Cryptologic, by any chance? Just curious. I agree with you, incidentally - I have significant experience working for a large, legal, and extremely successful betting operation, and our biggest problem with staff retention is the fact that investment banks keep poaching our developers.
a) This subthread is about the general perception of the anti-globalisation movement, and the best indicator of general public thought is the mass media. It doesn't matter whether the info is 'right' or 'wrong'; if you are interested in what the man-on-the-street is thinking, the mass media is among the best places to find out.
b) Any movement, no matter how right it is or how much it resists evil, needs the public onside to be successful. If public opinion is that the anti-globalisation movement is a bunch of dirty hippies, then that is a big problem. Again, it's not about right or wrong. If you are right and 300 million Americans are wrong, you lose. That's the thing about democracy.
Yeah I'll go watch the lying MSM that told us that there were WMDs in Iraq for sure. Oh you mean Chalabi and "Curveball" stovepiped false "intelligence" to Cheney and the MSM reported these lies verbatim without any questioning whatsoever from "liberal" CNN/NYTs/NPR to Fox all the same story? What a shock. And their reporting on environmental and economic issues is just as distorted. No life is too short to be lied to by the MSM, I value my time more than that. Just because large swaths of the American public are being lied and dazzled by flashy graphics and news anchor bimbos peddling celebrity gossip, fear mongering about the in fact very small dangers posed by terrorism ans pedophilia, and endless stories on missing white girls doesn't mean that I have to fall into the same trap. I am far more interested in hard numbers and facts on what the power elite is actually up and the MSM is the last place to find that information.
Stop frothing with self-righteous indignation and read what people are saying to you. The point being made is that the anti-globalization movement is perceived as dirty hippies by the general public, and that MSM is a good place to see where that perception is coming from. The conversation is not about 'hard numbers and facts', it is about the perception (right or wrong) of the general public.
People like you are the reason these movements largely fail - you're too busy with hard facts and numbers to notice that the people you are trying to convince all think you are a whacked-out crazy. It doesn't matter one jot whether or not this is true.
The point of going to college is poon-tang. Pure and simple. Why do you think they make you take English literature classes? To learn what a boring read Emily Bronte really is? No, it's so you can speak meaningfully to the cutie who wears the green satin bra on Thursdays, and so you can find out exactly what is under that bra, son.
Only if you are incredibly, incredibly shallow. I spent much of my time at university getting drunk and chasing airheads, and 10 years later I regret not taking better advantage of the learning opportunities I ignored by being distracted. Luckily I earn well now and can easily afford the two part-time degrees I am currently undertaking.
Whenever a story like this shows on slashdot or digg, as sure as the sun rises in the east you get people dragging themselves up and babbling on about how getting hold of some bint's tits is some sort of major social and formative achievement. It's pretty sad. What are you, a panting teenager or something? Is it deep-seated insecurity, or simply susceptibility to advertising, that makes people think that getting laid is the most important thing anybody can do?
If you're downloading pictures or.avi or.mpg movies...how can a trojan slip by there? You're not executing a script or a program. Are they using that old.jpg exploit? Hasn't that been patched?
I don't understand how people are falling for this.
Oh, come on - it's not like 99% of people on the internet aren't utter morons. Penny to a pound that the file in question was called something like "preteen_fantasy_blah_blah_blah.exe". If you don't understand how people fall for this, you grossly overestimate the averge net user.
One thing i will say is that you should give day trading / spread betting a go. It will really test your nerve and help you decide if you really want to go ahead with this
This is good advice, though I'd recommend playing with small stakes since both activities can chew you up and spit you out in double-quick time. If you're in a country where you are allowed access (which, unfortunately, exludes the US) I'd also recommend an account on Betfair. A UK horserace in the ten minutes before the off shows more activity than a stock market does all day. Ideal if you want to get your feet wet taking a position and looking to trade out.
