"And all it takes is 30 seconds to dump an SQL output of 10,000 CC#/account info records to a flat file on a 1.4M "service patch disk" and out the door they go."
With a BIG FAT log of who logged into the console and database and performed the dump, not to mention paper logs of entry if they do that. To tell the truth, there are many things which we could just "walk away" from...but there would be sufficient trail that would lead right back to us, so it would be suicidal (nothing is really physically preventing me from mugging old ladies on the street, but it's still not the perfect crime).
"Any form of storing or recording the decryption key reduces to storing the credit card numbers in plaintext, so you should avoid that."
Well, if you want to get technical, if they rooted the box, they could still presumably walk through memory (ok, encrypted swap would add another level here).
create a new column called, say, PASSWORD, in the database, and throw some random junk in there, and hope the cracker wastes all their time trying to crack *that*;)
"Oh, poor sensitive creative person! The world is so much more difficult for you!"
Tell me about it...
I'm talking about the people with their offices/cubicles decorated with every imaginable sticker and toy -- the ones who treat their office as a second home.
Ok, sorry to be plain rude, but - these are the people that annoy me the most. "Oh look at my layers of crappy kitsch on my desk, I'm so cool - I brought a cot in so I can crash overnight because I'm so passionate about whatever the fuck lame thing I do". I'm sorry, did that sound burnt out?
Why is this a big deal? From what I can tell UnitedLinux is not a distribution. Therefore you will not be installing "UnitedLinux". You will be installing some distro that some vendor has adapted from UnitedLinux, and that vendor will choose whether to publish binaries along with source. If you *want* you can take a peek at the source for the framework called "UnitedLinux" that several vendors will be using to create distros, but really, I don't see that it is their responsibility to fully distro-ize something that is not a distro.
I know, wtf? The post is very misleading. "Those of us who have played with CrystalFontz and Matrix Orbital serial LCD displays for geeky messaging " "only 21k of which are using as red/green/blue combinations for the presentation display" WTF? I thought this was a post about some new LCD technology. Christ.
How about this: "Sanyo builds new clean power plant."
Sure some superstitions are unfounded, but many superstitions and cultural knowledge actually DO turn out to have some merit - witness all the various herbs that were used by some cultures, that science is now finding the chemical basis for, and acupuncture. Sure the Chinese may have described acupuncture as "aligning Chi", but wtf does it matter what they thought as long as it works? If you think about it, quantum physics is as superstitious as it gets, and isn't that far from magical Chi forces floating around in the body.
Wow, this is nothing like indigenous people have known, um, forever...before we introduced them to "correct" farming by ripping up the ground with a plow and stuffing it with chemicals and pesticides. They should thank us for indebting them to big agribusiness/chemical companies instead of falling for all that "sustainable" mumbo jumbo.
* Describe a situation in which the best technical solution was not the best overall solution (or otherwise, not possible). What did you do?
* Describe a project you worked on that failed. Why did it fail? What would you do differently?
* Describe a project of which you inherited maintainence. Any thoughts?
* Describe a project in which you transferred maintainence to somebody else. What state was it in and why?
* Describe an instance in which you had a technical disagreement with a coworker. How did you resolve the issue.
* What do you do to relax/recoup?
(I'm serious about the last one...you want to know if this is somebody who is going to burn out fast, or whether they have enough experience to pace themselves, or have some strategy for keeping focused)
"So the Linux kernel and open source development are not "done properly"? Large projects and most business systems are programmed by teams of people working together."
Well, in the case of Linux, I'd say it's "teams of people working independently".
Unless we stop repeating this to ourselves and get off our asses and actually DO SOMETHING about it. Under this logic we will "still need oil for the foreseeable future" right up to the second it runs out at which point we'll run around scrambling in absolute chaos...when we could be planning for this all along. All it takes is a bit of incentive from the government. The alternative energy source market has tremendous potential, but the government simply would rather sink millions of dollars into subsidies for good old oil, instead of incentivizing alternative energy sources which we WILL need to convert to at some point. It's all a matter of how willing you are to SCREW OVER future generations. Judging from recent decades, it looks like we are very eager to screw over future generations for temporary gains today.
"until we eliminate the demand for it"
We can eliminate demand for it by stopping investment in looking for MORE of it!
"But nobody knows how much oil is under there."
From what I've heard, half to one year supply. What an incredibly shortsighted thing to do to get only ONE YEAR more of fueling gas guzzling SUVs.
Really, CS is probably one of the cheapest fields to get an education in:
* Middle-of-the-line PC: $1200 * Books: 4bk/yr * ~$50/bks * 4yrs = ~$800 (MAX - remember there are libraries) * Internet connection: ~$40/mo * Time: furnish this yourself
Unless you really need to work on some funky hardware I'd wager most CS can be learned with very little as far as equipment/supplies. There is very low startup costs, and with open source, you can basically go wherever your imagination takes you.
