I seem to remember an article by Dvorak or Cringely about 12-14 years ago, where a big named software product did something like this. But instead of nailing a pirate, they bagged a New York Times reporter, who got it into the paper. I'm thinking Aldus Pagemaker. Might be wrong.
"Good science fiction" is about what does it mean to be human. Bad sci-fi is only about ray guns and spaceships. An example of a great sci-fi author would be Lois McMaster Bujold, and her Miles Vorkosigan series of books. Are there spaceships and rayguns in them? Sure, but the stories are about the people.
What would a human be if you removed this trait? Characters like vulcans are humans with emotions removed. Other "aliens" are likewise variations of humans, with human traits/foibles either removed, or dialed up to 11.
Book stores are flooded with junk books, like The Davinci Code or the for dummies series. Publishers are pushing these books and as gresham's law would put it, bad books are driving out good books. As someone who spends about $200 per month on books, I have seen this decline in what is available for quite some time. The amount of money that publishers spend on promoting fad books (like the davinci code) is appalling. It is becoming like the record industry where good musicians get pushed aside, so that this month's fad band can get all the promotion. I find more new science fiction books at the library than I do at the bookstore.
Books about elves and wizards sell very well, thanks to the Lord of the Rings. They just are not sci-fi.
Are book sales down? In the 1970s, paperbacks sold for around 50cents (some less, some more). Nowadays, everything is $6.99 or $7.99.
I do not believe that Caldwell actually reads sci-fi. She thinks Singularity created the idea that technology would grow so fast that people could not cope, but instead that idea came from a 1970 book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. She thinks 2001 was bad because it had a date in the title? How about 1984? Perhaps she should look into the trend of publishing stories after the author dies. Ghost writing with a oiuja board, I guess.
Are the modern sci-fi books dystopic? Yes, and that is not a new trend. Is it because that is all the publishers will publish? I don't know. In 1972, The Sheep Look Up was published, and that is about as dystopic a story as I have ever read. I don't remember a single book by Phillip Dick (some of whose books were turned into Bladerunner and Total Recall) having a happy ending. If you want a happy ending, watch tv. If you want to think, read a book.
Whether you thrive or wither is a function of what you learned to love as a youngster. Just like why some people enjoy high risk sports (hmm, BASE jumping comes to mind), they are addicted to the chemicals their body produces under stress.
My experience with pressure and pressure-holics, is that they make more mistakes when they are working under a deadline than when they have planned things out. Since many of them believe that they cannot perform well unless they are under some pressure, they either (subconciously) blow it off until the deadline or they sabotage themselves until there is some pressure.
In addition, many of these people cannot distinguish between important and urgent. If you have read First Things First, or The 7 habits of highly successful people then you have seen the 2x2 matrix showing the difference between important and urgent. Draw a box, then divide it in half vertically and half horizontally. Label the left column urgent and the right column not urgent. Lable the top row Important, and the bottom row not important. The pressure-holics cannot see the top right, nor the lower left corners. To them, anything in the left column, belongs in the top left corner. Anything that is in the right column belongs in the bottom right square. A phone call is urgent. If it is a customer, or boss, then it is important (upper left), if it is someone selling carpet cleaning, it is not important (lower left). Doing your taxes is important, but it is not urgent until early April. As important things "ripen" they become more urgent.
The worst bosses are the ones who cannot see the difference between important and urgent. The TPS report might be due on Friday, but if you are working on it on Monday, then you are screwing off, and they will dump some imaginary crisis on you, to stop you from doing what (to them) is goofing off. Or, they will arbitrarily move up deadlines because you aren't sweating enough. You cannot make plans or schedules when these sort of people are around, as they will deliberately mess things up for you.
When the story first came out, many folks, myself included, were thinking about Steve Jackson Games. They published games and novels on their bulletin board system. The Secret Service confiscated all their gear and never returned it, nor charged them. It would be equivalent to raiding a local newspaper and siezing everything because one classified ad was placed by one crook. The SS even refused to obey a court order for the return of the gear. When the gear was finally returned, several years later, all of it was broken.
Or maybe you might remember Ruby Ridge or Waco. Or maybe you might remember some of the excesses since 9/11. Was this a good bust or bad one? It looks more like a good one. Don't automatically think that they are the evil jackbooted minions of the evil overlord. Nor should you automatically presume that they are the good guys.
A division of Sony runs Everquest (or evercrack if you prefer), and earlier this year they felt that replacing guides (volunteers who get nothing but free expansions and free subscription - worth about $200/year in forgone billing) with offshored salaried employees was cheaper to sony than the volunteers.
Proponents of offshoring have propped it up as the new religion of business. Like the TQM or 6-Sigma of the past. Wildly irrational business decisions are being made by the groupthinkers who are today's and tomorrow's CEOs, because everyone else is doing it.
Everyone old enough to have seen Logans Run should have been renewed on carosel already.
