> In fact, I can't think of a single large-scale (scale as in cost) software > that has not been cracked.
This is peripheral to your point, but Vista is not large-scale (scale as in cost) software, not by a longshot.
Software that's really expensive will get you for more per seat in incremental aftermarket component sales alone in a single year than you'll ever pay for Vista during its entire lifetime as a product, even if you buy the Superlative Edition. At work I deal with midrange systems, which are *much* cheaper than the really expensive stuff. We're a small site (about twenty seats), and when we were looking at migrating from our old system to something a bit newer, the sales teams had me on speed dial for most of six months. There ended up being ten thousand dollars' *difference* between the quotes for the two main systems we looked at, which are both in the same general price range. (Yes, we went with the cheaper one, but only because we were looking at potential budget cuts at the time. Otherwise we might not have.)
Really large-scale (scale as in cost) software is much more expen$ive.
The English language does not contain sufficiently strong terminology to express how pathetic that sounds to people who have a life. It sounds pretty bad even if you just know someone who has a life, or have met someone who claims to know someone who has a life.
> I use the word "precedent" all the time. Apparently I can go around telling people I'm a > lawyer now. Sweet.
Indeed, just think of the precedent that sets. If mere vocabulary now determines profession, can I start throwing around medical terminology and become a doctor?
I had to google ASX to find out what it is, but the first result (which seems to be advocating their use, incidentally) says this:
> ASX files are textual command files that manage [something]. They are very > small in size (about 1K) because they contain no data, just instructions.
Now, I don't know the technical details of the format, but if that statement is straightforwardly true, then automatically launching these files is inherently a complete abdication of all pretense of security, and any application (be it a mailreader, a web browser, or a desktop application) that automatically launches just any old.asx file it happens to run into is inherently totally insecure.
I don't mean just risky. I mean totally stupidly insanely dangerous.
Automatic launching of *anything* is risky, even if it's just data (e.g., a PNG image), because you don't know what vulnerabilities the app that handles the format might have (e.g., buffer overruns and so forth). But when you automatically launch *instruction* (as opposed to data) formats, the risk that you have introduced an exploitable vulnerability is practically always 100%.
It's a cardinal no-no. You don't *EVER* program an app to automatically launch executable code like that. This is not your garden variety programming mistake that introduces the potential for insecurity. This is Grade-A Fancy insecurity, served on a golden platter to the bad hats.
> Imagine a Beow...[Error in universe.pl line 15x10^9: Division by zero]
Woah, what version of perl are you using? You should be getting NaN, rather than an exception, in any vaguely recent Perl5. (In Perl6 of course you get an unthrown proto-exception, which would evaluate to undef in scalar context.)
> How different is it than MSFT placing its products (Internet Explorer) in > a premium marketing position (embedded in the OS)?'"
Applying the word "Monopoly" to Google in the same way as to Microsoft is disingenuous.
Microsoft's OS has _conservatively_ 85% market share in consumer OSes. (Some estimates put it as high as 95%.)
Yes, Google has the _largest_ market share of any individual search engine, but it's still less than 50% and *way* less than 85%. Yahoo and MSN both have _significantly_ more market share in search engine use than Microsoft's closest competitors in the consumer OS space can claim in their wildest dreams.
Google is not a regulated monopoly and does not need to be as long as they have so many healthy competitors.
> Maybe you mean that someone raised to administer a *nix machine/system wouldn't > be capable of understanding how to use a sophisticated OS like Windows?
The problem there is going to be willingness, not ability. The employer's going to sit them down in front of an OEM Windows install and they're going to spend half of the next three weeks discovering features that aren't included out of the box and tracking down and downloading and installing applications to do that stuff. A normal employee wouldn't notice the missing features due to lack of prior exposure, so they'd sit there doing their job, (or talking on the phone to their friends, or whatever it is they normally do at work).
Some employers won't notice this. Others won't mind, and still others will withhold judgement long enough that the new employee will reach the point where his workstation *has* software installed to provide a lot of the features he's accustomed to, and at that point it won't be a problem. (Indeed, he may well be more productive for not having to work around the missing features. I know I would be. I can get my job done a *lot* faster once I have a working CPAN.pm, my custom lisp stuff installed for Emacs, and the extensions and bookmark keywords I use regularly in my browser.)
But yes, there are probably also employers who would be less than impressed.
And there are a *few* employers whose IT departments will have the workstations so locked down that the new employee will be *unable* to install software to provide the missing features, and he'll be stuck with the official company Windows installation, in which case he'll quit or go out of his mind (assuming he's not permitted to bring in a personal laptop to get work done).
