use today
Can you explain in a few words why Ruby is so superior? Can you explain why PHP is worse than, for instance, Visual Basic, Fortran, or Cobol? If it's so obvious, it should be very easy to demonstrate.
Or for a broader one that incompasses the first, security.
These are just two examples of what I see as a broad pattern. The attitudes of the two languages (and their associated communities) are very different.
The first attempt is to drop little windmills. The spinning of the windmill powers a small generator, which is connected to a heating coil. Thus, this turns wind energy into heat energy, which we are assured by the sciencey characters will help warm the planet. Except of course that the net effect on temperature is exactly ZERO as this just turns one form of energy (wind) into another (heat) which it would have turned into anyway due to friction. So there is no increase in temperature. Now from a planetary perspective, enough of these devices could actually lower temperature. These devices raise the temperature a lot in one place, whereas the wind would dissipate over a large area raising the temperature very little, but spread out. Thus the heating coils are radiating much higher frequency radiation, which might more easily escape into space if the atmosphere is less able to absorb radiation of that frequency. This is a subtle point, but the not subtle point is that the main super smart physicist in the story doesn't know basic first year college thermodynamics.
I can still remember exactly where I stopped reading, and why.
Windmills with heating coils? That's not science fiction. And it would be an insult to fantasy writers (and readers) to call it fantasy. So what should we call it? I know, how about "mind bogglingly stupid."
Agreed, but I kind of felt that "a plurality of the local democracies comprising a federated republic" was a little heavy for the allusion I was aiming for.
There were marches. There was outraged protest. And the only reason I know is that I was there. If you watched the news that day all you heard about was the bread (or was it circus day?) that was deemed newsworthy by our *ahem* free and independent news corporations.
Which leads to the question: If a democracy falls in the forest and there's nobody willing to report it--where'd all the bean dip go--dang, I forgot my question. Who's got the remote?
It's hard to overstate the importance of this--no matter what your stance on any of the multitude of wedge issues, you should be behind this. Only people who somehow expect to gain from rigged elections could rationally oppose it.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely it's a way to protect trolls and astroturfers; from what I see this is the huge growth market in internet advertising--especially for political candidates. Here's a few fun things you can try:
--MarkusQ
What are you going to say about yourself when your machine is zombied by someone that finds a hack that you and your antivirus company doesn't know about yet.
The sad thing is, this used to be just simple responsible net use. At the level of "make sure your breaks work before taking your car on the road, and always drive on the proper side of the road." Same deal as with firearms. Or airplanes. Or cranes, jack hammers, and x-ray machines. But somehow with computers (and thank god, only computers) we've drifted into the notion that it's permissible to operate much more complicated equipment with much less basic knowledge.
--MarkusQ
The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from...
Why didn't I think of that! That's 100,000 lusers that won't be getting infected again soon, unless they learn enough to reassemble their boxen, by which point...*sigh* What am I thinking? They'll probably just buy new systems and throw the piles of parts out. They'll be back on bot nets by this weekend.
What they need to do is dismantal the owners!
--MarkusQ
Yes! Now I just need someone to find and publish the source to PLANNER and CONIVER.
--MarkusQ
He was looking for ways around the problem of office politics, not a beginers guide participating in them--and half your suggestions are just that. Specifically:
- Don't lie. It will always bite you in the end.
- Don't try to manipulate people. That just starts an arms race that ends in madness.
- Don't think in terms of Alphas and all that crap. Figgure out what your goals are and focus on them. Unless "being the alpha" is your goal, in which case you shook seek help.
--MarkusQIn other news, officals proudly announced a new line of "war causer" missles, capable of spreading fear, hate and missinformation to everyone on the planet in seconds.
They claimed that the new system, though quantitatively more expensive than the peacekeepers, was scrumulously cheaper. And that price didn't matter, since it could be paid for with an agressive series of tax cuts. And if it did turn out to be expensive, the blaim lay with state and local officials for not asking for the system sooner.
When asked how the news system differed from the existing network of communications satilites, a spokesperson wailed "Won't somebody think of the children?" while the reporter was dragged from the room by Homeland Security.
There were no further questions.
--MarkusQ
Patience. Let karma take its course. If present trends continue, they will find themselves locked for all eternity in an impenetrable vault with the most awful "music" you can imagine, and no one will care. I expect they will cackle with glee for almost twenty minutes when they pull the door closed and weld it shut--not that we will be able to hear them of course.
In general, the grief you can inflict on others is nothing compared to what they will do to themselves if you just stand back.
--MarkusQ
I remeber going into a linrary when I was at high school and writing down passages that I thought I could use in an essay.
Any idea what your error rate was?
--MarkusQ
While many of us don't like Microsoft, for various reasons, we still use it, many of us exclusively.
On the other hand, many of us don't use it at all, and don't miss it. I've got 5 boxes on my KVM switcher here, and every one of them is running some flavour of *nix. There's no reason that I can see to use Windows; we have exactly one Windows box in the office and it is used for 1) testing web pages and 2) testing anti-virus software.
Reading the rest of your post (You're being paid to reduce uncertainty for the users. It's not fair to your users to increase that uncertainty by orders of magnitude unless there is a massive benefit to the users.) and (Feel free to ignore my advice, but you might want to update your resume if you do so.) and I almost begin to wonder if you've got a case of FUD. GNU/Linux et al work just as well and are a heck of a lot easier to administer, less random in their behaviour, and more reliable than Windows if the system administrator knows whats they are doing. The problem with Windows is that even if you know what you are doing you run a high risk of finding yourself in a can't-get-there-from-here situation with no way to find out what's happening or even start to fix it.
