Remember that sales people typically make percentages based on sales. You don't get that percentage until you ship. So you get a lot of pressure to deliver quickly. And you can't do security in a rush. Typically your engineering head will do a security assessment and sales will go over it (usually in a series of small hops and jumps) and then ship anyways, because that's how they get paid. They'll have engineering bang out patches later on. If anyone complains.
Bottom line is that engineers don't get to make these kinds of decisions usually.
Lose the Yahoo toolbar installation on your installer. It's unprofessional and it makes you look desperate. It makes you look like you're selling screen savers or clipart. In the 90's. So stop it.
And don't forget those sea cucumbers that live near volcanic vents! They can survive in boiling sulfurous water. We could never do that, so clearly they are superior.
Ok kidding aside. We simply don't have that skillset anymore - we don't need it. But we are smart enough to make an aluminum bag and land it on the moon. Soon as we find a Neanderthal skeleton on the moon I'll be convinced of their superiority.
Everything is relative. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a brown dwarf heading somewhat in the correct direction. You'd have to spend some fuel to match the trajectory, but with judicious selection you could minimize that.
I absolutely would not build such a device for Nazis, zombies, or Independence Day aliens. Ok? I just said it is a neato gadget that solves a complex math problem quickly.
Bankers and lawyers and the like are still human beings. Pretty much. I don't see any ethical problems working for those guys.
Now granted if some banker hired me to make a widget like this and said "Hey, we're going to use this gadget to more effectively screw people over and force them into foreclosure with a special emphasis on orphans and war widows" I'd pass and go do something else.
All this gizmo does is financial analysis. And maybe with faster and better analysis we could avoid the next housing crisis or some such. A super fast financial simulation might have predicted the last mess we got in, you know.
I would positively love to do something like this. The purpose of an engineer is to solve problems. That's what makes me happy at work. Solving problems. So here you have a very specific problem that required the construction of a custom computer made out of banks of FPGAs. Tell me that's not sexy! Who cares if it's for bankers. That is a damn nifty gadget to work on building.
Imagine building it yourself. Switching networks, Linux on ARM cores peppered here and there coordinating and dumping program code to the FPGA banks, writing the drivers to grab the data once the run is completed...
And at the end of the day a problem solved: What once took all day now takes a couple of minutes.
This would have been a thoroughly nifty machine to work on.
Do it outdoors in your backyard. And set up a big fan with some oomph behind you. Doing this kind of thing in an enclosed space (on a limited budget anyways) is asking for it.
Probably be a good idea to use at least a disposable mask of some kind too, to pick up any stragglers.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse.
I set up an android dev station once out of curiosity. Ran a hello world program. My machine was mediocre, dual core intel, nothing fancy. And I didn't get this huge delay.
Maybe you should take another poke at it. I don't know what could be causing your hang problem but it doesn't jive with my experience.
Thing the first: In TFA, they tested this with brain cancer tumors transplanted onto mice, and the result was a 100% cure. Full remission.
Second thing: If this takes billions of cancer cells and reduces that number to a few hundred, then it's a treatment and not a cure. But still would be massively useful.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. The only reason this guy is complaining about the obnoxious potheads is because it's the obnoxious ones you notice. Potheads that pay taxes and go to work? No way to notice those ones because by definition they're not making a fuss.
I can't blame him though because that's what the media does these days. Take a loud and obnoxious example and parade it around as if it were the norm. All Christians are like Fred Phelps. All people on the right are like Rush Limbaugh. All people on the left are in PETA and are naked in cages protesting animal cruelty. You know - whatever makes good news.
But I will say this: I used to smoke decades ago so I'm familiar with the culture. I think that guy would be absolutely horrified to know how many people around him are high. Horrified.
Yes, I suppose "you can find people in all fields who do this sort of thing" would have been a better phrasing. All I really meant to say is that IT is hardly alone when it comes to corporate revenge. It's just that IT people who do this are more newsworthy.