My (fuzzy and faded) memory of the series was that the events in it took place after the ending of the movie, but I don't think I have seen an episode of the series in something like 20 years.
Say... isn't the gem on your hand blinking? Off to carosel with you!
Over twenty years ago, people were complaining that we in the US were graduating more lawyers than engineers. They were also complaining that Japan was graduating more engineers than the US was.
In the US, we value money and power. We absolutely despise knowledge and intellect. This is why academic research in CS is 5-30+ years ahead of the industry. Why can't we do a better job programming? Because people refuse to learn why things went/go wrong and what can be done to prevent them in the future. Those are social factors that will end up causing the US to sink to the bottom. We may have invented this profession, but if we continually fail to properly educate people, we will end up the lowest cost workers in the world.
You will see dozens of anecdotes here claiming that the best programmer at their shop never got a degree. As a result, everyone in the industry ends up reinventing the wheel. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. Yes, there are some smart people who never got edumacated; they would have been even better people if they had been. You wouldn't go to a self-taught doctor. Why would you trust your business to a self-taught IT worker?
I have worked at several companies that had licences for Winrunner and Loadrunner, but because the software was so expensive, they wouldn't let anyone who was uncertified touch it, and the cost of the software blew the budget for testing for well over a year. End result: 6-digit price tag software sits on a shelf for several years.
During the dotBoom, I coughed up $500 out of my own pocket for Visual Test. I thought it would help me with the hard parts of testing my code: the NT services and the database connectivity. Unfortunately, VT was only good at testing UI pieces, of which there were very little (although one of the Access applications had about 300 forms). The latest version runs about $4k.
My current employer knows we need to do some better testing and version control, but won't allocate time or resources to installing, oh, say, cvs or subversion or visual source safe. We also can't take the time to install and use NUnit (current shop uses microsoft dev tools exclusively). So all the time used learning NUnit has to be done on my own.
Of all of the employers I had in the last 5 years, none actually used the automated test tools they had, instead all depending on human activity (button pushing), with excel spreadsheets to record the results. One place actually fired testers that didn't pass software.
How about you put the following in the log in prompt for the web pages that access that DB...
User: bob
Password: x' or 2>1 --
and see what breaks. If you compose SQL on the web page script, the bad guy is in.
Welcome to the cruel world of sql injection. Just imagine if the abuser types in the following for the password: x' or 2>1; truncate table customers; drop table users; --
All it takes is one page somewhere to forget to trap/escape out bad stuff, and you are hosed.
Uncle Charlie was a marine biologist. His daughters were into 4H. He took care of the "prize winning" sheep that the daughters showed in fairs. His specialty was very deep water fishes, frequently snagging 3 of each species: one for the pickling jar, one for dissection, and one for dinner. Note: deep water fishes don't have air bladders, they store ammonia in their flesh for boyancy, and their flavor sucks.
If it was up to me, all those sheep would have been buried the week he was diagnosed. It turned out that no one else in the family got vCJD (it would be over 10 years before it was admitted that the transmission of the disease was through eating tainted flesh), they (the aunt and 3 daughters) all died of female specific cancers within a few years of his death.
>It's not very nice to watch.
You are right. I had an uncle die of vCJD (mad cow disease when a person gets it) back in the early 80s. AIDS merely kills you, vCJD destroys what makes you human before it kills you. It basically destroys your brain bit by bit, until it finally destroys the part that controls your breathing and heartbeat (and you stop/forget breathing at that point).
It is the most scary thing I have ever seen or experienced in my life. I've seen folks with advanced AIDS and other fatal diseases. We aren't really sure how he got it (they raised sheep, who get a version of BSE/vCJD called "scrapie"), but after seeing the effect, you wouldn't even want to be in the same building as him. It is very easy to understand the terror and fear folks had when AIDS first came out.
Yes, scientists will need this kind of thing to understand how and why it works, as well as how and why a cure will work.
Would the general civilian populace really have fought with bamboo spears and such? I doubt it.
Actually, you need only look at the combat that took place in Okinawa to prove yourself wrong. People with wooden weapons did indeed charge soldiers and did die rather uselessly. It took somewhere between 50 and 200 people with bamboo spears to kill a US soldier. It was expected that ratio would continue and between 1/2 and 1 million US soldiers would die in a conventional invasion of Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Hokkaido. Do the math: it would have meant the deaths of 20-50 million Japanese. And Japanese would have become an extinct language, and came very close to becoming that way. Pride, perversion of Bushido, the requirement that they keep all lands conquered, the requirement that the Emperor remain immune from war crimes, those requirements by the Japanese prevented any surrender negotiations from taking place. If you look at the conditions they were making for any armistice negotiations to take place, you would laugh at their absurdity. They kept holding out because they wanted to dictate terms, even though they knew they had lost the war. They kept making the fight as bloody as possible because they believed the Americans would tire of the oceans of blood. The Imperial High Command was wrong, and huge numbers of innocents perished because of their errors and arrogance.
