I love how not being able to change your mind or agree with someone else's proposal is now a thing of weakness in a politician.
The thing I like about Obama is that he pushes for compromise, builds consensus, and isn't just out to fuck over the other party.
But no, no, the fact that he is open to funding something that wasn't a priority for him originally, is this HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM because OMFG HE CHANGED HIS MIND~!@!@$#~!
Lot of places in America have laws against pay toilets, so the "I am willing to pay to use a nice toilet" thing doesn't fly here. The closest thing you can do is try to limit your facilities to paying customers (assuming you're a business) but obviously this doesn't fly if you're a city.
Email is mission critical here; we can't afford to block bounce messages from anywhere because a non-response might be grounds for legal action. If they never received the email, however, it's not.
Catch 22 for us; can't block the bounce messages, even though they're nearly all crap, because there exists a possibility that there might be a real one, and we can't afford to miss it.
That's the whole point. They're using the REPLY-TO to point to a legitimate address on a legitimate domain, whereas the mail is coming from some other source.
A number of spam filters will refuse to block mail where the REPLY-TO is correct on the principle that the actual email address is some sort of temporary/hotmail/whatever crap email sender for someone who has a legitimate interest.
A sad little loophole that makes my life a bit harder.
We've been getting a lot of "reverse spam"...The organizational emails are necessarily public, so some enterprising Russian has harvested the entire set and is using them as "REPLY-TO" addresses, so we get all the bounce messages from their damn spamming.
It's all the fun of having an exploited mail server without actually having an exploited mail server. The mail doesn't actually come from us so we're not having any blacklist problems, but the floods of bounce messages zip right through the spam filters and piss off the users.
Mark Smith was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "...he hadn't seen much of Colbert's work" and he was the one who invited Colbert. People walked out. The reception was mostly silent and unfriendly. Bush himself looks like he's wondering how to get Colbert sent to Gitmo.
Some conservatives may be able to take a joke (Scalia apparently laughed his ass off), but Bush isn't one of them. In his whole Presidency this was probably the only time he was forced to sit and listen to someone rip on him for his policies, and it's clear from the video that he didn't enjoy it.
The fact that they invited Colbert to host the Correspondents Dinner shows they don't have a fricking clue. (If you live under a rock and haven't seen the video of it linky linky here...The man has balls of solid steel).
As per the "bump" I imagine it's more because Colbert is specifically looking for it, and trumpeting it. Free publicity is almost always going to create funding opportunities for politicians.
Right. You're obviously wildly pro-China if you view the Tibetans as "Terrorists"; the Tibet situation is one of the most appalling things to happen in the last 50 years or so, and only a true believer would term their attempts to get their country back "terrorism".
The damn Dam is an ego project, nothing more. The guy who designed it is on record saying it should be blown up. They tried to throw down a dam on the fricking Yellow river like it's some sweet blue-water stream; the sediment makes the damn nearly useless and causes vast flooding problems.
The green city may be a nice idea, but China is leading us into the next century by having some of the most polluted cities in the world inside its borders. It has no meaningful pollution controls, and it's actually subsidising gas prices to help drive its economy. It's an eco hellhole.
It's like driving a hummer to work with a greenpeace sticker on the back, and trying to pretend like a gesture like this absolves them of all their problems is absurd.
Other than that, it's junk. If you live in a poorer area and you think someone might be able to use it, then you can donate it somewhere...Or if you're completely bleeding edge and your old crappy gear is still pretty modern, you can try and ebay it...but by and large old equipment isn't useful for much.
Don't throw it in the trash though; computer stuff is pretty toxic, and there are lots of good things that can be recycled out of it.
Hmmm. I was going to go into detail, but it occurred to me that posting such information in the clear, through the monitor I would hypothetically have to be bypassing, would be teh stupid.
Suffice it to say, "Yes." I can think of a number of ways to secure my transmissions, and it's not unlikely that I've used at least one of them. Paranoia is your friend.