> Microsoft has the best virtual machine with.NET, the best development > tool with Visual Studio and the best access to developers with their > MSDN programs.
Talk about a cultural divide! I find myself totally unable to fathom the mindset behind these statements..NET being the best VM is at least arguable, as it depends on what you're looking for in a VM, and it really makes quite a big difference what general type of development you're looking to do and what sort of language you're planning to use, but throwing out such a broad statement without qualification or supporting rationale is not what I would call a hallmark of sound reasoning. As for the other two statements, we might as well throw in that they have the best web standards support with IE and the best bug tracking with MSKB and the fastest upgrade cycle with only six years from XP to Vista.
I mean, have you ever tried to *use* Visual Studio? Because, I *have*, just a little, and it only comes across as pleasant to use if you compare it to something out of the fifties, like perhaps punchcards. It makes development tools from the seventies (like Emacs for instance) seem by comparison like the best thing since indoor plumbing.
And as far as access to developers... the access to developers that Microsoft has is much less than would be expected looking only at their market share of users. Sure, they probably have 60% of developers developing primarily for their platform, but based on the percentage of users that they have that number should be much higher. In fact they have a singular knack for alienating developers and driving them away, because developers *hate* them. Even many of the ones who develop primarily for Windows don't like it and would prefer to jump ship if only the market share of users were a little less overwhelmingly slanted in their favor. And we're comparing them to Google, a company that has demonstrated they can cherry pick the best talent away from within Microsoft itself pretty much at will, all those fantastic MSDN programs notwithstanding.
Yet, Microsoft has the best of these things. Sure, whatever. Pass the Grape Flavor-Aid.
There were a number of technical security flaws he exploited as well. Among them:
> I then disconnected the network cable from the copier/printer and attached my laptop. As soon > as my laptop booted up, DHCP provided a network address and I was on the internal network.
This should never be. In the first place, DHCP should not hand out an internal-network address to any old network card that comes calling, and in the second place, the copier should probably be isolated from any important or sensitive subnets by a firewall that should only pass the sort of traffic needed for printing/copying/scanning functions, and only if it's coming from the copier's IP address. Discovering the copier's IP address, in order to use it, would be easy enough (our copier has an easy menu interface for configuring that, for instance), but it's an extra thing the attacker has to do, and it should still only get him the ports that the copier normally uses. Defense in depth demands that you erect whatever barriers you can.
Furthermore...
> I started a few of our utilities and started sniffing the traffic on the network. > Within seconds I had a variety of logins and passwords,
Ack! Switches cost, what, a whole extra fifty cents per port, as compared to hubs? WHY would anybody with anything significant to protect be running an unswitched network? Bad network engineer, no cookie.
> You know, if Microsoft would give every police district across the world > free software, tools and maybe even hardware to catch these guys
Hardware and software are not the key things most police forces are lacking in pursuing white-color crime perpetrated via the internet. The key things most police forces are lacking for this are training, manpower, jurisdiction, and training.
Throwing hardware and software at the problem would be like throwing money at the problems in the education system. It's very hard to prove that it doesn't do any good at all, but it's certainly not what's really needed.
> Myself, I get around 100 days per year off and I wouldn't want any other way.
I only take one vacation a year, usually about a week and a day (plus the weekends at both ends, so it adds up to more like a twelve day stretch). And I don't travel during my vacation, because that would spoil it for me. (My idea of the perfect vacation is to unplug the phone, bolt the doors, close the drapes, and stay home. Alone, by preference.)
I do also get eight days' worth of holidays that we're closed, e.g., two days at Thanksgiving (which makes a four-day weekend, unless I happen to draw that Saturday).
However, I work five-hour days most days and total around twenty-five hours a week. So I get most of my mornings off until noon (except Thursdays, when I go in early and get off at 1:30pm) and have all of my evenings after about 6pm.
I only work about three, maybe four Saturdays a quarter (taking another day off during the week to compensate, usually Wednesday), and we're closed on Sundays, so I only go in on Sunday 2-3 times a year -- twice for about ten minutes for DST adjustments, and once more for a couple of hours for year-end rollovers if that happens to fall on the weekend.
Honestly, I think I'll take my short days over your lots of vacations, although of course I can see advantages to either arrangement.
> I'd see a figure like 497ME and figure it's Molvanian quasi-Euro-sheckels
OTOH, E497M (again, with the E being the Euro symbol) would naturally read as a currency symbol, number, and suffix, and the meaning of M in that context would be easy to guess.
