It's interesting how you've asserted the transitive here from disliking the man who currently occupies the office of the presidency to disliking our country. Can you please explain how the transitive property can be used to conclude that if someone dislikes a given leader that they must dislike their country?
I have to agree with mordors9 on this - psychology as a subject started off with a reputation as a pseudoscience and it looks to be coming full circle. The notion that we can label anything an "addiction" or "compulsion" if we find it objectionable in any way and through that stigmatize it tells me that there is something other than science at work here.
Right now I'm more concerned about trying to set up coding standards, so that any developer can jump into any part of a project and be able to figure out what's going on, without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code.
Unless you are dealing with trivial projects it will take more than a couple of hours to figure out the code. Even the best documented open source and commercial projects take a few days to figure out.
Not if you don't care how much you trash the code. Getting something to "work" can be done relatively quickly. Keeping a maintainable piece of code from getting mucked up takes some effort. I see this all the time where I work. The code we have is large (millions of sloc) and people take the OP's path. It now takes over a year before a new developer can even do quick fixes and making it maintainable usually involves a rewrite of a large section of code - if it's even possible. Another problem that this mentaility creates is recurring bugs (I fixed it a month ago, why is it back?). This is because nobody has any idea what anyone else is doing because the code is so hacked up and the architecture is so broken down that people's band-aid fixes are undoing each other.
I once spoke to a headhunter (around 8 years ago) about a local video game company and was told that since I was looking for a stable job (i.e. $x per year = $x/12 per month, every month) that the company was not a good match for me. It was explained to me that between games there are a lot of layoffs.
I didn't see anything in the article about stability of the job. $60k is good if you can make it consistently, and if you're just starting off, it's probably good. However, if you're looking for a job where you can live in a house, drive a car that won't leave you stranded, and maybe have a family, you need more than $60k to make up for the lack of stability.
I've got an MSCS and 9 years in at the company I started with straight from undergrad. I'm not too far above the $60k, but the stability and other non-tangibles have been excelent. The main theme I've seen is that if you work where the technology is the product and not just a means to a buisness end, the job is much more fulfilling. (but they usually don't pay as much)
I second that. I live in rural Jefferson County, Missouri and I have a wireless service that works, well, most of the time, kinda. I have been keeping statistics on them for about 2 years now (100 pings on the tower at 4 hour intervals, output piped to text files) and I'm starting to spot trends of when the service dropps off. Initially, I thought it was that in the summer, the leaves were on the trees and they were blocking my signal (I'm about.25 miles from the tower with trees in the way), but I'm starting to think that there is more of a weather component to it (air viscocity, heat on the antenna and boards). I noticed that about 1-2 days after it rains, the connection gets better while the longer we go without rain and the hotter it gets, the worse the connection gets.
Does anyone know of a tool that can be acquired relatively cheaply that can be used to find sources of interference in the 2.4GHz range? Also, is there any type of toy that uses 2.4GHz that one could reasonably expect to work over that distance that I could use to check for blockage?
If a potential employer tried this garbage with me, I'd think they were a joke and probably start trying to throw their little game. You may interview me verbally up to 3 times with up to two of those times being phone interviews. I will not submit code samples since all of my code is the property of my current employer and would be subject to release restrictions.
Good luck trying to interrogate my references. Most of them won't put up with nonsense either. I don't work for morons and they'll figure out that you're indirectly questioning their integrity.
This attitude has struck a nerve with me because of some interviewers I had at the end of my undergrad. One had the audacity to hand me a drug test package on the way into the on-campus interview - I dropped it in the trash on the way out. Not to say that I use drugs - far from it, but if you want me to pee in the cup, you better have a job offer for me, and I better like it enough to overlook your questioning of my integrity.
You strike me as one of those people that started their own company for the thrill of "being in charge" and hey - that's great, as long as you never intend to build a product larger than a website. With this as your business model, you should never expect to acquire or retain top talent. You would have lost me long before the end of your process.
You have to remember that it isn't a blessing or privilege for the upper part of the market to work for you, only the bottom part.
I would agree that 2 years toward a CS major wouldn't prepare you for much. However, if all your school was teaching was programming, those two years would have been better spent at a tech school toward an associate's degree that was actually in programming.