Any invasion of Honshu would have had to pass by Kyushu, subjecting their flanks to attack (by suicide aircraft and boats). There were more than 2000 aircraft held in reserve in Honshu and about 1 million troops as well. As absurd as an invasion of Kyushu might seem to you, it was necessary to prevent more casualties. Hiroshima was the military command center controlling the defence of Kyushu and Shikoku.
Nagasaki perished because Kokura was overcast (Kokura was the primary target, Nagasaki was the secondary). Why Nagasaki? 2 very important reasons: it was a large port that would have been needed for the conventional invasion of Kyushu and it was the place that the special torpedos used in Pearl Harbor were made. Normal torpedos dropped by aircraft plunge to about 20-30 meters after splashing into the water (and would slammed into the bottom of Pearl Harbor if they had been dropped there), the ones made by Mitsubishi in Nagasaki were made to plunge to only 10 meters before leveling off. Never underestimate the power of revenge.
Scientists from Tokyo were in Hiroshima within 12 hours of the bomb dropping, and they knew what sort of weapon it was immediately. Why? They were working on their own. Japan was within 1 year of making their own atomic bombs when the war ended. The facilities used to make the components for theirs were located in Northen Korea.
If you think that the arguments in favor of the use of nuclear weapons were unjustified, you don't understand them, the cultures involved, nor the people involved. I recommend you read the following 2 books by Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Dark Sun.
Almost all of the warranty forms used by GM Ford and Chrysler (used for fixing radios or other electronics in the vehicle) have one stage where human handwriting is used. Uppercase and lower case can be really hard for even humans to distinguish. Along with some idiot leaving off 1 digit from the VIN can make the warranty processing situation more challenging.
Dealing with handwriting is why certain characters were eliminated. Think of error correcting/preventing codes. The check digit really only existed to prevent the casual abuser from falsifying warranty claims and VIN tags.
IBM licensed OLE to MS. You remember Object Linking and Enabling? The fine successor to DDE? The license was about to expire and MS said that they were not going to renew it. So they renamed it ActiveX and dared IBM to sue. IBM blinked (they were still twitching after the OS/2 war).
ActiveX was never meant to be secure, nor for sandboxing code. It was meant to be the replacement for embedding Excel spreadsheets into Word docs. Then they added stuff to try to make it into a Netscape killer by bribing developers to use it as a feature on their websites. ActiveX is a kludge, it keeps getting new warts and features to make it seem New and Improved!
How do you mark an ActiveX control safe for scripting? There is a magic value you place in the registry. Yep, that's right, the author of the control is trusted to claim that it is safe. It is as safe as asking folks getting on a plane if they have any guns. How many airlines settle for merely asking their customers vs how many run their customers through metal detectors?
I wonder how long before someone leaves their's in the bathroom (like the skymarshal who left her gun in the bathroom) and it gets sold. This would make a great burglar's tool to find out who to rob while they are on a plane trip.
More than a few companies have IT policies that prohibit them from purchasing software that CA sells, and to divest any product if CA acquires the company. MS can't afford to have that much hate on them.
There are programs like MacroQuest for botting in EverCrack. Some of the scripts are for making tradeskill items, those are primarily used when there is some tradeskill recipe that makes a profit (which happened last year, depending on cpu speed, up to around 50kpp per hour; and to throw people off the scent, they started rumors about a broken banker in zones like najena or befallen). There are other experience making scripts. There are even some folks who find fun in griefing botters. The folks who spend time writing the scripts and code for MQ could probably make more money writing their own games. But oh noooooooos, we be evercrackheads here.
Set up your cash farming action in Old Sebilis. If you have a strong group (levels 60+) you can hunt at the bottom of the well in Sirens Grotto where the cash and gem split at the end of an evening can be 500-1kpp per hour grouped.
There are quite a few characters who spend 24 hours a day at certain spots that drop above average amounts of platinum. Those teams/contractors sell their plat to IGE/Yantis who then sell it to the other players. The people playing the toons are getting paid a couple dollars per day.
The guides in the game (who are unpaid volunteers) are starting to get replaced, along with most of the GMs (who are employees of Sony, and used to be located in San Diego and UK) with GMs working in India.
The reason they check your purchases is to check up on the cashier. A crooked cashier could easily fail to scan items for confederates/friends real easily. Or ring them up as something far cheaper, so that hard drive which should have been $100 gets rung up as a $1 battery. Someone looking from a distance would see what looked like a real transaction. Crooked employees are the cause of around half of all retail losses.
This is the same reason for the black glass panels above cashiers in supermarkets. Take a look up next time you shop. For some psychological reason, people won't look up. And why there is commonly an LCD next to the scanner that is placed to show directly upwards. It is not for your benefit, it is for the benefit of the video camera behind the black glass.
Social engineering works because no one can know all the rules. Especially when the managers change them on a whim. And when the penalties for failing to follow a rule are totally capricious.
