Handles large files well, doesn't respect UNIX permissions (which are problematic for removable drives) and is freely installable on Linux and Mac using NTFS3G and FUSE or MacFUSE. A lo
Concur. You can't--cannot--sell a game concept, so get "the intent to sell the concept" out of your head. There is no market for "concepts" in any endeavor (a screenplay is not an idea--it's a screenplay), only markets for working products.
1) Learn to program, write the game, then sell it.
2) Make a shitload of money doing something you're actually good at, hire developers, get the game written, then sell it.
3) Talk about how you had the idea for MachineGirlZombieGoldNakedPalaceAttack VII twenty years ago, but sadly lacked the skillz to get the billz.
Exceptional programmers write code. They can't--can not--be paid to maintain the code of other people. They leave. They find other opportunities where their prowess and ability to think in code is appreciated.
Mediocre programmers take any job they can get. They pore over the cryptic codex's of their thoughtful predecessors like acolytes transcribing the utterances of prophets. Their most important talent is that they stay.
Code maintenance, therefore, is a non-starter. Architects and Engineers build buildings, and plumbers maintain them. Plumbers can fix a leak, but it'll take a while and everything will have gotten wet. They certainly can't re-engineer a chilled water delivery system to meet new building code requirements or calculate the pipe required to handle superheated steam.
Extending the purpose or function of an application isn't "maintenance". It's re-design. It takes engineers, not plumbers.
There's no amount of dumbing down that stupid can't be baffled by, but harnessing your Arabians to oxcarts will guarantee that your software never ships in the first place.
I find it surprising that this isn't obvious to anyone who knows a decent programmer.
Absolutely not. The purpose of prison is not to rehabilitate, it is to separate. The three strikes law, however immoral you consider it to be, is primarily responsible for the 70% reduction in violent crime between 1980 and 2009. As it turns out, keeping people who are likely to re-offend in prison dramatically reduces crime.
Unfair? Sure, but only to people who have a proven inability to play well with others. Random victimization is unfair to everyone.
Disclaimer: I am the author of INSTEON: Smarthomes for everyone.
There are basically only three "Do it yourself" home automation systems on the market that are advertised as such:
X10, which is basically obsolete due to its lack of reliability features and speed INSTEON, which is essentially X10 except faster and with reliability features like retry and confirmation built in Z-Wave, which is wireless
Other systems like Lutron and UPB require custom installers and are not appropriate for DIY.
I went with INSTEON in my home. I have every light in the house automated, and because we were building we were able to save some money on the electrical wiring by not including any three-way or outdoor switches--those functions are all handled by the smarthome system. Our total cost for a 6000 sq.ft. home was about $5000 including an optional central controller called an ISY-99 that provides programmability beyond just linking lights to switches.
What we got for the money boils down basically to convenient path lighting and remote control. Everything can be controlled by a native iPhone app, I can shut off all lights in the house with a wall switch in the bedroom, and we have the kids lights programmed to dim and then shut off with their bedtimes, and prevent them from coming back on unless we "unlock" the lights with a keypad in the livingroom. at 1:00 a.m. a script shuts off every light in the house ensuring that nothing is ever left on. Motion sensors turn on lights automatically as people move throughout the house if it's after dark.
For lighting, the savings from before I had the system programmed in electrical costs is about $100/mo, but I have a $400 month electrical bill and pay.31 cents per kW beyond 2kW, so unless you live in a high-rate electricity area you won't save this much on lights alone.
We also save about $250 per month during the summer months by not using the A/C when the temp is below 85 outside with automated windows that open and close on their own based on the inside and outside temperature. This is all handled by the home automation protocol. When we use the AC, our power bill is between $600..$700 per month. By automating with the windows, we've been able to cut AC use to about three weeks per year total without sacrificing comfort.
Anyway, just my specific use case. I wouldn't expect to see these kinds of savings unless you live somewhere like Southern California. I went with INSTEON because it was reliable in my tests and cost less than anything but X10. I looked into Z-Wave, but it didn't seem as flexible, there were not nearly as many types of devices available, and it cost about double what INSTEON cost.
I think we should use the traditional terms, "interpreter" and "compiler", because that is a fundamental and intrinsic differentiator. I'm leaving byte-coded languages like Python and Java in the interpreted category, but perhaps "coded" would be a better intermediate term.
While any language could be implemented either way, languages do have their defaults and those defaults speak to design differences that matter. interpreted languages are almost always garbage collected, which creates memory and performance characteristics that don't change much even if they are compiled. For example, "compiling" python to an executable is really just binding the python interpreter to a package of byte-code wrapped as an executable--it's not really converting Python to machine code. As such, it's not much faster than interpreted python and really only exists as a convenient way to package Python for Windows.
