So you got bit by the, "geforce4mx is really a geforce2" thing as well. Of course I upgreded to a 4200 around thanksgiving, but I mean, putting a different chipset in was a dirty trick I figured I'd be able to get the bonuses of the chipset for a low price rather than spending the same amount on a geforce3, of course low an behold I get a geforce2 with a new label. Ahh well such is life.
Well it sort of depends, I probably won't donate my processor power to SARS simply because SARS is as has been previously stated a supercold/flu virus, and has a relatively low level of infection/fatality when compared with other things. We had a massive killer flu during WWI which was spread all around by troops and troop transports and had a much higher fatality rate than SARS but after a year or so it just went away. Scientists have been saying for years that eventualy we're going to get another one of those things and we have. Therefor I think that this one is probably just a waste of time since even with distributed computing it's not likely to be solved before it solves itself.
On the other hand, I did run the UD client for the cancer cure for a while(I had to stop because my fan/heatsink wasn't good enough and it was increasing my cpu temp by about 10 degrees Celcius which put me in the danger zone and caused problems. I've since replaced that equipment so I could run it again, just haven't gotten arount to it).
My general feeling on this issue is that yes drug companies are going to continue to charge astronomical prices even though they're research costs have been subsidized by the people, and yes this is wrong(it's wrong for life saving drugs even when the costs are born entirely by the company), but it's better for people like my aunt(for whom it's now too late) to be alive and broke than to be dead. Not to mention that it can't possibly be more expensive than the chemo/radiation therapy cancer patients have to go through now.
In general I think that my own political beliefs have to come after thoughts for people who are currently dying a horrible and painfully slow death.
I wasn't by any means complaining about the girls wearing little clothing in the mall(though most of the girls in the mall are jailbait so I'm not terribly excited about it either). I too live in Wisconsin, I understand the wonder that is the warm days in this state. I'm down at UW Madison. I was more complaining about the fact that you can't have a good massage clothed and I wouldn't feel comfortable being naked in a mall.
Maybe we should find those researchers, there seems to be a lot of parallel posting here at/.
Of course when you can see two copies of the same post on the front page at one time, that's pretty sad, even here.
I don't know about you, but I've always found that massages tend to be much more effective when you're not wearing bulky clothing(admitedly some of the girls I've seen at the mall barely wear clothing at all, but still). I personally would not be willing to strip down in the middle of a mall even assuming it was appropriate. I've always figured them to be a waste, if I wanted my jeans pressed into my clothing by high pressure water I'd turn on the hose.
My comment was meant more as a joke than seriously, though you could argue that since there appears to be at least another OSS product with the firebird moniker(though it's not a web browser), that they didn't do a very good job of researching things.
All in all I'm a big fan of phoenix and minotaur(well firebird and thunderbird now I suppose). I just started using phoenix and am really enjoying it's fast start and smooth features as well as the easily installable extension. Minotaur is of course less exciting so far, but considering it's a pre.1 version release, it shows a great deal of potential.
Well depending on how it's done, it's by no means a real violation of either privacy or any other civil right.
Firstly, what AOL is essentially doing is asking these ISPs to disclose the source of spam messages. Spam is essentially thrown into the public domain for all and sundry to see, it is not web browsing habits or even something which deserves a reasonable amount of anonymity. If I receive a real letter which has a false address on it, that's mail fraud, it should be the same for spam. All AOL wants to know is who sent them something they already received, the spammers sacrificed their right to the privacy of that information when they sent that e-mail.
Secondly, spamming ought to be thought of as a criminal activity(this is the only way we'll ever get rid of it), evidence of criminal activity would result in a perfectly legal warrant for the information in question were it, as we wish it to be illegal.
Thirdly, we in the US(which is where this is happening I assume) are only about 3 years away from the government having a record of absolutely everything we do on-line(or elsewhere) anyway, and while they're busting down my door for thought crime, they may as well be busting down the door of a spammer's house as well.
Or maybe Mozilla could stop giving their products names which are the same as vaguely related products. Of course that would mean giving up coolness for stability and we we wouldn't want to do that would we?
I don't think this actually works, at least not without modification. If you always overestimate time(a good ploy in general), and then always succeed in less time than anticipated, people are going to become accustomed to this idea and your ability to look like a genius will be seriously diminished, unless of course you're significantly faster than your coworkers, or deliver decidedly higher quality, in which case you're a miracle worker anyway.
