Thank you. Facebook didn't exist yet when I attended college at the same age you are (started at 28, graduated at 32), and I also pretty much forewent the social life thing. I graduated from UCSD with a 3.39, and could have done better if I didn't also have to work. My younger brother, who followed the same route but didn't have to work thanks to the Army College Fund, managed Magna Cum Laude from UCSD in a harder major than mine. He's also smarter than I am, which helps.
My big question about TFA is at what sort of school can you only study 1 - 5 hours a week and still get a 3.0 to 3.5 GPA?:p Sure ain't the UC, unless things have changed a lot since I graduated 15 years ago.
Wow, last time I heard about pre-paying for a virgin, the price was thousands of dollars. 8 Canadian sounds like a steal. Are you sure she's really a virgin? Between you and the $15/month hooker guy, you seem to have all the cheap bases covered.
I started college at 28 and graduated at 32. Not pissing away my twenties but working to save enough to pay for college. OK, and some pissing it away on 60s muscle cars
I'm now north of 45 and am not even the oldest member of my team. My boss is the same age as I am, and two of my team mates are older. I work for an IT company whose name is a household word. Before that, I worked for another one like that. I've never had a problem with age when it comes to hiring, although that probably does happen. If you have skill, you're a personality fit, and you have passion for what you're doing (that's really important, at least at the best places to work), you should do fine.
My experience has been that if I get as far as the interview, most of the time I get the job. Before the interview, your age can only be guessed at within a wide range unless you volunteer it (I wouldn't, and they aren't allowed to ask, at least not in the United States), I can reasonably infer that age wasn't the cause in cases where I didn't get an interview.
Don't forget to mention that if a person is style-conscious, s/he isn't much of an individualist. Style-conscious = having an above-average concern with what others think of your physical appearance. Individualist = not caring very much what others think of your appearance, you wear/compute on whatever you like.
No flames here. IMO the OP is basically failing in his duties as a dad, and he's going to find that out first hand when his daughter gets pregnant before she gets out of high school. Maybe even middle school.
He sounds like he's stuck in that "Where do I get off telling my kids what to believe/watch/read/etc.?" trap. That "trap" is called being a parent. Not doing it is called failing to be a parent. If you don't guide your kids on that stuff, as well as guard them against harmful things for their age, you're not a mom or a dad. You're just an egg/sperm donor.
My kids don't even know the passwords to their computers, and their computers are both in the living room. They don't use them without permission, and they don't use them without supervision.
Not long ago, somebody here posted about Internet controls for his kid's computer, which would be located in the kid's room. Putting the computer in a young child's room is mistake number one. Keep it where you can see it, and make sure that you - and only you - have root. That's online security step number one for your kids.
I was torn between replying and modding you up, chose to reply.
I've never seen the point of LaTex either, except for doing, say, math writing. It's really very good at that and should not be overlooked if that's your thing.
But for most other stuff? Hmmmph. The big marketing line for LaTex is that it separates the writing from the presentation so that you can concentrate on the writing. BFD, any plain old text editor separates the writing from the presentation, too. So write your document in vi, emacs, or the editor of your choice, then format it later.
Of course, if I had to write something that actually needed linked footnotes, linked end notes, or a bibliography (none of which I've really needed since getting my degree in linguistics), I'd most likely use OpenOffice.Org. Certainly, I'd avoid MS Word if at all possible, But then, I'd also avoid LaTex, or even a friendly front end like LyX, if at all possible.
Don't tell them the zip codes? Fine, but make sure to remove any reference to the locality from any publicly viewable page, because with the name of the locality, it takes only a few tries (one, in some cases) to hit a valid zip code.
Of course, that carries with it the problem that anyone from that locality will have no way of knowing the site is locality-specific, unless they hear about it from someone else. Googling mytown, mystate, USA" will totally miss any site that has no mention of those things on robot-accessible pages. If it does mention them, we're back to the problem of the zip code being easy to figure out.
Even then, if he's not using a whois privacy service, a whois lookup will solve the valid zip code problem, too.
But why would we want to see more women entering IT?
