Bullshit on all of this. You can be ruthless and honorable at the same time. Actually, there are times when being honorable (aka nice) demands that one be ruthless.
Just don't be selfless. There's no shame in taking credit where it's due, the same as there's no shame in exercising and going out to meet "pretty girls". There's also no shame in calling someone out on their bullshit. Don't play politics, go to war.
"Nice guy" is just a euphemism for "gutless", the same as "bad guy" is the same for "self-centered". A lot can be said for taking the middle ground.
p.s. - those of us who understand this not only get to kiss the hot chicks, we get to fuck them as well. And occasionally have a meaningful relationship to boot.
Let's see - it's 2009 and someone still thinks that "security by obscurity" is a good thing? Please. Not when any user could run "ypcat -k passwd >/tmp/file.out" from any system and then run a cracker against it.
No more or less secure than letting a crappy password sit there. Probably more secure, actually, since we at least kept Sendmail patched. Plus the fact that now someone (the IT dept.) knew that user X had a shitty password.
And, if you bothered to use the Internet (you know, this thing us geeks built and use), you'd know that neither of those piercings has anything to do with one's scrotal sac.
And they didn't hurt much either. It was more trouble to find someone to stand in to hand me equipment while I was laying on the piercing table juggling forceps, needle, cork, jewelry, etc. I didn't trust my girlfriend not to panic.
But, come to think of it, I did almost get canned from one job after being told do clean up a/home volume and implementing a script that sent warnings if a user had files of set X or used N amount of disk space (N = total/users).
And for a similar reason...the bosses were the ones using up all the shared disk space with presentations and other bullshit that they could have easily put somewhere else. Yeah, the same bosses who told me to make sure the disk space was available for job data that needed to be shared amongst users.
But, then again, I didn't report to the people that would have potentially been pissed off (PHB's in IT), so the worst they could do was complain to my manager (who would have laughed them out of his office, he had the same ideas about security that I did).
That's why I pick a phrase that I remember (like "goingtohellanyways"), do alphanumeric substitution on it, and then shift a character or two around. That way you just need to remember the phrase, the substitution is automatic, and then an association of the numbers with the phrase (like "hey, it has four words in it, let's just shift every fourth character around").
The fact that I can remember this for multiple accounts at once just indicates how obsessive I am. Or neurotic.
It's pretty easy to write a dictionary generator in perl if you have a good dictionary file to start with. Just take the original, perform however many permutations on it that you'd like, and output to generate a fairly comprehensive dictionary.
They didn't have any authority over me. I ran their clusters (data processing dept.), whereas IT was a separate department. Besides, I think a lot of people in IT were glad I did it. They didn't have any kind of password security policy, so people would make their passwords all kinds of silly shit, like their favorite color.
Well, the point was to make sure that people didn't have easily cracked passwords. Not perfect ones. It was a stop-gap measure. And bear in mind this was almost ten years ago.
Anyone remember that quote that goes something along the lines of "every time we build an idiot-proof system, nature designs a better idiot"?
You can't make people smarter. You can only hit them with a stick when they do something stupid. Thankfully, you can program a stick above their heads.
I once wrote a program that did a weekly dictionary attack (using a standard *nix cracking utility) on the site's passwd file, and then sent out a notice (containing the password, so that it *had* to be changed) to the offending users and the head of IT (I was in another department, but had root access since I ran the majority of the gear).
Needless to say, it didn't make me very popular. But it sure as fuck made my point, both to management and to the users.
Yep. 2 gauge Prince Albert, 10 gauge Frenum. Shaft tattooed like a WWII-era bomb. Did the piercings myself (it's how I put myself through most of college, running a body piercing shop).
And what's this "is this bullshit too?" bullshit? Are you making a reference to my original comment, or what?
What one says is not necessarily what one means. What one professes to do is not necessarily what one intends to do.
That is the credo of the modern world in which we live.
It is disgusting and dishonorable. But it is a fact of life. One that I've had to learn the hard way. I'm honest to a fault, but my "bullshit detectors" have been calibrated by dealing with this world in which we find ourselves. Many people (especially scientists) find this hard, since there are many wrong answers and only one right answer in many circumstances. At other times, there are no right answers, just some that are less incorrect.
And people wonder why I hate the world and would much rather deal with computers.
