The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building....According to defense experts, (spy sats) use radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
Let's be honest...Law enforcement isn't going to get much use out of this...there is too much data, and they have too few people and resources to sift through it all.
Geeks on the other hand, would have a field day. There would be AJAX pages tracking border crossers in real time, sites dedicated to assembling satellite photos of crimes in progress, the works.
Sure, you'd have to deal with lawsuits from every nude sunbather in america, but that's a small price to pay for freedom.
Oh, no doubt. It's clearly what happened...This kind of thing is almost impossible with modern switching hardware, and not even the really expensive stuff, but the reasonable consumer stuff as well.
Fricking stupid. People think it'll never come back to bite them, and it always does.
The AC is right. Your network topology should be spread out over a number of subnets, and they should only talk to each other where it's critical. The subnets should be separated by expensive managed switches, or by custom hardware configured to monitor packet traffic and isolate problems. Critical systems should be largely inaccessible to the vast majority of the network, and where they are accessible the access is monitored and throttled. If one machine takes too much traffic, you need a second machine set up in a load balancing configuration.
This stuff is basic. To have one card take down a whole network...I can't even conceive. There isn't one card that can talk to my whole network on all ports, and there would never be a need for such a thing.
Yup. I've never really seen a situation where you'd have more than a dozen or so computers on a crappy layer 1 switch. Higher quality hardware would throttle this stuff down to the very most local layer, unless you're specifically multicasting across the whole network, which is a security horror story.
Sure, if you're buying consumer grade switching hardware, and you have only one subnet, or all your subnets are weirdly bridged or whatever.
For my money, this should never have happened from a problem with one machine. That's wholly unacceptable. My home network is robust enough to handle one bad machine without going down completely...Hell, I could lose a whole subnet and no one on the other subnet would notice a thing.
If this system or switch or whatever is critical, there should have been a fail over. They should have been able to trace the problem, and they should have been able to isolate it or remove it entirely. If you really do have a card going nuts and spamming the network, that is laughably easy to trace, unless you're in the habit of assigning dynamic IPs to critical pieces of your network.
According to the effing article, it wasn't even a server, but a goddamn desktop. How in the holy hell does a desktop take down the whole system? I can't even conceive of a situation where that could be the case on anything other than a network designed by chimps, especially through a hardware failure...A compromised system might be able to do it, but a system just going dark?
For that to have had any effect at all, that system must have been the lynchpin for a critical piece of the network...probably some Homeland security abortion tacked on to the network, or some such crap...This is like the time I traced a network meltdown to a 4 port hub (not a switch, and unmanaged hub) that was plugged into (not a joke) a T-3 concentrator on one port, and and three subnets of around 200 computers each on the other 3 ports. Every single one of the outbound cables from the $15.00 hub terminated in a piece of networking infrastructure costing not less than $10,000 dollars.
This is like that. Single point of failure in the worst possible way. Gross incompetence, shortsightedness, and general disregard for things like "uptime"; pretty much what we've come to expect from the airline industry these days. If I'm not flying myself, I'm going to be driving, sailing, or riding a goddamn bicycle before I fly commercial.
Criticism about Joomla's name makes sense, but criticism about Feisty doesn't really...Most projects have a distinctive name that is wildly different from the actual market name. Here you might see someone talking about "Feisty Fawn" (Ubuntu 7.4) or "Longhorn" (Windows Vista) or "Moonshine" (Fedora 7) but you won't see any of those products marketed by anything other than their actual brand name.
How does it compare with Drupal or PHP-Nuke? Never found all that many differences between the PHP based CMS's (Can you say SQL injection?), and the best java ones aren't open source.
Best one I ever saw was a situation where the cabling had been done, done well, and labeled, accurately, with the room number and jack number.
Then some PHB came by and decided he didn't like the way the rooms were numbered, so he changed the numbers, but he didn't switch to an entirely new system so some of the numbers remained the same, though usually (but not always) attached to different rooms.
The excellent labeling became a major handicap, and, of course, no one was ever tasked with fixing the label system, so as work was done people would add their own cryptic notes to the cables.
How so? Can't you just walk out in the street and start peddling your...ha...wares? I don't know anything about it really. Do you have to buy a "ho license" or something?
The only reason you have to have money to start a casino is because if people don't win, they won't play, and while the odds guarantee you'll make a profit eventually, you still may have to do some significant payouts early on.
Might as well put it in the lottery. If they're returning 100% interest, then someone is getting screwed somewhere.
