The Linksys WRT54G is an excellent example of what could be gained by making your products "hacker-friendly" (for the original, "good" meaning of hacker).
The jobs being created are managerial in nature (and I doubt they're lower-paying): corporations require additional resources to coordinate work being done overseas. On the other hand, all of the development / engineering jobs are still being moved out of the country. At best, we're promoting a managerial monoculture, and at worst, we're setting ourselves up for a major brain drain. Or both.
Not true - my second job, which I landed while in my third year of high school, was in IT (mostly sysadmin and web development, so not *quite* programming). That was enough to get my foot in the door; all my jobs since then were skilled.
I landed that job by demonstrating to the employers that I was well-versed in both their business' industry (they dealt in historical documents, so that meant a firm knowledge of history) and in my own field.
I did that by showing them my independent projects. Having independent work to show to an employer is a way to back up claims of experience when lacking traditional job experience or education. Also, many people in the industry (myself included) believe that Good Programmers like to program outside of a job context, and thus have independent work to show.
A caveat: don't assume you can create a career out of programming without a college education: your pay will be substandard, you will find it more difficult to find work, you will miss out on some great opportunities for networking and personal growth, and you will lack much of theoretical depth that the rest of us have, if not the practical knowledge as well. I'm mentioning this so you can do what I did: build up formidable amounts of experience while you're still in school so that by the time you graduate, you will have a definite advantage.
enough that he's considered an expert at technology X in the community. You might not know this, because you don't specialize in technology X, let alone know the names of important but obscure community members
If you don't specialize in technology X, you should not be making hiring decisions for specialists in technology X without an advisor or consultant present. At best, you don't have sufficient familiarity to accurately judge the applicant's skills, and at worst, the applicant can be unskilled and you may not know it.
When I landed my second job, the disparity between what I knew and what my interviewers knew about the technology in question was great enough that I could have made something up and they still would have thought I was an expert.
Also, I'm not sure how well standing in the community translates into having skill in that area. The most skilled at something are seldom the most popular. Objective tests are harder to fool.
There are way to be helpful without dealing with these kinds of liability issues. For instance, offer a standardized test. When you reject someone, tell them to brush up on technology X, because they bombed that section. This is good for everyone involved. As an interviewer, you get a more accurate assessment of each interviewee's technical skills. The proficient interviewee gets the same. The rejected interviewee gets honest feedback.
Right. This way, even if the applicant is a prominent member of the technology X community, he has a concrete reason to refer to and will be less likely to hold it against you (and perhaps more likely to reapply after he improves).
If employees are so easily weaned away from an organization, I have to question whether the organization is offering them sufficient incentive to stay. Money is not the only reason; work environment in general plays a role.
Particularly so if the employees in question are "overqualified" (and thus probably much more competent than the average worker). These are the people you want to keep, because they perform an order of magnitude better than your worst performers (Mythical Man Month), yet cost less than twice the amount.
Let's say that instead of climate change, a large meteor was headed for the planet in, say, 2029. Would we argue for twenty years over whether mankind's radio emissions (or whatever) caused the meteor to near the earth or would we try to think up ways of doing something about it?
I personally think that climate change is caused by increased CO2 emissions from human industry because all of the theory supports it, but it honestly doesn't matter. We have a major problem. We can either point fingers endlessly like a bunch of 5 year olds, or we can try to solve it before it becomes a catastrophe.
The week before a concert is absolutely brutal, especially if you're rehearsing with a band/orchestra (but even if you're playing solo piano and rehearsing on your own). You're treated fairly well at other times (most importantly, after the performance), but you can sure feel like dirt during all of the rehearsals.
I guess it's like being treated with respect as a programmer, except that you still have deathmarches.
Your analogy is good, though - hire amateur musicians, and you're not going to get a good outcome. If the conductor knows next to nothing about music, you're not going to get a good outcome. If the instruments the orchestra is using are not tuned well, you're not going to get a good outcome. If you rehearse a piano part for weeks and the conductor suddenly asks you to play the oboe instead five minutes before the concert, you're not going to get a good outcome...
Once you go outside of a container, you already have a fatal error and the appropriate response is to crash (albeit gracefully if possible). The problem isn't so much that the program crashes, but rather that the program may consider data outside of bounds as valid memory, thus allowing buffer overflows and undefined behavior to occur.