I have a bachelor's and a master's in CS and I can confidently say that my schools prepared me well. CS encompases more than simple programming. There is a lot of study in algorithm analysis, computer architecture, OSes and real software engineering (not as in popular culture where it is interchangable with "programming".)
There is also the issue of studying the hardware. I don't understand how any accredited program can hand out CS degrees without coursework in hardware. (in undergrad, my school taught the circuit analysis, interfacing, etc. out of the physics dept beccause we didn't have an engineering dept. - and every CS student was 2 credits short of a physics minor, math minor was automatic.)
If the program you were looking at was as you describe, I would speculate that they were probably not an accredited program.
Short answer:
Anyone who can write code is doing so and making a lot more than they could configuring networks.
Longer answer:
I have been concidering changing my career to infosec. I've been a software engineer for 9 years at a defense constractor (I have been a deputy security officer before in one of our labs), and I have a Master's in CS. My concern going to infosec is that it will be concidered a step down that I may have a hard time getting out of if the respect that the company has for its infosec employees slips further. The team we have is grossly understaffed and training is almost nonexistant. I'm told that it is a high stress, low respect job with minimal chance for advancement. The only reason I'm concidering it is to gain skills (OTJ training, college courses that come from different $$ than "training") that I may be able to apply if I strike out on my own. It would seem to me that the old school hackers are in places that play to their motivations: respect, training, $$.
Ditch the idea of the reporter dealing with the source directly. If intermediaries employed by a news agency were responsible for determining the validity of a source, it could work. The intermediary uploads the information to a database which does not track which itermediary the information came from, but that it did come from a valid intermediary. This database is then made available to the reporters to spin their story.
Intermediaries would have to be self-policing and a sufficiently large group to prevent mass interrogations.
Interviews could also be handled via something like usenet or IM, where someone like Rove could come in and be assigned a generic (and frequently used) name like "WhiteHouseOfficial" by a third party who is denied access to what he writes.
The key is separating the knowledge of what is said from the knowledge of who said it while keeping the confidence high that the person doing the talking is a credible figure.
What is Cingular, T-Mobile and Verizon's legal liability for illegal activity ranging from petty drug dealing all the way up to terrorism when their products and network are used to perpetrate those crimes?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the game in question already rated "M" and still needed modification to produce the behavior in question?
I have to wonder how much hubub there would be if someone wrote a patch that put a similar "easter egg" into Word. Face it, this game has always had a bulls-eye on it as far as the self-rightous are concerned (just as Doom before it). This incident was just the most convienient excuse to attack it.
Frankly, I'm just sick of the self-rightous political nonsense assumption that it's ok to tell the rest of us what is "ok" and what's not. This used to be primarily the domain of the "right", but it seems to be spreading like a nasty rash.
I have seen a common thread in many of failings of society to deal with the evil de jour.
Do spy cameras in our cities cause crime to drop to zero, no.
Does the criminalizing of handguns prevent shootings, no.
If the money spent on the lobbying of the two above issues and development of detection technology had been spent on developing ways to minimize damage when someone does something stupid instead of trying to prevent them from doing it, these things would be non-issues.
The same can be said about spam. Don't try to prevent spammers from spamming. Spend your development on filters to minimize their effect.
You will never have control over "the other guy", nor should you. Focus on protecting yourself instead of controling others.
BTW - I get maybe 1 spam per day in my personal email. I have good filters. Yeah, it's not zero, but the filters are getting better faster than the spam is.
I graduated from a public high school in 1991 and I was well versed in diagramming sentences. On occasion I still find myself looking at a complex sentence thinking of how it would be diagrammed, and then reality sets in. The main value I got out of diagramming the analytical thinking skills that I use on a daily basis.
I didn't get along particularly well with that instructor, but I did learn in his class.
How well would it work to make a point of entering your username and password wrong a few times before actually logging in? I've never seen the output of a keylogger before. Would that make it enough of a pain that they'd move on to the next poor schmuck?
For me, it's been about control and customization. When consoles have a keyboard, the ability to install something like a Nostromo (or other customizable controllers not made/sold by the console producer) and mouse input for FPS games, then I'm interested.