Every so often you've got to actually take as long as you predicted just to keep them on their toes and appreciating the times you "pull out all the stops" for them and finish early. Of course picking what to be slow on is important, to surviving this sort of thing, as is looking busy when you're extending the build time.
Actually, it's far more cynical than that. The world where jobs where plentiful and people were making good(which is relative) money, was not realistic or sustainable(either bad investment as was the case, or the excessive growth in the number of developers caused by good money was going to do that regardless). I'm saying it's good that the people who got wiped out by it were people unlike me.
Sorry missed a hit, soma comes from the book brave new world by Aldous Huxley. If you had read said book, it critiques a society which places primary emphasis on physical enjoyment and consumption and was a critique not of Socialism or Communism, but of the future of capitalist and in particularAmerican society. That is all.
Freedom, well depending on how you define this, we used to have this, though we have significanlty less now than we did two years ago and are looking at even less. We're actually going to get Big Brother watching us pretty damned soon(TIAO), and I personally can't think of anything less free than that, especially since we're not even getting anything in return.
Wealth, well you can get wealth if you're born into the right family, or if you luck out, and assuming you measure wealth entirely by unecessary material objects. Of course this wealth comes at the price of making sure that at least several hundred other people don't get any of that wealth. Capitalism survives because it's likethe lottery, it offers people an astronomically low chance of upward social mobility which keeps the poor in line while not upsetting the rich.
Progress may as well be wiped off the list immediately since it's both hard to define and hard to place a value on, one man's progress is another's degeneration.
best of the best is merely American arogance, if you don't think there's anything wrong with America, then you've got to look around at the world outside you.
As for your arguments against socialism, we aren't all that far from the first two(though we're slaves to the protection of "democracy and freedom", neither of which we really have), we're in an economic recession which sort of implies at least temporarily the last two
That's not to say socialism is the answer either, Marxism is just as based on rampant materialism as capitalism is, and yes of course several millions of people have been murdered by communist systems, as they have by fascist systems, monarchic systems, and even supposedly democratic systems, people aren't terribly nice to each other. Nor does Marxist socialism actually exist now or previously in it's theorized form anywhere on the globe. That said, Marxism though it is certainly a failed ideology, it is a step in the right direction(if you don't believe this, look at how many socialist style reforms have been introduced into the united states and how many of your freedoms depend on those, particularly economically). There is value in working towards the good of the many rather than solely for your own gain, just as there is value in having the state play a much larger role in protecting the people from the economic excesses of big buisness.
I personally have almost zero faith in my own(American) politcal system, and just about the same amount in that of other countries.
No offense, but if you think 30-40k a year is peanuts, you aren't going to be getting many jobs in the near future, which is good because maybe they'll give them to me. Technology is not the instant road to riches that the world thought it was in the 90's, nor is there the shortage of candidates that there was prior to that(though I've been hearing radio ads claiming otherwise from people who want to teach you how to do the jobs in two years), because of this, companies are treating tech as just another part of their buisness structure, which means you get paid as much as everyone else, though 40k is pretty damned good for a recent graduate in any field.
Personally I think there have been some good things about the downturn(though before I started college I could expect to make far more than I can expect now). Prior to the tech bubble bursting there was admitedly millions in fake money to be made, but at the same time, that fake money was being given to absolutely anyone who could turn on a computer and put together a web page(pretty much anyone if they try). Now most jobs seem to be looking for a college degree as well as real world experience(like jobs for every other field), which means that if you have a college degree and you can manage to find yourself some real world experience(which is the challenge), you're looking at reasonable chances of employment, just not at what you used to make. It seems that many of the jobs that were lost were the people who were underqualified to begin with.
Those of use who can take advantage of the current system will be able to reasonably well, albeit not as well as we did/could have done before.
This statement bases itself on an entirely false and optimistic view of capitalism. Quality will reduce as much as manufacturers are able to get away with, just as employee numbers will decrease and workloads increase as long as it is maintainable(and probably beyond). There are a few instances where quality is just not maintainable without bankruptcy, but these are usually caused by market slumps or product gluts(remember ram a few years back when they couldn't give it away).
Consumers also have really little choice in regards to this trend where it does exist, the few companies which maintain quality have to charge disproportionally high prices in order to maintain their profitability, and most consumers can't afford them(see Yamaha cd-rw's a year or so ago, they were better than anything else on the market and the quality was excellent, but they were also approx 3x the average price).