* the food you eat (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning Monsanta et al., big agribusiness) * the clothes you wear (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the sweatshop labor that goes into most imported clothing) * the air you breath, the land you use (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the gross malfeasance and greed that results in the polluting of our public land) * every fucking product or service you use in any concievable way
I support the notion, but in a world that is so highly specialized that we completely isolated from the origins of the products and services we use and for which we come to depend on society (and its big black box of tangled interactions), it is just not practical, fair or even possible to expect everybody person become an expert on all economic chains they participate in as a consumer. In reality, it is *also* a company's responsibility to behave ethically and shoulder half the burden, and we enforce this by laws and regulation. There should not be a double standard where people have to behave ethically but companies can behave like assholes just "because". Maybe we should just abolish the Bill of Rights and have people "vote with their bats"?
... [Later that day] FBI Agent 2: here is the data you requested KGB Agent: Zank you very much Agent 2. *hands over one million dollars* FBI Agent 2: Ka-ching! Bring on the prostitutes!
"If I understand how patents work, there is no reason to take out a patent on principle--the only thing a patent is good for is to stop people from using an invention"
OR, by patenting, be able to enforce a GPL-like license which gives everyone free royalty to use a certain patent (e.g. there is a "patentleft": OpenPatents). If you DON'T claim the patent because you want it to be usable by everyone, that still doesn't stop somebody in the future from patenting it, and restricting usage.
My main complaint is that all of your points could have been accomplished much sooner, and with less bloat (Mozilla uses 17MB on my machine at fresh startup...I know memory is cheap, but *dayamn*, that will never fly on older machines...), if they had not decided to reinvent the world, and come up with some new weirdo GUI component and layout system. Mozilla is a major accomplishment, but I fear it could have done so much more if they followed the KISS rule and gotten some form of final usable product out the door long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
"And all it takes is 30 seconds to dump an SQL output of 10,000 CC#/account info records to a flat file on a 1.4M "service patch disk" and out the door they go."
With a BIG FAT log of who logged into the console and database and performed the dump, not to mention paper logs of entry if they do that. To tell the truth, there are many things which we could just "walk away" from...but there would be sufficient trail that would lead right back to us, so it would be suicidal (nothing is really physically preventing me from mugging old ladies on the street, but it's still not the perfect crime).
"Any form of storing or recording the decryption key reduces to storing the credit card numbers in plaintext, so you should avoid that."
Well, if you want to get technical, if they rooted the box, they could still presumably walk through memory (ok, encrypted swap would add another level here).
"So predictable, it hurts."
Yeah, as predictable as superfluous MS bashing...
create a new column called, say, PASSWORD, in the database, and throw some random junk in there, and hope the cracker wastes all their time trying to crack *that* ;)
"Do you even know how much it takes to create a decent web page layout that looks cool"
Don't hold your breath waiting for me to sympathize with you...
Tell me about it...
Ok, sorry to be plain rude, but - these are the people that annoy me the most. "Oh look at my layers of crappy kitsch on my desk, I'm so cool - I brought a cot in so I can crash overnight because I'm so passionate about whatever the fuck lame thing I do". I'm sorry, did that sound burnt out?
This is just the successor to their previous "iDon'tWork" program.
(sorry, it was too irresistable)
Well, I hope this technology arrives in time for the Slashdot crowd and all its free beer.
:p
And, to quote Bowie Poag: "Cloning is bad. It will only produce more clowns and lawyers"
couldn't find that pic though...
Why is this a big deal? From what I can tell UnitedLinux is not a distribution. Therefore you will not be installing "UnitedLinux". You will be installing some distro that some vendor has adapted from UnitedLinux, and that vendor will choose whether to publish binaries along with source. If you *want* you can take a peek at the source for the framework called "UnitedLinux" that several vendors will be using to create distros, but really, I don't see that it is their responsibility to fully distro-ize something that is not a distro.
I know, wtf? The post is very misleading. "Those of us who have played with CrystalFontz and Matrix Orbital serial LCD displays for geeky messaging " "only 21k of which are using as red/green/blue combinations for the presentation display" WTF? I thought this was a post about some new LCD technology. Christ.
How about this: "Sanyo builds new clean power plant."
Sure some superstitions are unfounded, but many superstitions and cultural knowledge actually DO turn out to have some merit - witness all the various herbs that were used by some cultures, that science is now finding the chemical basis for, and acupuncture. Sure the Chinese may have described acupuncture as "aligning Chi", but wtf does it matter what they thought as long as it works? If you think about it, quantum physics is as superstitious as it gets, and isn't that far from magical Chi forces floating around in the body.
Wow, this is nothing like indigenous people have known, um, forever...before we introduced them to "correct" farming by ripping up the ground with a plow and stuffing it with chemicals and pesticides. They should thank us for indebting them to big agribusiness/chemical companies instead of falling for all that "sustainable" mumbo jumbo.