I think that you've hit on another important point: gamers don't want to be boxed into a particular set of games by their choice of console. Also, nobody wants to go buy 3 or more different consoles so they can play all of the games they like. (3 $400 consoles = price of a reasonable PC)
Too bad that the use of said pen is a violation of the DMCA (circumventing access control).
The whole IP issue has just become disgraceful. How long will this go on before people realize that the model is fundamentally flawed?
I watched testamony given to a U.S. Senate subcomittee by a researcher (from MIT, IIRC) where he bluntly said that whatever can be heard can be copied. The only way to prevent unauthorized copies is not to let anyone hear the music. All attempts at labeling unauthorized copying as "stealing" have fallen flat because of the lack of logic (to the layman) in "stealing" something without quantity. At some point we have to acknowledge that this problem is unique and requires a unique solution.
Given the fast paced, fix-it-now-clean-it-up-later sloppiness that is prevalent in our industry, it's not too much of a reach to put the following into the code:
Take 2 a well-known, pro-regeime web postings (could be pics, pages, whatever). Work out a stego key that will decrypt 1 said pro-regeime website to a pro-regeime letter condemning subversives while at the same time will decrypt the second to what they were wanting to send. That way, if they were to be questioned by [insert despot regeime] about what this garbage file is they were posting was, they have an "out".
Surely, Slashdot has some stego experts that can critique this approach.
I'm by no means a stego expert, but if I were starting from scratch, this would be where I'd start.
Before I get started, I need to say that I have had a college course that extensively covered IP issues and also was an Eagle Scout.
The thing that I find problematic about this is that the adult world hasn't figured out how much creedence to give IP rights, yet the group in question appears to be indoctrinating the youth. Understanding that Scouting in other countries can work differently, the core values should remain the same. I seem to remember something in scouting about being an upstanding, law-abiding citizen- so maybe it's not a total sell-out. It's entirely possible that the merit badge covers what is legal/illegal and not ethical/unethcal by corporate standards.
My final thought: We adults need to get our story straight before we start teaching the next generation what is right and wrong.
When was last time you heard of a Jumbo jet successfully landing on water? Yeah, that is right: never!
Since they aren't designed for successful water landings (when they do that, it's not exactly plan 'A'), you won't ever see one either. However, that's not the point. I was prodding at the arrogance of those that decided to put only enough lifeboats on the Titanic to satisfy the asthetic requirements because, after all, the ship was too big to sink.
FYI: There has been at least one jet (707 cargo) ending up in water still intact that I can think of off the top of my head: http://www.cargolaw.com/2000nightmare_africa_air.h tml I'm sure you can find more if you look, but since it's bad form to post pics of airliner crashes, you might have a hard time finding photos.
I really have to question the wisdom in making such a large airliner. Sure, you can cut into the overhead by fitting more carcasses per plane, but you're concentrating the risks of mishap. The first time one of these monsters go down, it will be a tragedy larger than we're willing to admit.
At least I haven't heard anyone say that there are no flotation devices onboard because the 380 is too big to crash.
I took a class in grad school on the general legal environment in engineering (mostly IP issues), but for part of our legal research, we were given access to Lexus Nexus by one of their sales reps. Part of us being given access was that we had to listen to the rep talk about the company. I questioned whether ornot the responsability of keeping such a large database with such personal info in it was a nitemarish liability, and was told by the rep that if anyone wanted to sue them "I'ts a company full of lawyers- good luck".
You know, somebody needs to post the response to the "only the guilty have something to hide" argument on a webpage so we can just post a link when this fallacy rears its ugly head.
Nothing personal against you Caley, but any type of intrusive laws such as what we're discussing here are the opposite of freedom, and need to be called out as such whenever they're seen.
If you want to keep everything, that's your business. However, you should evaluate your motives. Keeping everything for the express purpose of being able to prove your innocence says a lot about your view of the political climate.
Besides, the idea that making a law to force people to not change the pattern of bits on a disk will actually prevent it is naive. Anyone with any level of proficiency can make it look like the file in question was never there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting how you've asserted the transitive here from disliking the man who currently occupies the office of the presidency to disliking our country. Can you please explain how the transitive property can be used to conclude that if someone dislikes a given leader that they must dislike their country?