Why not look to see if there is a copy in your university library? If not, ask at the checkout desk where the interlibrary loan (ILL) office is. ILL is the way you can check out books from other libraries. If you do research, you may find this to be the best way to get hard-to-get items.
My experience with borrowing books is that if I renew the book 3 times, I need to go buy it. At one time I was a grad student; and when I checked out a book, I got it for the whole semester. Renewing it twice meant I had it over a year.
Another habit I learned to be somewhat useful was the adjacent shelf technique. Look up in the library catalog what books you are looking for, write down some locations and look at the nearby shelves. Too many times I would find books that weren't in the catalog, or were misfiled, had the wrong/mispelled search terms put in the catalog, or were indexed with words you had not thought of. Learn the indexing system your library uses, whether it is dewey or library of congress. If I found booboos, I tried to get them fixed, so the next guy (probably me) would not get near as lost as I had been. At FAU, sometimes I found books that had not been checked out in 10+ years because they had been misfiled.
The last habit I learned to use in the university library systems was to walk all the aisles at least once per school year with a notebook. Write down the books that catch your eye, look interesting, might have something to do with your classes. Check them out or cross them off as you go back to them later. Best done during breaks or near the beginning of semesters before you get overwhelmed in work, or before gamesmen check out all relevant books for a class to prevent the other students in the class from doing better than themselves. It was impossible to do this when I was at Purdue, where they had 2.5 million books spread over 13(?) different libraries. FAU was more managable with around 1/20th that number of books.
I find that the areas folks are starting to notice more (like data mining) are very heavily into math. Data mining is not just about "who is today's terrorist-de-jour" but more useful to solve problems like "who are our best customers and how can we better serve them?" or "can we make our mediocre customers into good customers?" or "where are our customers?" or "what funny things have been going on?" My latest book purchase is Data Engineering, and the math in it is beyond the capabilities of all my coworkers. Fuzzy logic? duh. Neural networks? duh. Support vector machines? duh. Principal component analysis? duh. Kalman filtering? duh. Without a solid background in math, the book is just a $90 paperweight. Maybe in 10 years it will be all componentized for the code monkeys to use. But I am sure they will use it wrong. I still see things like bubblesort appearing in code I have to fix.
I don't know about your experience, but I find that post bachelor research in CS to be between 5 and 20 years ahead of industry. Some of the research goes no where, but some becomes the bleeding edge, then the mainstream. Like relational databases. Started (or first written up) as a paper in 1969. If you want to see where theory hits programming, check out game development. That is where most of the new technologies first hit development and get used successfully (the game may suck, but it becomes a showcase for some new techniques). Writing code for the TMS320 (a single chip digital signal processor) is an excercise in math: you spend more time modeling the code in Matlab than you do turning the code into C or assembly.
I am also finding that graphs (not those blasted pie charts) can be useful in solving complicated problems. And some of the tasks to do, can be described with names like traveling salesman problem or minimum spanning tree. One of the first shocks I ever got in a meeting full of programmers was having to spend most of it explaining graphing algorithms and why algorithm X would solve the problem and why the proposed solution in the meeting would be a bad one. It would be hard to correctly, or quickly, solve a minimum spanning tree problem if you could not recognize it, nor understand what the algorithms were trying to solve. Education is about learning to solve problems and recognizing new situations resembling a problem you already know how to solve. Being uneducated is like only having a hammer to solve problems: you can only fix things by bashing them, good for nails, but not a good tool to use to remove screws and bolts.
It is also fun to explain to the PHB why something he asks for is totally impossible. Usually it is headbangingly painful. Him: This number must be absolutely accurate, no rounding is allowed. Me: I can write 2 numbers on your notepad here that cannot be represented the way you describe. Him: BS, there ain't no such animal. Me: (writing) e and pi. Him: (scowling). I once tried to explain how.1 cannot be represented as a floating point number, but that ended up being a waste of time. Or how, to answer a question he had would require a time machine.
Our society does not value intelligence, and has been actively disparaging intellectuals for 200+ years. Our country may have been founded by intellectuals, but de Tocqueville pointed out the disparagement of intellectuals back in 1835 in Democracy in America.
Getting a Masters or PhD is not an economically viable option for students. When one compares the money you would earn over your lifetime, a non-research position in Electrical Engineering would never repay the cost of the MS, or PhD, degree. When I was getting my Bachelors, 20 years ago, the difference in income between a BS and an MS was only $5k per year. Doing the math showed it to be a loser economically. You get one because it is a hobby or because you get your jollies learning. You do not get an MS or PhD because they will pay the rent.
Sample (for me):
1985 * $45k with BS, -$70K going for MS (cost of school + lost wages).
1986 * $90k total earned with BS, vs -$140k with MS.
1987 * 135k total with BS, vs -$90k with MS.
1988 * 180k total with BS, vs -$40k with MS.