My guess why is because most people are pretty close to helpless when it comes to deeper computer issues and it's a kind of nagging boogeyman fear they all have. The evil IT guy, looking at your bank account and reading your email and browsing through your folders to see what kind of porn you like. Your secrets aren't safe - Boo!
Pretty standard journalism these days, fear-mongering. A guy gets a suspended sentence and some community service for a prank and it's national news.
Nope, customers didn't know they were screwed until a few days later when the delivery trucks didn't show up. We did our best to refund these people after liquidation, but we couldn't get everyone. There just simply wasn't enough cash.
I was the IT guy for a company that did company restructuring, or failing that, liquidation. If you've ever been to Ohio and you're the right age you'll remember Carpet Barn and Tile House. I was the guy who liquidated their technical assets. That's a fancy way of saying the boss gave me a truck and a map and said "if it's worth more than 2 cents and plugs into something, put it on the truck." So I got to see every single Carpet Barn.
Now to be fair, they closed very suddenly. It was a Thursday. Workers showed up to locked doors. Salesmen had taken down payments from customers the previous day. The money was lost and never refunded, people didn't get their carpet. It was a bad scene.
You should have seen these places.
Workers opened up the doors with bolt cutters and trashed every single outlet. Holes kicked in the walls, refrigerators turned over, coffee pots smashed into copiers. Office furniture beaten into splinters. Carpet rolls thrown everywhere. Every store looked like the scene of a riot.
They have a right to say that. It doesn't have to be true, they're just hoping the plaintiff will say "Oh I see, well nevermind then" and back off.
It's like how you see those signs on trucks that say "Not responsible for objects coming off the road." Or signs in parking lots saying "Not responsible for any damage to your vehicle." Or at the park "Not responsible for any missing or stolen items."
They want you to believe that so you don't sue. When honestly it's up to the judge to determine if they are responsible or not. But if they can bluff you into not asking, bravo for them.
I'm sorry that he messed up one of your favorites, though. I can understand that sentiment.
Indeed. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the look of the movie. It looks right. Mostly. But none of the characters do anything that makes sense. The weirding way being projectile voice boxes? If that's all they are then anyone can have them. The Emperor wouldn't have attacked the Atreides, he would have spied on them and stolen the secret. Why blow up something that useful? Why would Chani have helped Paul take the water of life? She knows it's fatal to men. She wouldn't do that to her lover - no way! In the book Paul snuck away and did it on his own. And reverend mothers do not have telepathy! If they could read minds the empire would be a different place completely. Kinda hard to have double agents like Dr. Yueh running around if you have a race of telepathic women hanging around all the royal courts, right?
And that final scene! Rain on Dune because Paul really is a messenger of God. Wrong on so many levels. Paul was no such thing. He was simply manipulating a simple people by knowing their legends, legends that the Bene Gesserit planted eons ago as a lever to move them should such a need arise. It is a 100% rewrite of the character. And it makes no sense! In the extended version of Lynch's film they show a worm being poisoned with water to make the water of life. So. If it is established that water is toxic to the worms, and Paul makes it rain...what happens to the worms? They die, the spice dies with them, and the empire is doomed to a slow strangling death because the guild dies as well and interstellar transport becomes impossible. Nice work, messenger of God. You just doomed everyone.
This is what I am talking about with the word tapestry. Pull one thread and the whole thing falls apart. You said it yourself, Lynch is an artist. Not a storyteller. Frank is the storyteller.
And we agree on Lynch being a autocrat. That bio my wife had me read confirms it. Towards the end Frank just shrugged his shoulders and said "do whatever you want I don't care anymore I've already been paid" and that's why the film doesn't make any sense. It is a lovely acid trip on film but conveys very little of the story. The only real plus I'll give it is that it made me go buy the book so I could try to figure out what the hell it was that I had just seen.