Serious question, I'm not trolling you. I am, however, positing that diversity, in and of itself, is crap. Completely worthless. I've lived in one of the least diverse countries in the world. I've also spent a good bit of time in what is probably the most diverse country in the world. Both are among the most successful countries in the world, and neither is the United States. One is highly successful despite being non-diverse. The other is highly successful despite being diverse. (My use of "despite" in both cases is quite deliberate.)
What do they have in common? Not a whole lot, other than being within a few hours of each other by air. And the fact that in both places, it's talent that matters, and neither gets caught up too much in political correctness B.S. In the United States, diversity has become, at least for some, a goal in and of itself, as if all you need to succeed is to be diverse, or worse, as if diversity is a prerequisite for success. What a sad state of affairs. Diversity, in and of itself, is utterly worthless. Skill is the only prerequisite for success.
The United States itself was a lot more successful in the world overall when it was a lot less diverse. I'm not implying any cause and effect between coming down in the world and becoming more diverse, and none should be inferred, but our lack of diversity during most of the 20th century did not prevent us from dominating the 20th century.
If women want to enter IT, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine, too. I don't care what percentage of my co-worker are male, female, white, not white, gay, straight, or any other tag you'd care to put on them. I like to work around smart, self-motivated people. If someone needs special scholarships or special sign-on bonuses that are based on something other than ability in order to be entice into this field, then I very clearly do not want that person in this field, lest I have to work with her/him someday.
Some of the very best people I've worked with in IT have been women. So have some of the very worst. Ditto for men. What the good ones, regardless of gender, all had in common is that they liked IT, liked computers, and were in it because they really wanted to be. What the bad ones all had in common is that they didn't, really, and they clearly did not belong in IT.
My wife, for example, is brilliant at many things. She's an great business woman, she's an incredibly tough negotiator, she can kick my ass in most areas of business, and at a poker table, too. But she'd be a miserable failure in IT. Computers just aren't her thing. A computer, like her car, is something she just expects to work. You don't want to go around enticing people like that into IT with scholarships or signing bonuses that they don't deserve. They, their employers, and the entire industry, will suffer for things like that.
For a look at a flip-side situation, consider male nurses. The fact that the word "male" even gets prepended to "nurse" tells you how much that field is dominated by a single gender and to what extent there is societal expectation that nurses are women. One does not normally hear terms like "female programmer" or "female doctor." Even "female soldier" isn't a common thing to here, although the great majority of those in military service in the United States are male. Despite this one-sidedness, however, men who really want to become nurses have not only done so, they have done so without any special scholarships, signing bonuses, or anything of that nature. They became nurses because they wanted to, and were ready to do a lot more stereotype-busting than a woman who wants to be a programmer or sysadmin would ever do.
That's the way it ought to be. If someone chooses to enter a profession that is heavily dominated by one gender, race, or any other category you can think of, that's fine. The only thing that should matter is if they can do the job. There should be strong legal protections against discrimination, sexual ha
You should ask this question on UUASC (Unix Users of Southern California - uuasc.org) instead. A good answer might be in here somewhere amongst all the crap, but that's the problem: a good answer might be somewhere amongst all the crap.
UUASC's readership is primarily highly experienced *nix admins, and there's doubtless many people working in mixed *nix/Windows environments. You're much more likely to get a good answer there, and to be able to find it.
Male gold diggers are a tad more common than you think. My late aunt had the misfortune of marrying one. What a shithead. He even drove an orange Chevette. My cousin and I both had him pegged as a dork at best and probably worse than that. It's a shame we were right.
He sucked up lots of her money on a new car, new this, new that, and a couple years later when she was on her death bed from cancer, he swore to her that he'd care for her children (one of whom was 18, the other younger). The body was scarcely closed before he walked away from that promise and into someone else's bed. My parents took in one of my cousins, the other went to live with his dad. That slimebag tried to take two other women to the cleaners within a year of her death. The temptation to put his name up here is almost overwhelming.
The AC who said "balls to that" is right. Sure, it might work, but it's not needed, and the same people who make a lot of https exploits possible by embedding secure elements in insecure pages (like, uhhh, pretty much every financial institution, with a few exceptions) would not implement it, for the same reason they put that little secure login section in an insecure page: they don't want to spend the extra bandwidth and CPU time to run the whole site over https. If they would just do that - run a separate login page over https only, and run everything beyond it over https only, that would make exploits much harder. Simple, easy, safe, and they won't do it. Wonderful.