1989 * 225k total with BS, vs +$10k total earned with MS.
Do you see where this is going? 2027 would be the first year that having an MS would be worth more than having a BS. That is assuming zero cost of money. If the interest rate on student loans was above 0, then it would take longer. One could make a more complicated model with wild assumptions like pay raises, cost of money, inflation, or that you would even be employed. Any engineer or scientist worth their diploma can do the same math. If you had any intention of teaching in High School, an MS would be required. Teaching at the post secondary level would require at least a PhD. Please note that I will make less money in 2004 than I did in 1985.
The leading cause of children entering engineering is to have a family member or friend who is an engineer. As most engineers, scientists and programmers in the US get thrown out of their profession before they finish paying off their student loans, potential students in that career are strongly discouraged from entering the profession. Young adults aren't stupid, if they see a career is a joke, they won't go near it. Gates can whine all he wants, but kids are staying away from engineering and CS with a passion. They can do the math and see that they will never pay off any student loans incurred. Get rid of all the Benedict Arnold CEOs and it may make a difference in a decade.
There was an effort about 10 years ago by Motorola and other electronics firms to get Universities to change engineering curicula to be a 2 year, job preparatory, degree. They did not want to pay for engineers back then, and they still don't. The "book learning" that students learned was not desirable, they wanted training in the specific CAE/CAD software and methodologies used at the specific employer. The half-life of an engineer's career is under 5 years at this time. It would have been far less under the proposed regime: oh, new version of the software came out, you are all fired. Even the H1B abuses that they do is silly when you consider that the CAD/CAE software that engineers use usally has a $20k-$200k annual license fee. They did not want technicians, they wanted engineers but did not want to pay then, nor now for it.
The USA also has a 200+ history of deprecating education, intelligence, intellectuals and "book learning." Things will never get better in the USA unless there is some new sputnik race, and then the change will only be temporary. We never learn, because learning is not cool.
Some interesting essays on Nerd and Uncoolness are here and here. I wish I had seen those 30 years ago when I was about to become a teen, but I also think that I could not have understood them as a teen. Like a lot of things about growing up, they only made sense long after the fact.
If you put Patent(s) Pending on a manufactured good, your competitors will not know what features may or may not be covered by a patent. Since patents are kept secret from the time filed to the time issued, no one really knows if there is a filed patent or not. One could be liable for treble damages if you knew that there was a patent, or a pending one when you copied it.
The real problems for other manufacturers are the submarine patents, where the inventor keeps the application alive for 15 or so years, tweaking the application. Since there is an application pending, all other applications for the same thing get denied. An example would be single-chip-microprocessors. Since everyone in the industry tried to patent it and were denied, they assumed that it was not a patentable idea. Big surprise when the submarine came up to sink the industry. When I went to a police academy, we were taught never to assume anything. The saying goes, when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
The big problem for the software industry is that there have been enterprising crooks filing patents based on obscure theses and books, hoping that no one notices it was plagiarized. The patent examiners are not stopping duplicate patents now, they want the user fees, and to the devil (err the courts) with the details.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember an article by Dvorak or Cringely about 12-14 years ago, where a big named software product did something like this. But instead of nailing a pirate, they bagged a New York Times reporter, who got it into the paper. I'm thinking Aldus Pagemaker. Might be wrong.
What would a human be if you removed this trait? Characters like vulcans are humans with emotions removed. Other "aliens" are likewise variations of humans, with human traits/foibles either removed, or dialed up to 11.
Book stores are flooded with junk books, like The Davinci Code or the for dummies series. Publishers are pushing these books and as gresham's law would put it, bad books are driving out good books. As someone who spends about $200 per month on books, I have seen this decline in what is available for quite some time. The amount of money that publishers spend on promoting fad books (like the davinci code) is appalling. It is becoming like the record industry where good musicians get pushed aside, so that this month's fad band can get all the promotion. I find more new science fiction books at the library than I do at the bookstore.
Books about elves and wizards sell very well, thanks to the Lord of the Rings. They just are not sci-fi.
Are book sales down? In the 1970s, paperbacks sold for around 50cents (some less, some more). Nowadays, everything is $6.99 or $7.99.
I do not believe that Caldwell actually reads sci-fi. She thinks Singularity created the idea that technology would grow so fast that people could not cope, but instead that idea came from a 1970 book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. She thinks 2001 was bad because it had a date in the title? How about 1984? Perhaps she should look into the trend of publishing stories after the author dies. Ghost writing with a oiuja board, I guess.
Are the modern sci-fi books dystopic? Yes, and that is not a new trend. Is it because that is all the publishers will publish? I don't know. In 1972, The Sheep Look Up was published, and that is about as dystopic a story as I have ever read. I don't remember a single book by Phillip Dick (some of whose books were turned into Bladerunner and Total Recall) having a happy ending. If you want a happy ending, watch tv. If you want to think, read a book.