Essentially you will continually have quality issues because consumers are trying to get the highest quality/price ratio where as manufacterers are attempting to maximize profits. These two goals are mutually exclusive and since the majority of manufacturers have far more influence and knowledge than consumers, they win the battle more often than not.
I think you misunderstand the idea of "too much choice". I don't think the intention of this article is to imply that having options is a bad thing, I think what it is trying to imply is that too much of the work being done is not productive. It's all well and good to have two or even more high quality products competing for the market place, in fact that's a good thing, the problem is when you have several dozen projects which for the most part aren't yet complete.
Vi(m) and Emacs aren't the problem because they're both stable, high quality products, if they weren't it wouldn't be a holy war it would be a decided issue. The problem is more all the duplicates we have which detract from other projects.
Of course when it comes right down to it, this "too much choice" isn't really the major problem to OSS desktop adoption. The real problems are, IMHO, as follows:
a) Lack of OSS software for windows. I know most OSS developers hate windows, but people fundamentally don't trust OSS and they're much more likely to try out a smallish piece of software and see that they like it than they are to try out something major. I'm not counting things like Mozilla and OpenOffice here for a reason, and it's not because they aren't GPL'd,most end users use that use Mozilla use it as part of Netscape not as stand alone Mozilla or even Phoenix and so don't really see the OSS angle of it. In addition, both Mozilla and OpenOffice are replacements for very major parts of a regular users computer using experience, people get attached to these apps.
b) General emphasis on CLI's rather than GUI's. I know GUI's are harder to design, implent and debug, but the WYSIWYG interface is here to stay. Part of the problem with this is related to problems with X and part to problems with KDE/Gnome. That's not to say that KDE/Gnome should combine, that again is an issue of taste, but a shared windowing library might be nice.
c)This one is sort of related to the first two, but OSS with rare exceptions builds software for itself, not for other people. Again this isn't really a problem, but if you want to get onto the desktop you have to build for desktop users, if you don't want to do that, stop complaining about how Microsoft has all the desktop users.
d) Linux is not ready for end users, it may never be ready, this may not be a problem.
I find this too, not so much the walk in the woods part(I live nowhere near the woods), but the taking a break. When I encounter a problem I can't solve I find it best to take a break from the situation and then, while I'm doing something else, all of a sudden the answer will pop into my head and all will be well. Of course most employers don't understand this, though with my job I have various things to do so it's somewhat possible, and want you to force the answer out staring at the screen. It is possible to force an answer to a solution, but it's very physically draining. I personaly feel severely burnt out when I do this.
Well, I would argue that that's pretty much a worthless statement. Not to say that non US coders aren't better, or vice versa, it's just a worthless statement. With very, very, very few exceptions, if you take anyone's code and give it to someone else you will find "b0rked code" and "lousy design", which is one of the reasons open source has a great deal of potential. This is the case simply because you look at code very differently than someone else looks at code, moreso if there are cultural differences as well.
What seems like a great design to me, may seem crappy to you because it doesn't make sense to you the way it does to me.
At the same time, I may be completely unable to find a bug in my code, or for that matter to generate the bug, because I looked at the softwar in a different way and so didn't find the bug, or because I keep seeing what the code is supposed to do, what I designed it to do, rather than what it actually does. Again this is why open source works at all, because the everyone uses code differently, and everyone sees code differently, and everyone designs code differently(though there is some work towards standardization).
On a more personal note, assuming everything you say is true, why are you being paid a significantly lower rate than US programmers(which we can assume based on why US companies outsource work). That either means that you like working for very little money, or you don't know how to get your value out of your employer. In either case, both you, and I would be better off if instead of working at a lower wage and claiming your a better programmer, you proved it and expected money comensory with your worth. In that case, good programmers, regardless of their nationality, would be able to get jobs, rather than bad programmers(and even if you are very good I'm sure you know some), getting jobs because they are cheaper.
Of course all of this could be fixed by getting rid of capitalism which is basically a system where everyone tries to screw everyone else, but that's beside the point.
Personally I'm not particularly fond of cheating, especially in the cases where it provides an unfair advantage vs other players.