> For the Euro sign is a suffix not a prefix like $ or £.
That's a l10n issue.
In the US, for instance, the symbol designating the primary currency of any country is a prefix, and a suffix means small change. If you used the Euro symbol as a suffix people would be likely to assume it means Eurocents, rather than whole Euros, and seeing a letter added, like you did, is even _more_ likely to create that impression, since it makes it potentially stand for something different. (It's like when you see figures like $A250 and you know it's not US money. I'd see a figure like 497ME (with the E being the Euro sign; I can't type that here) and figure it's something oddball like Molvanian quasi-Euro-sheckels or whatnot.
On the other hand, I am given to understand that in some locales all currency symbols are attached as a suffices, including dollars and pounds sterling.
So it depends where you are (or where the person you're writing to is).
> However, lack of money can be a HUGE set of stressors in your life and > can certainly make you quite unhappy.
The desire for a lot more money than you have can make you unhappy, but the mere lack of money will not. There are plenty of happy people in the world with no money to speak of, living by subsistence farming, enjoying their lives.
Indeed, whether you make ten million dollars a year or two hundred, the principle is the same: however much you've got, you have to learn to be _satisfied_ with it. Not that you can't ever try to earn some more, but if your happiness depends on it, you're screwed. You have to learn to be content with what you have. And it's not any easier to be content if you have more. Nothing you can have will make you content. No matter how much you get, it'll never be enough, _unless_ you learn to be satisfied with what you have.
> Lack of a reasonable level of income can ruin your relationships,
If your relationships are that dependent on money, you don't really have any.
> your self-esteem
Self-esteem is overrated. The world would on the whole be a much better place if people on average had a lot less of it.
> your health, etc...
Granted, money can buy medical care, which can solve some health problems (though certainly not all of them). It's nice to be able to afford antibiotics when you have a use for them, for instance. I did say money was nice to have.
> I would have to say that another exception to the rule here is in > Information Technology.
That may be so.
> It is simply not feasible for courses to be up-to-date with technology > affairs, and as such the education you get from University will never > be on par with somebody who has training.
This, however, I'm not sure I agree with -- at least, not entirely. Once you have a general understanding of the underlying principles, keeping up-to-date on your own is relatively easy. For instance, many college IT programs require you to take a dozen or so different programming languages, and it frankly doesn't matter if the language you're going to end up working in isn't one of them, because once you've stretched your mind and wrapped it around everything from COBOL to ForTran to BASIC to Lisp to C to 8086 Assembler to Smalltalk, or whatever your school's assortment happens to be, you're not going to have a lot of trouble picking up Java (or whatever) too.
Not to mention the courses that aren't language-specific anyhow, because they cover general techniques and principles, to say nothing of the courses outside your major. I work in IT, and honestly I think the _most_ valuable course I had in college was the one art class, Intro to Drawing. If I had to do over again I would take another art class or two as electives. I'm not sure which of the classes that I did take I'd be willing to give up, but I'd find a way to make room for another couple of art classes. What I learned in Intro to Drawing has been _amazingly_ useful. Various of the other gen-ed courses I took have also proven useful, another obvious example being the public speaking course. Even humanities courses like Appreciation of Fine Arts (basically, a history of art, music, and architecture), History of Western Civilization, and philosophy have proven to be a more valuable part of my background than you might suppose.
So what I'm saying is that getting a college degree does have _value_ if you're going into IT, although I would say it is not nearly as _necessary_ as for many fields. You do need to study some stuff on your own beyond what you get in class, of course, and real-world job training is also valuable. But there are some kinds of things it's easy to miss out on if you only have on-the-job training, that a college program will be sure to give you, e.g., a course in data structures and algorithm analysis, which is quite useful to have. You can, of course, study such things on your own, getting books from the library, so it is certainly possible to get good training (indeed, even a good education) without attending college. And I would say it's easier to do so in IT than in many fields.
I did go to college, for four years. I majored in math, which is virtually useless in terms of career training. (It qualifies you to take graduate-level schooling to go into various fields, but a B.S. in math does not qualify you for any mathematics job of which I am aware.) However, the nice thing about a four-year degree from a liberal-arts school is that it's a sort of general qualification, and you can get jobs quite outside your major. I'm currently working _sort of_ in my minor field, or at least something tangentially related. My minor was Computer Science, which is basically programming, and my job is one-man-IT-department, which involves only a little programming, being mostly focused on system and network administration type stuff, and providing training to end users, and unjamming printers, and other non-programming tasks. There is also some web development, which I didn't have a course in as the web was too new at the time, but I did play around with HTML in the college computer lab, and would not have had access to the internet to do so if I hadn't been in college, since this was before residential internet access was common outside Silicon Valley; AOL and Compuserve didn't start offering usenet and the web until my senior year, for instance.