My experience with pressure and pressure-holics, is that they make more mistakes when they are working under a deadline than when they have planned things out. Since many of them believe that they cannot perform well unless they are under some pressure, they either (subconciously) blow it off until the deadline or they sabotage themselves until there is some pressure.
In addition, many of these people cannot distinguish between important and urgent. If you have read First Things First, or The 7 habits of highly successful people then you have seen the 2x2 matrix showing the difference between important and urgent. Draw a box, then divide it in half vertically and half horizontally. Label the left column urgent and the right column not urgent. Lable the top row Important, and the bottom row not important. The pressure-holics cannot see the top right, nor the lower left corners. To them, anything in the left column, belongs in the top left corner. Anything that is in the right column belongs in the bottom right square. A phone call is urgent. If it is a customer, or boss, then it is important (upper left), if it is someone selling carpet cleaning, it is not important (lower left). Doing your taxes is important, but it is not urgent until early April. As important things "ripen" they become more urgent.
The worst bosses are the ones who cannot see the difference between important and urgent. The TPS report might be due on Friday, but if you are working on it on Monday, then you are screwing off, and they will dump some imaginary crisis on you, to stop you from doing what (to them) is goofing off. Or, they will arbitrarily move up deadlines because you aren't sweating enough. You cannot make plans or schedules when these sort of people are around, as they will deliberately mess things up for you.
Or maybe you might remember Ruby Ridge or Waco. Or maybe you might remember some of the excesses since 9/11. Was this a good bust or bad one? It looks more like a good one. Don't automatically think that they are the evil jackbooted minions of the evil overlord. Nor should you automatically presume that they are the good guys.
Proponents of offshoring have propped it up as the new religion of business. Like the TQM or 6-Sigma of the past. Wildly irrational business decisions are being made by the groupthinkers who are today's and tomorrow's CEOs, because everyone else is doing it.
My (fuzzy and faded) memory of the series was that the events in it took place after the ending of the movie, but I don't think I have seen an episode of the series in something like 20 years.
Say... isn't the gem on your hand blinking? Off to carosel with you!
I agree, the orignal post is describing a bad thing to do. Vandalism is a crime whether it is painting a wall, or disabling someone's website.
In the US, we value money and power. We absolutely despise knowledge and intellect. This is why academic research in CS is 5-30+ years ahead of the industry. Why can't we do a better job programming? Because people refuse to learn why things went/go wrong and what can be done to prevent them in the future. Those are social factors that will end up causing the US to sink to the bottom. We may have invented this profession, but if we continually fail to properly educate people, we will end up the lowest cost workers in the world.
You will see dozens of anecdotes here claiming that the best programmer at their shop never got a degree. As a result, everyone in the industry ends up reinventing the wheel. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. Yes, there are some smart people who never got edumacated; they would have been even better people if they had been. You wouldn't go to a self-taught doctor. Why would you trust your business to a self-taught IT worker?
During the dotBoom, I coughed up $500 out of my own pocket for Visual Test. I thought it would help me with the hard parts of testing my code: the NT services and the database connectivity. Unfortunately, VT was only good at testing UI pieces, of which there were very little (although one of the Access applications had about 300 forms). The latest version runs about $4k.
My current employer knows we need to do some better testing and version control, but won't allocate time or resources to installing, oh, say, cvs or subversion or visual source safe. We also can't take the time to install and use NUnit (current shop uses microsoft dev tools exclusively). So all the time used learning NUnit has to be done on my own.
Of all of the employers I had in the last 5 years, none actually used the automated test tools they had, instead all depending on human activity (button pushing), with excel spreadsheets to record the results. One place actually fired testers that didn't pass software.
User: bob
Password: x' or 2>1 --
and see what breaks. If you compose SQL on the web page script, the bad guy is in.
Welcome to the cruel world of sql injection. Just imagine if the abuser types in the following for the password:
x' or 2>1; truncate table customers; drop table users; --
All it takes is one page somewhere to forget to trap/escape out bad stuff, and you are hosed.
If it was up to me, all those sheep would have been buried the week he was diagnosed. It turned out that no one else in the family got vCJD (it would be over 10 years before it was admitted that the transmission of the disease was through eating tainted flesh), they (the aunt and 3 daughters) all died of female specific cancers within a few years of his death.
It is the most scary thing I have ever seen or experienced in my life. I've seen folks with advanced AIDS and other fatal diseases. We aren't really sure how he got it (they raised sheep, who get a version of BSE/vCJD called "scrapie"), but after seeing the effect, you wouldn't even want to be in the same building as him. It is very easy to understand the terror and fear folks had when AIDS first came out.
Yes, scientists will need this kind of thing to understand how and why it works, as well as how and why a cure will work.
Any invasion of Honshu would have had to pass by Kyushu, subjecting their flanks to attack (by suicide aircraft and boats). There were more than 2000 aircraft held in reserve in Honshu and about 1 million troops as well. As absurd as an invasion of Kyushu might seem to you, it was necessary to prevent more casualties. Hiroshima was the military command center controlling the defence of Kyushu and Shikoku.