I have to agree with mordors9 on this - psychology as a subject started off with a reputation as a pseudoscience and it looks to be coming full circle. The notion that we can label anything an "addiction" or "compulsion" if we find it objectionable in any way and through that stigmatize it tells me that there is something other than science at work here.
Right now I'm more concerned about trying to set up coding standards, so that any developer can jump into any part of a project and be able to figure out what's going on, without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code.
Unless you are dealing with trivial projects it will take more than a couple of hours to figure out the code. Even the best documented open source and commercial projects take a few days to figure out.
Not if you don't care how much you trash the code. Getting something to "work" can be done relatively quickly. Keeping a maintainable piece of code from getting mucked up takes some effort. I see this all the time where I work. The code we have is large (millions of sloc) and people take the OP's path. It now takes over a year before a new developer can even do quick fixes and making it maintainable usually involves a rewrite of a large section of code - if it's even possible. Another problem that this mentaility creates is recurring bugs (I fixed it a month ago, why is it back?). This is because nobody has any idea what anyone else is doing because the code is so hacked up and the architecture is so broken down that people's band-aid fixes are undoing each other.
I once spoke to a headhunter (around 8 years ago) about a local video game company and was told that since I was looking for a stable job (i.e. $x per year = $x/12 per month, every month) that the company was not a good match for me. It was explained to me that between games there are a lot of layoffs.
I didn't see anything in the article about stability of the job. $60k is good if you can make it consistently, and if you're just starting off, it's probably good. However, if you're looking for a job where you can live in a house, drive a car that won't leave you stranded, and maybe have a family, you need more than $60k to make up for the lack of stability.
I've got an MSCS and 9 years in at the company I started with straight from undergrad. I'm not too far above the $60k, but the stability and other non-tangibles have been excelent. The main theme I've seen is that if you work where the technology is the product and not just a means to a buisness end, the job is much more fulfilling. (but they usually don't pay as much)
I second that. I live in rural Jefferson County, Missouri and I have a wireless service that works, well, most of the time, kinda. I have been keeping statistics on them for about 2 years now (100 pings on the tower at 4 hour intervals, output piped to text files) and I'm starting to spot trends of when the service dropps off. Initially, I thought it was that in the summer, the leaves were on the trees and they were blocking my signal (I'm about .25 miles from the tower with trees in the way), but I'm starting to think that there is more of a weather component to it (air viscocity, heat on the antenna and boards). I noticed that about 1-2 days after it rains, the connection gets better while the longer we go without rain and the hotter it gets, the worse the connection gets.
Does anyone know of a tool that can be acquired relatively cheaply that can be used to find sources of interference in the 2.4GHz range? Also, is there any type of toy that uses 2.4GHz that one could reasonably expect to work over that distance that I could use to check for blockage?
If a potential employer tried this garbage with me, I'd think they were a joke and probably start trying to throw their little game. You may interview me verbally up to 3 times with up to two of those times being phone interviews. I will not submit code samples since all of my code is the property of my current employer and would be subject to release restrictions.
Good luck trying to interrogate my references. Most of them won't put up with nonsense either. I don't work for morons and they'll figure out that you're indirectly questioning their integrity.
This attitude has struck a nerve with me because of some interviewers I had at the end of my undergrad. One had the audacity to hand me a drug test package on the way into the on-campus interview - I dropped it in the trash on the way out. Not to say that I use drugs - far from it, but if you want me to pee in the cup, you better have a job offer for me, and I better like it enough to overlook your questioning of my integrity.
You strike me as one of those people that started their own company for the thrill of "being in charge" and hey - that's great, as long as you never intend to build a product larger than a website. With this as your business model, you should never expect to acquire or retain top talent. You would have lost me long before the end of your process.
You have to remember that it isn't a blessing or privilege for the upper part of the market to work for you, only the bottom part.
Here's one I found:o rithms:Chapter_4
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computer_Science:Alg
Look under the heading: find-median
I would agree that 2 years toward a CS major wouldn't prepare you for much. However, if all your school was teaching was programming, those two years would have been better spent at a tech school toward an associate's degree that was actually in programming.
I have a bachelor's and a master's in CS and I can confidently say that my schools prepared me well. CS encompases more than simple programming. There is a lot of study in algorithm analysis, computer architecture, OSes and real software engineering (not as in popular culture where it is interchangable with "programming".)