> If you put it away in a bank account and later into a Savings Bond > or similar, you'd have a much larger amount of cash in the long run > compared to someone who finishes school and then gets a job and > starts saving/investing.
For a few years, yeah. Then you wake up and realize you're thirty-five, out of work, looking for a job, hoping you can find one where you can make eight bucks an hour, which is hard, because most of the stuff you're qualified to do can just as well be done by somebody in Hyderabad who makes eight bucks a day.
There are exceptions, certain careers you can pick that are going to be reasonably good without a lot of school-and-book learning, because the training is more hands-on type of stuff. Diesel repair is a good example of this. But such jobs are the exception, not the rule. If you drop out of school to work a cash register, no amount of scrimping and saving and earning interest is going to put you ahead financially.
Of course, money is not, despite what you may have heard, really the most important thing in life. It's nice to have, but it will not make you happy, nor will the lack of it _keep_ you from being happy. (Messed-up family relationships, on the other hand, _can_ keep you from being happy. Never screw up your family relationships over a career.)
And a good education, quite independent of fiscal concerns, is also really nice to have, although it, too, will not by itself make you happy, nor will the lack of it keep you from being happy. And there are other ways to get one besides going to college, and it is easily possible to go to college and not get one, although on the whole going to college is a good approach, and one I generally recommend. I am pretty pleased with what I got out of college.
> Not only is it not radioactive, it also isn't useful in non-thermonuclear > fission weapons AFAIK.
Its primary use is in producing weapons-grade fissionable materials, given non-weapons-grade fissionable materials. For instance, you can take some mildly enriched uranium, run it through a heavy-water reactor, and get tritium and weapons-grade plutonium. Other types of reactors are more efficient (and/or safe) for producing power, but heavy-water reactors are desirable for developing a weapons program.
I was wondering that too. It's not exactly the sort of thing you can get by the quart from any hardware store.
> I mean the bush administration has a fit when Iran tries to buy some
That's not because of the deuterium. It's because of what it implies about their uranium enrichment activities, and specifically about the motivation behind such. (We sort of already knew that, because as a major petroleum supplier they don't _need_ nuclear power, but the deuterium makes it even more obvious.)
Deuterium is expensive and (somewhat) difficult to obtain, but it's not dangerous like weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. It's not like letting a Michigan teenager have some deuterium is really very dangerous, per se. If he'd had weapons-grade fissionable material that would be much more worrisome.
But it does seem a little odd that he would know _how_ (or, perhaps more to the point, _where_) to obtain it. This is apparently not your garden-variety teenager. I lived in Michigan for three years, and I can assure you, normal kids up there are as unlikely to know where to get deuterium as normal kids anywhere else. This kid is functioning more or less at an adult level, intellectually. That's the only conclusion I can draw.
> Ah, clearly you've never been to a cricket test match.
Granted. As far as I am aware, I have never been within a thousand miles of a cricket test match. Why, is cricket as boring as baseball? (Is that even _possible_, that there could be another sport as boring as baseball? Are there entire rounds when the players are merely required to watch the grass grow?)
> Bah. You're obviously new here.....I mean, to New Zealand.
Actually, I've never been anywhere near there. Indeed, most of what I know about New Zealand comes from reading Alan Villiers' biography of James Cook. Be that as it may, it is my considered opinion that rugby is boring no matter where you live. (FWIW, the major sports around here are boring too. I believe I mentioned two of them expressly.)
Interactive Fiction works great for a group of people to play together, as a team. You can take turns being at the keyboard, or just leave one person there, in which case it kind of works like people hanging over your shoulder helping you play solitaire, except that good IF is much more interesting than solitaire, and having additional people help is much more useful, especially for difficult works (e.g., some of the Infocom classics).
I think Curses works particularly well for several people to play together, and you can easily get a number of gaming sessions out of it, if nobody in the group has ever played it through before.
Slashdot Mirror
> In fact, I can't think of a single large-scale (scale as in cost) software
> that has not been cracked.
This is peripheral to your point, but Vista is not large-scale (scale as in cost) software, not by a longshot.