The difference in terms matter. Scripting langauges are for integration work, administration, and other "one-time" coding projects. Compilers are for creating shippable mass market products. That difference will always be with us.
Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.
An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.
I'm running Vista pre-installed on a brand new Sony UX390N, with 1GB of RAM and a solid state 32GB hard disk.
What's wrong with it? Let's see... Large file copies are inordinately slow--way slower than XP on the same hardware. Apps like Microsoft Office hang for up to a minute while the hard disk thrashes away on some unknown background process (undoubtedly to speed searches or something). The OS asks me literally seven times to confirm and click okay to things like trying to delete a file that I just created. Plugging in new hardware creates a bizarre cacaphony of dialog boxes and confirmations.
Video games pause and jerk suddenly when the disk starts its background processes--again, a feature that didn't exist in XP.
Microsoft seriously messed up the kernel frobbing or application priorities for large parts of Vista. Their naive approach to indexing the hard disk causes constant disk thrashing for a feature THAT STILL SUCKS ASS and cannot find anything that I'm really looking for. They've gratuitously moved nearly every operating system configuration setting or hid it behind three more layers of dialog boxes for no reason other than to treat me like I'm an idiot whose never used a computer before.
Every 10th time I reboot my computer, it informs me that I've changed my hardware (I haven't) and I need to reactivate. I ignore it, and you know what? It goes away the next time I boot. So it's a user insulting licensing process THAT DOESN'T EVEN WORK.
I bought the Ultimate addition with the promise of killer applications provided free throughout Vista's lifetime. I don't consider two crappy games to be worth the money.
I was a serious Windows fan. Hell, I wrote the Windows 2000 MCSE security guide for Microsoft Press. But I'll never buy another Microsoft product for my personal use until that company has knelt down before the alter of its customers and contritely begged forgivingness for such sins as license activation (even typing in CD keys), restricting virtualization for no reason, and their relentless attempt to build a software monoculture that excludes anything not coming Redmond.
They're Smith Corona in 1985, going out to their users and asking what new features their customers want on their typewriters because they've noticed that sales have flattened. Vista is just adding an LCD to a typewriter. It's not going to stop what's about to happen to Microsoft.
Whenever the answer to a question seems particularly nebulous, it's because you're asking the wrong question.
System administrators are not, in themselves, productive. They do not produce the product that the company sells. Therefore, their productivity is not measurable.
What _is_ measurable is the effect of proper system administration on the rest of the company. It's not even difficult to quantify.
What you need to measure is minutes of user downtime for every technology user in the company. Every minute that someone in the company wastes because a resource that you're responsible for is not available, >or because they don't know how to use it counts against you. Every minute they spend on the phone explaining the problem to the help desk, every minute they wait, period.
How to know? Ask the users to report their minutes of downtime in each ticket, in a machine queryable way, such as: [27m]. Major server went down? Multiply it's users and the time down as minutes in the ticket IT opens to fix it. Want to make sure people report minutes? Report on the number of tickets with no minute report as a negative, and assign that blame to the technician who closed the ticket. Worried about technicians lying down their numbers? Copy the affected users on the minutes reported in the ticket. They'll correct it.
It doesn't matter if a server is down for patching over the weekend if nobody is trying to use it. This is why measuring user uptime is stupid. It leads to not patching.
Make your IT department responsible for training. IT's job is to create efficiency for everyone else. The only way for you to get credit for the amazing technology you deploy is if users know how to consume it. Training isn't a budget buster for IT, it is the realization of IT at the point of use. If it's not part of your process, you will never reach zero user downtime.
You are what you measure. Only measure those things whose trend towards ideal has no negative impact. People will make their quotas and statistics happen, so you better damn well not have any unintended consequences in your statistics.
Of course, there's a lack of clarity around who is to blame for downtime, but it doesn't really matter because only you can get them back to work, and you're not trying for perfection, merely improvement.
The best you can do is to get up to zero. Zero downtime is SA nirvana--not a state you can attain, only a state you can aspire to.
Want to count beans? Those are your fucking beans. Go count 'em.
This paper does not say that being good at math makes you unhappy or bad with people. What it says is that trying to make kids happy about math results in students who aren't that good at math.
I guess the author of this post is also bad at reading. What's humorous is that none of the comment posters appear to have actually read the article either.
Grassrooted certificates are not a new idea (as discussed here). My company is planning to start a free certificate issuing authority funded by pop-under advertisements that will get it's root certificates registered with Microsoft when enough revenue has been collected to do so. The URL will be www.grassrooted.org.