There is also the issue of studying the hardware. I don't understand how any accredited program can hand out CS degrees without coursework in hardware. (in undergrad, my school taught the circuit analysis, interfacing, etc. out of the physics dept beccause we didn't have an engineering dept. - and every CS student was 2 credits short of a physics minor, math minor was automatic.)
If the program you were looking at was as you describe, I would speculate that they were probably not an accredited program.
they could get my wireless broadband to work over a 1/4 mile distance with a couple of trees in the way.
Short answer:
Anyone who can write code is doing so and making a lot more than they could configuring networks.
Longer answer:
I have been concidering changing my career to infosec. I've been a software engineer for 9 years at a defense constractor (I have been a deputy security officer before in one of our labs), and I have a Master's in CS. My concern going to infosec is that it will be concidered a step down that I may have a hard time getting out of if the respect that the company has for its infosec employees slips further. The team we have is grossly understaffed and training is almost nonexistant. I'm told that it is a high stress, low respect job with minimal chance for advancement. The only reason I'm concidering it is to gain skills (OTJ training, college courses that come from different $$ than "training") that I may be able to apply if I strike out on my own. It would seem to me that the old school hackers are in places that play to their motivations: respect, training, $$.
Ditch the idea of the reporter dealing with the source directly. If intermediaries employed by a news agency were responsible for determining the validity of a source, it could work. The intermediary uploads the information to a database which does not track which itermediary the information came from, but that it did come from a valid intermediary. This database is then made available to the reporters to spin their story.
Intermediaries would have to be self-policing and a sufficiently large group to prevent mass interrogations.
Interviews could also be handled via something like usenet or IM, where someone like Rove could come in and be assigned a generic (and frequently used) name like "WhiteHouseOfficial" by a third party who is denied access to what he writes.
The key is separating the knowledge of what is said from the knowledge of who said it while keeping the confidence high that the person doing the talking is a credible figure.
Or we could just decide to honor confidentiality.
What is Cingular, T-Mobile and Verizon's legal liability for illegal activity ranging from petty drug dealing all the way up to terrorism when their products and network are used to perpetrate those crimes?
[Raises Hand]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the game in question already rated "M" and still needed modification to produce the behavior in question?
I have to wonder how much hubub there would be if someone wrote a patch that put a similar "easter egg" into Word. Face it, this game has always had a bulls-eye on it as far as the self-rightous are concerned (just as Doom before it). This incident was just the most convienient excuse to attack it.
Frankly, I'm just sick of the self-rightous political nonsense assumption that it's ok to tell the rest of us what is "ok" and what's not. This used to be primarily the domain of the "right", but it seems to be spreading like a nasty rash.
I have seen a common thread in many of failings of society to deal with the evil de jour.
Do spy cameras in our cities cause crime to drop to zero, no.
Does the criminalizing of handguns prevent shootings, no.
If the money spent on the lobbying of the two above issues and development of detection technology had been spent on developing ways to minimize damage when someone does something stupid instead of trying to prevent them from doing it, these things would be non-issues.
The same can be said about spam. Don't try to prevent spammers from spamming. Spend your development on filters to minimize their effect.
You will never have control over "the other guy", nor should you. Focus on protecting yourself instead of controling others.
BTW - I get maybe 1 spam per day in my personal email. I have good filters. Yeah, it's not zero, but the filters are getting better faster than the spam is.
I graduated from a public high school in 1991 and I was well versed in diagramming sentences. On occasion I still find myself looking at a complex sentence thinking of how it would be diagrammed, and then reality sets in. The main value I got out of diagramming the analytical thinking skills that I use on a daily basis.
I didn't get along particularly well with that instructor, but I did learn in his class.
How well would it work to make a point of entering your username and password wrong a few times before actually logging in? I've never seen the output of a keylogger before. Would that make it enough of a pain that they'd move on to the next poor schmuck?
For me, it's been about control and customization. When consoles have a keyboard, the ability to install something like a Nostromo (or other customizable controllers not made/sold by the console producer) and mouse input for FPS games, then I'm interested.
