Finally, we are about get some science that is not tied to advancing some political cause, political party, or some religious belief for or against Gaia.
The Fast Light Optical Gyroscope project will marry researchers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center; the US Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center and Northwestern University
I would think that at some point we are going to see intelligence agencies start to send hit teams to kill hackers. It has probably already happened but we haven't seen headlines for it.
If all that Simberg, Steyn et. al. wanted to do was have a look at Mann's data, this is how they might be going about it:
W: Simberg, Steyn write inflammatory articles about Mann and his hockey stick graph, hoping Mann tries to sue their asses.
B: Mann tries to sue their asses.
W: Simberg & Steyn subpoena data out of Mann's ass.
B: Mann must choose which is more important, the anonymity of his data or realizing the slim possibility of owning S & S's asses but still being more likely to lose.
W: S & S smile.
I think you are reading too much into the original posting. But we can thank Jacques Derrida and poststructuralism (deconstruction) for giving us a rationale to entertain alternative readings like this even if the author did not intend any such thing.
I have heard of Git, and I know people who have recommended it instead of Subversion. I myself also use subversion for my own personal projects, because it's free and for the reason you mention: I don't use its full power on my own stuff. However, there are little conveniences in proprietary software that you appreciate, even when not using its full power.
For example, when creating a QA test plan, I take screen shots from the application I'm working with and directly paste them into table cells to show exactly what the system response should look like. When I do this in MS Word (2007), it resizes the image to the size of the cell. When I try this with OpenOffice Writer, the screen goes dark, and then it doesn't do paste the image. That might just be my bad luck or I don't have the latest, greatest patch that takes care of the problem. But I appreciate the relative lack of bugs in MS Word as compared with OO Writer.
Another thing I like about MS Word is the ability to move paragraphs or table cells up and down using shift + arrow keys. Maybe that's a "power user" feature, and I'm sure it could be implemented in OO Writer. But a point about proprietary software is that you have people spending the best part of their waking hours developing and perfecting these products whereas most open source initiatives are volunteer efforts. More time goes to the proprietary projects, so more attention to detail can be given to them.
Let's just say that both open source and proprietary software occupy their own important niches.
I work in a U.S. fed agency, and I use a Linux distro, but most of the rest of my colleagues use Microsoft Windows.
Some observations about Windows vs. Linux:
1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux, even if you are using a relatively user-friendly distro like Ubuntu. Most people, by definition, are not above average.
2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world:
a) As compared with MS Office (Word, Excel, etc.), OpenOffice is a piece of crap.
b) Ditto for Subversion. As compared with proprietary source control like Harvest or Merant PVCS, Subversion is also a piece of crap.
That said, a government putting some of its spending power behind some key open source projects could produce some quality open-source software to shore up some of these shortcomings.
Also, open source software provides unprecedented opportunity for others to innovate with the software itself in ways you cannot do with proprietary software.
So, I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration.
Humans make mistakes all the time. That's why making it really, really easy to pay for things online is a bad idea. What to speak of the problems a malicious takeover of ones system produces, very easy online payments will make many, many people pine for doing things the hard way.
I have spent most of my career as a software developer inheriting and updating such spaghetti code bases. Here are few remarks and some of my experiences around this:
1) 200K lines is not such a formidable size. If your average module size is 1000 lines of code, that's 200 separate modules. Or if the module size averages 2000 locs, that's 100 modules. Gradually getting your head around the modules is not as big a problem as it seems, even if there are many interdependencies between modules. However, if the average module size is something on the order of 10K or 20K, then you really are dealing with spaghetti code, and that's quite a bit harder to figure out than if the module size on average were around 2 or 3K.
2) For the time being, treat the whole application like a black box, which means not worrying too much about how well it works until you have to fix some "bug". At that point, figure out how it works only insofar as you need to in order to get your bug fix in, and record your lessons learned in a wiki and in comments in the code. Refactor as you go along, if feasible.
3)Being able to step through code is really helpful when trying to understand a poorly documented code base--even if the code is well structured. A number of technology platforms (like Java JVM) offer remote debugging.
4) You can reverse engineer these things and produce a set of business specs with which to port the application to a new platform. Right now, I'm on a project that is porting 125K lines of COBOL code that ran on OS2 to an Apache/mod_perl technology stack. Our team consists of 2 cobol developers, who are producing the specs from the code, and 3 perl developers who are porting it. The key here is to capture the business requirements and the user interface behavior. Once you do that, how you implement it on the new platform is quite straightforward. HOWEVER, this approach is not advised unless your company or gov enterprise has lots of time, deep pockets, and a commitment to seeing the project through to its eventual success.