Software that's really expensive will get you for more per seat in incremental aftermarket component sales alone in a single year than you'll ever pay for Vista during its entire lifetime as a product, even if you buy the Superlative Edition. At work I deal with midrange systems, which are *much* cheaper than the really expensive stuff. We're a small site (about twenty seats), and when we were looking at migrating from our old system to something a bit newer, the sales teams had me on speed dial for most of six months. There ended up being ten thousand dollars' *difference* between the quotes for the two main systems we looked at, which are both in the same general price range. (Yes, we went with the cheaper one, but only because we were looking at potential budget cuts at the time. Otherwise we might not have.)
Really large-scale (scale as in cost) software is much more expen$ive.
> UNIX is still king regardless of what everybody says.
Dude, as long as it runs Emacs and Perl, it doesn't really matter what the OS is.
> If playing WoW is one of your major activites
The English language does not contain sufficiently strong terminology to express how pathetic that sounds to people who have a life. It sounds pretty bad even if you just know someone who has a life, or have met someone who claims to know someone who has a life.
> I use the word "precedent" all the time. Apparently I can go around telling people I'm a
> lawyer now. Sweet.
Indeed, just think of the precedent that sets. If mere vocabulary now determines profession, can I start throwing around medical terminology and become a doctor?
I had to google ASX to find out what it is, but the first result (which seems to be advocating their use, incidentally) says this:
.asx file it happens to run into is inherently totally insecure.
> ASX files are textual command files that manage [something]. They are very
> small in size (about 1K) because they contain no data, just instructions.
Now, I don't know the technical details of the format, but if that statement is straightforwardly true, then automatically launching these files is inherently a complete abdication of all pretense of security, and any application (be it a mailreader, a web browser, or a desktop application) that automatically launches just any old
I don't mean just risky. I mean totally stupidly insanely dangerous.
Automatic launching of *anything* is risky, even if it's just data (e.g., a PNG image), because you don't know what vulnerabilities the app that handles the format might have (e.g., buffer overruns and so forth). But when you automatically launch *instruction* (as opposed to data) formats, the risk that you have introduced an exploitable vulnerability is practically always 100%.
It's a cardinal no-no. You don't *EVER* program an app to automatically launch executable code like that. This is not your garden variety programming mistake that introduces the potential for insecurity. This is Grade-A Fancy insecurity, served on a golden platter to the bad hats.
> Imagine a Beow...[Error in universe.pl line 15x10^9: Division by zero]
Woah, what version of perl are you using? You should be getting NaN, rather than an exception, in any vaguely recent Perl5. (In Perl6 of course you get an unthrown proto-exception, which would evaluate to undef in scalar context.)
> How different is it than MSFT placing its products (Internet Explorer) in
> a premium marketing position (embedded in the OS)?'"
Applying the word "Monopoly" to Google in the same way as to Microsoft is disingenuous.
Microsoft's OS has _conservatively_ 85% market share in consumer OSes. (Some estimates put it as high as 95%.)
Yes, Google has the _largest_ market share of any individual search engine, but it's still less than 50% and *way* less than 85%. Yahoo and MSN both have _significantly_ more market share in search engine use than Microsoft's closest competitors in the consumer OS space can claim in their wildest dreams.
Google is not a regulated monopoly and does not need to be as long as they have so many healthy competitors.
> Maybe you mean that someone raised to administer a *nix machine/system wouldn't
> be capable of understanding how to use a sophisticated OS like Windows?
The problem there is going to be willingness, not ability. The employer's going to sit them down in front of an OEM Windows install and they're going to spend half of the next three weeks discovering features that aren't included out of the box and tracking down and downloading and installing applications to do that stuff. A normal employee wouldn't notice the missing features due to lack of prior exposure, so they'd sit there doing their job, (or talking on the phone to their friends, or whatever it is they normally do at work).
Some employers won't notice this. Others won't mind, and still others will withhold judgement long enough that the new employee will reach the point where his workstation *has* software installed to provide a lot of the features he's accustomed to, and at that point it won't be a problem. (Indeed, he may well be more productive for not having to work around the missing features. I know I would be. I can get my job done a *lot* faster once I have a working CPAN.pm, my custom lisp stuff installed for Emacs, and the extensions and bookmark keywords I use regularly in my browser.)
But yes, there are probably also employers who would be less than impressed.
And there are a *few* employers whose IT departments will have the workstations so locked down that the new employee will be *unable* to install software to provide the missing features, and he'll be stuck with the official company Windows installation, in which case he'll quit or go out of his mind (assuming he's not permitted to bring in a personal laptop to get work done).