However I feel that the definition of what is "cheating" here is somewhat over broad and that some examples given in this article do not fall under my envelope of cheating(assuming the game has any sense at all). Many games particularly of the skill developing variety are designed so that the only real way to increase a skill is to repeat said skill over and over again. I think so long as this is the case, and especially in cases where this is the only way to build up skills, I feel that the use of reasonable bots is not all that a hugely bad idea.
In essence I think that the best way to prevent cheating in on-line games would be to alter said games in such a way where regular users were not encouraged to cheat by the circumstances of the game, at which point the few who did so would have either a much harder time doing it, or would be so blatantly obvious that no one would play with them.
I don't know quite what this guy has been smoking, but C/C++ is a high level language, it's one which allows you to have power you don't have in something like java at the cost of expecting you to know what to do with that power.
Assuming this guy means an intepreted language when he talks about a high level language, then that doesn't do you any good either. Not only are interpreted languages somewhat slower than compiled languages, they all have to run through a compiled program anyway. The JRE is a compiled program with all the vulnerabilities that come with that status, and for that matter even Sun has been switching away from java lately. C#, while not a bad language(I've been taking a look at it recently), just uses.NET as a layer between regular MFC/Win32 system calls, and their newly developed C# calls. I have no illusions that anything as complicated as.NET, or even MONO it's open source equivilant is ever going to be completely secure, it's just too big.
I agree that better libraries should be written and used and that buffer overflows should have some default protection, it would also be nice if there was a way to find out exactly how buffer overflows work and how to protect against them without looking like a cracker. I'm about to graduate from a relatively prestigious 4 year university with a BS in computer science, but while buffer overflows have been frequently mentioned and I have a general idea of how they work, no one has ever made it clear exactly how they work and what you can do to stop them from happening.
Admitedly broadband costs(at least for me) have been going up rather than down, but depending on how much you use the internet, an average ISP($20/month) plus the phone costs of dialing it($10/month), at least these were my costs, is as anyone with basic math skills could tell you $30 a month just for internet access. There isn't all that much room on this sort of price to increase before you're reaching the price of your average cable modem(assuming you already have tv cable to your home which most people do).
Where I live you can get a 256k/128k cable modem for about $40/month if you have cable already, and my district is horrendously expensive. The gains from this would have to be incredible to make it worthwhile for users. It's possible this could be worthwhile in areas where broadband is more expensive or less available, assuming you can access an ISP which has implemented the technology, but I just don't think the demand is there for something like this.
So that place is still open? Moved to Madison for college several years ago and haven't been around much to check it out, used to be quite an interesting place. Admitedly the Milwaukee store wasn't as good when they moved their location, but it certainly had a lot of weird stuff, never seen as many different motors in my life.
Nearly everyone regardless of how little computer knowledge they have knows someone who has enough knowledge to fix the problem. Your organization obviously knows the e-mail patterns of its members as well as what they're using(based on the fact that you know there's one e-mail appliance), and so it wouldn't be too difficult for the organization to find someone to go around and fix everyone up(possibly you).
On another note, it might not be a horrible idea for people of that kind to be disenfranchised from e-mail. The kind of people who are incapable of updating their e-mail client, assuming of course that people were made appropriately aware of the change and the process was simple enough, probably shouldn't be getting e-mail. These are the same people who will continue to open and forward attachments and who fail to keep their systems even remotely up to date(windows update on a non networked machine is a no brainer) and who by doing so allow for the spread of the various worms and viruses which have been making everyones life unpleasant for a while now, and if you believe the reports are costing lots of money.
I've tried that, applying for CS jobs no less. Not only does some formatting get lost(which is no biggy), but 99% of people will send the damned thing back to you with no idea how to open it, even if you explain it clearly to them.
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So you got bit by the, "geforce4mx is really a geforce2" thing as well. Of course I upgreded to a 4200 around thanksgiving, but I mean, putting a different chipset in was a dirty trick I figured I'd be able to get the bonuses of the chipset for a low price rather than spending the same amount on a geforce3, of course low an behold I get a geforce2 with a new label. Ahh well such is life.
Not to rant, and be offtopic, but I bought an MX500 fairly recently and it's seriously the sweetest thing ever.
On the other hand, I did run the UD client for the cancer cure for a while(I had to stop because my fan/heatsink wasn't good enough and it was increasing my cpu temp by about 10 degrees Celcius which put me in the danger zone and caused problems. I've since replaced that equipment so I could run it again, just haven't gotten arount to it).