Let's face it, there's no real security in third party validation anyway when hackers have regularly had certificates issued by third party certifiers in the names of legitimate companies (including microsoft). Transitive trust doesn't work beyond the inherent biometric authentication of vouching for those you know personally, period.
If anyone is interested in participating early, e-mail me at mbs(a)connetic.net
This is an easy problem. 2.4GHz sees through Windows like they're made of glass. Just get a pair of linksys WAP11 WAPs with the stock dual antennas, configure them in bridge mode, and place them in the windows of the various buildings such that they have a clear view of one another. These devices run about $170 in the U.S., and are trivially easy to configure. I've used them for building-building at distances >100m without external antennas and had no issues.
Software solution? Are you kidding? I don't know of any software that runs without a computer underneath it, and it's damned difficult to put together a reliable machine with a case and four network adapters for less than $400.
Software isn't free. It requires hardware. When you get dedicated hardware and software that can be configured by someone who doesn't frequent slashdot, you've got a compelling solution.
Anyway, I installed this box at a client site four months ago (two Covad DSL lines), and it's been flawless the entire time. I highly recommend it for situations where better bandwidth isn't available. It's about as easy to configure as a Sonicwall, not quite as easy as a Linksys. Web managed with a gotcha or two in the UI.
It's amazing how much good advice you can get from Slashdot posts! Frankly, about 80% of the work consultants do comes from call-backs and personal recommendations. I can't imagine how anyone could keep enough work coming in the door by leaving a trail of rampant destruction in their wake.
You've obviously never written a book about consulting. To date, this book has made me about $20,000 over the course of two years. The consulting firm I own makes well over $500,000 now. But, granted, I am audacious.
Actually, the book has a considerable amount of material warning that marketing isn't easy, and a lot on taking stock of your talents to be sure consulting is for you. The first chapter is actually a "demotivator" to try to get people for whom consulting would be a burden to reconsider.
Slashdot Mirror
Handles large files well, doesn't respect UNIX permissions (which are problematic for removable drives) and is freely installable on Linux and Mac using NTFS3G and FUSE or MacFUSE. A lo
Concur. You can't--cannot--sell a game concept, so get "the intent to sell the concept" out of your head. There is no market for "concepts" in any endeavor (a screenplay is not an idea--it's a screenplay), only markets for working products.
1) Learn to program, write the game, then sell it.
2) Make a shitload of money doing something you're actually good at, hire developers, get the game written, then sell it.
3) Talk about how you had the idea for MachineGirlZombieGoldNakedPalaceAttack VII twenty years ago, but sadly lacked the skillz to get the billz.
Good luck
How do you manage security if you're a n00b? Only you can manage your security. Only you care enough to do the work.
Start reading. And FAST!
Exceptional programmers write code. They can't--can not--be paid to maintain the code of other people. They leave. They find other opportunities where their prowess and ability to think in code is appreciated.
Mediocre programmers take any job they can get. They pore over the cryptic codex's of their thoughtful predecessors like acolytes transcribing the utterances of prophets. Their most important talent is that they stay.
Code maintenance, therefore, is a non-starter. Architects and Engineers build buildings, and plumbers maintain them. Plumbers can fix a leak, but it'll take a while and everything will have gotten wet. They certainly can't re-engineer a chilled water delivery system to meet new building code requirements or calculate the pipe required to handle superheated steam.
Extending the purpose or function of an application isn't "maintenance". It's re-design. It takes engineers, not plumbers.
There's no amount of dumbing down that stupid can't be baffled by, but harnessing your Arabians to oxcarts will guarantee that your software never ships in the first place.
I find it surprising that this isn't obvious to anyone who knows a decent programmer.
Absolutely not. The purpose of prison is not to rehabilitate, it is to separate. The three strikes law, however immoral you consider it to be, is primarily responsible for the 70% reduction in violent crime between 1980 and 2009. As it turns out, keeping people who are likely to re-offend in prison dramatically reduces crime.
Unfair? Sure, but only to people who have a proven inability to play well with others. Random victimization is unfair to everyone.
Disclaimer: I am the author of INSTEON: Smarthomes for everyone.
There are basically only three "Do it yourself" home automation systems on the market that are advertised as such:
X10, which is basically obsolete due to its lack of reliability features and speed
INSTEON, which is essentially X10 except faster and with reliability features like retry and confirmation built in
Z-Wave, which is wireless
Other systems like Lutron and UPB require custom installers and are not appropriate for DIY.