In summary, don't be too scared of a legacy spaghetti code base. These things can be understood well enough in time to refactor or port to a new platform.
Sorry, as someone who has worked for the fed and has held a security clearance, I don't sympathize with the journalist who wrote the WP article. If you work for the federal govt, then you have absolutely no expectation of privacy for communications sent using federal equipmentt. It's in the U.S. laws, and HR in all the places I worked where the fed was involved made sure you knew that. And yes, there is a legitimate public interest for the government to find out who is leaking confidential information. Lives, reputations, and public confidence is often at stake in these matters.
As much as I like languages like Perl and Java, where memory is managed for you (kind of), there will always be a great need for languages that brings programmers as close as necessary to the workings of the machine itself.
daveschroeder wrote: "Most of the commenters here will twist this story into how the US is somehow evil, and drone on (pun intended) about how the US and West governments and/or corporations and/or political systems are what's wrong with the world, when in reality, people are suffering and dying under actual tyranny and oppression."
Agreed. And there is usually some political objective behind it: unseat the incumbent political party if it's not yours, or remain (somewhat) silent if it is the party you identify with.
But if fundamental values are to be subordinated to the interests of group identity--whether that identity be political, or social, or national, or racial, or some combination of them--then there is really no important moral difference between the crowd that supports a project like Wikileaks (because supporting such a project somehow advances their own group identity) and the various "corrupt" regimes around the world that Wikileaks supposedly seeks to "out."
Wikileaks is a project waiting for just one of those less politically correct countries like Syria but that has enough time on their hands to send a hit squad to wipe them out permanently--as in personnel and extended family if necessary.
It would be a big incentive to attraact the best of the best from around the world to the United States. It would go hand-in-hand with smart immigration policies that tried to retain that talent.
Now that there is an economic "boom" in offensive hacking in the US (and probably elsewhere, too), what are the core skill sets that one should have? Computer languages, networking, social engineering? Any non-IT skills, like physics, EE, etc.?
A lot depends on your reputation. If you are something like a "god among coders", and the standards of what management considers "god" can vary widely, then they tend to lean on you for a lot of things, and then they will be more inclined give you a significantly free hand to try new things. But you really have to be something like magnitudes better than the most all of the others in your area.
At least as far back in the 1970s the B-52s were able to fly mach2+, which, given they are dropping nuclear-armed gravity weapons (i.e. "bombs") many times more powerful than the Hiroshim/Nagasaki bombs, getting the heck out of a very big target area as quickly as possible is an operational necessity.
. . . which means that even if you stop using the pesticides, the trees are going to get you. And if you are going to go after the trees out of self-defense, that also puts the bees in a tight spot which, then, could spiral out of control and lead to a . . . script for an M Night Shyamlan sequel. Either way we're screwed.
OK, after reading TFA, I think it would be appropriate to fire the network admin who set up the router with that ID, not arrest him. A public recreation center does have to answer to public and therefore political opinion, and doing something like this is just plain stupid. That said, I do think that we may start to see more of this thing and having laws against it may be unavoidable (but hopefully not as severe as jail time).
I have been to India. I have lived there and worked there. I even ran my own business there doing digital graphic design and image processing when it was just getting started.
As regards to India, along side the "open sewers, piles of rubbish, and rats all over the place," you will also find computer training centers all over the place. Practically every nook and corner and hole in the wall in all but the remotest villages has some sort of computer training center. And then the Indian public education system produces legions of top-notch graduates in the maths and sciences, including computer science. This despite all the "open sewers, piles of garbage and rats."
One thing to remember is that societies are always changing, and so is Indian society. One thing Indians have that America (for example) is losing, is a reverence for education. In India it is regarded as a privilege, not a right (despite the government's best effort to make it one), and because it's regarded as a privilege (that is, you aren't entitled to it if you don't deserve it), the Indian education system produces a lot of very, very smart and talented people in the science, engineering, health care, and business sectors. America, on the other hand, is floundering in its educational initiatives and is moving in the direction of producing more lawyers and massage therapists.
There will come a day when America will feature plenty of its own "open sewers, piles of garbage, and rats," because it is losing the very values that made it a great world power. India, on the other hand, is rediscovering those values.
Well, the author of the article is a true geek, because his take on reality is not completely based in it (though I agree with most everything else he writes):
From the article: "Do Java programmers make more money than.NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or.NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career."
I disagree. Not only is "how many years have you worked in (C|JAVA|Perl|Python|etc)" the first question you get asked, but the questions aren't merely about which language but particular frameworks that happen to employ whatever language it is they are asking about. And I turn down.NET jobs. What language you know matters nowadays because languages and the frameworks built on them have become exceedingly complex.