With all due respect, anyone who thinks they have a 'sure thing' can't be that clever or intelligent. If it was a sure thing, you wouldn't get odds. I bet fairly regularly on betfair, and during in-play sports events you see at least one 1.01 shot (odds of 1/100 - bet £100 to win £1) get beaten per week. The trick is to be a good judge of value, and pick the bets that represent good value - if you can do this, it is perfectly possible to make a profit. For instance, if I was able to back heads on a coin toss at odds slightly longer than evens, then over time I would make money (assuming the coin wasn't rigged), as I would win and lose a roughly equal number of times but each win would give me more money than each loss took away.
2 very good questions. Firstly, the company didn't need a board of directors, but as I said, it was a family business - hence nepotism was rife. When the founder sold out (for about 10 million quid - not bad), one of his sons stayed on and hired a bunch of his mates into well-paid sinecures. The vast majority of the employees were clock-punchers who were there to pick up a weekly paycheque for menial work. The IT department, of which I was part, consisted of four people (including my idiot boss) and was by no manner or means the core of the company's business. On top of that, the company got much of its business by having extremely good contacts (at least one senior manager was there purely because he had previously had a good working relationship with a key decision maker at a big potential client). Finally, it was very much a niche market, and with just 50 employees and a bunch of on-the-road contractors the company was a very big fish in a very small pond.
In other words, setting up in competition would not be easy - and in fact, it's not a trade I'd want to work in anyway; I took the gig because I was young and they were prepared to hire me at what felt at the time like a big salary (I was a freshly-hatched graduate looking to get my start). Taught me a valuable lesson about being a greedy sod, that did. Incidentally, one upwardly-mobile employee did have a go at doing it himself - after becoming a (very) minor celebrity after featuring on a TV documentary, he tried to set up on his own and use his name to drum up business and maybe nab a few clients. After a fairly successful couple of months, however, he dropped off the radar - presumably the money ran out.
So much bollocks. My last job was at a small, family-owned company (50 employees). Most of the staff were treated like cattle by overbearing board members who paid peanuts whilst pocketing artifically-inflated salaries themselves. To a man they drove Mercs, BMWs, and Bentleys; to a man they had personalised number plates. They pissed off the local community (a small, pretty town in Hertfordshire) by buying out the lease from the only local library and using it as a training centre for contracted security staff. My boss, in particular, was an ill-educated bully with *absolutely no* qualifications at all (not even GCSEs - in fact he was only just above the literacy line, and had a secretary purely to read anything more complicated that a 5-line email for him), who owed his position and authority to a combination of luck and stomach-turning obsequiousness to those on the board. Finally, clients (typically local councils and magistrates' courts) were treated like pond scum and routinely told what was good for them, even when it was crystal clear that the opposite was true. And yet, at the time I left, the company had been growing an average of 30% year-on-year for about 4 years.
I have no great love for mega-corporations - my current employer has about 700 staff, and I chose to work there specifically because the company visibly behaves ethically in an industry full of cowboys - but to claim that all large corporations are evil and all small businesses are automatically socially-responsible good-eggs is astonishingly naive. From experience, I know that there are successful small businesses out there who are about as pleasant as a viper nest and will pillage your wallet with as much gusto as any convicted monopolist you care to mention.
The human creature was not made for this. We were made for the occasional hunt, some fruit picking, some tuber digging, some fishing and a little shelter fabrication & repair. That's it. The rest of the time is supposed to be just hangin out with friends and family, singing, telling stories and jokes, trying out random ideas, traveling, staring into the sky, etc.,. Man, we have to get back to what we were built for.
Utter nonsense. If you think pre-civilisation man had an easy time of it just chilling out and relaxing rather than, say, being hungry most of the time and every day being a long, hard, graft to find food, with starvation the penalty for failure, then you have no comprehension of our past at all. The only reason humans ever had time to do all the things you mention is because of the time saved by agriculture and farming, not in spite of it.
