What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be "deem successes" and by whom? I could pick this apart in my sleep. Suffice it to say, that statement is ambiguous to the point of being worse than meaningless. It is laughable. Anyone naive enough to quote such a thing in their own material is equally laughable.
I seriously doubt that someone would look through 8,000 projects without any clear idea of what they were looking for. I'm sure if you read the actual study, you would see clear operative definitions and lots of information on how they were decided. It would help if the author of the article actually told us which study he was talking about so we could read it ourselves, though...:/
Was anyone else reminded of that SNL skit with the Obnoxious tech-support guy? I can't remember the name, ah well.
I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mindset of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users. After all, in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier.
I think this attitude is seen here on slashdot a lot, I see posts by people who feel they are entitled to set policy because they can implement policy at the touch of a few buttons. But that's asinine, policy should be made by people paid to set policy. The IT person's job is to implement policy on a technological level.
Daniel Steel and Tom Clancy are surely the saviors of civilization.
The standard of evidence is extremly high for libe
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
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· Score: 1
Kevin would need to prove beyond a resonable doubt that Markoff knew what he was printing was false. Absolutly false. Not iffy. Not unproven. False. Proving that would be extreemly difficult.
You know, I wonder. AFAIK, John Carmack was one of the ones at iD who was against growing the company too much (and this was one of the reasons Romero wanted to leave). I wonder if getting into all this rocket stuff would make him change his mind. Cars are one thing, but this stuff has to be expensive. A larger company would give him more money to spend on rocketry.
The problem is that the supposed 'safeguards' that protect our identity are so weak, and because 'identity' is over-relied on. Rather then having a single thing (our SSN, in this case) being used a better solution would to get a secure log-in to use when requesting credit and banking services. That's really the only thing that a cross-organization identity is needed for (getting a credit rating)
As for everyone having their fingerprints registered, well, I would guess most Americans would rather have a few criminals go free then knowing the government has their fingerprints stored in a database somewhere...
I recently went into get a state ID after, erm, my suspended drivers license got confiscated when I was stopped for speeding.
Anyway, here in Iowa they stopped putting SSNs on Driver's licenses. It used to be an option. If you didn't want your SSN on the drivers license, they would give you an ID number. Now they won't even let you put your Social Security number on it. The idea is cut down on Identity theft. Social security numbers are really becoming unpopular for identification.
Retnal scans, for example, could be used to filter out suspects by race
Well, iris scans would let you check eyecolor, but we arn't talking about iris canners, we are talking about retnal scanners. And lots of white people have brown eyes, and lots of latinos have green or blue eyes. Eye color is not a good indicator of race.
A retnal scan dosn't tell you anything about someone's eyesight.
Actually, it's kind of interesting. The Spanish just inter-bread with everyone, which is why south and central America are full of 'Hispanic' people. You also need to realize that England attitude changed a lot after the revolutionary war.
England changed their minds later, but they were the ones who really got the whole thing going, in order to build their sugar holdings in Jamaica and such.
But they certainly got better later. One telling difference in attitude was the attitude to native-Americans compared with the nascent US government. The UK looked at the Indians as being 'subjects of the king', and therefore deserving of rights, while the US just looked at them as savages to be wiped out. If the US lost the revolutionary war, the Indians would have been a hell of a lot better off, that's for sure.
Unless you count things like bribery and corruption. I'm not saying the Japanese are particularly corrupt or anything, but 'violent' crime there is very low.
Big corps do this kind of thing all the time, commission a study and throw out the results if they don't like 'em.
It's actually important for a company to know these things for their internal decision making but if the study's result doesn't support them no one else would ever know. It's a pretty bad way of doing science, because even if the individual researchers aren't biased and use a good methodology the overall results made public end up being way out of whack.
The same thing happens in benchmarking all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
You steal my tires. Can you come and steal them back? I dunno, most people would say you could.
But that dosn't mean you could steal my whole car...
What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be "deem successes" and by whom? I could pick this apart in my sleep. Suffice it to say, that statement is ambiguous to the point of being worse than meaningless. It is laughable. Anyone naive enough to quote such a thing in their own material is equally laughable.
:/
I seriously doubt that someone would look through 8,000 projects without any clear idea of what they were looking for. I'm sure if you read the actual study, you would see clear operative definitions and lots of information on how they were decided. It would help if the author of the article actually told us which study he was talking about so we could read it ourselves, though...
Was anyone else reminded of that SNL skit with the Obnoxious tech-support guy? I can't remember the name, ah well.