Well, I did hear a comedian once make a joke along the lines of "his idol, JFK, was banging Marilyn Monroe...he's banging Marilyn Manson. Come on, you're the President of The United States, not the the International House of Pancakes...at least bang a hostess from Applebee's!".
I meant that number of basic math questions, not what 2^10 was. Smartass.
Seriously, if I had to sit in a room and answer 1024 basic math questions (like "what's the square root of 2?" "Uh, that's an irrational number"), for 4 hours, I'd be pretty batty by the time they asked me a question pertaining to the actual job.
I've never had a problem getting a job before. No felony convictions, aggravated or otherwise, etc. Just bullshit cases. Besides, what would you rather have done - fought the case, potentially lost (both the case and the job), and sat in state jail for a year or two (there's no parole in TX state jails, no good time, nothing - day for day; penitentiary time is different...you can get 10 years and get paroled after 3, regardless of what you do inside) or take time served and keep working?
Out of curiousity, did your father ever encounter a candidate that was both patient and dogged enough to deal with the BS questions, and sharp enough to snap to it when faced with a real problem? There are people like that. I'm energetic but astute, so unless I was faced with 2^10 basic math questions, I think the test would be easy to beat.
I was recently turned down by a recruiting company when they discovered that I had 2 DWIs (both of which were 10+ years old) and 2 weapon possession cases (one of which was legitimate, the other was total bullshit that I signed a plea-bargain on so I wouldn't have to sit out the time and lose my job).
Now, personality tests aren't a big worry to me. I'm pretty crazy (by "normal" standards) but intelligent and diligent, so not only do I make a good (if outspoken) employee, but I figured out a long time ago how to manipulate psychological tests. I did it as a teenager, when I was incarcerated in numerous state institutions. If I wanted out of the place, I just picked the answers that made me sound as sane and healthy as an indoctrinated drone. If I wanted to beat a criminal case on grounds of insanity (that's the shortened term for it), I simply picked answers that would make sense for the given situation.
Human beings are pattern-recognizing creatures by nature. And the more intelligent a person is, the more aware of a situation they are and the easier it becomes for them to manipulate a test.
Point taken. But he still got the blowjobs, right? And he didn't cause much harm to the country, unlike his successors (I can't wait to see the Obama debacle). So a well-laid president who doesn't fuck up the economy or practice neo-fascist politics is fine by me.
Indeed, my friend. That's pretty much my philosophy. I get regular exercise (military style - pushups and free weights), eat a healthy diet (I drink maybe one soda a month, if even that), thrive off situations that other people find stressful (I'm so hyper and insomniac that it takes benzodiazepines in large quantities to even get 4-6 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle), my metabolism is off the scale, my cholesterol (the last time I had it checked) is virtually non-existent, etc. etc.
Plus, when I bike (my ex-wife stole my mountain bike, for whatever perverse reason, and I have yet to replace it) I smoke less and have even more energy. So I think I have a pretty long life expectancy, barring any unnatural cause of death (something that I seem prone to invite, but have escaped with little more than a few stab wounds and broken bones).
As for ejaculation, I can handle that on my own. Though I much rather prefer not to. Lucky for me that I seem to have some sort of natural charm with females.
Though I think you ruined my masturbatory fantasies with the SG comment. Unless Natalie Portman gets appointed, that is.
You know what causes cancer? Carcinogens. My native city (Houston) has people dying of lung cancer who never touched a cigarette (I can't quote you a statistic because (a) I'm cooking and need to go check on it, (b) I need to find my cigarettes, and (c) I'm too lazy to do it right now). I smoke and live in the country, yet my breathing (I have sinus problems, broke my nose about ten times too many, and I don't go to doctors unless it's really serious) is significantly better than when I lived in the city and rode a bike for 2-3 hours a day (of course, I'm planning on taking up biking again regardless, exercise is good for you). So the Surgeon General can blow me, as well as everyone else in my family who's a heavy smoker and has no cancer or heart problems. Yawn.
In my opinion, it's just another supercomputer. Plain and simple. People are already using other specialized processors (IBM, Cray, etc.) - and have been for a long time - to process data.
