I know I'd be really glad for my chunks of dead trees that have information about what plants are safe to eat, which ones are good for medicine, and so forth.
Granted, there will be an immediate scramble for survival, and I have no illusions that I'm in a good position to survive that, but in the long term there are lots of books that would be damn nice to have if you're lucky enough to survive.
I hate to say it, because I know that some smart, non-crackpot people just haven't bothered to update their HTML and UI style skills since the 90's, but I saw the big borders and pretty much immediately clicked the back button.
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience. This is just the old whining of companies not wanting to pay for training.
If I recall correctly, it only returned to yellow during the summer of election years, so that it could pop back up to orange shortly before election day and give us a good scary reason to not vote for Democrats. Amazingly, the terror threats always subsided after election day.
ONLY A COMPLETE MORON will hook up a scada system to a pc that bridges the internet and the secured network, OR puts the whole damn thing on a unsecured network.
As someone that worked on SCADA software for about a decade, I wholeheartedly approve this message. With very few exceptions, every bit of SCADA code I saw makes [insert favorite insecure software target here] look like Fort Knox. You do NOT want the internet getting anywhere near that code.
P.S. Thanks, Slashdot, for making me log in to IE to post. I still can't copy/paste in Chrome.
There isn't much to do with SCADA regarding security - The systems themselves are inherently insecure...
As somebody that worked at a SCADA software company for a few years, and saw (1) the skill level of the core development team and (2) what customers did with our systems, I heartily endorse this viewpoint.
Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app."
People have been claiming this (at least the on-line part) for a long time, though. I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.
I bet many of their better software engineers are making close to that much...
You mean actual, non-management, I-write-software-all-day people making near $250k per year at M$ and/or Amazon? I've worked at one of those companies, and I seriously doubt it--I would be really surprised if more than 1% of software engineers make more than $150k.
We might ask "would it not be more efficient for a lawyer or engineer to earn $200 K and pay someone else $50 K to watch an elder?" but that is probably a rare case.
On the slim hope that someone actually wants to suggest this, please make sure you also include the names of any cities where they pay engineers $200k, because I want to move there.
You make it sound like the act of sneaking ~4GB out of a "secure" facility would be hard. I'm sure you could find (or easily make yourself) a waterproof capsule that would hold a 4GB SD card and/or usb stick, and stow your data device in a bodily orifice for the transit in and out of the facility. The hardest part would probably be actually finding a way to copy it off the secure system without getting caught, unless you're the IT admin guy that's trusted enough to be alone with the backup tapes.
I would think grabbing a big pile of stuff at once would be less noticeable than a lot of little collection events, too, unless there's no chance at all of getting caught while you're actually copying data.
Sorry if it appears that I'm conflating the two; I didn't mean to imply that accuracy and complexity are necessarily related. I meant that sometimes one can find ways to reduce the complexity of a correct implementation without affecting accuracy, and sometimes one will find that a numerical method has been implemented incorrectly, or that the selected method isn't applicable to the problem at hand, and therefore the results produced may be wrong.
The general case I'm talking about for reducing complexity is when the original coder chose some sub-optimal way to implement something. For example, some step in the algorithm requires using the value of an integral inside a loop, and so they make O(n) calls to an O(n) function to calculate the integral, rather than computing the integral first and then using the computed values in the loop.*
* And, no, we're not talking about small values of n, or limited memory, or any other reason somebody might have for doing this. It's just that they didn't realize they were doing something in an O(n^2) fashion when it could be done just as accurately in O(n).
I find there are way too many physicists working in isolation that think "numerical recipes" is extent of what they need to know to do computational physics, and not surprisingly, poor-quality numerical (and scientific) code is often the result..
I have to second this. There are some fields in which the researchers are not strongly mathematically-minded, let alone numerically-minded, and it does indeed lead to inefficient code that produces results which may be incorrect in ways they never thought to check. You could easily be a hero (or villian) if you can get into one of these research communities with good software and numerical skills: you can sometimes make their code run in O(n) or O(n log n) time instead of O(n^2) (or worse), but you may also show them that it's producing results (which they've been relying on) that are incorrect in some (perhaps not so subtle) ways.
He was much better when he just wanted to share some amazing stories floating in his head...
Just based on things I've seen and read here and there, he was "much better" back then because he was confined by limited resources, and by people around him that would actually say, "No, George, just....no."
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'd be really glad for my chunks of dead trees that have information about what plants are safe to eat, which ones are good for medicine, and so forth.
Granted, there will be an immediate scramble for survival, and I have no illusions that I'm in a good position to survive that, but in the long term there are lots of books that would be damn nice to have if you're lucky enough to survive.
I hate to say it, because I know that some smart, non-crackpot people just haven't bothered to update their HTML and UI style skills since the 90's, but I saw the big borders and pretty much immediately clicked the back button.
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience. This is just the old whining of companies not wanting to pay for training.