I can dig it that you don't like his style. It's not for everyone. I like it, but then again I think the Silmarillion is Tolkien's best work. I like things to be...well, grand. Frank and Prof. Tolkien are grand. And they both deserve better than Lynch and Jackson gave them. These truncated stories with frayed ends dangling that don't join up just seriously annoys the piss out of me.
You can't possibly have the same opinion as him because his critique was a comparison of the movie versus the novel. If you haven't read the novel, you have no basis for comparison.
He took some rather pedestrian purple prose and turned it into an expressionist nightmare with some indelible imagery.
He did nothing of the sort. He took a book that was a perfectly woven tapestry covering a half a dozen simultaneous themes and turned it into a nonsensical comic book. When I saw Dune in the theaters I wanted to know just what the hell it was that I just saw. Went out, bought the book, and fell in love with it.
My wife is an English major. One of the books she was assigned to read was a "behind the scenes" book about major science fiction movies and their production. Dune was in there. In one version of the script Paul and Jessica were to have an incestuous affair. Salvador Dali was almost cast as Emperor Shaddam. Frank Herbert eventually just threw up his hands and said "do whatever the hell you want I don't care anymore." So, no. This movie is a quilt of spare parts and committee ideas, a pile of leftover crusts Hollywood left on the floor and decided were fit for public consumption. That's how it was made. It's a fact. If you liked it - that's fine. De gustibus non disputandum est. But don't knock the book. It's the deepest thing I've ever read.
BTW, never read the Silmarillion. It's not for you.
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Remember that sales people typically make percentages based on sales. You don't get that percentage until you ship. So you get a lot of pressure to deliver quickly. And you can't do security in a rush. Typically your engineering head will do a security assessment and sales will go over it (usually in a series of small hops and jumps) and then ship anyways, because that's how they get paid. They'll have engineering bang out patches later on. If anyone complains.
Bottom line is that engineers don't get to make these kinds of decisions usually.
True. I despise that one as well.
Lose the Yahoo toolbar installation on your installer. It's unprofessional and it makes you look desperate. It makes you look like you're selling screen savers or clipart. In the 90's. So stop it.
Well I'm questioning your questioning of his questioning!
I can't help myself, I'm a Lisp programmer and this level of nesting is compulsory for me.
Murdoch is hoping that if enough heads roll, one of them won't be his. If the mob is satisfied before they get to him, he escapes with impunity.
And don't forget those sea cucumbers that live near volcanic vents! They can survive in boiling sulfurous water. We could never do that, so clearly they are superior.
Ok kidding aside. We simply don't have that skillset anymore - we don't need it. But we are smart enough to make an aluminum bag and land it on the moon. Soon as we find a Neanderthal skeleton on the moon I'll be convinced of their superiority.
Everything is relative. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a brown dwarf heading somewhat in the correct direction. You'd have to spend some fuel to match the trajectory, but with judicious selection you could minimize that.
GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013.
A couple of years now. Just like cheap solar panels and sustainable fusion and the replacement for the space shuttle. Just a couple more years now.
How about you call us when it's working?
Seriously, stop telling us what you are going to do. Instead tell us what you have done. One is impressive and the other is not.
I absolutely would not build such a device for Nazis, zombies, or Independence Day aliens. Ok? I just said it is a neato gadget that solves a complex math problem quickly.
Bankers and lawyers and the like are still human beings. Pretty much. I don't see any ethical problems working for those guys.
Now granted if some banker hired me to make a widget like this and said "Hey, we're going to use this gadget to more effectively screw people over and force them into foreclosure with a special emphasis on orphans and war widows" I'd pass and go do something else.
All this gizmo does is financial analysis. And maybe with faster and better analysis we could avoid the next housing crisis or some such. A super fast financial simulation might have predicted the last mess we got in, you know.
I would positively love to do something like this. The purpose of an engineer is to solve problems. That's what makes me happy at work. Solving problems. So here you have a very specific problem that required the construction of a custom computer made out of banks of FPGAs. Tell me that's not sexy! Who cares if it's for bankers. That is a damn nifty gadget to work on building.