The fact that this one is specifically targeted towards rendering graphics doesn't make it any conceptually unique. And just like everyone has been rabbiting along about the wonders of grid computing (and yet there are so many varying alliances right now that I don't think we'll see much progress for a while; companies don't use grids because of the bandwidth/latency issues, generally...and thus the only people doing anything with grids are publicly funded institutions, like national labs and various educational systems - it's a lot easier to justify running a lot of fiber around the country when you have a state or national government behind you), I don't think this will be some wonderful thing that anyone can go buy a 200 USD hand-held device and watch indie flicks on. Or whatever.
It's still a cool use of a supercomputer, don't get me wrong. I just don't think it's going to be the Next Great Thing (TM) until a lot of social infrastructure paradigms (what people just call "shit") change.
That's the rub, though. Text is easy to compress, especially ASCII, UTF-8, et al. Hence the reason for mark-up languages that are rendered locally by your browser, as well. That's old news.
The kinds of data that they're implying that this "Cloud" (not an original name - the Supercomputing Conference has had "Cloud Computing" for several years, basically a pool/grid of various institutions and/or sponsors who contribute compute, storage, etc. to the conference participants) will handle does not lend itself all that well to compression. Hence the lag you experience in online games, despite the wired connections and the specialized gaming hardware necessary to render the scenery and whatnot.
I'm not saying it's infeasible. I'm saying that you won't see it in a consumer-grade, relatively open fashion in the near future. And not without some of the restrictions I mentioned.
And I apologize to the world at large for not bringing latency into the picture. I was high as a kite and assumed it would be pretty obvious.
Obviously, they're going off one or more of these assumptions/instances :
1) They have designed one hell of a compression algorithm. The OTOY site has between fuck-all and nothing on it, and the domain is relatively new (which doesn't say much - if some bright spark at AMD developed a mean compression algorithm that isn't overwhelmingly intensive, and s/he split off, then it would be new).
2) Mobile bandwidth will be making a fantastic leap at roughly the same time as this system is implemented (not an unreasonable assumption - I've done a little bit of work with long-range wireless - it was directed, not broadcast - and can tell you that it's coming faster than most people think, just not this year).
3) Wired, consumer-grade bandwidth will be making a similar leap. This falls under the "yeah, so what?" category. We all know it. Now if someone could explain to the telco execs and the general public why we should be planning/upgrading our infrastructure (both for this and in general - the last hurricane that hit the Texas coast left me with no power for about 3 goddamn weeks), the world would be a better place.
4) This will only be usable in certain hot-spots (like places with > N Mbps - wired or wireless).
5) This will only be usable with certain devices (like ones that have the software and hardware necessary to handle both the bandwidth and/or compression).
6) Someone's been putting liquid LSD-25 in the AMD/ATI water again. Hey, remember the K6-2? Anyone other than me want to shoot someone at IBM/Lenovo for picking out ATI graphics cards for their ThinkPad laptops (which is the only brand of laptop that meets my standards for power and resilience, but those ATI driver suck!).
Now my guess is that more than one of the above are true. Which ones are true remain to be decided by a tripod of brilliance, avarice, and sheer bone-headed susceptibility to delusions.
Hey, slick, I hate to break this one to you...but drugs, homosexuality, and computers have nothing that intrinsically links them together. They are variables (what I call "things" when I'm speaking in layman's terms) in a person's lifestyle (or you can view that as a set called P for person, or an object of the class Homo Sapiens).
Now, I personally enjoy the hell out of drugs, sex, and computers (preferably supercomputers, which is why I'm reading this damn article) - in which order depends on which day of the week it is (today's Friday, so it's drugs and computers; tomorrow's Saturday, so it's sex and drugs). The fact that I enjoy sex with women (preferably more than one, but I think the average/.er is happy if they can get one gal; word of advice to fellow geeks - date bisexual women...it's a lot of fun) doesn't necessarily mean I have anything against gays. To each their own.
And, for the record, I'm a dedicated ThinkPad user (despite the crappy ATI drivers that don't work worth a damn unless you're using a specific version of X) and a patriot (in the sense of Anti-Flag's song "Red, White, And Brainwashed" : "If you don't fight to make things better, then you're the one betraying the country". Though they need to get off their high horse with the word "Aryan". No one is perfect I guess...).
You, my surprisingly lucid friend, should probably check in with your doctor. Schizophrenia is hard to treat, so we'll bear with you while you do that. Check back in when you have something sane to say.
