All those things SHOULD be accounted for in the cost of an office visit. I'm aware that it costs alot of money to be a doctor, and the vast majority of the people I know in the medical profession are wonderful people. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems with the system.
Take a look at wxArt2D (which really should get merged into at least the contrib branch of wxWindows some day). It's a downright spiffy little library. I'm not sure if theres any Python bindings, though...
They didn't file any till 1995. Kinda clever, really - don't even bother patenting it untill you see if it's going to be popular. All the benefits of the submarine patent, but without the up front patent fee!
The people who this will mainly affect, and who the post is referring to, are the manufacturers of Flash and USB memory, which almost universally uses FAT. Not to mention all the devices which use those memory sticks, like every single digital camera out there. I think it's fair to say that most people who make Flash memory ship more than a million units of it.
I was referring to the tools used by developers to create packages (or installers), rather than the tools used by end-users. Creating and maintaining RPMs is a pain and theres nothing that matches NSIS or even InstallShield in the Linux world. And if there is, more people need to start using it:P
The 2 things I see missing for this are a front end that will do it and a way for the package to provide the location of a repository. That way an application that consists of multiple packages can also be distributed in a single click. With CDs this is possible right now, of course.
I thinking pushing this requirement to the packagers isn't too much to do. Apt should be able to handle this in it present form with minimal tweaking (probably all in the front end). You double click on the package, apt solves the dependencies, retrieves any missing ones from the normal apt mirror, and installs the app from the local file. This is almost identical to how the majority of (well-written) Windows installers work, except for the auto-downloading of dependencies. If the apt package format was expanded to allow the package to provide optional sources for packages (or bundling multiple packages into a single archive), then you've got everything you need for single-click install.
People talk alot about the ease of installation on Windows, but I think thats more a tribute to the existence of excellent, very user/developer friendly installer packaging tools than anything intrinsic to Windows.
How far do you think you'd get porting a proprietary terminal emulation package?
In any case, while I'm not familiar with that package (there are terminal emulators that run on windows, you know), projects with file counts in the hundreds are far from uncommon, and knowing how to familiarize yourself with the build system is a key part of being a programmer. You sound like someone whining about not being able to code because it's "too hard".
Porting an application to a totally different platform is rarely a trivial exercise. If you were expecting it to be, then it's no wonder that you didn't get what you wanted. OSS isn't some magic potion you can drink to get your software for free, and THAT is probably the most damaging preconception people have.
If we had trains that went 300mph it'd be alot more reasonable... but to get anything like large scale commuter rail in the US, we'd need to to change a LOT of things. And the railroad industry in the US is about as stodgy and resistant to change as you can possibly get.
Thankfully, despite the massive kind of corporate shielding we have in this country, covering your eyes and yelling "LA LA LA I SEE NOTHING! NOTHING!" is still not a valid legal defense.
Re:Common Sense
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You make an important point, and it's actually relevent to all procedures, not just security. If you want them to be followed and not evaded or ignored, then you need the following:
a) your procedures must make sense to your users. Sometimes this means education, other times (more often, in my experience) it means having intelligent procedures.
b) Your procedures have to generate the minimum amount of work required to be effective. Duplication of work or extra work that people have to do (like forcing a stupid click through quiz) without an obvious benefit will just piss people off. And when you piss people off, they don't feel like following your rules.
This doesn't mean you don't need strong rules, but you have to present them in such a manner that people feel comfortable with them, and not like you're being a bitchy secadmin.
Oh, and you need to remember that your job is to keep the network safe and clean so that it's accessible - just locking everything down so that everything is unusable is NOT a real security policy!
We're running into this problem where I work, where the security people got bitched out for something not really thier fault (infected laptop brought a virus onto the LAN, and a couple misconfigured machines got bit), and are responding by instituting a whole slew of moronic ideas. For example all (ALL) outgoing traffic is blocked by default, and you need a triplicate firewall request form for any outgoing traffic, and even thats restricted to a specific IP/port, and it takes a week to get the ports opened up anyway. Which would be fine except it's total overkill for our level of security, and doesn't protect us in any way because HTTP is allow, including downloading of executables and ActiveX and every other thing. All it does is piss off people like me who rely (or at least use) on IRC and NNTP for support.