That's an interesting problem. Your browser can recognize a bogus certificate, or at least one that's signed by a CA for which it doesn't have a root certificate, so barring an exploitable browser vulnerability, it would be necessary for the phisher to steal the signing certificate from the CA, break its passphrase, create a bogus SSL certificate, and place said certificate on the bank's website. Then snarf your info. If they've penetrated that far into the bank's infrastructure, they can probably just snarf your info from that side of the https connection without bothering with all that certificate compromise hokey pokye.
Going back to your original question, if they had gotten far enough inside the CA to steal its signing certificate and compromise the password, you couldn't trust any MD5 sum that site gave you, either. An unbreakable web of trust is hard. Maybe impossible. That's a reason why security organizations symmetric ciphers with keys carried in locked diplomatic bags, and one-time PADs.
In the military, if you come up with a money-saving idea, you get a percentage of the money saved. At least, so it was once upon a time. AFAIK it still is.
If you really want to hear people's ideas for improvement, you need to really reward them for it. To do so means through pay incentives/raises/bonuses, of course, and also by actually *implementing* those ideas. People soon lose interest in a suggestion box that could be easily mistaken for a wastebasket. And for ideas not implemented, people should get weasle-free feedback as to why the idea wasn't chosen.
I need to correct myself on one point: if MSFT had stuck to its core competencies, it wouldn't have profit numbers much like the ones it has now.It would have far better profit numbers, because the R&D spending would be lower and the profitable product lines would not be supporting MSFT's raft of perennial money losers. Net profits would be a lot higher, and so would the stock price. Gross revenues might be lower, but gross and net profit would be higher.
Funny how I couldn't get a single mod point with a well thought-out, balanced post, while the one to which I replied got it completely wrong and got mod points anyway. But this is/.:)
Even on that Tesla Motors Vs. GM comparison, it was wrong. Tesla probably has a huge R&D budget compared to revenues and probably hasn't yet made a profit. GM spends quite a bit on R&D and probably should spend more. It's main problem is very high personnel costs compared to its Japanese competitors. If GM had the same sort of wage and pension structure as Toyota, it would be in great shape. Enviro-activist opinions notwithstanding, GM has done a great job of making vehicles people want. Big SUVs were, until very recently, very popular, big sellers, and probably GM's most profitable product line. And still might be were it not for rampant oil speculation for which the oil companies took the rap even though they didn't do it.
Tesla is like Apple only in that it's making cool, forward-thinking products that are above-average in price and still a niche market, except for the iPod line. GM isn't a good model of Microsoft. It doesn't dominate its market, doesn't carry a boatload of unprofitable product lines, and when it makes R&D spends or acquisitions, pays a lot more attention to the likelihood of making money as a result of that spend. GM, like other carmakers, will swiftly cut an unprofitable product line if it can't be made . If Xbox were a car, it would be history by now.
Now, as a Linux supporter, I'm happy to see MSFT blunder about like this. It creates opportunity for competing platforms, and that's a rising tide that floats all boats other than the SS Redmond:)
Sure you can. The comparison is mostly that Apple gets a lot more bang for its R&D buck than Microsoft does.
Secondly, Apple is in most of the markets Microsoft is in. Their cloud stuff (formerly called.mac, forget what it's called now) is small compared to Microsoft's, but they're in the market. Apple is a bit player in the server market, but they're in that market, too. Smartphones: check. Desktop/notebook OS: check. Mobile software check. Media players: check. Mobile phone hardware: check (Microsoft isn't even in that one). Game console: OK, no. Score 1 for Microsoft. Sort of. They don't make money on the Xbox.
I also have to dispute the claim that Microsoft has thousands of applications. Microsoft has fewer than you think, and Apple likely has more. The numbers aren't nearly as disparate as you state, although Microsoft has much larger ones, such as MS Office, SQL Server, and Exchange. In the desktop PC space, they're about equal. For every app that comes on a Windows machine, there's an Apple equivalent. MS has more apps on the server side, and probably more in the cloud computing space. The biggest lead area is in Xbox titles, since Apple isn't in the game console market.