My general feeling on this issue is that yes drug companies are going to continue to charge astronomical prices even though they're research costs have been subsidized by the people, and yes this is wrong(it's wrong for life saving drugs even when the costs are born entirely by the company), but it's better for people like my aunt(for whom it's now too late) to be alive and broke than to be dead. Not to mention that it can't possibly be more expensive than the chemo/radiation therapy cancer patients have to go through now.
In general I think that my own political beliefs have to come after thoughts for people who are currently dying a horrible and painfully slow death.
I wasn't by any means complaining about the girls wearing little clothing in the mall(though most of the girls in the mall are jailbait so I'm not terribly excited about it either). I too live in Wisconsin, I understand the wonder that is the warm days in this state. I'm down at UW Madison. I was more complaining about the fact that you can't have a good massage clothed and I wouldn't feel comfortable being naked in a mall.
Maybe we should find those researchers, there seems to be a lot of parallel posting here at /.
Of course when you can see two copies of the same post on the front page at one time, that's pretty sad, even here.
I don't know about you, but I've always found that massages tend to be much more effective when you're not wearing bulky clothing(admitedly some of the girls I've seen at the mall barely wear clothing at all, but still). I personally would not be willing to strip down in the middle of a mall even assuming it was appropriate. I've always figured them to be a waste, if I wanted my jeans pressed into my clothing by high pressure water I'd turn on the hose.
My comment was meant more as a joke than seriously, though you could argue that since there appears to be at least another OSS product with the firebird moniker(though it's not a web browser), that they didn't do a very good job of researching things. All in all I'm a big fan of phoenix and minotaur(well firebird and thunderbird now I suppose). I just started using phoenix and am really enjoying it's fast start and smooth features as well as the easily installable extension. Minotaur is of course less exciting so far, but considering it's a pre .1 version release, it shows a great deal of potential.
Firstly, what AOL is essentially doing is asking these ISPs to disclose the source of spam messages. Spam is essentially thrown into the public domain for all and sundry to see, it is not web browsing habits or even something which deserves a reasonable amount of anonymity. If I receive a real letter which has a false address on it, that's mail fraud, it should be the same for spam. All AOL wants to know is who sent them something they already received, the spammers sacrificed their right to the privacy of that information when they sent that e-mail.
Secondly, spamming ought to be thought of as a criminal activity(this is the only way we'll ever get rid of it), evidence of criminal activity would result in a perfectly legal warrant for the information in question were it, as we wish it to be illegal.
Thirdly, we in the US(which is where this is happening I assume) are only about 3 years away from the government having a record of absolutely everything we do on-line(or elsewhere) anyway, and while they're busting down my door for thought crime, they may as well be busting down the door of a spammer's house as well.
Or maybe Mozilla could stop giving their products names which are the same as vaguely related products. Of course that would mean giving up coolness for stability and we we wouldn't want to do that would we?
Every so often you've got to actually take as long as you predicted just to keep them on their toes and appreciating the times you "pull out all the stops" for them and finish early. Of course picking what to be slow on is important, to surviving this sort of thing, as is looking busy when you're extending the build time.
Actually, it's far more cynical than that. The world where jobs where plentiful and people were making good(which is relative) money, was not realistic or sustainable(either bad investment as was the case, or the excessive growth in the number of developers caused by good money was going to do that regardless). I'm saying it's good that the people who got wiped out by it were people unlike me.
Sorry missed a hit, soma comes from the book brave new world by Aldous Huxley. If you had read said book, it critiques a society which places primary emphasis on physical enjoyment and consumption and was a critique not of Socialism or Communism, but of the future of capitalist and in particularAmerican society. That is all.
Freedom, well depending on how you define this, we used to have this, though we have significanlty less now than we did two years ago and are looking at even less. We're actually going to get Big Brother watching us pretty damned soon(TIAO), and I personally can't think of anything less free than that, especially since we're not even getting anything in return.
Wealth, well you can get wealth if you're born into the right family, or if you luck out, and assuming you measure wealth entirely by unecessary material objects. Of course this wealth comes at the price of making sure that at least several hundred other people don't get any of that wealth. Capitalism survives because it's likethe lottery, it offers people an astronomically low chance of upward social mobility which keeps the poor in line while not upsetting the rich.