"Cell-phone, organizer, pager, fold-up-keyboard, bad of dice, slide-rule, and Gameboy Advance..."
...and a big fat BEAT ME UP PLEASE sign on your back, right?
* Describe a situation in which the best technical solution was not the best overall solution (or otherwise, not possible). What did you do?
* Describe a project you worked on that failed. Why did it fail? What would you do differently?
* Describe a project of which you inherited maintainence. Any thoughts?
* Describe a project in which you transferred maintainence to somebody else. What state was it in and why?
* Describe an instance in which you had a technical disagreement with a coworker. How did you resolve the issue.
* What do you do to relax/recoup?
(I'm serious about the last one...you want to know if this is somebody who is going to burn out fast, or whether they have enough experience to pace themselves, or have some strategy for keeping focused)
"So the Linux kernel and open source development are not "done properly"? Large projects and most business systems are programmed by teams of people working together."
Well, in the case of Linux, I'd say it's "teams of people working independently".
"yet are able to comprehend someone else's code enough such that they are able to reproduce the algorithm without copying it verbatim?"
Two words: Copy. Paste.
"We'll still need oil for the foreseeable future"
Unless we stop repeating this to ourselves and get off our asses and actually DO SOMETHING about it. Under this logic we will "still need oil for the foreseeable future" right up to the second it runs out at which point we'll run around scrambling in absolute chaos...when we could be planning for this all along. All it takes is a bit of incentive from the government. The alternative energy source market has tremendous potential, but the government simply would rather sink millions of dollars into subsidies for good old oil, instead of incentivizing alternative energy sources which we WILL need to convert to at some point. It's all a matter of how willing you are to SCREW OVER future generations. Judging from recent decades, it looks like we are very eager to screw over future generations for temporary gains today.
"until we eliminate the demand for it"
We can eliminate demand for it by stopping investment in looking for MORE of it!
"But nobody knows how much oil is under there."
From what I've heard, half to one year supply. What an incredibly shortsighted thing to do to get only ONE YEAR more of fueling gas guzzling SUVs.
Really, CS is probably one of the cheapest fields to get an education in:
* Middle-of-the-line PC: $1200
* Books: 4bk/yr * ~$50/bks * 4yrs = ~$800 (MAX - remember there are libraries)
* Internet connection: ~$40/mo
* Time: furnish this yourself
Unless you really need to work on some funky hardware I'd wager most CS can be learned with very little as far as equipment/supplies. There is very low startup costs, and with open source, you can basically go wherever your imagination takes you.
"Guess what...I'm not playing that game."
Great. Now do that with:
* the food you eat (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning Monsanta et al., big agribusiness)
* the clothes you wear (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the sweatshop labor that goes into most imported clothing)
* the air you breath, the land you use (unless of course you are explicitly sactioning the gross malfeasance and greed that results in the polluting of our public land)
* every fucking product or service you use in any concievable way
I support the notion, but in a world that is so highly specialized that we completely isolated from the origins of the products and services we use and for which we come to depend on society (and its big black box of tangled interactions), it is just not practical, fair or even possible to expect everybody person become an expert on all economic chains they participate in as a consumer. In reality, it is *also* a company's responsibility to behave ethically and shoulder half the burden, and we enforce this by laws and regulation. There should not be a double standard where people have to behave ethically but companies can behave like assholes just "because". Maybe we should just abolish the Bill of Rights and have people "vote with their bats"?
I have no idea what this means, but I laughed like hell.
*cough* Robert Hanssen *cough*
...
[Later that day]
FBI Agent 2: here is the data you requested
KGB Agent: Zank you very much Agent 2. *hands over one million dollars*
FBI Agent 2: Ka-ching! Bring on the prostitutes!
"If I understand how patents work, there is no reason to take out a patent on principle--the only thing a patent is good for is to stop people from using an invention"
OR , by patenting, be able to enforce a GPL-like license which gives everyone free royalty to use a certain patent (e.g. there is a "patentleft": OpenPatents). If you DON'T claim the patent because you want it to be usable by everyone, that still doesn't stop somebody in the future from patenting it, and restricting usage.
My main complaint is that all of your points could have been accomplished much sooner, and with less bloat (Mozilla uses 17MB on my machine at fresh startup...I know memory is cheap, but *dayamn*, that will never fly on older machines...), if they had not decided to reinvent the world, and come up with some new weirdo GUI component and layout system. Mozilla is a major accomplishment, but I fear it could have done so much more if they followed the KISS rule and gotten some form of final usable product out the door long ago.
Objectives:
* Depart from airbase and patrol no-fly zone.
* Follow waypoints to Canadian "training" area.
* Drop bombs
* Shit, I mean DON'T DROP BOMBS!