Banks make money through investing in other people's projects, and by loaning money for interest. Like everything else, it's a diminishing return, so you can't loan money at an equal rate to the interest rate you're giving your depositors, so either they're loaning your money to people at an interest rate that is higher than 100%, with no possible way to collect on a bad debt.
Chances are they were using that money to finance one of the now-illegal casino's, which would make sense, as that's about the only way to make money in SL that would actually require an input of cash. Now that they've tanked there is basically no longer any point in a bank that actually pays interest. There is nowhere for the money to come from.
Heh. +1 for the Lovecraft reference if I had mod points.
I think it just boils down to the increased mobility of populations allowing groups to interbreed more freely...200 years ago, you could have lots of little enclaves of genetic diversity within a few dozen miles of each other that would seldom if ever gain any genes from each other.
These days there is no guarantee that genes won't be shared regularly across a thousand miles or more. My wife and I were born 400 miles apart. My parents were born in the same town, but their parents were born 500 and 2000 miles apart, respectively.
Yea, I've been salaried for a while, so I guess I'm instinctively averse to things I know will snowball into more headache than I want to deal with. GUI projects never get finished, and I've worked on a few that just traversed in circles after a while...Literally, I could pull version 1.19 and replace version 1.36 with it and give them all the changes they were requesting.
I've got a few ugly projects to finish up where I am, and then I'll be looking again. A nice tenure here will look good on the old resume, and though it sucks in terms of work, the stuff I'm working with is big and sexy stuff.
Meh. It's more that I just don't like working with front-end applications all that much, and javascript is mostly useful there.
Databases, servers, server jobs, server-side applications, etc...It's all clean and useful...No one even notices if it's working, and when you take over a task from someone and automate it, it's like christmas and they're never anything but happy (unless you screw it up, which I seldom do, thankfully).
But move into GUI's and you're screwed...Nothing is ever clean again, no one is ever happy about it for long, and you're forever getting bothered by people who want to push push push the functionality of their web app or their swing app, and make this or that "minor" change which flies in the face of the whole design philosophy as it was conveyed to you by your boss. I guess I just like doing work that is impenetrable to most users...They know it's there, and they know it works, but they can't see it and there is nothing there for them to comment on.
My type of work, you'd be surprised how people's eyes light up when you say "Cobol." It means they can write off calling their septuagenarian consultant who charges 500 dollars for picking up the phone, next time they have some minor issue. My worry about putting it on my resume is the same as my worry about putting javascript on my resume...It's that I'll apply for a job, and they'll see it and say to themselves, "This guy would be great for our ancient legacy server (cobol)" or "This guy would be a great web developer (javascript)" and that's just really not what I want to do.
If old bacteria can thaw out fine, then I'm sure it happens decently often naturally...Lot of ice melting in the world, and it's not all "new" ice...When ice melts, the water carves channels deep into the ice, and liberates more ice in the process (or refreezes, depending).
Interesting that they're so robust, though I guess if the freezing doesn't kill it, there isn't anything else that will either.
That's always going to be the case with some people; there isn't any foolproof way to perpetual employment.
In some of the stuff I work with though, I see the same people over and over again. They get fired by one group that finally drops their obsolete system, and then immediately get picked up by a company that offers support contracts on that obsolete system. There are so few people left who understand it.
COBOL is so obscure, and so seldom taught these days, that you can really clean up if you have good experience in it. There really isn't any new competition coming up through the ranks, and I'm not joking about the software...I do administration on a system that's more than 25 years old, and every time I mention upgrades around our CFO, he gets dizzy and has to be helped to a chair. So we keep paying for support, and those people keep their jobs.
I said I know perl; if you do unix/linux administration I'd say you have to know perl...You'll be seriously handicapped if you don't.
As it happens, in fact, I'm a Java programmer as well; I've been doing it since 1998. I originally got into administration because I was working at windows shops, and I really needed to be able to install and configure Apache and Tomcat on Linux systems in order to deploy my applications.
Since then I've worked in mostly corporate environments as a programmer. I program well in Java, C#, Perl, and Python. I can get by in COBOL, and I program well in javascript, but I don't enjoy it. I've been certified in administration of three different unix environments, and I've administered databases ranging from TurboIMAGE/XL legacy databases running on MPE/iX machines, all the way up to Oracle databases running on modern blade servers.
And I would never, ever put HTML on my resume; that will get you designing forms for marketing. Don't think you know me because I said the word "Perl." I never claimed to be a script jockey, that's your prejudice leaping to the fore.
Ha! Trust me on this, COBOL programmers will take their goddamn jobs to the grave with them. Those S.O.Bs get called out of retirement and paid consultant money to fix things they arsed up decades before.