I think that you've hit on another important point: gamers don't want to be boxed into a particular set of games by their choice of console. Also, nobody wants to go buy 3 or more different consoles so they can play all of the games they like. (3 $400 consoles = price of a reasonable PC)
Too bad that the use of said pen is a violation of the DMCA (circumventing access control).
The whole IP issue has just become disgraceful. How long will this go on before people realize that the model is fundamentally flawed?
I watched testamony given to a U.S. Senate subcomittee by a researcher (from MIT, IIRC) where he bluntly said that whatever can be heard can be copied. The only way to prevent unauthorized copies is not to let anyone hear the music. All attempts at labeling unauthorized copying as "stealing" have fallen flat because of the lack of logic (to the layman) in "stealing" something without quantity. At some point we have to acknowledge that this problem is unique and requires a unique solution.
Given the fast paced, fix-it-now-clean-it-up-later sloppiness that is prevalent in our industry, it's not too much of a reach to put the following into the code:
#include "MyHomeDirectory/MegaImportantAndNotCMd.h"
You could also store config files there and flip that archive flag to "off".
Folks will get a really nasty surprise when your account is deleted, but was it malice, laziness or just someone constantly running "under the gun"?
Take 2 a well-known, pro-regeime web postings (could be pics, pages, whatever). Work out a stego key that will decrypt 1 said pro-regeime website to a pro-regeime letter condemning subversives while at the same time will decrypt the second to what they were wanting to send. That way, if they were to be questioned by [insert despot regeime] about what this garbage file is they were posting was, they have an "out".
Surely, Slashdot has some stego experts that can critique this approach.
I'm by no means a stego expert, but if I were starting from scratch, this would be where I'd start.
Before I get started, I need to say that I have had a college course that extensively covered IP issues and also was an Eagle Scout.
The thing that I find problematic about this is that the adult world hasn't figured out how much creedence to give IP rights, yet the group in question appears to be indoctrinating the youth. Understanding that Scouting in other countries can work differently, the core values should remain the same. I seem to remember something in scouting about being an upstanding, law-abiding citizen- so maybe it's not a total sell-out. It's entirely possible that the merit badge covers what is legal/illegal and not ethical/unethcal by corporate standards.
My final thought: We adults need to get our story straight before we start teaching the next generation what is right and wrong.
When was last time you heard of a Jumbo jet successfully landing on water? Yeah, that is right: never!
h tml
Since they aren't designed for successful water landings (when they do that, it's not exactly plan 'A'), you won't ever see one either. However, that's not the point. I was prodding at the arrogance of those that decided to put only enough lifeboats on the Titanic to satisfy the asthetic requirements because, after all, the ship was too big to sink.
FYI: There has been at least one jet (707 cargo) ending up in water still intact that I can think of off the top of my head: http://www.cargolaw.com/2000nightmare_africa_air.
I'm sure you can find more if you look, but since it's bad form to post pics of airliner crashes, you might have a hard time finding photos.
I really have to question the wisdom in making such a large airliner. Sure, you can cut into the overhead by fitting more carcasses per plane, but you're concentrating the risks of mishap. The first time one of these monsters go down, it will be a tragedy larger than we're willing to admit.
At least I haven't heard anyone say that there are no flotation devices onboard because the 380 is too big to crash.
I took a class in grad school on the general legal environment in engineering (mostly IP issues), but for part of our legal research, we were given access to Lexus Nexus by one of their sales reps. Part of us being given access was that we had to listen to the rep talk about the company. I questioned whether ornot the responsability of keeping such a large database with such personal info in it was a nitemarish liability, and was told by the rep that if anyone wanted to sue them "I'ts a company full of lawyers- good luck".
You know, somebody needs to post the response to the "only the guilty have something to hide" argument on a webpage so we can just post a link when this fallacy rears its ugly head.
Nothing personal against you Caley, but any type of intrusive laws such as what we're discussing here are the opposite of freedom, and need to be called out as such whenever they're seen.
If you want to keep everything, that's your business. However, you should evaluate your motives. Keeping everything for the express purpose of being able to prove your innocence says a lot about your view of the political climate.
Besides, the idea that making a law to force people to not change the pattern of bits on a disk will actually prevent it is naive. Anyone with any level of proficiency can make it look like the file in question was never there.