I went with INSTEON in my home. I have every light in the house automated, and because we were building we were able to save some money on the electrical wiring by not including any three-way or outdoor switches--those functions are all handled by the smarthome system. Our total cost for a 6000 sq.ft. home was about $5000 including an optional central controller called an ISY-99 that provides programmability beyond just linking lights to switches.
What we got for the money boils down basically to convenient path lighting and remote control. Everything can be controlled by a native iPhone app, I can shut off all lights in the house with a wall switch in the bedroom, and we have the kids lights programmed to dim and then shut off with their bedtimes, and prevent them from coming back on unless we "unlock" the lights with a keypad in the livingroom. at 1:00 a.m. a script shuts off every light in the house ensuring that nothing is ever left on. Motion sensors turn on lights automatically as people move throughout the house if it's after dark.
For lighting, the savings from before I had the system programmed in electrical costs is about $100/mo, but I have a $400 month electrical bill and pay .31 cents per kW beyond 2kW, so unless you live in a high-rate electricity area you won't save this much on lights alone.
We also save about $250 per month during the summer months by not using the A/C when the temp is below 85 outside with automated windows that open and close on their own based on the inside and outside temperature. This is all handled by the home automation protocol. When we use the AC, our power bill is between $600..$700 per month. By automating with the windows, we've been able to cut AC use to about three weeks per year total without sacrificing comfort.
Anyway, just my specific use case. I wouldn't expect to see these kinds of savings unless you live somewhere like Southern California. I went with INSTEON because it was reliable in my tests and cost less than anything but X10. I looked into Z-Wave, but it didn't seem as flexible, there were not nearly as many types of devices available, and it cost about double what INSTEON cost.
Wouldn't the easiest solution be to simply increase the gas tax to compensate for average fuel efficiency?
It's true, that's what I do with mine. I'm gazing lovingly at it right... right... right... now. Yeah, that was good.
You must have missed "Signs". And every monster movie made in the 1950s.
I think we should use the traditional terms, "interpreter" and "compiler", because that is a fundamental and intrinsic differentiator. I'm leaving byte-coded languages like Python and Java in the interpreted category, but perhaps "coded" would be a better intermediate term.
While any language could be implemented either way, languages do have their defaults and those defaults speak to design differences that matter. interpreted languages are almost always garbage collected, which creates memory and performance characteristics that don't change much even if they are compiled. For example, "compiling" python to an executable is really just binding the python interpreter to a package of byte-code wrapped as an executable--it's not really converting Python to machine code. As such, it's not much faster than interpreted python and really only exists as a convenient way to package Python for Windows.
The difference in terms matter. Scripting langauges are for integration work, administration, and other "one-time" coding projects. Compilers are for creating shippable mass market products. That difference will always be with us.
Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.
An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.
I'm running Vista pre-installed on a brand new Sony UX390N, with 1GB of RAM and a solid state 32GB hard disk.
What's wrong with it? Let's see... Large file copies are inordinately slow--way slower than XP on the same hardware. Apps like Microsoft Office hang for up to a minute while the hard disk thrashes away on some unknown background process (undoubtedly to speed searches or something). The OS asks me literally seven times to confirm and click okay to things like trying to delete a file that I just created. Plugging in new hardware creates a bizarre cacaphony of dialog boxes and confirmations.
Video games pause and jerk suddenly when the disk starts its background processes--again, a feature that didn't exist in XP.
Microsoft seriously messed up the kernel frobbing or application priorities for large parts of Vista. Their naive approach to indexing the hard disk causes constant disk thrashing for a feature THAT STILL SUCKS ASS and cannot find anything that I'm really looking for. They've gratuitously moved nearly every operating system configuration setting or hid it behind three more layers of dialog boxes for no reason other than to treat me like I'm an idiot whose never used a computer before.
Every 10th time I reboot my computer, it informs me that I've changed my hardware (I haven't) and I need to reactivate. I ignore it, and you know what? It goes away the next time I boot. So it's a user insulting licensing process THAT DOESN'T EVEN WORK.
I bought the Ultimate addition with the promise of killer applications provided free throughout Vista's lifetime. I don't consider two crappy games to be worth the money.
I was a serious Windows fan. Hell, I wrote the Windows 2000 MCSE security guide for Microsoft Press. But I'll never buy another Microsoft product for my personal use until that company has knelt down before the alter of its customers and contritely begged forgivingness for such sins as license activation (even typing in CD keys), restricting virtualization for no reason, and their relentless attempt to build a software monoculture that excludes anything not coming Redmond.
They're Smith Corona in 1985, going out to their users and asking what new features their customers want on their typewriters because they've noticed that sales have flattened. Vista is just adding an LCD to a typewriter. It's not going to stop what's about to happen to Microsoft.