...or experience.
Shut up and take my money!
...if you are really young, really smart, and really naive, you just might go for it and end up owing Thiel 50% of your idea.
How appropriate that "Thiel" looks a lot like "Thief" if you're sitting far enough away from your monitor.
Microsoft's new slogan appears to be, "Be What's Next," which seems to fit pretty well, too.
Ah, I see, and agree completely. If I could pick and choose at maybe $3-5 per channel per month, it would be worth it for me to switch.
> I think its a great idea but its too expensive at $30 a month.
Damn, where do you live? $30/month is less than the cheapest basic cable subscription I can get without a long-term contract.
GO AWAY! BATIN'!
Excuse me, Mr. Boudreau, Mr. Wolf? You've got something white and gooey on your chin...no...on the other side. That's it.
Pirate leprechauns?
If I recall correctly, it only returned to yellow during the summer of election years, so that it could pop back up to orange shortly before election day and give us a good scary reason to not vote for Democrats. Amazingly, the terror threats always subsided after election day.
No worries, I think he works for Spishak now.
ONLY A COMPLETE MORON will hook up a scada system to a pc that bridges the internet and the secured network, OR puts the whole damn thing on a unsecured network.
As someone that worked on SCADA software for about a decade, I wholeheartedly approve this message. With very few exceptions, every bit of SCADA code I saw makes [insert favorite insecure software target here] look like Fort Knox. You do NOT want the internet getting anywhere near that code.
P.S. Thanks, Slashdot, for making me log in to IE to post. I still can't copy/paste in Chrome.
There isn't much to do with SCADA regarding security - The systems themselves are inherently insecure...
As somebody that worked at a SCADA software company for a few years, and saw (1) the skill level of the core development team and (2) what customers did with our systems, I heartily endorse this viewpoint.
Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app."
People have been claiming this (at least the on-line part) for a long time, though. I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.
'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site...
...what kind of hell-spawned interface did the other guy make if Facebook is clean by comparison?
In other news, my barber tells me I need a haircut.
I bet many of their better software engineers are making close to that much...
You mean actual, non-management, I-write-software-all-day people making near $250k per year at M$ and/or Amazon? I've worked at one of those companies, and I seriously doubt it--I would be really surprised if more than 1% of software engineers make more than $150k.
Now if they could just do the same thing for Windows itself...
We might ask "would it not be more efficient for a lawyer or engineer to earn $200 K and pay someone else $50 K to watch an elder?" but that is probably a rare case.
On the slim hope that someone actually wants to suggest this, please make sure you also include the names of any cities where they pay engineers $200k, because I want to move there.
You make it sound like the act of sneaking ~4GB out of a "secure" facility would be hard. I'm sure you could find (or easily make yourself) a waterproof capsule that would hold a 4GB SD card and/or usb stick, and stow your data device in a bodily orifice for the transit in and out of the facility. The hardest part would probably be actually finding a way to copy it off the secure system without getting caught, unless you're the IT admin guy that's trusted enough to be alone with the backup tapes.
I would think grabbing a big pile of stuff at once would be less noticeable than a lot of little collection events, too, unless there's no chance at all of getting caught while you're actually copying data.
Sorry if it appears that I'm conflating the two; I didn't mean to imply that accuracy and complexity are necessarily related. I meant that sometimes one can find ways to reduce the complexity of a correct implementation without affecting accuracy, and sometimes one will find that a numerical method has been implemented incorrectly, or that the selected method isn't applicable to the problem at hand, and therefore the results produced may be wrong.
The general case I'm talking about for reducing complexity is when the original coder chose some sub-optimal way to implement something. For example, some step in the algorithm requires using the value of an integral inside a loop, and so they make O(n) calls to an O(n) function to calculate the integral, rather than computing the integral first and then using the computed values in the loop.*
* And, no, we're not talking about small values of n, or limited memory, or any other reason somebody might have for doing this. It's just that they didn't realize they were doing something in an O(n^2) fashion when it could be done just as accurately in O(n).
I find there are way too many physicists working in isolation that think "numerical recipes" is extent of what they need to know to do computational physics, and not surprisingly, poor-quality numerical (and scientific) code is often the result..
I have to second this. There are some fields in which the researchers are not strongly mathematically-minded, let alone numerically-minded, and it does indeed lead to inefficient code that produces results which may be incorrect in ways they never thought to check. You could easily be a hero (or villian) if you can get into one of these research communities with good software and numerical skills: you can sometimes make their code run in O(n) or O(n log n) time instead of O(n^2) (or worse), but you may also show them that it's producing results (which they've been relying on) that are incorrect in some (perhaps not so subtle) ways.
He was much better when he just wanted to share some amazing stories floating in his head...
Just based on things I've seen and read here and there, he was "much better" back then because he was confined by limited resources, and by people around him that would actually say, "No, George, just....no."