The big difference is that so many of those are money-losers for Microsoft. Live/Hotmail/MSN. Xbox. Zune. All the money that has been poured into those has come from profitable product lines like Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server (and I'm just guessing that SQL Server is profitable, but it probably is). If Microsoft had stayed focused on its core strengths in the operating systems, desktop apps, and server apps spaces instead of trying to do and be *everything* and do much of it poorly, Microsoft would be both a far more profitable company and a far more formidable competitor.
Put another way, if MSFT had stuck to its core competencies, it would have an R&D budget that looked more like Apple's or Google's, but profit numbers that still look a lot like the ones it has anyway, selling the dominant desktop OS, a major server OS, the dominant office suite, Exchange, SQL Server, and its developer tools (which may or may not be a direct money maker, but they drive the Windows ecosystem and so are necessary).
MSFT today has its fingers in far too many pies and as a result is spending too much R&D money on things that never show a profit. The unhappy investors have a real point there, and it's a point many in the IT industry have been making for years.
Tell that to Alexander the Great. Attila. $ROMAN_EMPEROR. Genghis Khan. The European colonial powers. General Sherman.
Even a century ago (just before the outbreak of WW I), nobody thought much of minimizing the impact of war on civilians. No one cared about collateral damage. The term didn't even exist. Go back another 50 years and it was still widely considered a normal part of war to wage it upon civilians as well as military personnel. The enemy was the enemy.
Fast forward to WW II and you find a lot of that again. WW II was a lot more brutal than WW I. WW II was in many respects an anomaly in the midst of a general trend toward less brutal war. In both the European and Pacific theaters, targeting civilians was common on all sides,
The general trend has been toward fighting war with kid gloves on. For example, in WW II, not one brick would have been left piled on another in a place like Fallujah. It would have been bombed flat, along with any civilians who didn't leave.
Without arguing for brutality from a moral standpoint, it's pretty clear that the way we fight wars these days has a lot to do with the difficulty of achieving the objective of a war. When you're fighting a war, "Screw public opinion, screw the enemy, and screw any civilian who gets in the way" is a far more effective way to win it. Or as Machiavelli would put, it's a lot better to have people fear you than love you. Fear lasts. Love doesn't.
War - and humanity - are definitely less brutal now than in the past. There are exceptions, of course. Islam, which has practiced conversion at swordpoint since the day of Mohammed, has, if anything, become more brutal. Saladin treated prisoners and civilians in accordance with Islamic standards of hospitality. Not so for bin Laden and Wahabis in general. They'd just as soon not take prisoners, and when they do, they'll like as not wind up dead, unless maybe they convert to Islam and switch sides.
Actually, that money thing is a pretty good argument. I work for a (mostly) hardware vendor that sells to quite a few universities and I know they are feeling the budget crunch just as much as everybody else. There is certainly interest in reducing IT costs. However, like someone else in this thread said, if he's not in a position to even find out what their licensing costs are, he's probably not in much of a position to influence things.
This being/. and all, I didn't bother to read TFA, but phishing targeting online games is out there, too. I maintain an anti-phishing ruleset, and I first published rules targeting WoW phish over 6 months ago. The target of the phish was login credentials for WoW.
That's a great deal for the right person, but I can see how most laid-off employees wouldn't go for it.
I lived abroad for many years, and married while doing so. If my employer wanted to send me to my wife's native country, or some of the countries we lived in during that phase of my career, while paying me the same salary I make here in the Silicon Valley area, I'd jump at the chance (or in the case of Japan, they'd have to pay me way more).
If we could take my salary and go live in my wife's country, between that and the money of her semi-wealthy family, we'd live like royalty. But I can see how that wouldn't work for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. Facebook didn't exist yet when I attended college at the same age you are (started at 28, graduated at 32), and I also pretty much forewent the social life thing. I graduated from UCSD with a 3.39, and could have done better if I didn't also have to work. My younger brother, who followed the same route but didn't have to work thanks to the Army College Fund, managed Magna Cum Laude from UCSD in a harder major than mine. He's also smarter than I am, which helps.