Myself? I'm off to post my original comment. I was just blown away by the sheer psychotic doggedness it took to post what you did (as I had believed that to be solely my province).
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Bullshit on all of this. You can be ruthless and honorable at the same time. Actually, there are times when being honorable (aka nice) demands that one be ruthless.
Just don't be selfless. There's no shame in taking credit where it's due, the same as there's no shame in exercising and going out to meet "pretty girls". There's also no shame in calling someone out on their bullshit. Don't play politics, go to war.
"Nice guy" is just a euphemism for "gutless", the same as "bad guy" is the same for "self-centered". A lot can be said for taking the middle ground.
p.s. - those of us who understand this not only get to kiss the hot chicks, we get to fuck them as well. And occasionally have a meaningful relationship to boot.
Let's see - it's 2009 and someone still thinks that "security by obscurity" is a good thing? Please. Not when any user could run "ypcat -k passwd > /tmp/file.out" from any system and then run a cracker against it.
No more or less secure than letting a crappy password sit there. Probably more secure, actually, since we at least kept Sendmail patched. Plus the fact that now someone (the IT dept.) knew that user X had a shitty password.
And, if you bothered to use the Internet (you know, this thing us geeks built and use), you'd know that neither of those piercings has anything to do with one's scrotal sac.
And they didn't hurt much either. It was more trouble to find someone to stand in to hand me equipment while I was laying on the piercing table juggling forceps, needle, cork, jewelry, etc. I didn't trust my girlfriend not to panic.
But, come to think of it, I did almost get canned from one job after being told do clean up a /home volume and implementing a script that sent warnings if a user had files of set X or used N amount of disk space (N = total/users).
And for a similar reason...the bosses were the ones using up all the shared disk space with presentations and other bullshit that they could have easily put somewhere else. Yeah, the same bosses who told me to make sure the disk space was available for job data that needed to be shared amongst users.
Hell, I did it just for fun.
But, then again, I didn't report to the people that would have potentially been pissed off (PHB's in IT), so the worst they could do was complain to my manager (who would have laughed them out of his office, he had the same ideas about security that I did).
Amen, brother, amen.
That's why I pick a phrase that I remember (like "goingtohellanyways"), do alphanumeric substitution on it, and then shift a character or two around. That way you just need to remember the phrase, the substitution is automatic, and then an association of the numbers with the phrase (like "hey, it has four words in it, let's just shift every fourth character around").
The fact that I can remember this for multiple accounts at once just indicates how obsessive I am. Or neurotic.
It's pretty easy to write a dictionary generator in perl if you have a good dictionary file to start with. Just take the original, perform however many permutations on it that you'd like, and output to generate a fairly comprehensive dictionary.
They didn't have any authority over me. I ran their clusters (data processing dept.), whereas IT was a separate department. Besides, I think a lot of people in IT were glad I did it. They didn't have any kind of password security policy, so people would make their passwords all kinds of silly shit, like their favorite color.
Well, the point was to make sure that people didn't have easily cracked passwords. Not perfect ones. It was a stop-gap measure. And bear in mind this was almost ten years ago.
Anyone remember that quote that goes something along the lines of "every time we build an idiot-proof system, nature designs a better idiot"?
You can't make people smarter. You can only hit them with a stick when they do something stupid. Thankfully, you can program a stick above their heads.
I once wrote a program that did a weekly dictionary attack (using a standard *nix cracking utility) on the site's passwd file, and then sent out a notice (containing the password, so that it *had* to be changed) to the offending users and the head of IT (I was in another department, but had root access since I ran the majority of the gear).
Needless to say, it didn't make me very popular. But it sure as fuck made my point, both to management and to the users.
Yep. 2 gauge Prince Albert, 10 gauge Frenum. Shaft tattooed like a WWII-era bomb. Did the piercings myself (it's how I put myself through most of college, running a body piercing shop).
And what's this "is this bullshit too?" bullshit? Are you making a reference to my original comment, or what?
What one says is not necessarily what one means. What one professes to do is not necessarily what one intends to do.
That is the credo of the modern world in which we live.