Nagasaki perished because Kokura was overcast (Kokura was the primary target, Nagasaki was the secondary). Why Nagasaki? 2 very important reasons: it was a large port that would have been needed for the conventional invasion of Kyushu and it was the place that the special torpedos used in Pearl Harbor were made. Normal torpedos dropped by aircraft plunge to about 20-30 meters after splashing into the water (and would slammed into the bottom of Pearl Harbor if they had been dropped there), the ones made by Mitsubishi in Nagasaki were made to plunge to only 10 meters before leveling off. Never underestimate the power of revenge.
Scientists from Tokyo were in Hiroshima within 12 hours of the bomb dropping, and they knew what sort of weapon it was immediately. Why? They were working on their own. Japan was within 1 year of making their own atomic bombs when the war ended. The facilities used to make the components for theirs were located in Northen Korea.
If you think that the arguments in favor of the use of nuclear weapons were unjustified, you don't understand them, the cultures involved, nor the people involved. I recommend you read the following 2 books by Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Dark Sun.
Dealing with handwriting is why certain characters were eliminated. Think of error correcting/preventing codes. The check digit really only existed to prevent the casual abuser from falsifying warranty claims and VIN tags.
ActiveX was never meant to be secure, nor for sandboxing code. It was meant to be the replacement for embedding Excel spreadsheets into Word docs. Then they added stuff to try to make it into a Netscape killer by bribing developers to use it as a feature on their websites. ActiveX is a kludge, it keeps getting new warts and features to make it seem New and Improved!
How do you mark an ActiveX control safe for scripting? There is a magic value you place in the registry. Yep, that's right, the author of the control is trusted to claim that it is safe. It is as safe as asking folks getting on a plane if they have any guns. How many airlines settle for merely asking their customers vs how many run their customers through metal detectors?
I wonder how long before someone leaves their's in the bathroom (like the skymarshal who left her gun in the bathroom) and it gets sold. This would make a great burglar's tool to find out who to rob while they are on a plane trip.
More than a few companies have IT policies that prohibit them from purchasing software that CA sells, and to divest any product if CA acquires the company. MS can't afford to have that much hate on them.
There are programs like MacroQuest for botting in EverCrack. Some of the scripts are for making tradeskill items, those are primarily used when there is some tradeskill recipe that makes a profit (which happened last year, depending on cpu speed, up to around 50kpp per hour; and to throw people off the scent, they started rumors about a broken banker in zones like najena or befallen). There are other experience making scripts. There are even some folks who find fun in griefing botters. The folks who spend time writing the scripts and code for MQ could probably make more money writing their own games. But oh noooooooos, we be evercrackheads here.
Set up your cash farming action in Old Sebilis. If you have a strong group (levels 60+) you can hunt at the bottom of the well in Sirens Grotto where the cash and gem split at the end of an evening can be 500-1kpp per hour grouped.
The guides in the game (who are unpaid volunteers) are starting to get replaced, along with most of the GMs (who are employees of Sony, and used to be located in San Diego and UK) with GMs working in India.
The reason they check your purchases is to check up on the cashier. A crooked cashier could easily fail to scan items for confederates/friends real easily. Or ring them up as something far cheaper, so that hard drive which should have been $100 gets rung up as a $1 battery. Someone looking from a distance would see what looked like a real transaction. Crooked employees are the cause of around half of all retail losses. This is the same reason for the black glass panels above cashiers in supermarkets. Take a look up next time you shop. For some psychological reason, people won't look up. And why there is commonly an LCD next to the scanner that is placed to show directly upwards. It is not for your benefit, it is for the benefit of the video camera behind the black glass. Social engineering works because no one can know all the rules. Especially when the managers change them on a whim. And when the penalties for failing to follow a rule are totally capricious.
My experience with borrowing books is that if I renew the book 3 times, I need to go buy it. At one time I was a grad student; and when I checked out a book, I got it for the whole semester. Renewing it twice meant I had it over a year.
Another habit I learned to be somewhat useful was the adjacent shelf technique. Look up in the library catalog what books you are looking for, write down some locations and look at the nearby shelves. Too many times I would find books that weren't in the catalog, or were misfiled, had the wrong/mispelled search terms put in the catalog, or were indexed with words you had not thought of. Learn the indexing system your library uses, whether it is dewey or library of congress. If I found booboos, I tried to get them fixed, so the next guy (probably me) would not get near as lost as I had been. At FAU, sometimes I found books that had not been checked out in 10+ years because they had been misfiled.
The last habit I learned to use in the university library systems was to walk all the aisles at least once per school year with a notebook. Write down the books that catch your eye, look interesting, might have something to do with your classes. Check them out or cross them off as you go back to them later. Best done during breaks or near the beginning of semesters before you get overwhelmed in work, or before gamesmen check out all relevant books for a class to prevent the other students in the class from doing better than themselves. It was impossible to do this when I was at Purdue, where they had 2.5 million books spread over 13(?) different libraries. FAU was more managable with around 1/20th that number of books.