On top of that, I've got no intention whatsoever of wasting my life being an idle layabout. You can sit there staring at the fucking sky for the rest of your life - I'm (metaphorically) busy trying to work out how to go there for real.
I get what you're saying, but calling javascript a 'basic' language is a little unfair. Writing webpages holds no interest for me at all, but I've recently reacquainted myself with javascript whilst writing a few Konfabulator widgets as visualisation concepts at work, and it's not half bad. First-class functions, anonymous functions, prototype classes, closures, convenient list/dictionary syntax, regexes - I was pleasantly surprised. It certainly gave me all the tools I needed to do what I wanted, even with quite an elegant design. The Konfabulator environment also provides an XmlHttp object (obviously) and XPath access to XML documents.
I use C# and python professionally and like to hack in Haskell in my own time, so wasn't anticipating a good time with js, but I quite like it. Of course, using Konfabulator means I don't have to deal with the myriad inconsistencies between different browsers and stuff, which would no doubt sour anyone's opinion.
Really? A trade secret is more important than the Right of Free Speech? Really?
Try this on for size..... The general public is protected by the leakage or the leakage is in the general public's interest because the ability to leak re-affirms the general public's Right of Free Speech.
Granting non-living entities rights&priviledges that superceed my rights is a bad&dangerous thing to do.
Ridiculous. Free speech is not an absolute, no matter how much some people like to tell themselves. Go call in a couple of fake bomb threats, shout "fire!" in a crowded theatre, publish the details of a few people on witness protection programmes, leak the specs to some military research, and then see how far the "free speech" defence gets you.
Free speech comes with responsibilities, it's not carte blanche to go blabbing all over the place. If you sign a legal document promising not to talk about something and you then go and do exactly that, you can expect to be sued unless you are revealing illegal behaviour, as covered by whistleblowing laws. To claim a minor Apple product is covered by this is immature extremism.
(My elementary school principal used to tell me, "It takes two to make a fight!" What bullshit.)
The only reasonable response to this sort of nonsense is to punch the idiot in the face. At least you know they can't hit you back without incriminating themselves.
I used to write PocketPC software at my last job, and ActiveSync would bluescreen my XP dev box every two weeks or so. Really annoying, especially as W2K didn't crash once in over two years doing the exact same tasks on the same hardware. Stupid mandatory 'upgrades'...
Hey, so, what's the going rate these days for shills? MS obviously don't have high standards for their paid stooges, and I could do with a little extra spare cash.
I don't believe I was a good programmer until I learned NOT to think like a computer. High level languages let you accomplish a great deal with very clear and concise code, but it is hard to write clean code if you look at a problem and try to solve it by thinking "what does the computer need to do".
This is a key point. One of the principle benefits of functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml is that they allow you to express what you want to do, rather than how to do it. You don't write for loops to process a list, you just specify an operation and a list and it gets done for you; no need to worry about how the list is traversed, or how the returned list (containing the results) was created, allocated, and populated. Python and ruby are starting to bring these ideas a little more into the mainstream (python's list comprehensions are especially nice, lifted right out of Haskell). Granted there are occasions when you really need to micro-manage how something gets done, but in normal application development it's exceedingly rare.
No buddy, I was aiming my attack directly at your innability to code at home without surfing the web while you should be coding!
What makes you think I can't code effectively at home? I think you're referring to somebody else, as that was my first post in the thread. I've telecommuted before, I don't rate it - as a lead dev I need to do a lot more than write code, and I find it much more efficient to be in the office for when a bug shows up that is difficult to describe but easy to demonstrate, or when I need to speak to a wide range of people to understand and estimate the impact of a requirements change, and so on. And IM is no replacement for getting a bunch of devs in a meeting room with coffee and sandwiches, and thrashing out a first-cut design around a whiteboard. I've tried using whiteboard software, and without exception they were all crap.