Anything that sits on a financial system will be changed as seldom as possible, and COBOL is alive and well with people who maintain those damn ancient not-to-be-upgraded systems.
That's pretty much his point. In his opinion, you're far better off hiring a handful of senior guys than the slew of newbies who could do the same work because:
1)The quality of work will be better, so less rewrite/bug costs. 2)It's a lot cheaper to have 4 guys rather than 12 guys, just in terms of office costs. 3)Senior guys aren't as mobile, so you're not going to have to be constantly filling holes and training new people.
It's a "perfect world" situation, because it depends on your experts really being experts, and we all know how often a loser with experience is hired into a position they aren't qualified to fill.
FTA:...Experience is key, but not necessarily in ways you might imagine. Time in the saddle, with a particular language is not as important as diversity of experience. Someone who has worked in several disparate industries, a generalist, is often a much better developer than one who has spent years in the same industry. There are exceptions to this, but in general I have found this to be the case. Bonus points if your developer was a systems administrator in a former life.
Some of the best developers I know were originally trained as journalists, mathmaticians, linguists, and other professions not normally associated with software development...
As a generalist programmer, originally trained in cognitive science, who has formerly worked in several disparate industries, was a systems administrator, programs in half a dozen languages (including perl), etc, etc...Apparently I'm supposed to be making twice my salary. Goddamnit!
*stomps off in search of his boss*
These days, being a programmer generalist (even worse, one with admin experience) just increases the types of shit that get dumped on you...Where they might have had to hire a person to do the front end GUI code, a person to do the database work, a person to set up the server, and a person to code all the services that need to constantly run in the back end, instead, since they've got you, you can do it all, while the specialists sit around drinking coffee and making catty comments about how much better they are at what they do than you are.
My advice is specialize in something to the point where when you do any work on it, it's immediately out of the comprehension of a generalist or a less accomplished programmer...Sure, everyone will hate you, but they'll have to deal with you, and you'll be in a position to dictate terms. What's a generalist got? They're great employees. Big deal. Being a great employee is like being a great dog; at the end of the day, they'll still euthanize your ass when you're no longer of use.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no.
The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building....According to defense experts, (spy sats) use radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
Let's be honest...Law enforcement isn't going to get much use out of this...there is too much data, and they have too few people and resources to sift through it all.
Geeks on the other hand, would have a field day. There would be AJAX pages tracking border crossers in real time, sites dedicated to assembling satellite photos of crimes in progress, the works.
Sure, you'd have to deal with lawsuits from every nude sunbather in america, but that's a small price to pay for freedom.
So? Does it give you confidence in the rest of their equipment when one misbehaving computer can bring down their entire network for nine hours?
Bunch of monkeys. The reason I don't fly commercial anymore has nothing to do with the planes. It has everything to do with the airports.
Oh, no doubt. It's clearly what happened...This kind of thing is almost impossible with modern switching hardware, and not even the really expensive stuff, but the reasonable consumer stuff as well.
Fricking stupid. People think it'll never come back to bite them, and it always does.
The AC is right. Your network topology should be spread out over a number of subnets, and they should only talk to each other where it's critical. The subnets should be separated by expensive managed switches, or by custom hardware configured to monitor packet traffic and isolate problems. Critical systems should be largely inaccessible to the vast majority of the network, and where they are accessible the access is monitored and throttled. If one machine takes too much traffic, you need a second machine set up in a load balancing configuration.
This stuff is basic. To have one card take down a whole network...I can't even conceive. There isn't one card that can talk to my whole network on all ports, and there would never be a need for such a thing.
Yup. I've never really seen a situation where you'd have more than a dozen or so computers on a crappy layer 1 switch. Higher quality hardware would throttle this stuff down to the very most local layer, unless you're specifically multicasting across the whole network, which is a security horror story.
Sure, if you're buying consumer grade switching hardware, and you have only one subnet, or all your subnets are weirdly bridged or whatever.
For my money, this should never have happened from a problem with one machine. That's wholly unacceptable. My home network is robust enough to handle one bad machine without going down completely...Hell, I could lose a whole subnet and no one on the other subnet would notice a thing.
If this system or switch or whatever is critical, there should have been a fail over. They should have been able to trace the problem, and they should have been able to isolate it or remove it entirely. If you really do have a card going nuts and spamming the network, that is laughably easy to trace, unless you're in the habit of assigning dynamic IPs to critical pieces of your network.
According to the effing article, it wasn't even a server, but a goddamn desktop. How in the holy hell does a desktop take down the whole system? I can't even conceive of a situation where that could be the case on anything other than a network designed by chimps, especially through a hardware failure...A compromised system might be able to do it, but a system just going dark?