My big question about TFA is at what sort of school can you only study 1 - 5 hours a week and still get a 3.0 to 3.5 GPA? :p Sure ain't the UC, unless things have changed a lot since I graduated 15 years ago.
Anyway, I don't believe it. Everybody knows chicks suck at math ;-) (Just kidding! My wife kicks my ass at math.)
Are the ones with capital letters what they mean when they say "Extra Virgin?"
Note the complete lack of a humor circuit in your brain.
And of course, that's Virgin Mobile, not Virgin mobile. A Virgin mobile would be an Extra Virgin who was willing to go to your location...
Wow, last time I heard about pre-paying for a virgin, the price was thousands of dollars. 8 Canadian sounds like a steal. Are you sure she's really a virgin? Between you and the $15/month hooker guy, you seem to have all the cheap bases covered.
I'd hate to see what kind of hooker $15/month gets you :p
I started college at 28 and graduated at 32. Not pissing away my twenties but working to save enough to pay for college. OK, and some pissing it away on 60s muscle cars
I'm now north of 45 and am not even the oldest member of my team. My boss is the same age as I am, and two of my team mates are older. I work for an IT company whose name is a household word. Before that, I worked for another one like that. I've never had a problem with age when it comes to hiring, although that probably does happen. If you have skill, you're a personality fit, and you have passion for what you're doing (that's really important, at least at the best places to work), you should do fine.
My experience has been that if I get as far as the interview, most of the time I get the job. Before the interview, your age can only be guessed at within a wide range unless you volunteer it (I wouldn't, and they aren't allowed to ask, at least not in the United States), I can reasonably infer that age wasn't the cause in cases where I didn't get an interview.
Go for it; it's never too late to get a degree!
Don't forget to mention that if a person is style-conscious, s/he isn't much of an individualist. Style-conscious = having an above-average concern with what others think of your physical appearance. Individualist = not caring very much what others think of your appearance, you wear/compute on whatever you like.
No flames here. IMO the OP is basically failing in his duties as a dad, and he's going to find that out first hand when his daughter gets pregnant before she gets out of high school. Maybe even middle school.
He sounds like he's stuck in that "Where do I get off telling my kids what to believe/watch/read/etc.?" trap. That "trap" is called being a parent. Not doing it is called failing to be a parent. If you don't guide your kids on that stuff, as well as guard them against harmful things for their age, you're not a mom or a dad. You're just an egg/sperm donor.
My kids don't even know the passwords to their computers, and their computers are both in the living room. They don't use them without permission, and they don't use them without supervision.
Not long ago, somebody here posted about Internet controls for his kid's computer, which would be located in the kid's room. Putting the computer in a young child's room is mistake number one. Keep it where you can see it, and make sure that you - and only you - have root. That's online security step number one for your kids.
I was torn between replying and modding you up, chose to reply.
I've never seen the point of LaTex either, except for doing, say, math writing. It's really very good at that and should not be overlooked if that's your thing.
But for most other stuff? Hmmmph. The big marketing line for LaTex is that it separates the writing from the presentation so that you can concentrate on the writing. BFD, any plain old text editor separates the writing from the presentation, too. So write your document in vi, emacs, or the editor of your choice, then format it later.
Of course, if I had to write something that actually needed linked footnotes, linked end notes, or a bibliography (none of which I've really needed since getting my degree in linguistics), I'd most likely use OpenOffice.Org. Certainly, I'd avoid MS Word if at all possible, But then, I'd also avoid LaTex, or even a friendly front end like LyX, if at all possible.
Don't tell them the zip codes? Fine, but make sure to remove any reference to the locality from any publicly viewable page, because with the name of the locality, it takes only a few tries (one, in some cases) to hit a valid zip code.
Of course, that carries with it the problem that anyone from that locality will have no way of knowing the site is locality-specific, unless they hear about it from someone else. Googling
mytown, mystate, USA" will totally miss any site that has no mention of those things on robot-accessible pages. If it does mention them, we're back to the problem of the zip code being easy to figure out.
Even then, if he's not using a whois privacy service, a whois lookup will solve the valid zip code problem, too.