I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mindset of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users. After all, in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier.
I think this attitude is seen here on slashdot a lot, I see posts by people who feel they are entitled to set policy because they can implement policy at the touch of a few buttons. But that's asinine, policy should be made by people paid to set policy. The IT person's job is to implement policy on a technological level.
Daniel Steel and Tom Clancy are surely the saviors of civilization.
Kevin would need to prove beyond a resonable doubt that Markoff knew what he was printing was false. Absolutly false. Not iffy. Not unproven. False. Proving that would be extreemly difficult.
Was your life ruined when you lost your credit card? Should the life of the man who took it be ruined as well?
Punishments should be in proportion to the crime
They really should set up some other system then the moderation to decide what questions can be answered.
For one thing, the vast majority of people have no say, which is kind of annoying.
That can be bought and sold, it's just a group of hobbyists.
You know, I wonder. AFAIK, John Carmack was one of the ones at iD who was against growing the company too much (and this was one of the reasons Romero wanted to leave). I wonder if getting into all this rocket stuff would make him change his mind. Cars are one thing, but this stuff has to be expensive. A larger company would give him more money to spend on rocketry.
A windows program with the MFC libs staticaly linked comes in at a whopping 170k, if memory serves. 1/10th the size of a floppy.
Because god damn, interleaving the sprites on diffrent frames was annoying as hell.
Oh god. 20k!
Nevermind the fact that word stores tons of metadata with your document. It's not like a four word document takes 40k or anything.
I think... it was because it sucked, maybe?
I don't read very many AC comments, unless they are direct replies to mine.
Experienced HTML Programmer looking for part-time work
Wow, that's pretty impressive, considering that HTML isn't a programming language.
Or is the first 'click me' somewhat, erm, pornographic? Certanly the second type of creature seems to be a giant penis with feet and tiny balls.
And, it's not using Ascii, as there are no japanese characters in acii.
Down with ascii and romantic elitism! Unicode for the web, Unicode for email, unicode FOREVER!
Well, it would make things more convenient.
Managed to get a Driver's License with just his name on it. No picture, no SSN or address. So it's possible in at least one state to do that.
The problem is that the supposed 'safeguards' that protect our identity are so weak, and because 'identity' is over-relied on. Rather then having a single thing (our SSN, in this case) being used a better solution would to get a secure log-in to use when requesting credit and banking services. That's really the only thing that a cross-organization identity is needed for (getting a credit rating)
As for everyone having their fingerprints registered, well, I would guess most Americans would rather have a few criminals go free then knowing the government has their fingerprints stored in a database somewhere...
I recently went into get a state ID after, erm, my suspended drivers license got confiscated when I was stopped for speeding.
Anyway, here in Iowa they stopped putting SSNs on Driver's licenses. It used to be an option. If you didn't want your SSN on the drivers license, they would give you an ID number. Now they won't even let you put your Social Security number on it. The idea is cut down on Identity theft. Social security numbers are really becoming unpopular for identification.
Retnal scans, for example, could be used to filter out suspects by race
Well, iris scans would let you check eyecolor, but we arn't talking about iris canners, we are talking about retnal scanners. And lots of white people have brown eyes, and lots of latinos have green or blue eyes. Eye color is not a good indicator of race.
A retnal scan dosn't tell you anything about someone's eyesight.
Actually, it's kind of interesting. The Spanish just inter-bread with everyone, which is why south and central America are full of 'Hispanic' people. You also need to realize that England attitude changed a lot after the revolutionary war.
England changed their minds later, but they were the ones who really got the whole thing going, in order to build their sugar holdings in Jamaica and such.
But they certainly got better later. One telling difference in attitude was the attitude to native-Americans compared with the nascent US government. The UK looked at the Indians as being 'subjects of the king', and therefore deserving of rights, while the US just looked at them as savages to be wiped out. If the US lost the revolutionary war, the Indians would have been a hell of a lot better off, that's for sure.
Unless you count things like bribery and corruption. I'm not saying the Japanese are particularly corrupt or anything, but 'violent' crime there is very low.
Big corps do this kind of thing all the time, commission a study and throw out the results if they don't like 'em.
It's actually important for a company to know these things for their internal decision making but if the study's result doesn't support them no one else would ever know. It's a pretty bad way of doing science, because even if the individual researchers aren't biased and use a good methodology the overall results made public end up being way out of whack.
The same thing happens in benchmarking all the time.