Why do you think planning things decades ahead works? Why do you think we'd make better decisions than the ones we did make? For example, fifty years ago, we had a good idea about the extent of Middle East oil (it was starting to be exploited), but no idea about how unstable the region was going to be. I'd have to disagree there. We were well aware of the nature of the middle east at the time, especially the violent and primitive nature of the Wahabis controlling Saudi Arabia. That they and the other middle eastern countries nationalized (i.e. stole) all the oil property, refineries, pipelines, etc that had been discovered and produced by Western oil companies should have been a big clue number 1.
No, you couldn't predict 9/11 back then, as neither jetliners nor skyscrapers of that type existed. However, you could reliably predict that allowing violent death worshiping savages to steal hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth would lead to some negative long term consequences.
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class. You lose your freedom of movement sooner, and once you are seated they go ahead and file everyone else right through the first class cabin. They should just have nice reserved seating in the waiting areas for first class passengers, then board from the back of the plane forward.
My girlfriend & I got bumped to first class on Alitalia a few years ago, and that's exactly how they did it. No separate waiting area, but they boarded rear-first, and first class got on last.
The fact is, AdBlock makes it possible to read a newspaper with the Ad's just completely gone, only the newspaper is the internet.
Yes, it makes it possible. More accurately, it makes easy what has always been possible. DoubleClick and their ilk want to control what content is displayed to the user and how it looks. They keep forgetting or ignoring a tiny fact: This is utterly fucking impossible to do with the web.
The reason is that HTML is a SUGGESTION to the browser about how to lay something out. There is absolutely nothing in the HTML spec that mandates how a browser should display a table, execute an embedded script, load an image, or whether to do anything at all. The client is perfectly free to display it any way they want to. Granted, there are de-facto standards in web display, such that a web page using standard HTML more or less looks the same on IE, Firefox, Konqueror, etc, but there is nothing at all that mandates this per se. Obviously text-only and speech for the blind browsers handle things differently. Any browser is free to change how things are rendered, or not render them at all.
It is purely idiotic to try to use a mechanism (HTML) that was expressly designed for this flexibility, expect things will be done exactly as you want, and then bitch and moan that you don't like what people are doing on the other end of the wire.
Recently I've gotten a (volunteer) job looking after a small (approximately 500 computer) network
Volunteer? Dude, you need cash for this job.
What solutions have Slashdot readers came up with this and similar problems?"
Threaten to cut off a finger for every week running an unpatched system. Then you need to either:
1) Find someone with a missing finger to pretend to be one of your users. Have him put on a fake finger with some fake blood in it. Get some thuggish looking friends to publicly assault him in front of your users and 'cut off' his finger with some bolt cutters.
2) Skip all the pretending with fake blood & fingers. Just hire some goons straight off to 'educate' your users on network security.
Generally speaking*, you should trust the compiler to do the micro optimizations. Stick to using good algorithms, clear code and sensible object allocation. Only after measuring critical sections should you delve into optimizing low level code, and you should keep your optimizations as narrowly focused as possible.
Keep in mind that the guys who wrote the compiler's optimization code are experts at this sort of thing. In most cases, they know quite a bit more than you do about it; as long as your code is clear enough for the compiler to figure out, it'll probably do better than you could. I recall reading an example somewhere years ago, maybe in Code Complete, about two source listings. There was the original vanilla version and the hand tweaked code. Although the tweaked code was more 'optimal', and ran faster without compiler optimizations, the vanilla code ran much faster when optimizations were turned on. This is because the original code was clear enough for the compiler's optimizaiton code to understand and do something much more clever with.
* Obviously, there may be some domains, such as embedded, wherein this may not apply. The embedded experts can comment here:)
The airwaves are public property. Their use is not a right of companies. The use of the public airwaves must be, by its very nature, of benefit or substantial value to the public.
Although the airwaves are considered 'public property', the whole notion is unbelievably stupid. The vast majority of the public couldn't describe in the simplest terms the physics behind how radio works if their lives depended on it, much less construct a transmitter or receiver themselves. It is ridiculous that they should have any right of ownership & control over the airwaves.
There is nothing in the nature of the airwaves that demands they be 'public property' or 'serve the public'. Every natural resource existed long before humans did, and was either unknown or utterly useless for the vast bulk of human history. It is only the ingenuity & effort of individuals that turns unused resources into something of value to mankind.