Progress may as well be wiped off the list immediately since it's both hard to define and hard to place a value on, one man's progress is another's degeneration.
best of the best is merely American arogance, if you don't think there's anything wrong with America, then you've got to look around at the world outside you.
As for your arguments against socialism, we aren't all that far from the first two(though we're slaves to the protection of "democracy and freedom", neither of which we really have), we're in an economic recession which sort of implies at least temporarily the last two
That's not to say socialism is the answer either, Marxism is just as based on rampant materialism as capitalism is, and yes of course several millions of people have been murdered by communist systems, as they have by fascist systems, monarchic systems, and even supposedly democratic systems, people aren't terribly nice to each other. Nor does Marxist socialism actually exist now or previously in it's theorized form anywhere on the globe. That said, Marxism though it is certainly a failed ideology, it is a step in the right direction(if you don't believe this, look at how many socialist style reforms have been introduced into the united states and how many of your freedoms depend on those, particularly economically). There is value in working towards the good of the many rather than solely for your own gain, just as there is value in having the state play a much larger role in protecting the people from the economic excesses of big buisness.
I personally have almost zero faith in my own(American) politcal system, and just about the same amount in that of other countries.
Personally I think there have been some good things about the downturn(though before I started college I could expect to make far more than I can expect now). Prior to the tech bubble bursting there was admitedly millions in fake money to be made, but at the same time, that fake money was being given to absolutely anyone who could turn on a computer and put together a web page(pretty much anyone if they try). Now most jobs seem to be looking for a college degree as well as real world experience(like jobs for every other field), which means that if you have a college degree and you can manage to find yourself some real world experience(which is the challenge), you're looking at reasonable chances of employment, just not at what you used to make. It seems that many of the jobs that were lost were the people who were underqualified to begin with.
Those of use who can take advantage of the current system will be able to reasonably well, albeit not as well as we did/could have done before.
Consumers also have really little choice in regards to this trend where it does exist, the few companies which maintain quality have to charge disproportionally high prices in order to maintain their profitability, and most consumers can't afford them(see Yamaha cd-rw's a year or so ago, they were better than anything else on the market and the quality was excellent, but they were also approx 3x the average price).
Essentially you will continually have quality issues because consumers are trying to get the highest quality/price ratio where as manufacterers are attempting to maximize profits. These two goals are mutually exclusive and since the majority of manufacturers have far more influence and knowledge than consumers, they win the battle more often than not.
Vi(m) and Emacs aren't the problem because they're both stable, high quality products, if they weren't it wouldn't be a holy war it would be a decided issue. The problem is more all the duplicates we have which detract from other projects.
Of course when it comes right down to it, this "too much choice" isn't really the major problem to OSS desktop adoption. The real problems are, IMHO, as follows:
a) Lack of OSS software for windows. I know most OSS developers hate windows, but people fundamentally don't trust OSS and they're much more likely to try out a smallish piece of software and see that they like it than they are to try out something major. I'm not counting things like Mozilla and OpenOffice here for a reason, and it's not because they aren't GPL'd,most end users use that use Mozilla use it as part of Netscape not as stand alone Mozilla or even Phoenix and so don't really see the OSS angle of it. In addition, both Mozilla and OpenOffice are replacements for very major parts of a regular users computer using experience, people get attached to these apps.
b) General emphasis on CLI's rather than GUI's. I know GUI's are harder to design, implent and debug, but the WYSIWYG interface is here to stay. Part of the problem with this is related to problems with X and part to problems with KDE/Gnome. That's not to say that KDE/Gnome should combine, that again is an issue of taste, but a shared windowing library might be nice.
c)This one is sort of related to the first two, but OSS with rare exceptions builds software for itself, not for other people. Again this isn't really a problem, but if you want to get onto the desktop you have to build for desktop users, if you don't want to do that, stop complaining about how Microsoft has all the desktop users.
d) Linux is not ready for end users, it may never be ready, this may not be a problem.
I find this too, not so much the walk in the woods part(I live nowhere near the woods), but the taking a break. When I encounter a problem I can't solve I find it best to take a break from the situation and then, while I'm doing something else, all of a sudden the answer will pop into my head and all will be well. Of course most employers don't understand this, though with my job I have various things to do so it's somewhat possible, and want you to force the answer out staring at the screen. It is possible to force an answer to a solution, but it's very physically draining. I personaly feel severely burnt out when I do this.