Yea, I wasn't thinking of consulting...Talk about your personal relationships. I spent a couple of years doing consulting, and I get calls to this day (4 years later).
Sadly, the same goes for banking...People get attached to their banker, and since it's such a trust position, they'll follow that guy if he switches, rather than try to "break in" someone new.
Just another example of social networking privacy issues. If your contact list was on your crackberry, you could give 'em the finger, secure in the knowledge that they'd never get hold of it.
But if it's right out there on LinkedIn...Well shit. What do you do? Especially if some of the contacts you've made are more buddy-buddy than pure contact...Or hell, what about all the contacts you make in school? I know dozens of people working for tech companies all over.
I know a manager in a corp that is competing directly with the corp I work for. We even BS industry specific crap back and forth; nothing truly private, but you know how the auditors get...But I knew this guy before either of us started working our current gigs. It would be easy to argue it as related or suggestive, but in reality it's just co-incidental.
It depends on your business; if you're in banking or finance there can be rules about contacting your former clients for a period of time after you switch jobs.
I've seen them try and do the same thing to sales people, but it doesn't seem to work as well (in my experience).
For IT? I can't see where there would be a problem really.
If you make contacts, you keep 'em unless it's something profoundly related to your company (e.g. the guy in shared services who'll push your capital requests).
Otherwise those are your contacts. You bet your ass the sales guys turn around and pitch your customers in their next gig. Why should it be any different for IT?
I used to walk through that area carrying nothing but armed explosives, and watching them disappear from my inventory...Technically if they steal a bomb from you and it goes off later, that's not actually your doing, and you don't get flagged.
Yea, but they were stupid; even Marx thought Communism couldn't work in Russia because they weren't economically advanced enough to produce the sort of class dichotomy that he thought Communism required.
The idea behind the whole Trekian utopia is the replicator; with those, there is no scarcity...at all. Everyone has food, clothes, housing, medicine, books, etc, etc, etc.
Now what they seem to think will happen is that everyone will turn to the betterment of themselves given no constraints upon their resources. What I think they skip over is the century or two where they gave all the undesirables unlimited holodeck access until they keeled over dead.
We have a "relational database"; it's an old TurboImage/V database, running on MPE/iX. Flat table, 8 character names, no hierarchical file system. The system was maintained by 2 30 year vets who retired the same year, to be replaced by yours truly.
Our recovery is pretty much the same; either you edit the jobstream so that you can "re-run" the program from the point at which it crashed, or you restore and re-run.
Too often when I look at the problem I find its just some simple conflict or some weird missed condition; our nightly backup tries to stop a job before it runs. If that job has already been stopped, the backup crashes.
It's just not my world really. Manual recovery...The idea just hurts my brain. The program logic should be able to recover simple errors; if it runs into a file locking condition it should be able to pause for a moment, not just crash.
The trolls just write themselves...I'll attempt to rise above.
Still, it's pretty damn pathetic when you can't trust your supporters to express their own opinions to the point where you have to give them your opinions to reprint.
Ah fuck it. Lets burn some karma..."I guess all his supporters are too senile to remember what he stands for?" or maybe "He flip-flops so often that it's safer if they just cut and paste?" Maybe "Since most of his supporters are illiterate, it's the only way they can meaningfully contribute. Coming next month, a McDonalds-style interface with pictures of common attack points (a flat tire, little back guy in diapers, a black playing card, etc)."
I am so sick of "talking points." It just reeks of brand advertising.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
on
Why COBOL Could Come Back
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've rarely ever seen good COBOL, so maybe it's possible. From what I HAVE seen, especially with the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed KSAM flat table POS wannabe database files, suggests to me that good, recoverable, code, is nearly impossible to write. None of that stuff is transaction safe. The programs work in too many discrete steps; if it fails, it hardly ever fails in such a way that you can just RE-run the program; either you need a recovery-specific subset or you have to traverse the program until the point of failure and see if you can recover it.