The radio spectrum is no different from land, trees, ore, oil, or any other natural resource. It should belong to the people who discoved & exploited its value. The government should be relegated to its proper role of enforcing rights of property & contract in this domain, just as they do with land, mineral rights, air rights, etc.
Far more likely, the manager will hear "this abnormal temperature is beyond design specs, so I don't know what will happen. It might explode, or it might just work." and have to make a decision along with other pressure factors.
Designing things within tolerances and knowing exactly what you do and don't know about them is fundamental to engineering. This came up with the last shuttle accident. Henry Petroski (I think) pointed out that when an engineer says "I don't know. Anything can happen." that this is a very bad sign, and that one should take a very conservative view of risk. Taking a 'It will probably work out ok' view is very, very risky in this case. If a system is outside known tolerances, one literally has no idea what might happen. One can guess, but in a life critical system that's simply unacceptable.
What about the situation where you build under multiple compilers and they can't agree on things? Sometimes it's literally impossible to get rid of all the warnings.....Sometimes the only response to a warning that works is to say, "Yes, I know what you're trying to tell me mister compiler, but in this case, you're wrong.
When I worked in the C/C++ word, my solution to this was to explicitly document this in the code. In addition, we used code analysis tools that would allow selective disabling for blocks of code, something like:
#disble_error('EVIL') // Yes, this is evil, but neccessary because.... #end_disable
This & other structured comments made it straightforward to separate the wheat from the chaff with Perl.
The products we wrote were only of moderate size, but algorithmically complex with very high reliability requirements, so doing this sort of thing was both neccessary & unburdensome. I imagine if it were a huge code base, doing this would be more burdnesome. I'd still think, however, that it's less burdensome than thinking 'Crap. What the &$$!! does this warning mean? Damn, no line comment. I hope it isn't important.' , then likely having an evil bug slip though that actually showed up in the copious undocumented warnings.
When you're in college, the graders are not trying to break into your application, they're just evaluating the source code and give you points for correct stack and linked list implementation.
This certainly was not the case when I was in school. They definitely started checking nasty edge cases in intro CS courses, which was frequently automated, and it got worse from there. I remember my Operating Systems TAs being particularly evil testers.
Maybe it's the case that most universities don't do this? That's a scary thought.
i absolutely agree with you. this reminds me of a situation which is currently in place here in boston. they have decided to start randomly IDing people when they take the T. clearly, knowing who is on the T at a given time doesn't prevent or deter that person from bringing a bomb on board.
Supposedly they want to do random searches of bags, both during the convention and afterwards into perpetuity. This will only violate people's 4th ammendment rights, and do nothing to prevent terrorism. Given that they plan to do truely random searching, the odds of them actually catching a guy with a bomb are absurdly low. And if they do, the best that will happen is that he'll set his bomb off then and there.
Still, a good programmer should know his tools, and know the limits of his tools.
True, but the problem is that there are so many dangerous limits and gotchas in C/C++. This requires a programmer to spend a large chunk of his time and mental energy thinking about and dealing with these issues. That is time that isn't spend on the business/technical problem the software is supposed to solve.
Wouldn't it be better to use a safer language, where one can do something like:
for X in My_List'First..My_List'Last loop -- Do something with X end loop;
than to worry about having the size of the list correct, and worrying that you'll introduce a gruesome, hard to discover bug/possible security flaw if you're wrong?
It's not just online shopping. New Hampshire is nearby for many people in the state, and has no sales taxes. Thus, many people go there for major shopping trips. Taxachusetts wants you to pay tax on that too, and with this program can probably make you by tracking credit card purchases & such.
So what don't you want the state to spend money on? Education? Improving roads? Medicaid?
Education: Yes. If you have kids, pay for their school yourself. If you can't afford it, rely on charity or don't have kids.
Medicaid: Private charity. The fact that you are sick & poor is not a justification for legalized theft.
Improving roads: HAHAHAHA. Do you actually live in Massachusetts, or have at least driven on our roads? Unless you count the Big Dig, the state & local governments do very little but keep automotive repair shops in business fixing suspensions, tires, etc.
5) The game doesn't collect your CC numbers, Mr. Fortunato. Despite what one may think, pirates are not criminals.
Uh uh. So they:
1) Use viruses to plant keystroke loggers at Valve.
2) Use stolen passwords to crack Valve's systems to steal source code & other assets.
3) Resell the stolen property in another country.