Because there's a perception (that I have no reason to believe is false) that MIT graduates are among the most skilled and brightest people in thier field. Of course, if anything, people are learning that being skilled and bright is as much of a hindrence in the modern job market as it is a benefit - mediocre is good enough for almost everything.
This is not to say that Indian developers are mediocre, of course, most of the ones I've worked with are very skilled. It's simply rather depressing that the disparity in economies lets them be so much cheaper compared to US workers.
Maybe you should re-evaluate your knowledge of what an apple is and how it compares to an orange. A civil engineering degree has little or nothing to do with contractor work. I'd raise my eyebrows just as much if an architectural college hired an outside firm to design a new building, and then told students in a lecture that they based thier choice of firm on a Gartner report.
I bet a whole assload of people complained about it - everyone who lost a job because of it, for starters. And while I see very few Russian or Israeli H1-Bs, and very little outsourcing to that company, I see a very great deal of Indian H1-Bs and a very great deal of outsourcing to India. If you see more outsourcing to Europe, then you have my blessing to complain about that.
See, heres why it's funny. MIT is an engineering college. They're very famous and respected. However, even software enginerring graduates from MIT can have a hard time finding work in IT these days, because they expect (and often deserver) high salaries and the IT sector is very tight right now. One reason it's so tight is because alot of development is being outsourced to India, where it's cheaper.
So you've got one of the premier software development colleges in the country outsourcing it's software development work to India. It'd be like a medical school outsourcing it's health department.
You're incorrect - you could not be tried for, say, murder and then again for manslaughter if you were innocent. Thats why the DA will drop the charges or offer plea bargains and whatnot. You can be tried for RELATED charges, although it's far more common for them all the be part of the same trial. But you absolutely (in America) can not be tried for the same crime in the same court twice (sometimes you can be tried twice, once at federal level and once at state level, but thats also pretty rare and I'm not familiar with the details of when it's possible). You can be sued over and over again for the same thing, however. Civil court is a different buch of banannas.
It depends a very great deal on what a court decides "considerable effort" or "fincancial resources" are, and it may very well, particularly in a case by an individual against a corporation, side with the corporation simply because there were MORE resources put into it - if XYZ Corp spent 10 million and 10 man-years on it's database, you're going to have a hard time finding an individual who can meet that same standard. The wording of the bill makes it pretty clear to me that its mainly intended for use by corporate entities. In fact, I would doubt that even the authors of the bill would disagree with that - individuals and small buisnesses don't exactly have a huge problem keeping thier massive information databases secret.
Sa I truly, honestly, believe that black people are inferior to whites and therefore I, in my official capacity as a government employee, do my best to ensure that benefits and such go to white people and not black people. Should I be punished for what I believe in?
It doesn't matter if Diebold (insofar as there is a "Diebold" and not just a grouping of people) truly believes that it's DMCA takedown notices are a legitimate, honest use of the law, although I find it difficult to believe that - it's far more likely that they don't give two shits about the legitimacy of it, and instead are trying to supress information that makes them look bad in an utterly predictable corporate behavior. Thier ACTIONS are reprehensible, at least to me. Thier motives aren't really relevent.
Of course nobody is "forcing" the states to buy Diebolds machine - as in all to many cases in IT, the decision to do is being made by people unaware of the problems (and it's not like Diebold reps are going to volunteer them), and who're unfamiliar with the technology, and are otherwise not really qualified to make those kind of decisions. Thats not really related to Diebolds evilness (or lack thereof).
Certainly Diebold (as a company) is incompotent and of shady ethics. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say thats as far as it goes, and that they aren't trying to get rigged systems into place - but just barely. So many of the "features" of Diebold systems have no use I can think of except to rig sytems - in any case, intentional rigging aside, the security and integrity of the voting process was clearly not a priority at Diebold. Further, Diebold employees and reps are aware of that (they can hardly fail to be), but are willing to lie in order to thier paycheck. Depending on your viewpoint, that may or may not qualify as evil.