But why would we want to see more women entering IT?
Serious question, I'm not trolling you. I am, however, positing that diversity, in and of itself, is crap. Completely worthless. I've lived in one of the least diverse countries in the world. I've also spent a good bit of time in what is probably the most diverse country in the world. Both are among the most successful countries in the world, and neither is the United States. One is highly successful despite being non-diverse. The other is highly successful despite being diverse. (My use of "despite" in both cases is quite deliberate.)
What do they have in common? Not a whole lot, other than being within a few hours of each other by air. And the fact that in both places, it's talent that matters, and neither gets caught up too much in political correctness B.S. In the United States, diversity has become, at least for some, a goal in and of itself, as if all you need to succeed is to be diverse, or worse, as if diversity is a prerequisite for success. What a sad state of affairs. Diversity, in and of itself, is utterly worthless. Skill is the only prerequisite for success.
The United States itself was a lot more successful in the world overall when it was a lot less diverse. I'm not implying any cause and effect between coming down in the world and becoming more diverse, and none should be inferred, but our lack of diversity during most of the 20th century did not prevent us from dominating the 20th century.
If women want to enter IT, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine, too. I don't care what percentage of my co-worker are male, female, white, not white, gay, straight, or any other tag you'd care to put on them. I like to work around smart, self-motivated people. If someone needs special scholarships or special sign-on bonuses that are based on something other than ability in order to be entice into this field, then I very clearly do not want that person in this field, lest I have to work with her/him someday.
Some of the very best people I've worked with in IT have been women. So have some of the very worst. Ditto for men. What the good ones, regardless of gender, all had in common is that they liked IT, liked computers, and were in it because they really wanted to be. What the bad ones all had in common is that they didn't, really, and they clearly did not belong in IT.
My wife, for example, is brilliant at many things. She's an great business woman, she's an incredibly tough negotiator, she can kick my ass in most areas of business, and at a poker table, too. But she'd be a miserable failure in IT. Computers just aren't her thing. A computer, like her car, is something she just expects to work. You don't want to go around enticing people like that into IT with scholarships or signing bonuses that they don't deserve. They, their employers, and the entire industry, will suffer for things like that.
For a look at a flip-side situation, consider male nurses. The fact that the word "male" even gets prepended to "nurse" tells you how much that field is dominated by a single gender and to what extent there is societal expectation that nurses are women. One does not normally hear terms like "female programmer" or "female doctor." Even "female soldier" isn't a common thing to here, although the great majority of those in military service in the United States are male. Despite this one-sidedness, however, men who really want to become nurses have not only done so, they have done so without any special scholarships, signing bonuses, or anything of that nature. They became nurses because they wanted to, and were ready to do a lot more stereotype-busting than a woman who wants to be a programmer or sysadmin would ever do.
That's the way it ought to be. If someone chooses to enter a profession that is heavily dominated by one gender, race, or any other category you can think of, that's fine. The only thing that should matter is if they can do the job. There should be strong legal protections against discrimination, sexual ha
You should ask this question on UUASC (Unix Users of Southern California - uuasc.org) instead. A good answer might be in here somewhere amongst all the crap, but that's the problem: a good answer might be somewhere amongst all the crap.
UUASC's readership is primarily highly experienced *nix admins, and there's doubtless many people working in mixed *nix/Windows environments. You're much more likely to get a good answer there, and to be able to find it.
HTH
Male gold diggers are a tad more common than you think. My late aunt had the misfortune of marrying one. What a shithead. He even drove an orange Chevette. My cousin and I both had him pegged as a dork at best and probably worse than that. It's a shame we were right.
He sucked up lots of her money on a new car, new this, new that, and a couple years later when she was on her death bed from cancer, he swore to her that he'd care for her children (one of whom was 18, the other younger). The body was scarcely closed before he walked away from that promise and into someone else's bed. My parents took in one of my cousins, the other went to live with his dad. That slimebag tried to take two other women to the cleaners within a year of her death. The temptation to put his name up here is almost overwhelming.