It is disgusting and dishonorable. But it is a fact of life. One that I've had to learn the hard way. I'm honest to a fault, but my "bullshit detectors" have been calibrated by dealing with this world in which we find ourselves. Many people (especially scientists) find this hard, since there are many wrong answers and only one right answer in many circumstances. At other times, there are no right answers, just some that are less incorrect.
And people wonder why I hate the world and would much rather deal with computers.
Well, I did hear a comedian once make a joke along the lines of "his idol, JFK, was banging Marilyn Monroe...he's banging Marilyn Manson. Come on, you're the President of The United States, not the the International House of Pancakes...at least bang a hostess from Applebee's!".
I meant that number of basic math questions, not what 2^10 was. Smartass.
Seriously, if I had to sit in a room and answer 1024 basic math questions (like "what's the square root of 2?" "Uh, that's an irrational number"), for 4 hours, I'd be pretty batty by the time they asked me a question pertaining to the actual job.
I've never had a problem getting a job before. No felony convictions, aggravated or otherwise, etc. Just bullshit cases. Besides, what would you rather have done - fought the case, potentially lost (both the case and the job), and sat in state jail for a year or two (there's no parole in TX state jails, no good time, nothing - day for day; penitentiary time is different...you can get 10 years and get paroled after 3, regardless of what you do inside) or take time served and keep working?
Out of curiousity, did your father ever encounter a candidate that was both patient and dogged enough to deal with the BS questions, and sharp enough to snap to it when faced with a real problem? There are people like that. I'm energetic but astute, so unless I was faced with 2^10 basic math questions, I think the test would be easy to beat.
I was recently turned down by a recruiting company when they discovered that I had 2 DWIs (both of which were 10+ years old) and 2 weapon possession cases (one of which was legitimate, the other was total bullshit that I signed a plea-bargain on so I wouldn't have to sit out the time and lose my job).
Now, personality tests aren't a big worry to me. I'm pretty crazy (by "normal" standards) but intelligent and diligent, so not only do I make a good (if outspoken) employee, but I figured out a long time ago how to manipulate psychological tests. I did it as a teenager, when I was incarcerated in numerous state institutions. If I wanted out of the place, I just picked the answers that made me sound as sane and healthy as an indoctrinated drone. If I wanted to beat a criminal case on grounds of insanity (that's the shortened term for it), I simply picked answers that would make sense for the given situation.
Human beings are pattern-recognizing creatures by nature. And the more intelligent a person is, the more aware of a situation they are and the easier it becomes for them to manipulate a test.
Point taken. But he still got the blowjobs, right? And he didn't cause much harm to the country, unlike his successors (I can't wait to see the Obama debacle). So a well-laid president who doesn't fuck up the economy or practice neo-fascist politics is fine by me.
Indeed, my friend. That's pretty much my philosophy. I get regular exercise (military style - pushups and free weights), eat a healthy diet (I drink maybe one soda a month, if even that), thrive off situations that other people find stressful (I'm so hyper and insomniac that it takes benzodiazepines in large quantities to even get 4-6 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle), my metabolism is off the scale, my cholesterol (the last time I had it checked) is virtually non-existent, etc. etc.
Plus, when I bike (my ex-wife stole my mountain bike, for whatever perverse reason, and I have yet to replace it) I smoke less and have even more energy. So I think I have a pretty long life expectancy, barring any unnatural cause of death (something that I seem prone to invite, but have escaped with little more than a few stab wounds and broken bones).
As for ejaculation, I can handle that on my own. Though I much rather prefer not to. Lucky for me that I seem to have some sort of natural charm with females.
Though I think you ruined my masturbatory fantasies with the SG comment. Unless Natalie Portman gets appointed, that is.
You know what causes cancer? Carcinogens. My native city (Houston) has people dying of lung cancer who never touched a cigarette (I can't quote you a statistic because (a) I'm cooking and need to go check on it, (b) I need to find my cigarettes, and (c) I'm too lazy to do it right now). I smoke and live in the country, yet my breathing (I have sinus problems, broke my nose about ten times too many, and I don't go to doctors unless it's really serious) is significantly better than when I lived in the city and rode a bike for 2-3 hours a day (of course, I'm planning on taking up biking again regardless, exercise is good for you). So the Surgeon General can blow me, as well as everyone else in my family who's a heavy smoker and has no cancer or heart problems. Yawn.