I guess if you have no responsibilities other than churning out cookie-cutter code to a spec, then the above is not a problem.
I just have discipline to do the work I'm paid to do
Unfortunately, such self-effacing claptrap rings hollow when your last post mostly consisted of boasting about your alleged salary and accusing everyone who works in an office of being outdated. Yay for you, but none of us care a jot.
The only way the USA will die is if the government weighs down capitalism (also known as "freedom") so much that it can't function anymore (like, say, France with their insane worker policies). Unfortunately, we've been on that road for awhile, but it seems to ebb and flow. I'm fairly confident that we'll never get full-blown socialism. As long as we stay away from that, the US will live forever.
You're being funny, right? The US has only existed for a coupla hundred years, and been a global power for less than a hundred. Compared to the empires of the past, all of which eventually fell, the US hasn't even reached adolescence. To say it will stay the course at this stage is astonishingly short-sighted, especially considering the growing influence of China.
If I monitor the communications of a military unit and suddenly find a spike in message traffic, that's a pretty good indicator that something is going on. Anticipating that this might indicate imminent maneuvers from that unit, I might step up alertness of my own forces in the area and send out more scouts than usual. If the unit I monitor uses random noise to throw off traffic analysis, I will not have this information and so will be none the wiser.
Nice idea, but too easy to exploit by whoever's being monitored. If I was your enemy and believed you would react to a comms spike, I deliberately *wouldn't* swamp my messages in noise - I'd simply have another unrelated unit start sending me twenty weather reports a day instead of one, and while you were busy investigating this increase in activity I'd send a pigeon to notify the real unit to start manoeuvres. Trying to infer my plans by simple frequencies would just result in an impenetrable game of double-bluff, and all the while you'd be no closer to actually reading my messages.
The design of an encryption system itself -- as in the algorithm or device used for encipherment -- doesn't make it more or less resistant to traffic analysis. You could be using one-time pads, essentially unbreakable encryption, and still be vunerable to traffic analysis if you were using it poorly.
Ah, well, with the disclaimer you've added at the end there, all bets are off:-) To continue Schneier's safe analogy, if I handed over the keys as well, then obviously you'd be able to read the letter.
A good crypto system would not involve the transmission of any information that might help decrypt the message. This being the case, embedding it in a stream of gibberish will not help, because there's nothing to hide, and traffic analysis would therefore be futile. Using it poorly, as you point out, is likely to lead to failure, but that isn't the fault of the crypto system. If I'm using a one-time pad correctly, keeping the keys utterly private, using each key once and only once, and destroying them after use, then you can analyse my messages as much as you want, and you won't get anywhere, regardless of whether I obscure my message with line noise.
"If I take a letter, lock it in a safe, hide the safe somewhere in New York, then tell you to read the letter, that's not security. Thats obscurity. On the other hand, if I take a letter and lock it in a safe, and give you the safe along with the design specifications of the safe and a hundred identical safes with their combinations so that you and the worlds best safecrackers can study the locking mechanism - and you still can't open the safe and read the letter - thats security." Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier.
A really good crypto system wouldn't need to be embedded in a stream of gibberish to interfere with traffic analysis, as it would be impervious to traffic analysis anyway.
Snow Crash involves basically some lame hacker trying to prevent a very mild social re-ordering (the mass killing of a few thousand programmers) at the hands of some media tycoon. Woopee.
Yes, once you take out the fascinating conjecture about Sumerian culture, the origin of language, the nature of the relationship between language and the structure of the brain's neural pathways, the implied parallel of said relationship with that between a programming language and a computer, the concept of a dual-purpose (human/computer) virus that arises from such a parallel, and the attempted consolidation of parts of most of the world's major religions - as well as the simple fact that NS's writing style is a joy to read - it was just a lame story about some media tycoon. Talk about missing the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Cryptologic, by any chance? Just curious. I agree with you, incidentally - I have significant experience working for a large, legal, and extremely successful betting operation, and our biggest problem with staff retention is the fact that investment banks keep poaching our developers.