This makes them not criminals...how? What would they have to do, in your view, to be actual criminals? Would they have had to burst into Valve's offices waving guns, beat and tie up the staff, torture the passwords out of people, and physically steal the development servers?
I wonder if IBM has contracted with Wolfram & Hart yet for lawyers.:)
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
It may make them more money if Linux vendors are required to pay SCO some royalties until the offending code is removed. In this light, the longer the Linux developers leave it in, the more money SCO might demand.
This is legally invalid. They cannot refuse to disclose the nature of dammages for years on end, not allowing the other party to fix it, and then try to claim dammages for those years.
If they're stupid enough to try this, the judge will throw the case out with prejudice; likely after swearing at the top of his lungs at SCO's lawyer for failing to understand a damn thing he learned in law school.
You are an absolute blithering idiot. If I purchase a book, movie, painting, or whatever, I have every damn right to do whatever I want to it. If I want to skip the boring parts of a book or movie, I can. If I want to do this by ripping pages out or using software to automatically skip bits, I can. If I'm a rich crazy bastard and want to buy every Picasso I can get my hands on & send them through my woodchipper to make cat litter, I can.
An artist has the right to publish/create whatever they want to and to have their right to exclusive reproduction protected, but they have no rights whatsoever over the _physical media_ once the sell it to someone. If I buy a painting for 5 bucks today and it's worth 50 Million in a few years, the now famous artist has no right to a single penny of the profit I make selling it.
Likewise, a movie director or writter has no rights to control what I choose to do to view his movie if I own a reproduction of it.
driving them in boardrooms during important meetings would be a definite no (although they still wouldn't fire you for something so silly - in fact it would be illegal here).
And where is 'here'? If I can't fire a childish jackass for disrupting an important meeting with a prank, it sure as hell isn't somewhere I want to start a business.
but I have seen all to often the productive ones with a higher salary cut loose solely on the basis of immediate salary concerns. I would be interested to know if others have observed the same
I've certainly seen this before. It's happened to me, and to several other senior people at that company since I left. They encourage people to work hard, praise their efforts, and make it clear how valuable they are during the project. As soon as it's done, they fire the most senior people and replace them with college fresh H1B's. The H1B bit kinda violates the law, but who gives a shit about that anyhow?
In the end, we pulled it off and emerged successful on the project, and we were regarded almost as heroes in house. We are regarded as can-do people that can rise to a challenge
I bet the senior people who were axed before you did the same thing, were regarded as heroes, etc. It's quite probable it'll happen to you too.
Unless you have no choice, working long hours at a company like this is just plain nuts. Your hard work & loyalty will _not_ be rewarded in the long run. After they dump you, they'll hire someone else who'll be telling this same story on/. in 6 months.
visitors -- expected to number about 1,000 corporate executives per month -- can role-play workers in a hard-charging widget company
May God have mercy on all of us. Can you imagine the insane management trends we're going to have to suffer through due to this? They're going to put the most outlandish Dilbert strips to shame.
Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful.
Especially me, as I hold Patent# 32419281411: "A method for melting and burning stuff with magnified sunlight."
I'm gonna be filthy rich as soon as I sue them for patent infringement!!!
Slashdot Mirror
No, you couldn't predict 9/11 back then, as neither jetliners nor skyscrapers of that type existed. However, you could reliably predict that allowing violent death worshiping savages to steal hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth would lead to some negative long term consequences.
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class. You lose your freedom of movement sooner, and once you are seated they go ahead and file everyone else right through the first class cabin. They should just have nice reserved seating in the waiting areas for first class passengers, then board from the back of the plane forward.
My girlfriend & I got bumped to first class on Alitalia a few years ago, and that's exactly how they did it. No separate waiting area, but they boarded rear-first, and first class got on last.
Yes, it makes it possible. More accurately, it makes easy what has always been possible. DoubleClick and their ilk want to control what content is displayed to the user and how it looks. They keep forgetting or ignoring a tiny fact: This is utterly fucking impossible to do with the web.
The reason is that HTML is a SUGGESTION to the browser about how to lay something out. There is absolutely nothing in the HTML spec that mandates how a browser should display a table, execute an embedded script, load an image, or whether to do anything at all. The client is perfectly free to display it any way they want to. Granted, there are de-facto standards in web display, such that a web page using standard HTML more or less looks the same on IE, Firefox, Konqueror, etc, but there is nothing at all that mandates this per se. Obviously text-only and speech for the blind browsers handle things differently. Any browser is free to change how things are rendered, or not render them at all.