The line by line approach is a recipe for disaster. In old code, especially in old code, most lines are suspect. What is dependent on system crap (ISAM/KSAM files are a good example) that doesn't apply in the modern world? What is part of an ugly kludge? What is just unnecessary?
You need to step back, analyze the process, and replicate the functionality, not the code.
Yes, it's a sucky process. Yes, there are going to be problems. But it's only going to get worse going down the line, and supporting COBOL is getting more nightmarish by the year as there are fewer and fewer people in the market who are capable.
It's going to have to be done. I'm not against an incremental approach, but I am strongly against just pretending like the current situation can continue forever.
The dropping dollar spurs foreign investment and makes American products more marketable overseas...Give's 'em more bang for their buck, makes our manufacturing sector more competitive.
Skilled trade work is overrated, sadly; it's about economic opportunity costs. Trying to force your economy to stay in the developing stages is guaranteed to produce stagnation and inflation, while moving to the sort of service economy that can fleece other countries of the money they're making doing trade work is really the next step in evolution. Look at Switzerland.
The demographic problem is real and interesting, but the solution is simply to open the doors to more immigration; we'll need the bodies, we'll have the work, and despite our flaws, this country is still a pretty nice place to live, and unlike the snotty european social democracies, we still let people immigrate.
It's not about age, it's about relevance. C is relevant and you can get plenty of jobs working on new code if you use C.
COBOL? You're going to be working on other people's legacy code for the rest of your life.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
on
Why COBOL Could Come Back
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree; the stuff worked well in old systems. It was optimized to save CPU cycles and disk space...It was a conscious decision which made good use of the resources of the day.
Unfortunately that day is gone. We should focus now on code reliability and maintainability and COBOL is not great in those areas. Trying to write in intelligent failure into a COBOL app is a nightmare compared to JAVA where it's almost the backbone of the whole language.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how not being able to change your mind or agree with someone else's proposal is now a thing of weakness in a politician.
The thing I like about Obama is that he pushes for compromise, builds consensus, and isn't just out to fuck over the other party.
But no, no, the fact that he is open to funding something that wasn't a priority for him originally, is this HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM because OMFG HE CHANGED HIS MIND~!@!@$#~!
Fucking zombies.
Lot of places in America have laws against pay toilets, so the "I am willing to pay to use a nice toilet" thing doesn't fly here. The closest thing you can do is try to limit your facilities to paying customers (assuming you're a business) but obviously this doesn't fly if you're a city.
He's checking the referer and dumping all traffic from /.
It's a good solution to prevent slashdotting, while keeping your site available.
Email is mission critical here; we can't afford to block bounce messages from anywhere because a non-response might be grounds for legal action. If they never received the email, however, it's not.
Catch 22 for us; can't block the bounce messages, even though they're nearly all crap, because there exists a possibility that there might be a real one, and we can't afford to miss it.
That's the whole point. They're using the REPLY-TO to point to a legitimate address on a legitimate domain, whereas the mail is coming from some other source.
A number of spam filters will refuse to block mail where the REPLY-TO is correct on the principle that the actual email address is some sort of temporary/hotmail/whatever crap email sender for someone who has a legitimate interest.
A sad little loophole that makes my life a bit harder.
We've been getting a lot of "reverse spam"...The organizational emails are necessarily public, so some enterprising Russian has harvested the entire set and is using them as "REPLY-TO" addresses, so we get all the bounce messages from their damn spamming.
It's all the fun of having an exploited mail server without actually having an exploited mail server. The mail doesn't actually come from us so we're not having any blacklist problems, but the floods of bounce messages zip right through the spam filters and piss off the users.
Mark Smith was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "...he hadn't seen much of Colbert's work" and he was the one who invited Colbert. People walked out. The reception was mostly silent and unfriendly. Bush himself looks like he's wondering how to get Colbert sent to Gitmo.
Some conservatives may be able to take a joke (Scalia apparently laughed his ass off), but Bush isn't one of them. In his whole Presidency this was probably the only time he was forced to sit and listen to someone rip on him for his policies, and it's clear from the video that he didn't enjoy it.