Yes, that's all very well and admirable, but
a) This subthread is about the general perception of the anti-globalisation movement, and the best indicator of general public thought is the mass media. It doesn't matter whether the info is 'right' or 'wrong'; if you are interested in what the man-on-the-street is thinking, the mass media is among the best places to find out.
b) Any movement, no matter how right it is or how much it resists evil, needs the public onside to be successful. If public opinion is that the anti-globalisation movement is a bunch of dirty hippies, then that is a big problem. Again, it's not about right or wrong. If you are right and 300 million Americans are wrong, you lose. That's the thing about democracy.
Yeah I'll go watch the lying MSM that told us that there were WMDs in Iraq for sure. Oh you mean Chalabi and "Curveball" stovepiped false "intelligence" to Cheney and the MSM reported these lies verbatim without any questioning whatsoever from "liberal" CNN/NYTs/NPR to Fox all the same story? What a shock. And their reporting on environmental and economic issues is just as distorted. No life is too short to be lied to by the MSM, I value my time more than that. Just because large swaths of the American public are being lied and dazzled by flashy graphics and news anchor bimbos peddling celebrity gossip, fear mongering about the in fact very small dangers posed by terrorism ans pedophilia, and endless stories on missing white girls doesn't mean that I have to fall into the same trap. I am far more interested in hard numbers and facts on what the power elite is actually up and the MSM is the last place to find that information.
Stop frothing with self-righteous indignation and read what people are saying to you. The point being made is that the anti-globalization movement is perceived as dirty hippies by the general public, and that MSM is a good place to see where that perception is coming from. The conversation is not about 'hard numbers and facts', it is about the perception (right or wrong) of the general public.
People like you are the reason these movements largely fail - you're too busy with hard facts and numbers to notice that the people you are trying to convince all think you are a whacked-out crazy. It doesn't matter one jot whether or not this is true.
The point of going to college is poon-tang. Pure and simple. Why do you think they make you take English literature classes? To learn what a boring read Emily Bronte really is? No, it's so you can speak meaningfully to the cutie who wears the green satin bra on Thursdays, and so you can find out exactly what is under that bra, son.
Only if you are incredibly, incredibly shallow. I spent much of my time at university getting drunk and chasing airheads, and 10 years later I regret not taking better advantage of the learning opportunities I ignored by being distracted. Luckily I earn well now and can easily afford the two part-time degrees I am currently undertaking.
Whenever a story like this shows on slashdot or digg, as sure as the sun rises in the east you get people dragging themselves up and babbling on about how getting hold of some bint's tits is some sort of major social and formative achievement. It's pretty sad. What are you, a panting teenager or something? Is it deep-seated insecurity, or simply susceptibility to advertising, that makes people think that getting laid is the most important thing anybody can do?
If you're downloading pictures or .avi or .mpg movies...how can a trojan slip by there? You're not executing a script or a program. Are they using that old .jpg exploit? Hasn't that been patched?
I don't understand how people are falling for this.
Oh, come on - it's not like 99% of people on the internet aren't utter morons. Penny to a pound that the file in question was called something like "preteen_fantasy_blah_blah_blah.exe". If you don't understand how people fall for this, you grossly overestimate the averge net user.
One thing i will say is that you should give day trading / spread betting a go. It will really test your nerve and help you decide if you really want to go ahead with this
This is good advice, though I'd recommend playing with small stakes since both activities can chew you up and spit you out in double-quick time. If you're in a country where you are allowed access (which, unfortunately, exludes the US) I'd also recommend an account on Betfair. A UK horserace in the ten minutes before the off shows more activity than a stock market does all day. Ideal if you want to get your feet wet taking a position and looking to trade out.