> What defines refined taste in games?
Interactive Fiction springs immediately to mind... HTH.HAND.
> Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET, the best development
.NET being the best VM is at least arguable, as it depends on what you're looking for in a VM, and it really makes quite a big difference what general type of development you're looking to do and what sort of language you're planning to use, but throwing out such a broad statement without qualification or supporting rationale is not what I would call a hallmark of sound reasoning. As for the other two statements, we might as well throw in that they have the best web standards support with IE and the best bug tracking with MSKB and the fastest upgrade cycle with only six years from XP to Vista.
> tool with Visual Studio and the best access to developers with their
> MSDN programs.
Talk about a cultural divide! I find myself totally unable to fathom the mindset behind these statements.
I mean, have you ever tried to *use* Visual Studio? Because, I *have*, just a little, and it only comes across as pleasant to use if you compare it to something out of the fifties, like perhaps punchcards. It makes development tools from the seventies (like Emacs for instance) seem by comparison like the best thing since indoor plumbing.
And as far as access to developers... the access to developers that Microsoft has is much less than would be expected looking only at their market share of users. Sure, they probably have 60% of developers developing primarily for their platform, but based on the percentage of users that they have that number should be much higher. In fact they have a singular knack for alienating developers and driving them away, because developers *hate* them. Even many of the ones who develop primarily for Windows don't like it and would prefer to jump ship if only the market share of users were a little less overwhelmingly slanted in their favor. And we're comparing them to Google, a company that has demonstrated they can cherry pick the best talent away from within Microsoft itself pretty much at will, all those fantastic MSDN programs notwithstanding.
Yet, Microsoft has the best of these things. Sure, whatever. Pass the Grape Flavor-Aid.
There were a number of technical security flaws he exploited as well. Among them:
> I then disconnected the network cable from the copier/printer and attached my laptop. As soon
> as my laptop booted up, DHCP provided a network address and I was on the internal network.
This should never be. In the first place, DHCP should not hand out an internal-network address to any old network card that comes calling, and in the second place, the copier should probably be isolated from any important or sensitive subnets by a firewall that should only pass the sort of traffic needed for printing/copying/scanning functions, and only if it's coming from the copier's IP address. Discovering the copier's IP address, in order to use it, would be easy enough (our copier has an easy menu interface for configuring that, for instance), but it's an extra thing the attacker has to do, and it should still only get him the ports that the copier normally uses. Defense in depth demands that you erect whatever barriers you can.
Furthermore...
> I started a few of our utilities and started sniffing the traffic on the network.
> Within seconds I had a variety of logins and passwords,
Ack! Switches cost, what, a whole extra fifty cents per port, as compared to hubs? WHY would anybody with anything significant to protect be running an unswitched network? Bad network engineer, no cookie.
> You know, if Microsoft would give every police district across the world
> free software, tools and maybe even hardware to catch these guys
Hardware and software are not the key things most police forces are lacking in pursuing white-color crime perpetrated via the internet. The key things most police forces are lacking for this are training, manpower, jurisdiction, and training.
Throwing hardware and software at the problem would be like throwing money at the problems in the education system. It's very hard to prove that it doesn't do any good at all, but it's certainly not what's really needed.
> Myself, I get around 100 days per year off and I wouldn't want any other way.
I only take one vacation a year, usually about a week and a day (plus the weekends at both ends, so it adds up to more like a twelve day stretch). And I don't travel during my vacation, because that would spoil it for me. (My idea of the perfect vacation is to unplug the phone, bolt the doors, close the drapes, and stay home. Alone, by preference.)
I do also get eight days' worth of holidays that we're closed, e.g., two days at Thanksgiving (which makes a four-day weekend, unless I happen to draw that Saturday).
However, I work five-hour days most days and total around twenty-five hours a week. So I get most of my mornings off until noon (except Thursdays, when I go in early and get off at 1:30pm) and have all of my evenings after about 6pm.
I only work about three, maybe four Saturdays a quarter (taking another day off during the week to compensate, usually Wednesday), and we're closed on Sundays, so I only go in on Sunday 2-3 times a year -- twice for about ten minutes for DST adjustments, and once more for a couple of hours for year-end rollovers if that happens to fall on the weekend.
Honestly, I think I'll take my short days over your lots of vacations, although of course I can see advantages to either arrangement.
> I'd see a figure like 497ME and figure it's Molvanian quasi-Euro-sheckels
OTOH, E497M (again, with the E being the Euro symbol) would naturally read as a currency symbol, number, and suffix, and the meaning of M in that context would be easy to guess.