The fact that they invited Colbert to host the Correspondents Dinner shows they don't have a fricking clue. (If you live under a rock and haven't seen the video of it linky linky here...The man has balls of solid steel).
As per the "bump" I imagine it's more because Colbert is specifically looking for it, and trumpeting it. Free publicity is almost always going to create funding opportunities for politicians.
Right. You're obviously wildly pro-China if you view the Tibetans as "Terrorists"; the Tibet situation is one of the most appalling things to happen in the last 50 years or so, and only a true believer would term their attempts to get their country back "terrorism".
The damn Dam is an ego project, nothing more. The guy who designed it is on record saying it should be blown up. They tried to throw down a dam on the fricking Yellow river like it's some sweet blue-water stream; the sediment makes the damn nearly useless and causes vast flooding problems.
The green city may be a nice idea, but China is leading us into the next century by having some of the most polluted cities in the world inside its borders. It has no meaningful pollution controls, and it's actually subsidising gas prices to help drive its economy. It's an eco hellhole.
It's like driving a hummer to work with a greenpeace sticker on the back, and trying to pretend like a gesture like this absolves them of all their problems is absurd.
And make disposal their problem.
Other than that, it's junk. If you live in a poorer area and you think someone might be able to use it, then you can donate it somewhere...Or if you're completely bleeding edge and your old crappy gear is still pretty modern, you can try and ebay it...but by and large old equipment isn't useful for much.
Don't throw it in the trash though; computer stuff is pretty toxic, and there are lots of good things that can be recycled out of it.
Hmmm. I was going to go into detail, but it occurred to me that posting such information in the clear, through the monitor I would hypothetically have to be bypassing, would be teh stupid.
Suffice it to say, "Yes." I can think of a number of ways to secure my transmissions, and it's not unlikely that I've used at least one of them. Paranoia is your friend.
Yea, I wasn't thinking of consulting...Talk about your personal relationships. I spent a couple of years doing consulting, and I get calls to this day (4 years later).
Sadly, the same goes for banking...People get attached to their banker, and since it's such a trust position, they'll follow that guy if he switches, rather than try to "break in" someone new.
Just another example of social networking privacy issues. If your contact list was on your crackberry, you could give 'em the finger, secure in the knowledge that they'd never get hold of it.
But if it's right out there on LinkedIn...Well shit. What do you do? Especially if some of the contacts you've made are more buddy-buddy than pure contact...Or hell, what about all the contacts you make in school? I know dozens of people working for tech companies all over.
I know a manager in a corp that is competing directly with the corp I work for. We even BS industry specific crap back and forth; nothing truly private, but you know how the auditors get...But I knew this guy before either of us started working our current gigs. It would be easy to argue it as related or suggestive, but in reality it's just co-incidental.
It depends on your business; if you're in banking or finance there can be rules about contacting your former clients for a period of time after you switch jobs.
I've seen them try and do the same thing to sales people, but it doesn't seem to work as well (in my experience).
For IT? I can't see where there would be a problem really.
If you make contacts, you keep 'em unless it's something profoundly related to your company (e.g. the guy in shared services who'll push your capital requests).
Otherwise those are your contacts. You bet your ass the sales guys turn around and pitch your customers in their next gig. Why should it be any different for IT?
I used to walk through that area carrying nothing but armed explosives, and watching them disappear from my inventory...Technically if they steal a bomb from you and it goes off later, that's not actually your doing, and you don't get flagged.
Yea, but they were stupid; even Marx thought Communism couldn't work in Russia because they weren't economically advanced enough to produce the sort of class dichotomy that he thought Communism required.
The idea behind the whole Trekian utopia is the replicator; with those, there is no scarcity...at all. Everyone has food, clothes, housing, medicine, books, etc, etc, etc.
Now what they seem to think will happen is that everyone will turn to the betterment of themselves given no constraints upon their resources. What I think they skip over is the century or two where they gave all the undesirables unlimited holodeck access until they keeled over dead.