I don't know about your experience, but I find that post bachelor research in CS to be between 5 and 20 years ahead of industry. Some of the research goes no where, but some becomes the bleeding edge, then the mainstream. Like relational databases. Started (or first written up) as a paper in 1969. If you want to see where theory hits programming, check out game development. That is where most of the new technologies first hit development and get used successfully (the game may suck, but it becomes a showcase for some new techniques). Writing code for the TMS320 (a single chip digital signal processor) is an excercise in math: you spend more time modeling the code in Matlab than you do turning the code into C or assembly.
I am also finding that graphs (not those blasted pie charts) can be useful in solving complicated problems. And some of the tasks to do, can be described with names like traveling salesman problem or minimum spanning tree. One of the first shocks I ever got in a meeting full of programmers was having to spend most of it explaining graphing algorithms and why algorithm X would solve the problem and why the proposed solution in the meeting would be a bad one. It would be hard to correctly, or quickly, solve a minimum spanning tree problem if you could not recognize it, nor understand what the algorithms were trying to solve. Education is about learning to solve problems and recognizing new situations resembling a problem you already know how to solve. Being uneducated is like only having a hammer to solve problems: you can only fix things by bashing them, good for nails, but not a good tool to use to remove screws and bolts.
It is also fun to explain to the PHB why something he asks for is totally impossible. Usually it is headbangingly painful. .1 cannot be represented as a floating point number, but that ended up being a waste of time. Or how, to answer a question he had would require a time machine.
Him: This number must be absolutely accurate, no rounding is allowed.
Me: I can write 2 numbers on your notepad here that cannot be represented the way you describe.
Him: BS, there ain't no such animal.
Me: (writing) e and pi.
Him: (scowling).
I once tried to explain how
Our society does not value intelligence, and has been actively disparaging intellectuals for 200+ years. Our country may have been founded by intellectuals, but de Tocqueville pointed out the disparagement of intellectuals back in 1835 in Democracy in America.
Sample (for me):
Do you see where this is going? 2027 would be the first year that having an MS would be worth more than having a BS. That is assuming zero cost of money. If the interest rate on student loans was above 0, then it would take longer. One could make a more complicated model with wild assumptions like pay raises, cost of money, inflation, or that you would even be employed. Any engineer or scientist worth their diploma can do the same math. If you had any intention of teaching in High School, an MS would be required. Teaching at the post secondary level would require at least a PhD. Please note that I will make less money in 2004 than I did in 1985.
The leading cause of children entering engineering is to have a family member or friend who is an engineer. As most engineers, scientists and programmers in the US get thrown out of their profession before they finish paying off their student loans, potential students in that career are strongly discouraged from entering the profession. Young adults aren't stupid, if they see a career is a joke, they won't go near it. Gates can whine all he wants, but kids are staying away from engineering and CS with a passion. They can do the math and see that they will never pay off any student loans incurred. Get rid of all the Benedict Arnold CEOs and it may make a difference in a decade.
There was an effort about 10 years ago by Motorola and other electronics firms to get Universities to change engineering curicula to be a 2 year, job preparatory, degree. They did not want to pay for engineers back then, and they still don't. The "book learning" that students learned was not desirable, they wanted training in the specific CAE/CAD software and methodologies used at the specific employer. The half-life of an engineer's career is under 5 years at this time. It would have been far less under the proposed regime: oh, new version of the software came out, you are all fired. Even the H1B abuses that they do is silly when you consider that the CAD/CAE software that engineers use usally has a $20k-$200k annual license fee. They did not want technicians, they wanted engineers but did not want to pay then, nor now for it.
The USA also has a 200+ history of deprecating education, intelligence, intellectuals and "book learning." Things will never get better in the USA unless there is some new sputnik race, and then the change will only be temporary. We never learn, because learning is not cool.
Some interesting essays on Nerd and Uncoolness are here and here. I wish I had seen those 30 years ago when I was about to become a teen, but I also think that I could not have understood them as a teen. Like a lot of things about growing up, they only made sense long after the fact.
The real problems for other manufacturers are the submarine patents, where the inventor keeps the application alive for 15 or so years, tweaking the application. Since there is an application pending, all other applications for the same thing get denied. An example would be single-chip-microprocessors. Since everyone in the industry tried to patent it and were denied, they assumed that it was not a patentable idea. Big surprise when the submarine came up to sink the industry. When I went to a police academy, we were taught never to assume anything. The saying goes, when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
The big problem for the software industry is that there have been enterprising crooks filing patents based on obscure theses and books, hoping that no one notices it was plagiarized. The patent examiners are not stopping duplicate patents now, they want the user fees, and to the devil (err the courts) with the details.