--MarkusQ
But many people are deathly afraid of the idea with good reason:
True. And that reason is the fact that for years the Oil/Coal Industry funded FUD against nuclear power, till it got to the point that people belive the most outlandish things about it.
when nuke plants fail they fail really, really badly.
No, when they fail they fail democratically. They don't just kill coal miners or the poor, the kill kill everybody equally. But that isn't really a concern because:
And the people who are telling us they're safe now told us the same things when they built the first generation of nuke plants.
Well, not exactly the same people; most of the originals have retired by now. But in any case, they were right to tell us that, because it's true. Per mega-watt-hour, nuclear is much safer that coal and/or oil. I know the hype says otherwise, but that's largely because:
So what I'm saying is: I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
So get busy. It won't be as much work as you think; the key is to focus on alternatives and not on absolutes. Don't say just "what are we going to do with nuclear waste" but rather "how could we handle the wastes from generating X-megawatt/hours using a) coal, b) oil, c) nuclear, d) solar...?" Don't just worry about where we will burry things when we are done with them, but ask yourself where they would be if we never dug them up in the first place.
Pretty much across the board, nuclear or space-based solar would be cheaper, cleaner, safer (both politically and technically), better for the environment, last longer and be easier to scale as our needs grow.
--MarkusQ
Which Europa would that be? Are these things that might be swimming in it alive? Do they know they are swimming? Are they wearing swimming trunks, and if so where did they get them? What are they bigger than? Are they bigger than Europa? Or just bigger than each other? Are there more than two of them?
I'd love to reply, but your post brings so many questions to mind, I don't know where to start--or rather, where to stop. So I guess I'll just stop here.
--MarkusQ
P.S You asked for it (and I quote):
That's one reason I wish more projects would categorize themselves in the trove software map or something similar. It typically only takes a minute or two, and it's a nice break from coding (or something to do while you wait for a compile).
For that matter, writing up a few use-cases can help clarify your thinking, and posting them can help people find your project and decide if they want to use it. The problem with screen shots (which seem to be much more common) is that they aren't searchable.
--MarkusQ
No mod points at the moment, but you deserves some.
--MarkusQ
Or better, are they the same person? Has anyone seen them in the same place at the same time (and survived with enough sanity intact to report the fact? I didn't think so). But both of them seem to subsist on pompously worded pointless "conventional wisdom challeging."
Is "T" actually a vowel? What if paper money was edible? Is it already? Dispite what most city dwellers think, most of the worlds buildings are still only one story tall! And made-up words--are they really neologisms, or is everyone just crumulous?
Is this tabloid journalism for the neo-technoploobi, or something...more sinister.
Inquiring minds want it to STOP.
--MarkusQ
We are talking a wonderful job security here for the soon to retire crowd.
That's why I always make sure to forward my boss links like this.
--MarkusQ
I prefer design by contract, with precondition and postcondition checks in place.
For what it's worth, Ruby supports both of those as well (e.g. with assert_* in :around methods, or in Rails with validates and/or before/after filters). I don't recall PHP having anything of the sort--or at least, I wasn't able to find it a few months ago when I was trying to shore up a badly compromised PHP application.
--MarkusQ
Oddly, they say that they require IE (or did, the last time I noticed), even though it works fine cross-browser.
I once wrote them about the fact that they were requiring the use (or at least claimed to be) of the products of one of the companies that were traded through their service in a way that might seem to be an endorsement. I also pointed out this was ironic in view of the fact that the company in question was a convicted monopolist with a history of just this sort of positioning. I also pointed out that, as far as I could tell, their site was reasonably cross-browser, which must have taken some work--so why weren't they admiting it?
I don't think I ever heard back, but I still use them.
--MarkusQ
It's also a good way to have somewhat of a "short list" pool for future relevant hiring. It could allow the company to easily assess the person's work, and the potential employee to already have a relationship (however small) with the company.
My boss was an easy sell, but I think it was basically this point that tipped her. Plus, we'd had reasonably good luck paying bounties and use a huge amount of GPL/MIT/etc licenced stuff around the office (gnu/linux, X, Apache, Mozilla/firefox, mySQL, Ruby, etc., etc.) so it wasn't a strange idea.
Basically, anything that doesn't incorporate confidential information, trade secrets, etc. is fair game to GPL where I work.
--MarkusQ
Can you explain in a few words why Ruby is so superior? Can you explain why PHP is worse than, for instance, Visual Basic, Fortran, or Cobol? If it's so obvious, it should be very easy to demonstrate.
A few words? How about one: taint.
Or for a broader one that incompasses the first, security.
These are just two examples of what I see as a broad pattern. The attitudes of the two languages (and their associated communities) are very different.
--MarkusQ
Agreed, but I kind of felt that "a plurality of the local democracies comprising a federated republic" was a little heavy for the allusion I was aiming for.
--MarkusQ
There were marches. There was outraged protest. And the only reason I know is that I was there. If you watched the news that day all you heard about was the bread (or was it circus day?) that was deemed newsworthy by our *ahem* free and independent news corporations.
Which leads to the question: If a democracy falls in the forest and there's nobody willing to report it--where'd all the bean dip go--dang, I forgot my question. Who's got the remote?
--MarkusQ
Is anybody really that paperless? Would the go to a paperless bank for example?
--MarkusQ
It's hard to overstate the importance of this--no matter what your stance on any of the multitude of wedge issues, you should be behind this. Only people who somehow expect to gain from rigged elections could rationally oppose it.
So let's keep a list of who objects, shall we?
--MarkusQ
Now that is a great idea. And I'll bet Google wouldn't mind doing it in the least, considering recent history.
--MarkusQ