The difference between pure C/C++ and the STL is that something like strcmp can create a rather subtle sort of buffer overflow error, whereas buffer overflows involving STL containers are generally easier to avoid and detect. For that matter, if you use the STL algorithms library to its full potential, you may find that you hardly ever need to use explicit indexing or iterators other than begin() and end().
It could just be the learning curve of a new interface, but I find the ribbon in Office 2007 annoying, myself. Instead of selecting the desired option from a menu in a fixed location, I now need to figure out which ribbon a command lies under (which doesn't always make sense... why are paragraph settings in "Page Layout", for example?) and then where in that ribbon the command is (you need to do this in a menu as well, but you at least know the general neighborhood of where the item appears). It's replacing one step of indirection with two. Don't even get me started with using keyboard accelerators on the ribbon, either.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I doubt that this will work in animals. It depends too much on predictable cellular behavior (primarily that whatever enzymes are going to split this thing apart will be present) but cancer cells are by nature unpredictable. If even one cell in a tumor is immune to even one of the steps that this drug depends on, the entire tumor is going to come back resistant because selective pressure has been exerted for that cell's trait.
It is the responsibility of inventors to share their ideas with all society.
No. I used to think this as well, but this is one of the reasons why scientists are treated poorly despite their contributions. We will develop our ideas in any case, but we are under no obligation to share these ideas with an unworthy society. That we do anyway says quite a bit about ourselves as people, but never assume that we are in any way obliged to slave away so everyone else can use, abuse, and profit off of the fruits of our intellectual labor. Society doesn't give enough back to earn that right.
Patents are another beast entirely, however. The net effect of keeping your ideas to yourself is zero - nothing lost, nothing gained, except perhaps in potential. Developing an idea or process, releasing its details to the public, and patenting it has a negative effect, as it prevents others from disseminating that same idea or process to the public. By denying scientists the ability to build upon previous work, this undermines the very foundation of the field.
Drives usually exhibit early warning signs of failure before any significant data loss occurs. In my case, the drive started to make unusual clicking noises (not usual HD noise) and some sectors went bad. I backed up the data and kept using it for a couple of weeks (fully expecting it to suddenly fail), but more sectors started going bad. Problems were minimal in Linux (though the sequence of failed seeks apparently caused the kernel to turn DMA off on its own, which significantly impacted I/O performance), but eventually Windows stopped booting, which is when I decided to send the drive back to the manufacturer for repair - but not before wiping the contents in case I get a replacement and the original drive ends up being resold.
If you absolutely must use something like this, you can easily confuse spambots (and with far less code!) by interspersing some elements containing the CAPTCHA text itself and making them contiguous on the screen using absolute positioning. Such a thing is an accessibility nightmare, but no worse than the technique in the article.
This sort of thing is why HTML has a meta tag. Rather than proposing extensions to HTML every time an idea like this comes up, why not include meta attributes as well, so metadata can be associated with specific markup rather than an entire page?
And well, saying that WIndows is bad because almost all viruses are designed for them is like saying that houses are bad, because thieves might try to break in...
Windows is like a house where all of the doors are unlocked and most of the residents can't figure out how to use the key. It can be made secure, but not if it's being used by an average user. Linux is more secure by default and the users tend to know what they're doing more.
I don't think people are rushing out to buy the Wii because it has an innovative controller. IMO, the game lineup over the next few months (plus the low price point) is sufficient reason to get one, controller or no.
I would say that the greatest barrier to strong AI is the attitude we're approaching the problem with. We're trying to command computers, but that is never going to result in an intelligent being, because choice is a component of what we consider intelligence. This attitude was one third of what convinced me to leave AI research for algorithms (the other two thirds had to do with everyone going off in ten different directions and a general disregard for the consequences of what they were doing).
When machines can demand these rights of their own accord, that is when they should be granted.
No, but I would have said the same thing (about Hitler's supporters) if the Germans still supported Hitler by the 1940s. The Russians still support Putin after all that he's done. Choosing a leader is a consequential action, not to be taken lightly, and a vote is essentially an endorsement of a candidate's proposed method of governance, as best seen or estimated by the voters at the time of an election.
(It's worth noting that Hitler was not actually elected, but appointed by Hindenburg in what I can only describe as an utter failure of representative government, though it can be argued that the Weimar Republic was a very weak example of such a government. Hindenburg himself collaborated with Hitler until his death in 1934).