For example, one recruiter recently asked me if I have any architectural experience. I had the certs (SCEA), and I had the experience, but the recruiter came back to me and told me the client didn't see any Struts or Spring experience on my resume. Now, that's not architecture, but that's what the client (not recruiter, mind you) thinks architecture is all about.
And still, aside from client misconceptions about what something like "software architecture" is, I wouldn't for example try to attempt to say I know Ruby on Rails when I've done my 6 - 12 hour crash course in Ruby any more than I would suggest anyone to say he knows J2EE after he has done his 6 - 12 hour crash course in Java (even if he is a hot-shot C/C++ programmer). These frameworks are complex. If you don't have real experience with them, you are going to fall flat on your face if you are being called in to troubleshoot someone else's implementation that used any of these frameworks.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, we are about get some science that is not tied to advancing some political cause, political party, or some religious belief for or against Gaia.
I think they ran this story just to feature the shark-fin icon. So to the Slashdot gods: yeah, many of us "get it."
I would think that at some point we are going to see intelligence agencies start to send hit teams to kill hackers. It has probably already happened but we haven't seen headlines for it.
A hypothetical scenario:
If all that Simberg, Steyn et. al. wanted to do was have a look at Mann's data, this is how they might be going about it:
W: Simberg, Steyn write inflammatory articles about Mann and his hockey stick graph, hoping Mann tries to sue their asses.
B: Mann tries to sue their asses.
W: Simberg & Steyn subpoena data out of Mann's ass.
B: Mann must choose which is more important, the anonymity of his data or realizing the slim possibility of owning S & S's asses but still being more likely to lose.
W: S & S smile.
It's called Zugzwang, baby!
I think you are reading too much into the original posting. But we can thank Jacques Derrida and poststructuralism (deconstruction) for giving us a rationale to entertain alternative readings like this even if the author did not intend any such thing.
I have heard of Git, and I know people who have recommended it instead of Subversion. I myself also use subversion for my own personal projects, because it's free and for the reason you mention: I don't use its full power on my own stuff. However, there are little conveniences in proprietary software that you appreciate, even when not using its full power.
For example, when creating a QA test plan, I take screen shots from the application I'm working with and directly paste them into table cells to show exactly what the system response should look like. When I do this in MS Word (2007), it resizes the image to the size of the cell. When I try this with OpenOffice Writer, the screen goes dark, and then it doesn't do paste the image. That might just be my bad luck or I don't have the latest, greatest patch that takes care of the problem. But I appreciate the relative lack of bugs in MS Word as compared with OO Writer.
Another thing I like about MS Word is the ability to move paragraphs or table cells up and down using shift + arrow keys. Maybe that's a "power user" feature, and I'm sure it could be implemented in OO Writer. But a point about proprietary software is that you have people spending the best part of their waking hours developing and perfecting these products whereas most open source initiatives are volunteer efforts. More time goes to the proprietary projects, so more attention to detail can be given to them.
Let's just say that both open source and proprietary software occupy their own important niches.
I work in a U.S. fed agency, and I use a Linux distro, but most of the rest of my colleagues use Microsoft Windows.
Some observations about Windows vs. Linux:
1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux, even if you are using a relatively user-friendly distro like Ubuntu. Most people, by definition, are not above average.
2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world:
a) As compared with MS Office (Word, Excel, etc.), OpenOffice is a piece of crap.
b) Ditto for Subversion. As compared with proprietary source control like Harvest or Merant PVCS, Subversion is also a piece of crap.
That said, a government putting some of its spending power behind some key open source projects could produce some quality open-source software to shore up some of these shortcomings.
Also, open source software provides unprecedented opportunity for others to innovate with the software itself in ways you cannot do with proprietary software.
So, I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration.
Humans make mistakes all the time. That's why making it really, really easy to pay for things online is a bad idea. What to speak of the problems a malicious takeover of ones system produces, very easy online payments will make many, many people pine for doing things the hard way.
I have spent most of my career as a software developer inheriting and updating such spaghetti code bases. Here are few remarks and some of my experiences around this:
In summary, don't be too scared of a legacy spaghetti code base. These things can be understood well enough in time to refactor or port to a new platform.
Sorry, as someone who has worked for the fed and has held a security clearance, I don't sympathize with the journalist who wrote the WP article. If you work for the federal govt, then you have absolutely no expectation of privacy for communications sent using federal equipmentt. It's in the U.S. laws, and HR in all the places I worked where the fed was involved made sure you knew that. And yes, there is a legitimate public interest for the government to find out who is leaking confidential information. Lives, reputations, and public confidence is often at stake in these matters.
As much as I like languages like Perl and Java, where memory is managed for you (kind of), there will always be a great need for languages that brings programmers as close as necessary to the workings of the machine itself.