Please explain, then, without contradicting yourself, why the military SHOULD have control over the accuracy of GPS (or GPS like systems), but NOT control over the world power grid? Or water supply? Or how about the internet?
Whe defines "bad guy" anyway? And remember that we aren't talking about US infrastructure here - what, say, a train company in Iraq (do they have trains in Iraq? Maybe oil drilling...) considers critical infrastructure and what the US military considers critical infrastructure are very different things.
If you're going to get all freaked out and scared because "the bad guys" might use something, you may as well just sit in your basement for the rest of your life.
SA is NOT neccesary, by any definition of the word. It was added to our existing GPS system because GPS was designed for and implemented by the US military and they wanted to maintain control over it. It's essentially a historical artifact. By no means is it a critical component of a positioning system, any more than Clipper was an essential component of a TV.
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All those things SHOULD be accounted for in the cost of an office visit. I'm aware that it costs alot of money to be a doctor, and the vast majority of the people I know in the medical profession are wonderful people. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems with the system.
So does mine, from Fleet. A nifty new feature is that I can now look at a scanned jpg of all my checks, too.
Take a look at wxArt2D (which really should get merged into at least the contrib branch of wxWindows some day). It's a downright spiffy little library. I'm not sure if theres any Python bindings, though...
They didn't file any till 1995. Kinda clever, really - don't even bother patenting it untill you see if it's going to be popular. All the benefits of the submarine patent, but without the up front patent fee!
The people who this will mainly affect, and who the post is referring to, are the manufacturers of Flash and USB memory, which almost universally uses FAT. Not to mention all the devices which use those memory sticks, like every single digital camera out there. I think it's fair to say that most people who make Flash memory ship more than a million units of it.
I was referring to the tools used by developers to create packages (or installers), rather than the tools used by end-users. Creating and maintaining RPMs is a pain and theres nothing that matches NSIS or even InstallShield in the Linux world. And if there is, more people need to start using it :P
Take a look at wxPython, for the sake of your Windows users. GTK on Windows is still horrid.
The 2 things I see missing for this are a front end that will do it and a way for the package to provide the location of a repository. That way an application that consists of multiple packages can also be distributed in a single click. With CDs this is possible right now, of course.
People talk alot about the ease of installation on Windows, but I think thats more a tribute to the existence of excellent, very user/developer friendly installer packaging tools than anything intrinsic to Windows.
The virus installs a DDOS zombie that attacks Spamhaus. It's not that Spamhaus got infected.
In any case, while I'm not familiar with that package (there are terminal emulators that run on windows, you know), projects with file counts in the hundreds are far from uncommon, and knowing how to familiarize yourself with the build system is a key part of being a programmer. You sound like someone whining about not being able to code because it's "too hard".
Porting an application to a totally different platform is rarely a trivial exercise. If you were expecting it to be, then it's no wonder that you didn't get what you wanted. OSS isn't some magic potion you can drink to get your software for free, and THAT is probably the most damaging preconception people have.
If we had trains that went 300mph it'd be alot more reasonable... but to get anything like large scale commuter rail in the US, we'd need to to change a LOT of things. And the railroad industry in the US is about as stodgy and resistant to change as you can possibly get.
Thankfully, despite the massive kind of corporate shielding we have in this country, covering your eyes and yelling "LA LA LA I SEE NOTHING! NOTHING!" is still not a valid legal defense.
a) your procedures must make sense to your users. Sometimes this means education, other times (more often, in my experience) it means having intelligent procedures.
b) Your procedures have to generate the minimum amount of work required to be effective. Duplication of work or extra work that people have to do (like forcing a stupid click through quiz) without an obvious benefit will just piss people off. And when you piss people off, they don't feel like following your rules.
This doesn't mean you don't need strong rules, but you have to present them in such a manner that people feel comfortable with them, and not like you're being a bitchy secadmin.
Oh, and you need to remember that your job is to keep the network safe and clean so that it's accessible - just locking everything down so that everything is unusable is NOT a real security policy!