With all due respect, anyone who thinks they have a 'sure thing' can't be that clever or intelligent. If it was a sure thing, you wouldn't get odds. I bet fairly regularly on betfair, and during in-play sports events you see at least one 1.01 shot (odds of 1/100 - bet £100 to win £1) get beaten per week. The trick is to be a good judge of value, and pick the bets that represent good value - if you can do this, it is perfectly possible to make a profit. For instance, if I was able to back heads on a coin toss at odds slightly longer than evens, then over time I would make money (assuming the coin wasn't rigged), as I would win and lose a roughly equal number of times but each win would give me more money than each loss took away.
2 very good questions. Firstly, the company didn't need a board of directors, but as I said, it was a family business - hence nepotism was rife. When the founder sold out (for about 10 million quid - not bad), one of his sons stayed on and hired a bunch of his mates into well-paid sinecures. The vast majority of the employees were clock-punchers who were there to pick up a weekly paycheque for menial work. The IT department, of which I was part, consisted of four people (including my idiot boss) and was by no manner or means the core of the company's business. On top of that, the company got much of its business by having extremely good contacts (at least one senior manager was there purely because he had previously had a good working relationship with a key decision maker at a big potential client). Finally, it was very much a niche market, and with just 50 employees and a bunch of on-the-road contractors the company was a very big fish in a very small pond.
In other words, setting up in competition would not be easy - and in fact, it's not a trade I'd want to work in anyway; I took the gig because I was young and they were prepared to hire me at what felt at the time like a big salary (I was a freshly-hatched graduate looking to get my start). Taught me a valuable lesson about being a greedy sod, that did. Incidentally, one upwardly-mobile employee did have a go at doing it himself - after becoming a (very) minor celebrity after featuring on a TV documentary, he tried to set up on his own and use his name to drum up business and maybe nab a few clients. After a fairly successful couple of months, however, he dropped off the radar - presumably the money ran out.
So much bollocks. My last job was at a small, family-owned company (50 employees). Most of the staff were treated like cattle by overbearing board members who paid peanuts whilst pocketing artifically-inflated salaries themselves. To a man they drove Mercs, BMWs, and Bentleys; to a man they had personalised number plates. They pissed off the local community (a small, pretty town in Hertfordshire) by buying out the lease from the only local library and using it as a training centre for contracted security staff. My boss, in particular, was an ill-educated bully with *absolutely no* qualifications at all (not even GCSEs - in fact he was only just above the literacy line, and had a secretary purely to read anything more complicated that a 5-line email for him), who owed his position and authority to a combination of luck and stomach-turning obsequiousness to those on the board. Finally, clients (typically local councils and magistrates' courts) were treated like pond scum and routinely told what was good for them, even when it was crystal clear that the opposite was true. And yet, at the time I left, the company had been growing an average of 30% year-on-year for about 4 years.
I have no great love for mega-corporations - my current employer has about 700 staff, and I chose to work there specifically because the company visibly behaves ethically in an industry full of cowboys - but to claim that all large corporations are evil and all small businesses are automatically socially-responsible good-eggs is astonishingly naive. From experience, I know that there are successful small businesses out there who are about as pleasant as a viper nest and will pillage your wallet with as much gusto as any convicted monopolist you care to mention.
The human creature was not made for this. We were made for the occasional hunt, some fruit picking, some tuber digging, some fishing and a little shelter fabrication & repair. That's it. The rest of the time is supposed to be just hangin out with friends and family, singing, telling stories and jokes, trying out random ideas, traveling, staring into the sky, etc.,. Man, we have to get back to what we were built for.
Utter nonsense. If you think pre-civilisation man had an easy time of it just chilling out and relaxing rather than, say, being hungry most of the time and every day being a long, hard, graft to find food, with starvation the penalty for failure, then you have no comprehension of our past at all. The only reason humans ever had time to do all the things you mention is because of the time saved by agriculture and farming, not in spite of it.