. . . and then something like this happens:
Julian Asange, a uniter, not a divider. . .
Agreed. And there is usually some political objective behind it: unseat the incumbent political party if it's not yours, or remain (somewhat) silent if it is the party you identify with.
But if fundamental values are to be subordinated to the interests of group identity--whether that identity be political, or social, or national, or racial, or some combination of them--then there is really no important moral difference between the crowd that supports a project like Wikileaks (because supporting such a project somehow advances their own group identity) and the various "corrupt" regimes around the world that Wikileaks supposedly seeks to "out."
Wikileaks is a project waiting for just one of those less politically correct countries like Syria but that has enough time on their hands to send a hit squad to wipe them out permanently--as in personnel and extended family if necessary.
It would be a big incentive to attraact the best of the best from around the world to the United States. It would go hand-in-hand with smart immigration policies that tried to retain that talent.
Now that there is an economic "boom" in offensive hacking in the US (and probably elsewhere, too), what are the core skill sets that one should have? Computer languages, networking, social engineering? Any non-IT skills, like physics, EE, etc.?
A lot depends on your reputation. If you are something like a "god among coders", and the standards of what management considers "god" can vary widely, then they tend to lean on you for a lot of things, and then they will be more inclined give you a significantly free hand to try new things. But you really have to be something like magnitudes better than the most all of the others in your area.
At least as far back in the 1970s the B-52s were able to fly mach2+, which, given they are dropping nuclear-armed gravity weapons (i.e. "bombs") many times more powerful than the Hiroshim/Nagasaki bombs, getting the heck out of a very big target area as quickly as possible is an operational necessity.
Chinese Government Claims To Have Defaced Hundreds of Anonymous Sites
. . . which means that even if you stop using the pesticides, the trees are going to get you. And if you are going to go after the trees out of self-defense, that also puts the bees in a tight spot which, then, could spiral out of control and lead to a . . . script for an M Night Shyamlan sequel. Either way we're screwed.
OK, after reading TFA, I think it would be appropriate to fire the network admin who set up the router with that ID, not arrest him. A public recreation center does have to answer to public and therefore political opinion, and doing something like this is just plain stupid. That said, I do think that we may start to see more of this thing and having laws against it may be unavoidable (but hopefully not as severe as jail time).
I have been to India. I have lived there and worked there. I even ran my own business there doing digital graphic design and image processing when it was just getting started.
As regards to India, along side the "open sewers, piles of rubbish, and rats all over the place," you will also find computer training centers all over the place. Practically every nook and corner and hole in the wall in all but the remotest villages has some sort of computer training center. And then the Indian public education system produces legions of top-notch graduates in the maths and sciences, including computer science. This despite all the "open sewers, piles of garbage and rats."
One thing to remember is that societies are always changing, and so is Indian society. One thing Indians have that America (for example) is losing, is a reverence for education. In India it is regarded as a privilege, not a right (despite the government's best effort to make it one), and because it's regarded as a privilege (that is, you aren't entitled to it if you don't deserve it), the Indian education system produces a lot of very, very smart and talented people in the science, engineering, health care, and business sectors. America, on the other hand, is floundering in its educational initiatives and is moving in the direction of producing more lawyers and massage therapists.
There will come a day when America will feature plenty of its own "open sewers, piles of garbage, and rats," because it is losing the very values that made it a great world power. India, on the other hand, is rediscovering those values.
Well, the author of the article is a true geek, because his take on reality is not completely based in it (though I agree with most everything else he writes): From the article: "Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career."
I disagree. Not only is "how many years have you worked in (C|JAVA|Perl|Python|etc)" the first question you get asked, but the questions aren't merely about which language but particular frameworks that happen to employ whatever language it is they are asking about. And I turn down .NET jobs. What language you know matters nowadays because languages and the frameworks built on them have become exceedingly complex.
For example, one recruiter recently asked me if I have any architectural experience. I had the certs (SCEA), and I had the experience, but the recruiter came back to me and told me the client didn't see any Struts or Spring experience on my resume. Now, that's not architecture, but that's what the client (not recruiter, mind you) thinks architecture is all about.
And still, aside from client misconceptions about what something like "software architecture" is, I wouldn't for example try to attempt to say I know Ruby on Rails when I've done my 6 - 12 hour crash course in Ruby any more than I would suggest anyone to say he knows J2EE after he has done his 6 - 12 hour crash course in Java (even if he is a hot-shot C/C++ programmer). These frameworks are complex. If you don't have real experience with them, you are going to fall flat on your face if you are being called in to troubleshoot someone else's implementation that used any of these frameworks.
Any chance this could be weaponized, as with the Bugs in Starship Troopers?