The AC who said "balls to that" is right. Sure, it might work, but it's not needed, and the same people who make a lot of https exploits possible by embedding secure elements in insecure pages (like, uhhh, pretty much every financial institution, with a few exceptions) would not implement it, for the same reason they put that little secure login section in an insecure page: they don't want to spend the extra bandwidth and CPU time to run the whole site over https. If they would just do that - run a separate login page over https only, and run everything beyond it over https only, that would make exploits much harder. Simple, easy, safe, and they won't do it. Wonderful.
That's an interesting problem. Your browser can recognize a bogus certificate, or at least one that's signed by a CA for which it doesn't have a root certificate, so barring an exploitable browser vulnerability, it would be necessary for the phisher to steal the signing certificate from the CA, break its passphrase, create a bogus SSL certificate, and place said certificate on the bank's website. Then snarf your info. If they've penetrated that far into the bank's infrastructure, they can probably just snarf your info from that side of the https connection without bothering with all that certificate compromise hokey pokye.
Going back to your original question, if they had gotten far enough inside the CA to steal its signing certificate and compromise the password, you couldn't trust any MD5 sum that site gave you, either. An unbreakable web of trust is hard. Maybe impossible. That's a reason why security organizations symmetric ciphers with keys carried in locked diplomatic bags, and one-time PADs.
In the military, if you come up with a money-saving idea, you get a percentage of the money saved. At least, so it was once upon a time. AFAIK it still is.
If you really want to hear people's ideas for improvement, you need to really reward them for it. To do so means through pay incentives/raises/bonuses, of course, and also by actually *implementing* those ideas. People soon lose interest in a suggestion box that could be easily mistaken for a wastebasket. And for ideas not implemented, people should get weasle-free feedback as to why the idea wasn't chosen.
I need to correct myself on one point: if MSFT had stuck to its core competencies, it wouldn't have profit numbers much like the ones it has now.It would have far better profit numbers, because the R&D spending would be lower and the profitable product lines would not be supporting MSFT's raft of perennial money losers. Net profits would be a lot higher, and so would the stock price. Gross revenues might be lower, but gross and net profit would be higher.
Funny how I couldn't get a single mod point with a well thought-out, balanced post, while the one to which I replied got it completely wrong and got mod points anyway. But this is /. :)
Even on that Tesla Motors Vs. GM comparison, it was wrong. Tesla probably has a huge R&D budget compared to revenues and probably hasn't yet made a profit. GM spends quite a bit on R&D and probably should spend more. It's main problem is very high personnel costs compared to its Japanese competitors. If GM had the same sort of wage and pension structure as Toyota, it would be in great shape. Enviro-activist opinions notwithstanding, GM has done a great job of making vehicles people want. Big SUVs were, until very recently, very popular, big sellers, and probably GM's most profitable product line. And still might be were it not for rampant oil speculation for which the oil companies took the rap even though they didn't do it.
Tesla is like Apple only in that it's making cool, forward-thinking products that are above-average in price and still a niche market, except for the iPod line. GM isn't a good model of Microsoft. It doesn't dominate its market, doesn't carry a boatload of unprofitable product lines, and when it makes R&D spends or acquisitions, pays a lot more attention to the likelihood of making money as a result of that spend. GM, like other carmakers, will swiftly cut an unprofitable product line if it can't be made . If Xbox were a car, it would be history by now.
Now, as a Linux supporter, I'm happy to see MSFT blunder about like this. It creates opportunity for competing platforms, and that's a rising tide that floats all boats other than the SS Redmond :)
Sure you can. The comparison is mostly that Apple gets a lot more bang for its R&D buck than Microsoft does.
Secondly, Apple is in most of the markets Microsoft is in. Their cloud stuff (formerly called .mac, forget what it's called now) is small compared to Microsoft's, but they're in the market. Apple is a bit player in the server market, but they're in that market, too. Smartphones: check. Desktop/notebook OS: check. Mobile software check. Media players: check. Mobile phone hardware: check (Microsoft isn't even in that one). Game console: OK, no. Score 1 for Microsoft. Sort of. They don't make money on the Xbox.