Oh, had a foggy moment there...you're talking about "a bill", not Bill Clinton. My bad.
The fact that this one is specifically targeted towards rendering graphics doesn't make it any conceptually unique. And just like everyone has been rabbiting along about the wonders of grid computing (and yet there are so many varying alliances right now that I don't think we'll see much progress for a while; companies don't use grids because of the bandwidth/latency issues, generally...and thus the only people doing anything with grids are publicly funded institutions, like national labs and various educational systems - it's a lot easier to justify running a lot of fiber around the country when you have a state or national government behind you), I don't think this will be some wonderful thing that anyone can go buy a 200 USD hand-held device and watch indie flicks on. Or whatever.
It's still a cool use of a supercomputer, don't get me wrong. I just don't think it's going to be the Next Great Thing (TM) until a lot of social infrastructure paradigms (what people just call "shit") change.
The kinds of data that they're implying that this "Cloud" (not an original name - the Supercomputing Conference has had "Cloud Computing" for several years, basically a pool/grid of various institutions and/or sponsors who contribute compute, storage, etc. to the conference participants) will handle does not lend itself all that well to compression. Hence the lag you experience in online games, despite the wired connections and the specialized gaming hardware necessary to render the scenery and whatnot.
I'm not saying it's infeasible. I'm saying that you won't see it in a consumer-grade, relatively open fashion in the near future. And not without some of the restrictions I mentioned.
And I apologize to the world at large for not bringing latency into the picture. I was high as a kite and assumed it would be pretty obvious.
Bandwidth. That precious commodity.
Obviously, they're going off one or more of these assumptions/instances :
1) They have designed one hell of a compression algorithm. The OTOY site has between fuck-all and nothing on it, and the domain is relatively new (which doesn't say much - if some bright spark at AMD developed a mean compression algorithm that isn't overwhelmingly intensive, and s/he split off, then it would be new).
2) Mobile bandwidth will be making a fantastic leap at roughly the same time as this system is implemented (not an unreasonable assumption - I've done a little bit of work with long-range wireless - it was directed, not broadcast - and can tell you that it's coming faster than most people think, just not this year).
3) Wired, consumer-grade bandwidth will be making a similar leap. This falls under the "yeah, so what?" category. We all know it. Now if someone could explain to the telco execs and the general public why we should be planning/upgrading our infrastructure (both for this and in general - the last hurricane that hit the Texas coast left me with no power for about 3 goddamn weeks), the world would be a better place.
4) This will only be usable in certain hot-spots (like places with > N Mbps - wired or wireless).
5) This will only be usable with certain devices (like ones that have the software and hardware necessary to handle both the bandwidth and/or compression).
6) Someone's been putting liquid LSD-25 in the AMD/ATI water again. Hey, remember the K6-2? Anyone other than me want to shoot someone at IBM/Lenovo for picking out ATI graphics cards for their ThinkPad laptops (which is the only brand of laptop that meets my standards for power and resilience, but those ATI driver suck!).
Now my guess is that more than one of the above are true. Which ones are true remain to be decided by a tripod of brilliance, avarice, and sheer bone-headed susceptibility to delusions.
I'm taking bets...
Now, I personally enjoy the hell out of drugs, sex, and computers (preferably supercomputers, which is why I'm reading this damn article) - in which order depends on which day of the week it is (today's Friday, so it's drugs and computers; tomorrow's Saturday, so it's sex and drugs). The fact that I enjoy sex with women (preferably more than one, but I think the average /.er is happy if they can get one gal; word of advice to fellow geeks - date bisexual women...it's a lot of fun) doesn't necessarily mean I have anything against gays. To each their own.
And, for the record, I'm a dedicated ThinkPad user (despite the crappy ATI drivers that don't work worth a damn unless you're using a specific version of X) and a patriot (in the sense of Anti-Flag's song "Red, White, And Brainwashed" : "If you don't fight to make things better, then you're the one betraying the country". Though they need to get off their high horse with the word "Aryan". No one is perfect I guess...).
You, my surprisingly lucid friend, should probably check in with your doctor. Schizophrenia is hard to treat, so we'll bear with you while you do that. Check back in when you have something sane to say.
Myself? I'm off to post my original comment. I was just blown away by the sheer psychotic doggedness it took to post what you did (as I had believed that to be solely my province).