For that to have had any effect at all, that system must have been the lynchpin for a critical piece of the network...probably some Homeland security abortion tacked on to the network, or some such crap...This is like the time I traced a network meltdown to a 4 port hub (not a switch, and unmanaged hub) that was plugged into (not a joke) a T-3 concentrator on one port, and and three subnets of around 200 computers each on the other 3 ports. Every single one of the outbound cables from the $15.00 hub terminated in a piece of networking infrastructure costing not less than $10,000 dollars.
This is like that. Single point of failure in the worst possible way. Gross incompetence, shortsightedness, and general disregard for things like "uptime"; pretty much what we've come to expect from the airline industry these days. If I'm not flying myself, I'm going to be driving, sailing, or riding a goddamn bicycle before I fly commercial.
Criticism about Joomla's name makes sense, but criticism about Feisty doesn't really...Most projects have a distinctive name that is wildly different from the actual market name. Here you might see someone talking about "Feisty Fawn" (Ubuntu 7.4) or "Longhorn" (Windows Vista) or "Moonshine" (Fedora 7) but you won't see any of those products marketed by anything other than their actual brand name.
Ending your province with an exclamation point is almost as annoying as putting sound on your webpage.
How does it compare with Drupal or PHP-Nuke? Never found all that many differences between the PHP based CMS's (Can you say SQL injection?), and the best java ones aren't open source.
Best one I ever saw was a situation where the cabling had been done, done well, and labeled, accurately, with the room number and jack number.
Then some PHB came by and decided he didn't like the way the rooms were numbered, so he changed the numbers, but he didn't switch to an entirely new system so some of the numbers remained the same, though usually (but not always) attached to different rooms.
The excellent labeling became a major handicap, and, of course, no one was ever tasked with fixing the label system, so as work was done people would add their own cryptic notes to the cables.
Or convert it to hydrogen for portability.
How so? Can't you just walk out in the street and start peddling your...ha...wares? I don't know anything about it really. Do you have to buy a "ho license" or something?
The only reason you have to have money to start a casino is because if people don't win, they won't play, and while the odds guarantee you'll make a profit eventually, you still may have to do some significant payouts early on.
Might as well put it in the lottery. If they're returning 100% interest, then someone is getting screwed somewhere.
Banks make money through investing in other people's projects, and by loaning money for interest. Like everything else, it's a diminishing return, so you can't loan money at an equal rate to the interest rate you're giving your depositors, so either they're loaning your money to people at an interest rate that is higher than 100%, with no possible way to collect on a bad debt.
Chances are they were using that money to finance one of the now-illegal casino's, which would make sense, as that's about the only way to make money in SL that would actually require an input of cash. Now that they've tanked there is basically no longer any point in a bank that actually pays interest. There is nowhere for the money to come from.
Heh. +1 for the Lovecraft reference if I had mod points.
I think it just boils down to the increased mobility of populations allowing groups to interbreed more freely...200 years ago, you could have lots of little enclaves of genetic diversity within a few dozen miles of each other that would seldom if ever gain any genes from each other.
These days there is no guarantee that genes won't be shared regularly across a thousand miles or more. My wife and I were born 400 miles apart. My parents were born in the same town, but their parents were born 500 and 2000 miles apart, respectively.
Yea, I've been salaried for a while, so I guess I'm instinctively averse to things I know will snowball into more headache than I want to deal with. GUI projects never get finished, and I've worked on a few that just traversed in circles after a while...Literally, I could pull version 1.19 and replace version 1.36 with it and give them all the changes they were requesting.
I've got a few ugly projects to finish up where I am, and then I'll be looking again. A nice tenure here will look good on the old resume, and though it sucks in terms of work, the stuff I'm working with is big and sexy stuff.
Meh. It's more that I just don't like working with front-end applications all that much, and javascript is mostly useful there.
Databases, servers, server jobs, server-side applications, etc...It's all clean and useful...No one even notices if it's working, and when you take over a task from someone and automate it, it's like christmas and they're never anything but happy (unless you screw it up, which I seldom do, thankfully).
But move into GUI's and you're screwed...Nothing is ever clean again, no one is ever happy about it for long, and you're forever getting bothered by people who want to push push push the functionality of their web app or their swing app, and make this or that "minor" change which flies in the face of the whole design philosophy as it was conveyed to you by your boss. I guess I just like doing work that is impenetrable to most users...They know it's there, and they know it works, but they can't see it and there is nothing there for them to comment on.