> For the Euro sign is a suffix not a prefix like $ or £.
That's a l10n issue.
In the US, for instance, the symbol designating the primary currency of any country is a prefix, and a suffix means small change. If you used the Euro symbol as a suffix people would be likely to assume it means Eurocents, rather than whole Euros, and seeing a letter added, like you did, is even _more_ likely to create that impression, since it makes it potentially stand for something different. (It's like when you see figures like $A250 and you know it's not US money. I'd see a figure like 497ME (with the E being the Euro sign; I can't type that here) and figure it's something oddball like Molvanian quasi-Euro-sheckels or whatnot.
On the other hand, I am given to understand that in some locales all currency symbols are attached as a suffices, including dollars and pounds sterling.
So it depends where you are (or where the person you're writing to is).
> However, lack of money can be a HUGE set of stressors in your life and
> can certainly make you quite unhappy.
The desire for a lot more money than you have can make you unhappy, but the mere lack of money will not. There are plenty of happy people in the world with no money to speak of, living by subsistence farming, enjoying their lives.
Indeed, whether you make ten million dollars a year or two hundred, the principle is the same: however much you've got, you have to learn to be _satisfied_ with it. Not that you can't ever try to earn some more, but if your happiness depends on it, you're screwed. You have to learn to be content with what you have. And it's not any easier to be content if you have more. Nothing you can have will make you content. No matter how much you get, it'll never be enough, _unless_ you learn to be satisfied with what you have.
> Lack of a reasonable level of income can ruin your relationships,
If your relationships are that dependent on money, you don't really have any.
> your self-esteem
Self-esteem is overrated. The world would on the whole be a much better place if people on average had a lot less of it.
> your health, etc...
Granted, money can buy medical care, which can solve some health problems (though certainly not all of them). It's nice to be able to afford antibiotics when you have a use for them, for instance. I did say money was nice to have.
> I would have to say that another exception to the rule here is in
> Information Technology.
That may be so.
> It is simply not feasible for courses to be up-to-date with technology
> affairs, and as such the education you get from University will never
> be on par with somebody who has training.
This, however, I'm not sure I agree with -- at least, not entirely. Once you have a general understanding of the underlying principles, keeping up-to-date on your own is relatively easy. For instance, many college IT programs require you to take a dozen or so different programming languages, and it frankly doesn't matter if the language you're going to end up working in isn't one of them, because once you've stretched your mind and wrapped it around everything from COBOL to ForTran to BASIC to Lisp to C to 8086 Assembler to Smalltalk, or whatever your school's assortment happens to be, you're not going to have a lot of trouble picking up Java (or whatever) too.
Not to mention the courses that aren't language-specific anyhow, because they cover general techniques and principles, to say nothing of the courses outside your major. I work in IT, and honestly I think the _most_ valuable course I had in college was the one art class, Intro to Drawing. If I had to do over again I would take another art class or two as electives. I'm not sure which of the classes that I did take I'd be willing to give up, but I'd find a way to make room for another couple of art classes. What I learned in Intro to Drawing has been _amazingly_ useful. Various of the other gen-ed courses I took have also proven useful, another obvious example being the public speaking course. Even humanities courses like Appreciation of Fine Arts (basically, a history of art, music, and architecture), History of Western Civilization, and philosophy have proven to be a more valuable part of my background than you might suppose.
So what I'm saying is that getting a college degree does have _value_ if you're going into IT, although I would say it is not nearly as _necessary_ as for many fields. You do need to study some stuff on your own beyond what you get in class, of course, and real-world job training is also valuable. But there are some kinds of things it's easy to miss out on if you only have on-the-job training, that a college program will be sure to give you, e.g., a course in data structures and algorithm analysis, which is quite useful to have. You can, of course, study such things on your own, getting books from the library, so it is certainly possible to get good training (indeed, even a good education) without attending college. And I would say it's easier to do so in IT than in many fields.
I did go to college, for four years. I majored in math, which is virtually useless in terms of career training. (It qualifies you to take graduate-level schooling to go into various fields, but a B.S. in math does not qualify you for any mathematics job of which I am aware.) However, the nice thing about a four-year degree from a liberal-arts school is that it's a sort of general qualification, and you can get jobs quite outside your major. I'm currently working _sort of_ in my minor field, or at least something tangentially related. My minor was Computer Science, which is basically programming, and my job is one-man-IT-department, which involves only a little programming, being mostly focused on system and network administration type stuff, and providing training to end users, and unjamming printers, and other non-programming tasks. There is also some web development, which I didn't have a course in as the web was too new at the time, but I did play around with HTML in the college computer lab, and would not have had access to the internet to do so if I hadn't been in college, since this was before residential internet access was common outside Silicon Valley; AOL and Compuserve didn't start offering usenet and the web until my senior year, for instance.