Whenever the answer to a question seems particularly nebulous, it's because you're asking the wrong question.
System administrators are not, in themselves, productive. They do not produce the product that the company sells. Therefore, their productivity is not measurable.
What _is_ measurable is the effect of proper system administration on the rest of the company. It's not even difficult to quantify.
What you need to measure is minutes of user downtime for every technology user in the company. Every minute that someone in the company wastes because a resource that you're responsible for is not available, >or because they don't know how to use it counts against you. Every minute they spend on the phone explaining the problem to the help desk, every minute they wait, period.
How to know? Ask the users to report their minutes of downtime in each ticket, in a machine queryable way, such as: [27m]. Major server went down? Multiply it's users and the time down as minutes in the ticket IT opens to fix it. Want to make sure people report minutes? Report on the number of tickets with no minute report as a negative, and assign that blame to the technician who closed the ticket. Worried about technicians lying down their numbers? Copy the affected users on the minutes reported in the ticket. They'll correct it.
It doesn't matter if a server is down for patching over the weekend if nobody is trying to use it. This is why measuring user uptime is stupid. It leads to not patching.
Make your IT department responsible for training. IT's job is to create efficiency for everyone else. The only way for you to get credit for the amazing technology you deploy is if users know how to consume it. Training isn't a budget buster for IT, it is the realization of IT at the point of use. If it's not part of your process, you will never reach zero user downtime.
You are what you measure. Only measure those things whose trend towards ideal has no negative impact. People will make their quotas and statistics happen, so you better damn well not have any unintended consequences in your statistics.
Of course, there's a lack of clarity around who is to blame for downtime, but it doesn't really matter because only you can get them back to work, and you're not trying for perfection, merely improvement.
The best you can do is to get up to zero. Zero downtime is SA nirvana--not a state you can attain, only a state you can aspire to.
Want to count beans? Those are your fucking beans. Go count 'em.
This paper does not say that being good at math makes you unhappy or bad with people. What it says is that trying to make kids happy about math results in students who aren't that good at math.
I guess the author of this post is also bad at reading. What's humorous is that none of the comment posters appear to have actually read the article either.
Congratulations, you've noticed that there are a billion times more trivial problems than there are hard ones.
I would suggest that the only way to be a really good security administrator is to have been a really good hacker.
Besides that, check out "Security Jumpstart" from Sybex books for an absolute beginner's guide to computer security.
Grassrooted certificates are not a new idea (as discussed here). My company is planning to start a free certificate issuing authority funded by pop-under advertisements that will get it's root certificates registered with Microsoft when enough revenue has been collected to do so. The URL will be www.grassrooted.org.
Let's face it, there's no real security in third party validation anyway when hackers have regularly had certificates issued by third party certifiers in the names of legitimate companies (including microsoft). Transitive trust doesn't work beyond the inherent biometric authentication of vouching for those you know personally, period.
If anyone is interested in participating early, e-mail me at mbs(a)connetic.net
Matthew Strebe
This is an easy problem. 2.4GHz sees through Windows like they're made of glass. Just get a pair of linksys WAP11 WAPs with the stock dual antennas, configure them in bridge mode, and place them in the windows of the various buildings such that they have a clear view of one another. These devices run about $170 in the U.S., and are trivially easy to configure. I've used them for building-building at distances >100m without external antennas and had no issues.
Software solution? Are you kidding? I don't know of any software that runs without a computer underneath it, and it's damned difficult to put together a reliable machine with a case and four network adapters for less than $400.
Software isn't free. It requires hardware. When you get dedicated hardware and software that can be configured by someone who doesn't frequent slashdot, you've got a compelling solution.
Anyway, I installed this box at a client site four months ago (two Covad DSL lines), and it's been flawless the entire time. I highly recommend it for situations where better bandwidth isn't available. It's about as easy to configure as a Sonicwall, not quite as easy as a Linksys. Web managed with a gotcha or two in the UI.
It's amazing how much good advice you can get from Slashdot posts! Frankly, about 80% of the work consultants do comes from call-backs and personal recommendations. I can't imagine how anyone could keep enough work coming in the door by leaving a trail of rampant destruction in their wake.
You've obviously never written a book about consulting. To date, this book has made me about $20,000 over the course of two years. The consulting firm I own makes well over $500,000 now. But, granted, I am audacious.
Actually, the book has a considerable amount of material warning that marketing isn't easy, and a lot on taking stock of your talents to be sure consulting is for you. The first chapter is actually a "demotivator" to try to get people for whom consulting would be a burden to reconsider.