My type of work, you'd be surprised how people's eyes light up when you say "Cobol." It means they can write off calling their septuagenarian consultant who charges 500 dollars for picking up the phone, next time they have some minor issue. My worry about putting it on my resume is the same as my worry about putting javascript on my resume...It's that I'll apply for a job, and they'll see it and say to themselves, "This guy would be great for our ancient legacy server (cobol)" or "This guy would be a great web developer (javascript)" and that's just really not what I want to do.
*anything else that will while it's frozen in a block of ice. Should have been more specific.
If old bacteria can thaw out fine, then I'm sure it happens decently often naturally...Lot of ice melting in the world, and it's not all "new" ice...When ice melts, the water carves channels deep into the ice, and liberates more ice in the process (or refreezes, depending).
Interesting that they're so robust, though I guess if the freezing doesn't kill it, there isn't anything else that will either.
That's always going to be the case with some people; there isn't any foolproof way to perpetual employment.
In some of the stuff I work with though, I see the same people over and over again. They get fired by one group that finally drops their obsolete system, and then immediately get picked up by a company that offers support contracts on that obsolete system. There are so few people left who understand it.
COBOL is so obscure, and so seldom taught these days, that you can really clean up if you have good experience in it. There really isn't any new competition coming up through the ranks, and I'm not joking about the software...I do administration on a system that's more than 25 years old, and every time I mention upgrades around our CFO, he gets dizzy and has to be helped to a chair. So we keep paying for support, and those people keep their jobs.
I said I know perl; if you do unix/linux administration I'd say you have to know perl...You'll be seriously handicapped if you don't.
As it happens, in fact, I'm a Java programmer as well; I've been doing it since 1998. I originally got into administration because I was working at windows shops, and I really needed to be able to install and configure Apache and Tomcat on Linux systems in order to deploy my applications.
Since then I've worked in mostly corporate environments as a programmer. I program well in Java, C#, Perl, and Python. I can get by in COBOL, and I program well in javascript, but I don't enjoy it. I've been certified in administration of three different unix environments, and I've administered databases ranging from TurboIMAGE/XL legacy databases running on MPE/iX machines, all the way up to Oracle databases running on modern blade servers.
And I would never, ever put HTML on my resume; that will get you designing forms for marketing. Don't think you know me because I said the word "Perl." I never claimed to be a script jockey, that's your prejudice leaping to the fore.
Ha! Trust me on this, COBOL programmers will take their goddamn jobs to the grave with them. Those S.O.Bs get called out of retirement and paid consultant money to fix things they arsed up decades before.
Anything that sits on a financial system will be changed as seldom as possible, and COBOL is alive and well with people who maintain those damn ancient not-to-be-upgraded systems.
That's pretty much his point. In his opinion, you're far better off hiring a handful of senior guys than the slew of newbies who could do the same work because:
1)The quality of work will be better, so less rewrite/bug costs.
2)It's a lot cheaper to have 4 guys rather than 12 guys, just in terms of office costs.
3)Senior guys aren't as mobile, so you're not going to have to be constantly filling holes and training new people.
It's a "perfect world" situation, because it depends on your experts really being experts, and we all know how often a loser with experience is hired into a position they aren't qualified to fill.
FTA: ...Experience is key, but not necessarily in ways you might imagine. Time in the saddle, with a particular language is not as important as diversity of experience. Someone who has worked in several disparate industries, a generalist, is often a much better developer than one who has spent years in the same industry. There are exceptions to this, but in general I have found this to be the case. Bonus points if your developer was a systems administrator in a former life.
Some of the best developers I know were originally trained as journalists, mathmaticians, linguists, and other professions not normally associated with software development...
As a generalist programmer, originally trained in cognitive science, who has formerly worked in several disparate industries, was a systems administrator, programs in half a dozen languages (including perl), etc, etc...Apparently I'm supposed to be making twice my salary. Goddamnit!
*stomps off in search of his boss*
These days, being a programmer generalist (even worse, one with admin experience) just increases the types of shit that get dumped on you...Where they might have had to hire a person to do the front end GUI code, a person to do the database work, a person to set up the server, and a person to code all the services that need to constantly run in the back end, instead, since they've got you, you can do it all, while the specialists sit around drinking coffee and making catty comments about how much better they are at what they do than you are.
My advice is specialize in something to the point where when you do any work on it, it's immediately out of the comprehension of a generalist or a less accomplished programmer...Sure, everyone will hate you, but they'll have to deal with you, and you'll be in a position to dictate terms. What's a generalist got? They're great employees. Big deal. Being a great employee is like being a great dog; at the end of the day, they'll still euthanize your ass when you're no longer of use.
//Not bitter or anything.