It is purely idiotic to try to use a mechanism (HTML) that was expressly designed for this flexibility, expect things will be done exactly as you want, and then bitch and moan that you don't like what people are doing on the other end of the wire.
1) Find someone with a missing finger to pretend to be one of your users. Have him put on a fake finger with some fake blood in it. Get some thuggish looking friends to publicly assault him in front of your users and 'cut off' his finger with some bolt cutters.
2) Skip all the pretending with fake blood & fingers. Just hire some goons straight off to 'educate' your users on network security.
Keep in mind that the guys who wrote the compiler's optimization code are experts at this sort of thing. In most cases, they know quite a bit more than you do about it; as long as your code is clear enough for the compiler to figure out, it'll probably do better than you could. I recall reading an example somewhere years ago, maybe in Code Complete, about two source listings. There was the original vanilla version and the hand tweaked code. Although the tweaked code was more 'optimal', and ran faster without compiler optimizations, the vanilla code ran much faster when optimizations were turned on. This is because the original code was clear enough for the compiler's optimizaiton code to understand and do something much more clever with.
* Obviously, there may be some domains, such as embedded, wherein this may not apply. The embedded experts can comment here :)
Although the airwaves are considered 'public property', the whole notion is unbelievably stupid. The vast majority of the public couldn't describe in the simplest terms the physics behind how radio works if their lives depended on it, much less construct a transmitter or receiver themselves. It is ridiculous that they should have any right of ownership & control over the airwaves.
There is nothing in the nature of the airwaves that demands they be 'public property' or 'serve the public'. Every natural resource existed long before humans did, and was either unknown or utterly useless for the vast bulk of human history. It is only the ingenuity & effort of individuals that turns unused resources into something of value to mankind.
The radio spectrum is no different from land, trees, ore, oil, or any other natural resource. It should belong to the people who discoved & exploited its value. The government should be relegated to its proper role of enforcing rights of property & contract in this domain, just as they do with land, mineral rights, air rights, etc.
Designing things within tolerances and knowing exactly what you do and don't know about them is fundamental to engineering. This came up with the last shuttle accident. Henry Petroski (I think) pointed out that when an engineer says "I don't know. Anything can happen." that this is a very bad sign, and that one should take a very conservative view of risk. Taking a 'It will probably work out ok' view is very, very risky in this case. If a system is outside known tolerances, one literally has no idea what might happen. One can guess, but in a life critical system that's simply unacceptable.
When I worked in the C/C++ word, my solution to this was to explicitly document this in the code. In addition, we used code analysis tools that would allow selective disabling for blocks of code, something like:
This & other structured comments made it straightforward to separate the wheat from the chaff with Perl.
The products we wrote were only of moderate size, but algorithmically complex with very high reliability requirements, so doing this sort of thing was both neccessary & unburdensome. I imagine if it were a huge code base, doing this would be more burdnesome. I'd still think, however, that it's less burdensome than thinking 'Crap. What the &$$!! does this warning mean? Damn, no line comment. I hope it isn't important.' , then likely having an evil bug slip though that actually showed up in the copious undocumented warnings.
When you're in college, the graders are not trying to break into your application, they're just evaluating the source code and give you points for correct stack and linked list implementation. This certainly was not the case when I was in school. They definitely started checking nasty edge cases in intro CS courses, which was frequently automated, and it got worse from there. I remember my Operating Systems TAs being particularly evil testers. Maybe it's the case that most universities don't do this? That's a scary thought.
i absolutely agree with you. this reminds me of a situation which is currently in place here in boston. they have decided to start randomly IDing people when they take the T. clearly, knowing who is on the T at a given time doesn't prevent or deter that person from bringing a bomb on board.
Supposedly they want to do random searches of bags, both during the convention and afterwards into perpetuity. This will only violate people's 4th ammendment rights, and do nothing to prevent terrorism. Given that they plan to do truely random searching, the odds of them actually catching a guy with a bomb are absurdly low. And if they do, the best that will happen is that he'll set his bomb off then and there.
True, but the problem is that there are so many dangerous limits and gotchas in C/C++. This requires a programmer to spend a large chunk of his time and mental energy thinking about and dealing with these issues. That is time that isn't spend on the business/technical problem the software is supposed to solve.