On top of that, I've got no intention whatsoever of wasting my life being an idle layabout. You can sit there staring at the fucking sky for the rest of your life - I'm (metaphorically) busy trying to work out how to go there for real.
I get what you're saying, but calling javascript a 'basic' language is a little unfair. Writing webpages holds no interest for me at all, but I've recently reacquainted myself with javascript whilst writing a few Konfabulator widgets as visualisation concepts at work, and it's not half bad. First-class functions, anonymous functions, prototype classes, closures, convenient list/dictionary syntax, regexes - I was pleasantly surprised. It certainly gave me all the tools I needed to do what I wanted, even with quite an elegant design. The Konfabulator environment also provides an XmlHttp object (obviously) and XPath access to XML documents.
I use C# and python professionally and like to hack in Haskell in my own time, so wasn't anticipating a good time with js, but I quite like it. Of course, using Konfabulator means I don't have to deal with the myriad inconsistencies between different browsers and stuff, which would no doubt sour anyone's opinion.
So what was your point again ?
That, given prices haven't gone down, XP is not in an open market with competition. Because of MS' monopoly.
So, what was your point again?
Really? A trade secret is more important than the Right of Free Speech? Really?
Try this on for size..... The general public is protected by the leakage or the leakage is in the general public's interest because the ability to leak re-affirms the general public's Right of Free Speech.
Granting non-living entities rights&priviledges that superceed my rights is a bad&dangerous thing to do.
Ridiculous. Free speech is not an absolute, no matter how much some people like to tell themselves. Go call in a couple of fake bomb threats, shout "fire!" in a crowded theatre, publish the details of a few people on witness protection programmes, leak the specs to some military research, and then see how far the "free speech" defence gets you.
Free speech comes with responsibilities, it's not carte blanche to go blabbing all over the place. If you sign a legal document promising not to talk about something and you then go and do exactly that, you can expect to be sued unless you are revealing illegal behaviour, as covered by whistleblowing laws. To claim a minor Apple product is covered by this is immature extremism.
(My elementary school principal used to tell me, "It takes two to make a fight!" What bullshit.)
The only reasonable response to this sort of nonsense is to punch the idiot in the face. At least you know they can't hit you back without incriminating themselves.
I used to write PocketPC software at my last job, and ActiveSync would bluescreen my XP dev box every two weeks or so. Really annoying, especially as W2K didn't crash once in over two years doing the exact same tasks on the same hardware. Stupid mandatory 'upgrades'...
Hey, so, what's the going rate these days for shills? MS obviously don't have high standards for their paid stooges, and I could do with a little extra spare cash.
I don't believe I was a good programmer until I learned NOT to think like a computer. High level languages let you accomplish a great deal with very clear and concise code, but it is hard to write clean code if you look at a problem and try to solve it by thinking "what does the computer need to do".
This is a key point. One of the principle benefits of functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml is that they allow you to express what you want to do, rather than how to do it. You don't write for loops to process a list, you just specify an operation and a list and it gets done for you; no need to worry about how the list is traversed, or how the returned list (containing the results) was created, allocated, and populated. Python and ruby are starting to bring these ideas a little more into the mainstream (python's list comprehensions are especially nice, lifted right out of Haskell). Granted there are occasions when you really need to micro-manage how something gets done, but in normal application development it's exceedingly rare.
No buddy, I was aiming my attack directly at your innability to code at home without surfing the web while you should be coding!
What makes you think I can't code effectively at home? I think you're referring to somebody else, as that was my first post in the thread. I've telecommuted before, I don't rate it - as a lead dev I need to do a lot more than write code, and I find it much more efficient to be in the office for when a bug shows up that is difficult to describe but easy to demonstrate, or when I need to speak to a wide range of people to understand and estimate the impact of a requirements change, and so on. And IM is no replacement for getting a bunch of devs in a meeting room with coffee and sandwiches, and thrashing out a first-cut design around a whiteboard. I've tried using whiteboard software, and without exception they were all crap.