It appears, however, to be an uneven contest against a man who enjoys 80 per cent approval ratings. Most Russians want Mr. Putin to overturn a constitutional bar on a third term in office. Many will back whomever Mr. Putin endorses to succeed him.
Slashdot Mirror
The newer models run VxWorks and have about half the RAM, but you can still run the "micro" version of DD-WRT on them.
The Linksys WRT54G is an excellent example of what could be gained by making your products "hacker-friendly" (for the original, "good" meaning of hacker).
The jobs being created are managerial in nature (and I doubt they're lower-paying): corporations require additional resources to coordinate work being done overseas. On the other hand, all of the development / engineering jobs are still being moved out of the country. At best, we're promoting a managerial monoculture, and at worst, we're setting ourselves up for a major brain drain. Or both.
Not true - my second job, which I landed while in my third year of high school, was in IT (mostly sysadmin and web development, so not *quite* programming). That was enough to get my foot in the door; all my jobs since then were skilled.
I landed that job by demonstrating to the employers that I was well-versed in both their business' industry (they dealt in historical documents, so that meant a firm knowledge of history) and in my own field.
I did that by showing them my independent projects. Having independent work to show to an employer is a way to back up claims of experience when lacking traditional job experience or education. Also, many people in the industry (myself included) believe that Good Programmers like to program outside of a job context, and thus have independent work to show.
A caveat: don't assume you can create a career out of programming without a college education: your pay will be substandard, you will find it more difficult to find work, you will miss out on some great opportunities for networking and personal growth, and you will lack much of theoretical depth that the rest of us have, if not the practical knowledge as well. I'm mentioning this so you can do what I did: build up formidable amounts of experience while you're still in school so that by the time you graduate, you will have a definite advantage.
If you don't specialize in technology X, you should not be making hiring decisions for specialists in technology X without an advisor or consultant present. At best, you don't have sufficient familiarity to accurately judge the applicant's skills, and at worst, the applicant can be unskilled and you may not know it.
When I landed my second job, the disparity between what I knew and what my interviewers knew about the technology in question was great enough that I could have made something up and they still would have thought I was an expert.
Also, I'm not sure how well standing in the community translates into having skill in that area. The most skilled at something are seldom the most popular. Objective tests are harder to fool.
Right. This way, even if the applicant is a prominent member of the technology X community, he has a concrete reason to refer to and will be less likely to hold it against you (and perhaps more likely to reapply after he improves).
If employees are so easily weaned away from an organization, I have to question whether the organization is offering them sufficient incentive to stay. Money is not the only reason; work environment in general plays a role.
Particularly so if the employees in question are "overqualified" (and thus probably much more competent than the average worker). These are the people you want to keep, because they perform an order of magnitude better than your worst performers (Mythical Man Month), yet cost less than twice the amount.
Let's say that instead of climate change, a large meteor was headed for the planet in, say, 2029. Would we argue for twenty years over whether mankind's radio emissions (or whatever) caused the meteor to near the earth or would we try to think up ways of doing something about it?
I personally think that climate change is caused by increased CO2 emissions from human industry because all of the theory supports it, but it honestly doesn't matter. We have a major problem. We can either point fingers endlessly like a bunch of 5 year olds, or we can try to solve it before it becomes a catastrophe.
My post was ambiguous. I meant amateurs in the sense of unskilled beginners, not in the sense of those doing programming for the love of programming.
You're correct; I meant strcpy.
The week before a concert is absolutely brutal, especially if you're rehearsing with a band/orchestra (but even if you're playing solo piano and rehearsing on your own). You're treated fairly well at other times (most importantly, after the performance), but you can sure feel like dirt during all of the rehearsals.
I guess it's like being treated with respect as a programmer, except that you still have deathmarches.
Your analogy is good, though - hire amateur musicians, and you're not going to get a good outcome. If the conductor knows next to nothing about music, you're not going to get a good outcome. If the instruments the orchestra is using are not tuned well, you're not going to get a good outcome. If you rehearse a piano part for weeks and the conductor suddenly asks you to play the oboe instead five minutes before the concert, you're not going to get a good outcome...
Once you go outside of a container, you already have a fatal error and the appropriate response is to crash (albeit gracefully if possible). The problem isn't so much that the program crashes, but rather that the program may consider data outside of bounds as valid memory, thus allowing buffer overflows and undefined behavior to occur.