> If you put it away in a bank account and later into a Savings Bond
> or similar, you'd have a much larger amount of cash in the long run
> compared to someone who finishes school and then gets a job and
> starts saving/investing.
For a few years, yeah. Then you wake up and realize you're thirty-five, out of work, looking for a job, hoping you can find one where you can make eight bucks an hour, which is hard, because most of the stuff you're qualified to do can just as well be done by somebody in Hyderabad who makes eight bucks a day.
There are exceptions, certain careers you can pick that are going to be reasonably good without a lot of school-and-book learning, because the training is more hands-on type of stuff. Diesel repair is a good example of this. But such jobs are the exception, not the rule. If you drop out of school to work a cash register, no amount of scrimping and saving and earning interest is going to put you ahead financially.
Of course, money is not, despite what you may have heard, really the most important thing in life. It's nice to have, but it will not make you happy, nor will the lack of it _keep_ you from being happy. (Messed-up family relationships, on the other hand, _can_ keep you from being happy. Never screw up your family relationships over a career.)
And a good education, quite independent of fiscal concerns, is also really nice to have, although it, too, will not by itself make you happy, nor will the lack of it keep you from being happy. And there are other ways to get one besides going to college, and it is easily possible to go to college and not get one, although on the whole going to college is a good approach, and one I generally recommend. I am pretty pleased with what I got out of college.
> Not only is it not radioactive, it also isn't useful in non-thermonuclear
> fission weapons AFAIK.
Its primary use is in producing weapons-grade fissionable materials, given non-weapons-grade fissionable materials. For instance, you can take some mildly enriched uranium, run it through a heavy-water reactor, and get tritium and weapons-grade plutonium. Other types of reactors are more efficient (and/or safe) for producing power, but heavy-water reactors are desirable for developing a weapons program.
> How does a 17 year old come by deuterium?
I was wondering that too. It's not exactly the sort of thing you can get by the quart from any hardware store.
> I mean the bush administration has a fit when Iran tries to buy some
That's not because of the deuterium. It's because of what it implies about their uranium enrichment activities, and specifically about the motivation behind such. (We sort of already knew that, because as a major petroleum supplier they don't _need_ nuclear power, but the deuterium makes it even more obvious.)
Deuterium is expensive and (somewhat) difficult to obtain, but it's not dangerous like weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. It's not like letting a Michigan teenager have some deuterium is really very dangerous, per se. If he'd had weapons-grade fissionable material that would be much more worrisome.
But it does seem a little odd that he would know _how_ (or, perhaps more to the point, _where_) to obtain it. This is apparently not your garden-variety teenager. I lived in Michigan for three years, and I can assure you, normal kids up there are as unlikely to know where to get deuterium as normal kids anywhere else. This kid is functioning more or less at an adult level, intellectually. That's the only conclusion I can draw.
> Ah, clearly you've never been to a cricket test match.
Granted. As far as I am aware, I have never been within a thousand miles of a cricket test match. Why, is cricket as boring as baseball? (Is that even _possible_, that there could be another sport as boring as baseball? Are there entire rounds when the players are merely required to watch the grass grow?)
> Bah. You're obviously new here. ....I mean, to New Zealand.
Actually, I've never been anywhere near there. Indeed, most of what I know about New Zealand comes from reading Alan Villiers' biography of James Cook. Be that as it may, it is my considered opinion that rugby is boring no matter where you live. (FWIW, the major sports around here are boring too. I believe I mentioned two of them expressly.)
Interactive Fiction works great for a group of people to play together, as a team. You can take turns being at the keyboard, or just leave one person there, in which case it kind of works like people hanging over your shoulder helping you play solitaire, except that good IF is much more interesting than solitaire, and having additional people help is much more useful, especially for difficult works (e.g., some of the Infocom classics).
I think Curses works particularly well for several people to play together, and you can easily get a number of gaming sessions out of it, if nobody in the group has ever played it through before.
> > While not necessarily a consequence of global warming it is very cool!
> Very cold, actually.
No, just cool. Real cold doesn't start until 60 below.
Actually, that just sounds like Non-Euclidean Geometry. HTH.HAND.