For the most part, stuff doesn't fail. It is pretty reliable, and the system is not under heavy utilization (thank god).
Some of the better bits of code have good recovery points; some of them even have "restart" options in their parameters.
With all the custom code, however, things have a tendency to fail in interesting ways.
We have a "relational database"; it's an old TurboImage/V database, running on MPE/iX. Flat table, 8 character names, no hierarchical file system. The system was maintained by 2 30 year vets who retired the same year, to be replaced by yours truly.
Our recovery is pretty much the same; either you edit the jobstream so that you can "re-run" the program from the point at which it crashed, or you restore and re-run.
Too often when I look at the problem I find its just some simple conflict or some weird missed condition; our nightly backup tries to stop a job before it runs. If that job has already been stopped, the backup crashes.
It's just not my world really. Manual recovery...The idea just hurts my brain. The program logic should be able to recover simple errors; if it runs into a file locking condition it should be able to pause for a moment, not just crash.
The trolls just write themselves...I'll attempt to rise above.
Still, it's pretty damn pathetic when you can't trust your supporters to express their own opinions to the point where you have to give them your opinions to reprint.
Ah fuck it. Lets burn some karma..."I guess all his supporters are too senile to remember what he stands for?" or maybe "He flip-flops so often that it's safer if they just cut and paste?" Maybe "Since most of his supporters are illiterate, it's the only way they can meaningfully contribute. Coming next month, a McDonalds-style interface with pictures of common attack points (a flat tire, little back guy in diapers, a black playing card, etc)."
I am so sick of "talking points." It just reeks of brand advertising.
I've rarely ever seen good COBOL, so maybe it's possible. From what I HAVE seen, especially with the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed KSAM flat table POS wannabe database files, suggests to me that good, recoverable, code, is nearly impossible to write. None of that stuff is transaction safe. The programs work in too many discrete steps; if it fails, it hardly ever fails in such a way that you can just RE-run the program; either you need a recovery-specific subset or you have to traverse the program until the point of failure and see if you can recover it.
The line by line approach is a recipe for disaster. In old code, especially in old code, most lines are suspect. What is dependent on system crap (ISAM/KSAM files are a good example) that doesn't apply in the modern world? What is part of an ugly kludge? What is just unnecessary?
You need to step back, analyze the process, and replicate the functionality, not the code.
Yes, it's a sucky process. Yes, there are going to be problems. But it's only going to get worse going down the line, and supporting COBOL is getting more nightmarish by the year as there are fewer and fewer people in the market who are capable.
It's going to have to be done. I'm not against an incremental approach, but I am strongly against just pretending like the current situation can continue forever.
Nice analysis there Chicken Little.
The dropping dollar spurs foreign investment and makes American products more marketable overseas...Give's 'em more bang for their buck, makes our manufacturing sector more competitive.
Skilled trade work is overrated, sadly; it's about economic opportunity costs. Trying to force your economy to stay in the developing stages is guaranteed to produce stagnation and inflation, while moving to the sort of service economy that can fleece other countries of the money they're making doing trade work is really the next step in evolution. Look at Switzerland.
The demographic problem is real and interesting, but the solution is simply to open the doors to more immigration; we'll need the bodies, we'll have the work, and despite our flaws, this country is still a pretty nice place to live, and unlike the snotty european social democracies, we still let people immigrate.
All in all, interesting times.
It's not about age, it's about relevance. C is relevant and you can get plenty of jobs working on new code if you use C.
COBOL? You're going to be working on other people's legacy code for the rest of your life.
I agree; the stuff worked well in old systems. It was optimized to save CPU cycles and disk space...It was a conscious decision which made good use of the resources of the day.
Unfortunately that day is gone. We should focus now on code reliability and maintainability and COBOL is not great in those areas. Trying to write in intelligent failure into a COBOL app is a nightmare compared to JAVA where it's almost the backbone of the whole language.