I also have to dispute the claim that Microsoft has thousands of applications. Microsoft has fewer than you think, and Apple likely has more. The numbers aren't nearly as disparate as you state, although Microsoft has much larger ones, such as MS Office, SQL Server, and Exchange. In the desktop PC space, they're about equal. For every app that comes on a Windows machine, there's an Apple equivalent. MS has more apps on the server side, and probably more in the cloud computing space. The biggest lead area is in Xbox titles, since Apple isn't in the game console market.
The big difference is that so many of those are money-losers for Microsoft. Live/Hotmail/MSN. Xbox. Zune. All the money that has been poured into those has come from profitable product lines like Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server (and I'm just guessing that SQL Server is profitable, but it probably is). If Microsoft had stayed focused on its core strengths in the operating systems, desktop apps, and server apps spaces instead of trying to do and be *everything* and do much of it poorly, Microsoft would be both a far more profitable company and a far more formidable competitor.
Put another way, if MSFT had stuck to its core competencies, it would have an R&D budget that looked more like Apple's or Google's, but profit numbers that still look a lot like the ones it has anyway, selling the dominant desktop OS, a major server OS, the dominant office suite, Exchange, SQL Server, and its developer tools (which may or may not be a direct money maker, but they drive the Windows ecosystem and so are necessary).
MSFT today has its fingers in far too many pies and as a result is spending too much R&D money on things that never show a profit. The unhappy investors have a real point there, and it's a point many in the IT industry have been making for years.
Tell that to Alexander the Great. Attila. $ROMAN_EMPEROR. Genghis Khan. The European colonial powers. General Sherman.
Even a century ago (just before the outbreak of WW I), nobody thought much of minimizing the impact of war on civilians. No one cared about collateral damage. The term didn't even exist. Go back another 50 years and it was still widely considered a normal part of war to wage it upon civilians as well as military personnel. The enemy was the enemy.
Fast forward to WW II and you find a lot of that again. WW II was a lot more brutal than WW I. WW II was in many respects an anomaly in the midst of a general trend toward less brutal war. In both the European and Pacific theaters, targeting civilians was common on all sides,
The general trend has been toward fighting war with kid gloves on. For example, in WW II, not one brick would have been left piled on another in a place like Fallujah. It would have been bombed flat, along with any civilians who didn't leave.
Without arguing for brutality from a moral standpoint, it's pretty clear that the way we fight wars these days has a lot to do with the difficulty of achieving the objective of a war. When you're fighting a war, "Screw public opinion, screw the enemy, and screw any civilian who gets in the way" is a far more effective way to win it. Or as Machiavelli would put, it's a lot better to have people fear you than love you. Fear lasts. Love doesn't.
War - and humanity - are definitely less brutal now than in the past. There are exceptions, of course. Islam, which has practiced conversion at swordpoint since the day of Mohammed, has, if anything, become more brutal. Saladin treated prisoners and civilians in accordance with Islamic standards of hospitality. Not so for bin Laden and Wahabis in general. They'd just as soon not take prisoners, and when they do, they'll like as not wind up dead, unless maybe they convert to Islam and switch sides.
You mean his belly hangs over his belt as much as Ron Jeremy's does?
Actually, that money thing is a pretty good argument. I work for a (mostly) hardware vendor that sells to quite a few universities and I know they are feeling the budget crunch just as much as everybody else. There is certainly interest in reducing IT costs. However, like someone else in this thread said, if he's not in a position to even find out what their licensing costs are, he's probably not in much of a position to influence things.
Probably because the number of halfway competent users is far, far less than half the number of users :p
This being /. and all, I didn't bother to read TFA, but phishing targeting online games is out there, too. I maintain an anti-phishing ruleset, and I first published rules targeting WoW phish over 6 months ago. The target of the phish was login credentials for WoW.
That's a great deal for the right person, but I can see how most laid-off employees wouldn't go for it.
I lived abroad for many years, and married while doing so. If my employer wanted to send me to my wife's native country, or some of the countries we lived in during that phase of my career, while paying me the same salary I make here in the Silicon Valley area, I'd jump at the chance (or in the case of Japan, they'd have to pay me way more).
If we could take my salary and go live in my wife's country, between that and the money of her semi-wealthy family, we'd live like royalty. But I can see how that wouldn't work for everyone.