The difference between pure C/C++ and the STL is that something like strcmp can create a rather subtle sort of buffer overflow error, whereas buffer overflows involving STL containers are generally easier to avoid and detect. For that matter, if you use the STL algorithms library to its full potential, you may find that you hardly ever need to use explicit indexing or iterators other than begin() and end().
Infer too much and the false positive rate skyrockets, though...
It could just be the learning curve of a new interface, but I find the ribbon in Office 2007 annoying, myself. Instead of selecting the desired option from a menu in a fixed location, I now need to figure out which ribbon a command lies under (which doesn't always make sense... why are paragraph settings in "Page Layout", for example?) and then where in that ribbon the command is (you need to do this in a menu as well, but you at least know the general neighborhood of where the item appears). It's replacing one step of indirection with two. Don't even get me started with using keyboard accelerators on the ribbon, either.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I doubt that this will work in animals. It depends too much on predictable cellular behavior (primarily that whatever enzymes are going to split this thing apart will be present) but cancer cells are by nature unpredictable. If even one cell in a tumor is immune to even one of the steps that this drug depends on, the entire tumor is going to come back resistant because selective pressure has been exerted for that cell's trait.
It doesn't behoove China to have a maniac developing WMDs on its doorstep either.
No. I used to think this as well, but this is one of the reasons why scientists are treated poorly despite their contributions. We will develop our ideas in any case, but we are under no obligation to share these ideas with an unworthy society. That we do anyway says quite a bit about ourselves as people, but never assume that we are in any way obliged to slave away so everyone else can use, abuse, and profit off of the fruits of our intellectual labor. Society doesn't give enough back to earn that right.
Patents are another beast entirely, however. The net effect of keeping your ideas to yourself is zero - nothing lost, nothing gained, except perhaps in potential. Developing an idea or process, releasing its details to the public, and patenting it has a negative effect, as it prevents others from disseminating that same idea or process to the public. By denying scientists the ability to build upon previous work, this undermines the very foundation of the field.
Drives usually exhibit early warning signs of failure before any significant data loss occurs. In my case, the drive started to make unusual clicking noises (not usual HD noise) and some sectors went bad. I backed up the data and kept using it for a couple of weeks (fully expecting it to suddenly fail), but more sectors started going bad. Problems were minimal in Linux (though the sequence of failed seeks apparently caused the kernel to turn DMA off on its own, which significantly impacted I/O performance), but eventually Windows stopped booting, which is when I decided to send the drive back to the manufacturer for repair - but not before wiping the contents in case I get a replacement and the original drive ends up being resold.
There's an opensource app called "wipe" that I just used to wipe my drive before sending it in for repair. It's in portage if you're using Gentoo.
It's slow, but probably not much slower than using dd manually.
If you absolutely must use something like this, you can easily confuse spambots (and with far less code!) by interspersing some elements containing the CAPTCHA text itself and making them contiguous on the screen using absolute positioning. Such a thing is an accessibility nightmare, but no worse than the technique in the article.
This sort of thing is why HTML has a meta tag. Rather than proposing extensions to HTML every time an idea like this comes up, why not include meta attributes as well, so metadata can be associated with specific markup rather than an entire page?
I don't think people are rushing out to buy the Wii because it has an innovative controller. IMO, the game lineup over the next few months (plus the low price point) is sufficient reason to get one, controller or no.
Ah, someone who shares my philosophy on AI :)
I would say that the greatest barrier to strong AI is the attitude we're approaching the problem with. We're trying to command computers, but that is never going to result in an intelligent being, because choice is a component of what we consider intelligence. This attitude was one third of what convinced me to leave AI research for algorithms (the other two thirds had to do with everyone going off in ten different directions and a general disregard for the consequences of what they were doing).
When machines can demand these rights of their own accord, that is when they should be granted.
No, but I would have said the same thing (about Hitler's supporters) if the Germans still supported Hitler by the 1940s. The Russians still support Putin after all that he's done. Choosing a leader is a consequential action, not to be taken lightly, and a vote is essentially an endorsement of a candidate's proposed method of governance, as best seen or estimated by the voters at the time of an election.
(It's worth noting that Hitler was not actually elected, but appointed by Hindenburg in what I can only describe as an utter failure of representative government, though it can be argued that the Weimar Republic was a very weak example of such a government. Hindenburg himself collaborated with Hitler until his death in 1934).