I guess if you have no responsibilities other than churning out cookie-cutter code to a spec, then the above is not a problem.
I just have discipline to do the work I'm paid to do
Unfortunately, such self-effacing claptrap rings hollow when your last post mostly consisted of boasting about your alleged salary and accusing everyone who works in an office of being outdated. Yay for you, but none of us care a jot.
The only way the USA will die is if the government weighs down capitalism (also known as "freedom") so much that it can't function anymore (like, say, France with their insane worker policies). Unfortunately, we've been on that road for awhile, but it seems to ebb and flow. I'm fairly confident that we'll never get full-blown socialism. As long as we stay away from that, the US will live forever.
You're being funny, right? The US has only existed for a coupla hundred years, and been a global power for less than a hundred. Compared to the empires of the past, all of which eventually fell, the US hasn't even reached adolescence. To say it will stay the course at this stage is astonishingly short-sighted, especially considering the growing influence of China.
If I monitor the communications of a military unit and suddenly find a spike in message traffic, that's a pretty good indicator that something is going on. Anticipating that this might indicate imminent maneuvers from that unit, I might step up alertness of my own forces in the area and send out more scouts than usual. If the unit I monitor uses random noise to throw off traffic analysis, I will not have this information and so will be none the wiser.
Nice idea, but too easy to exploit by whoever's being monitored. If I was your enemy and believed you would react to a comms spike, I deliberately *wouldn't* swamp my messages in noise - I'd simply have another unrelated unit start sending me twenty weather reports a day instead of one, and while you were busy investigating this increase in activity I'd send a pigeon to notify the real unit to start manoeuvres. Trying to infer my plans by simple frequencies would just result in an impenetrable game of double-bluff, and all the while you'd be no closer to actually reading my messages.
The design of an encryption system itself -- as in the algorithm or device used for encipherment -- doesn't make it more or less resistant to traffic analysis. You could be using one-time pads, essentially unbreakable encryption, and still be vunerable to traffic analysis if you were using it poorly.
:-) To continue Schneier's safe analogy, if I handed over the keys as well, then obviously you'd be able to read the letter.
Ah, well, with the disclaimer you've added at the end there, all bets are off
A good crypto system would not involve the transmission of any information that might help decrypt the message. This being the case, embedding it in a stream of gibberish will not help, because there's nothing to hide, and traffic analysis would therefore be futile. Using it poorly, as you point out, is likely to lead to failure, but that isn't the fault of the crypto system. If I'm using a one-time pad correctly, keeping the keys utterly private, using each key once and only once, and destroying them after use, then you can analyse my messages as much as you want, and you won't get anywhere, regardless of whether I obscure my message with line noise.
"If I take a letter, lock it in a safe, hide the safe somewhere in New York, then tell you to read the letter, that's not security. Thats obscurity. On the other hand, if I take a letter and lock it in a safe, and give you the safe along with the design specifications of the safe and a hundred identical safes with their combinations so that you and the worlds best safecrackers can study the locking mechanism - and you still can't open the safe and read the letter - thats security." Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier.
A really good crypto system wouldn't need to be embedded in a stream of gibberish to interfere with traffic analysis, as it would be impervious to traffic analysis anyway.
Snow Crash involves basically some lame hacker trying to prevent a very mild social re-ordering (the mass killing of a few thousand programmers) at the hands of some media tycoon. Woopee.
Yes, once you take out the fascinating conjecture about Sumerian culture, the origin of language, the nature of the relationship between language and the structure of the brain's neural pathways, the implied parallel of said relationship with that between a programming language and a computer, the concept of a dual-purpose (human/computer) virus that arises from such a parallel, and the attempted consolidation of parts of most of the world's major religions - as well as the simple fact that NS's writing style is a joy to read - it was just a lame story about some media tycoon. Talk about missing the point.
Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?
It can only be 'wankr's - http://www.parm.net/web2.0/