Imagine building it yourself. Switching networks, Linux on ARM cores peppered here and there coordinating and dumping program code to the FPGA banks, writing the drivers to grab the data once the run is completed...
And at the end of the day a problem solved: What once took all day now takes a couple of minutes.
This would have been a thoroughly nifty machine to work on.
Do it outdoors in your backyard. And set up a big fan with some oomph behind you. Doing this kind of thing in an enclosed space (on a limited budget anyways) is asking for it.
Probably be a good idea to use at least a disposable mask of some kind too, to pick up any stragglers.
I'm developing an Android app; doing it exclusively on my own device; have tried the emulator but it is so slow! Takes some 10-15 minutes just to start up, and then literally minutes to start running my app after starting it out of Eclipse.
I set up an android dev station once out of curiosity. Ran a hello world program. My machine was mediocre, dual core intel, nothing fancy. And I didn't get this huge delay.
Maybe you should take another poke at it. I don't know what could be causing your hang problem but it doesn't jive with my experience.
Thing the first: In TFA, they tested this with brain cancer tumors transplanted onto mice, and the result was a 100% cure. Full remission.
Second thing: If this takes billions of cancer cells and reduces that number to a few hundred, then it's a treatment and not a cure. But still would be massively useful.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. The only reason this guy is complaining about the obnoxious potheads is because it's the obnoxious ones you notice. Potheads that pay taxes and go to work? No way to notice those ones because by definition they're not making a fuss.
I can't blame him though because that's what the media does these days. Take a loud and obnoxious example and parade it around as if it were the norm. All Christians are like Fred Phelps. All people on the right are like Rush Limbaugh. All people on the left are in PETA and are naked in cages protesting animal cruelty. You know - whatever makes good news.
But I will say this: I used to smoke decades ago so I'm familiar with the culture. I think that guy would be absolutely horrified to know how many people around him are high. Horrified.
Yes, I suppose "you can find people in all fields who do this sort of thing" would have been a better phrasing. All I really meant to say is that IT is hardly alone when it comes to corporate revenge. It's just that IT people who do this are more newsworthy.
My guess why is because most people are pretty close to helpless when it comes to deeper computer issues and it's a kind of nagging boogeyman fear they all have. The evil IT guy, looking at your bank account and reading your email and browsing through your folders to see what kind of porn you like. Your secrets aren't safe - Boo!
Pretty standard journalism these days, fear-mongering. A guy gets a suspended sentence and some community service for a prank and it's national news.
Nope, customers didn't know they were screwed until a few days later when the delivery trucks didn't show up. We did our best to refund these people after liquidation, but we couldn't get everyone. There just simply wasn't enough cash.
It's not an IT thing. Everyone does this.
I was the IT guy for a company that did company restructuring, or failing that, liquidation. If you've ever been to Ohio and you're the right age you'll remember Carpet Barn and Tile House. I was the guy who liquidated their technical assets. That's a fancy way of saying the boss gave me a truck and a map and said "if it's worth more than 2 cents and plugs into something, put it on the truck." So I got to see every single Carpet Barn.
Now to be fair, they closed very suddenly. It was a Thursday. Workers showed up to locked doors. Salesmen had taken down payments from customers the previous day. The money was lost and never refunded, people didn't get their carpet. It was a bad scene.
You should have seen these places.
Workers opened up the doors with bolt cutters and trashed every single outlet. Holes kicked in the walls, refrigerators turned over, coffee pots smashed into copiers. Office furniture beaten into splinters. Carpet rolls thrown everywhere. Every store looked like the scene of a riot.
Please don't feed the troll.
Now send yours. Click the "inviting public comments" link above and email the patent office. There is an address in the link.
It's one thing to sit and bitch about the state of things. You have an opportunity to fix it, right now.
So do so. Be heard!
Oblig.
They have a right to say that. It doesn't have to be true, they're just hoping the plaintiff will say "Oh I see, well nevermind then" and back off.