What seems like a great design to me, may seem crappy to you because it doesn't make sense to you the way it does to me.
At the same time, I may be completely unable to find a bug in my code, or for that matter to generate the bug, because I looked at the softwar in a different way and so didn't find the bug, or because I keep seeing what the code is supposed to do, what I designed it to do, rather than what it actually does. Again this is why open source works at all, because the everyone uses code differently, and everyone sees code differently, and everyone designs code differently(though there is some work towards standardization).
On a more personal note, assuming everything you say is true, why are you being paid a significantly lower rate than US programmers(which we can assume based on why US companies outsource work). That either means that you like working for very little money, or you don't know how to get your value out of your employer. In either case, both you, and I would be better off if instead of working at a lower wage and claiming your a better programmer, you proved it and expected money comensory with your worth. In that case, good programmers, regardless of their nationality, would be able to get jobs, rather than bad programmers(and even if you are very good I'm sure you know some), getting jobs because they are cheaper.
Of course all of this could be fixed by getting rid of capitalism which is basically a system where everyone tries to screw everyone else, but that's beside the point.
However I feel that the definition of what is "cheating" here is somewhat over broad and that some examples given in this article do not fall under my envelope of cheating(assuming the game has any sense at all). Many games particularly of the skill developing variety are designed so that the only real way to increase a skill is to repeat said skill over and over again. I think so long as this is the case, and especially in cases where this is the only way to build up skills, I feel that the use of reasonable bots is not all that a hugely bad idea.
In essence I think that the best way to prevent cheating in on-line games would be to alter said games in such a way where regular users were not encouraged to cheat by the circumstances of the game, at which point the few who did so would have either a much harder time doing it, or would be so blatantly obvious that no one would play with them.
Assuming this guy means an intepreted language when he talks about a high level language, then that doesn't do you any good either. Not only are interpreted languages somewhat slower than compiled languages, they all have to run through a compiled program anyway. The JRE is a compiled program with all the vulnerabilities that come with that status, and for that matter even Sun has been switching away from java lately. C#, while not a bad language(I've been taking a look at it recently), just uses .NET as a layer between regular MFC/Win32 system calls, and their newly developed C# calls. I have no illusions that anything as complicated as .NET, or even MONO it's open source equivilant is ever going to be completely secure, it's just too big.
I agree that better libraries should be written and used and that buffer overflows should have some default protection, it would also be nice if there was a way to find out exactly how buffer overflows work and how to protect against them without looking like a cracker. I'm about to graduate from a relatively prestigious 4 year university with a BS in computer science, but while buffer overflows have been frequently mentioned and I have a general idea of how they work, no one has ever made it clear exactly how they work and what you can do to stop them from happening.
Where I live you can get a 256k/128k cable modem for about $40/month if you have cable already, and my district is horrendously expensive. The gains from this would have to be incredible to make it worthwhile for users. It's possible this could be worthwhile in areas where broadband is more expensive or less available, assuming you can access an ISP which has implemented the technology, but I just don't think the demand is there for something like this.
So that place is still open? Moved to Madison for college several years ago and haven't been around much to check it out, used to be quite an interesting place. Admitedly the Milwaukee store wasn't as good when they moved their location, but it certainly had a lot of weird stuff, never seen as many different motors in my life.
Nearly everyone regardless of how little computer knowledge they have knows someone who has enough knowledge to fix the problem. Your organization obviously knows the e-mail patterns of its members as well as what they're using(based on the fact that you know there's one e-mail appliance), and so it wouldn't be too difficult for the organization to find someone to go around and fix everyone up(possibly you). On another note, it might not be a horrible idea for people of that kind to be disenfranchised from e-mail. The kind of people who are incapable of updating their e-mail client, assuming of course that people were made appropriately aware of the change and the process was simple enough, probably shouldn't be getting e-mail. These are the same people who will continue to open and forward attachments and who fail to keep their systems even remotely up to date(windows update on a non networked machine is a no brainer) and who by doing so allow for the spread of the various worms and viruses which have been making everyones life unpleasant for a while now, and if you believe the reports are costing lots of money.
Sorry to be pedantic, but "Beaker" is from the muppets, and has a one word vocabulary.
I've tried that, applying for CS jobs no less. Not only does some formatting get lost(which is no biggy), but 99% of people will send the damned thing back to you with no idea how to open it, even if you explain it clearly to them.