We're running into this problem where I work, where the security people got bitched out for something not really thier fault (infected laptop brought a virus onto the LAN, and a couple misconfigured machines got bit), and are responding by instituting a whole slew of moronic ideas. For example all (ALL) outgoing traffic is blocked by default, and you need a triplicate firewall request form for any outgoing traffic, and even thats restricted to a specific IP/port, and it takes a week to get the ports opened up anyway. Which would be fine except it's total overkill for our level of security, and doesn't protect us in any way because HTTP is allow, including downloading of executables and ActiveX and every other thing. All it does is piss off people like me who rely (or at least use) on IRC and NNTP for support.
This is not to say that Indian developers are mediocre, of course, most of the ones I've worked with are very skilled. It's simply rather depressing that the disparity in economies lets them be so much cheaper compared to US workers.
Maybe you should re-evaluate your knowledge of what an apple is and how it compares to an orange. A civil engineering degree has little or nothing to do with contractor work. I'd raise my eyebrows just as much if an architectural college hired an outside firm to design a new building, and then told students in a lecture that they based thier choice of firm on a Gartner report.
I bet a whole assload of people complained about it - everyone who lost a job because of it, for starters. And while I see very few Russian or Israeli H1-Bs, and very little outsourcing to that company, I see a very great deal of Indian H1-Bs and a very great deal of outsourcing to India. If you see more outsourcing to Europe, then you have my blessing to complain about that.
So you've got one of the premier software development colleges in the country outsourcing it's software development work to India. It'd be like a medical school outsourcing it's health department.
You're incorrect - you could not be tried for, say, murder and then again for manslaughter if you were innocent. Thats why the DA will drop the charges or offer plea bargains and whatnot. You can be tried for RELATED charges, although it's far more common for them all the be part of the same trial. But you absolutely (in America) can not be tried for the same crime in the same court twice (sometimes you can be tried twice, once at federal level and once at state level, but thats also pretty rare and I'm not familiar with the details of when it's possible). You can be sued over and over again for the same thing, however. Civil court is a different buch of banannas.
It depends a very great deal on what a court decides "considerable effort" or "fincancial resources" are, and it may very well, particularly in a case by an individual against a corporation, side with the corporation simply because there were MORE resources put into it - if XYZ Corp spent 10 million and 10 man-years on it's database, you're going to have a hard time finding an individual who can meet that same standard. The wording of the bill makes it pretty clear to me that its mainly intended for use by corporate entities. In fact, I would doubt that even the authors of the bill would disagree with that - individuals and small buisnesses don't exactly have a huge problem keeping thier massive information databases secret.
It doesn't matter if Diebold (insofar as there is a "Diebold" and not just a grouping of people) truly believes that it's DMCA takedown notices are a legitimate, honest use of the law, although I find it difficult to believe that - it's far more likely that they don't give two shits about the legitimacy of it, and instead are trying to supress information that makes them look bad in an utterly predictable corporate behavior. Thier ACTIONS are reprehensible, at least to me. Thier motives aren't really relevent.
Certainly Diebold (as a company) is incompotent and of shady ethics. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say thats as far as it goes, and that they aren't trying to get rigged systems into place - but just barely. So many of the "features" of Diebold systems have no use I can think of except to rig sytems - in any case, intentional rigging aside, the security and integrity of the voting process was clearly not a priority at Diebold. Further, Diebold employees and reps are aware of that (they can hardly fail to be), but are willing to lie in order to thier paycheck. Depending on your viewpoint, that may or may not qualify as evil.
Whe defines "bad guy" anyway? And remember that we aren't talking about US infrastructure here - what, say, a train company in Iraq (do they have trains in Iraq? Maybe oil drilling...) considers critical infrastructure and what the US military considers critical infrastructure are very different things.
If you're going to get all freaked out and scared because "the bad guys" might use something, you may as well just sit in your basement for the rest of your life.
SA is NOT neccesary, by any definition of the word. It was added to our existing GPS system because GPS was designed for and implemented by the US military and they wanted to maintain control over it. It's essentially a historical artifact. By no means is it a critical component of a positioning system, any more than Clipper was an essential component of a TV.
I've always wondered why people who won't think twice about dosing a kid so he'll sit still in school will freak out when an adult smokes pot.