It's like how you see those signs on trucks that say "Not responsible for objects coming off the road." Or signs in parking lots saying "Not responsible for any damage to your vehicle." Or at the park "Not responsible for any missing or stolen items."
They want you to believe that so you don't sue. When honestly it's up to the judge to determine if they are responsible or not. But if they can bluff you into not asking, bravo for them.
No, the error is included for backwards compatibility to early Pentium processors. Linux NEVER abandons a platform.
I'm sorry that he messed up one of your favorites, though. I can understand that sentiment.
Indeed. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the look of the movie. It looks right. Mostly. But none of the characters do anything that makes sense. The weirding way being projectile voice boxes? If that's all they are then anyone can have them. The Emperor wouldn't have attacked the Atreides, he would have spied on them and stolen the secret. Why blow up something that useful? Why would Chani have helped Paul take the water of life? She knows it's fatal to men. She wouldn't do that to her lover - no way! In the book Paul snuck away and did it on his own. And reverend mothers do not have telepathy! If they could read minds the empire would be a different place completely. Kinda hard to have double agents like Dr. Yueh running around if you have a race of telepathic women hanging around all the royal courts, right?
And that final scene! Rain on Dune because Paul really is a messenger of God. Wrong on so many levels. Paul was no such thing. He was simply manipulating a simple people by knowing their legends, legends that the Bene Gesserit planted eons ago as a lever to move them should such a need arise. It is a 100% rewrite of the character. And it makes no sense! In the extended version of Lynch's film they show a worm being poisoned with water to make the water of life. So. If it is established that water is toxic to the worms, and Paul makes it rain...what happens to the worms? They die, the spice dies with them, and the empire is doomed to a slow strangling death because the guild dies as well and interstellar transport becomes impossible. Nice work, messenger of God. You just doomed everyone.
This is what I am talking about with the word tapestry. Pull one thread and the whole thing falls apart. You said it yourself, Lynch is an artist. Not a storyteller. Frank is the storyteller.
And we agree on Lynch being a autocrat. That bio my wife had me read confirms it. Towards the end Frank just shrugged his shoulders and said "do whatever you want I don't care anymore I've already been paid" and that's why the film doesn't make any sense. It is a lovely acid trip on film but conveys very little of the story. The only real plus I'll give it is that it made me go buy the book so I could try to figure out what the hell it was that I had just seen.
I can dig it that you don't like his style. It's not for everyone. I like it, but then again I think the Silmarillion is Tolkien's best work. I like things to be...well, grand. Frank and Prof. Tolkien are grand. And they both deserve better than Lynch and Jackson gave them. These truncated stories with frayed ends dangling that don't join up just seriously annoys the piss out of me.
You can't possibly have the same opinion as him because his critique was a comparison of the movie versus the novel. If you haven't read the novel, you have no basis for comparison.
I'll probably get slammed for saying that
Yes. Yes you will. Starting now. ;)
He took some rather pedestrian purple prose and turned it into an expressionist nightmare with some indelible imagery.
He did nothing of the sort. He took a book that was a perfectly woven tapestry covering a half a dozen simultaneous themes and turned it into a nonsensical comic book. When I saw Dune in the theaters I wanted to know just what the hell it was that I just saw. Went out, bought the book, and fell in love with it.
My wife is an English major. One of the books she was assigned to read was a "behind the scenes" book about major science fiction movies and their production. Dune was in there. In one version of the script Paul and Jessica were to have an incestuous affair. Salvador Dali was almost cast as Emperor Shaddam. Frank Herbert eventually just threw up his hands and said "do whatever the hell you want I don't care anymore." So, no. This movie is a quilt of spare parts and committee ideas, a pile of leftover crusts Hollywood left on the floor and decided were fit for public consumption. That's how it was made. It's a fact. If you liked it - that's fine. De gustibus non disputandum est. But don't knock the book. It's the deepest thing I've ever read.
BTW, never read the Silmarillion. It's not for you.