Wouldn't it be better to use a safer language, where one can do something like:
than to worry about having the size of the list correct, and worrying that you'll introduce a gruesome, hard to discover bug/possible security flaw if you're wrong?Yes, of course. Law enforcement, the military, and a court system are the proper domain of government.
The government of Massachusetts, and the US in general, don't even remotely limit themselves to the above.
It's not just online shopping. New Hampshire is nearby for many people in the state, and has no sales taxes. Thus, many people go there for major shopping trips. Taxachusetts wants you to pay tax on that too, and with this program can probably make you by tracking credit card purchases & such.
Education: Yes. If you have kids, pay for their school yourself. If you can't afford it, rely on charity or don't have kids.
Medicaid: Private charity. The fact that you are sick & poor is not a justification for legalized theft.
Improving roads: HAHAHAHA. Do you actually live in Massachusetts, or have at least driven on our roads? Unless you count the Big Dig, the state & local governments do very little but keep automotive repair shops in business fixing suspensions, tires, etc.
Uh uh. So they:
1) Use viruses to plant keystroke loggers at Valve.
2) Use stolen passwords to crack Valve's systems to steal source code & other assets.
3) Resell the stolen property in another country.
This makes them not criminals...how? What would they have to do, in your view, to be actual criminals? Would they have had to burst into Valve's offices waving guns, beat and tie up the staff, torture the passwords out of people, and physically steal the development servers?
I wonder if IBM has contracted with Wolfram & Hart yet for lawyers. :)
It may make them more money if Linux vendors are required to pay SCO some royalties until the offending code is removed. In this light, the longer the Linux developers leave it in, the more money SCO might demand.
This is legally invalid. They cannot refuse to disclose the nature of dammages for years on end, not allowing the other party to fix it, and then try to claim dammages for those years.
If they're stupid enough to try this, the judge will throw the case out with prejudice; likely after swearing at the top of his lungs at SCO's lawyer for failing to understand a damn thing he learned in law school.
You are an absolute blithering idiot. If I purchase a book, movie, painting, or whatever, I have every damn right to do whatever I want to it. If I want to skip the boring parts of a book or movie, I can. If I want to do this by ripping pages out or using software to automatically skip bits, I can. If I'm a rich crazy bastard and want to buy every Picasso I can get my hands on & send them through my woodchipper to make cat litter, I can.
An artist has the right to publish/create whatever they want to and to have their right to exclusive reproduction protected, but they have no rights whatsoever over the _physical media_ once the sell it to someone. If I buy a painting for 5 bucks today and it's worth 50 Million in a few years, the now famous artist has no right to a single penny of the profit I make selling it.
Likewise, a movie director or writter has no rights to control what I choose to do to view his movie if I own a reproduction of it.
Although both good books, 79.98 is not a 'bargain bundle'; it is just a bundle. $49.99 + $29.99 = 79.98.
And where is 'here'? If I can't fire a childish jackass for disrupting an important meeting with a prank, it sure as hell isn't somewhere I want to start a business.
I've certainly seen this before. It's happened to me, and to several other senior people at that company since I left. They encourage people to work hard, praise their efforts, and make it clear how valuable they are during the project. As soon as it's done, they fire the most senior people and replace them with college fresh H1B's. The H1B bit kinda violates the law, but who gives a shit about that anyhow?
In the end, we pulled it off and emerged successful on the project, and we were regarded almost as heroes in house. We are regarded as can-do people that can rise to a challenge
I bet the senior people who were axed before you did the same thing, were regarded as heroes, etc. It's quite probable it'll happen to you too.
Unless you have no choice, working long hours at a company like this is just plain nuts. Your hard work & loyalty will _not_ be rewarded in the long run. After they dump you, they'll hire someone else who'll be telling this same story on /. in 6 months.
I know, I really shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Were you born this stupid, or did you have to hit yourself on the head with a hammer repeatedly?
Am I a pirate for wanting to:
Pay a CD in my computer?
Play it in my car?
Rip a CD I _fucking own_ so I can put it on my MP3 player?
Dumbshit.
Think King Solomon.
May God have mercy on all of us. Can you imagine the insane management trends we're going to have to suffer through due to this? They're going to put the most outlandish Dilbert strips to shame.
Yet more proof that MS == Satan.
Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful. Especially me, as I hold Patent# 32419281411: "A method for melting and burning stuff with magnified sunlight." I'm gonna be filthy rich as soon as I sue them for patent infringement!!!