In order to shut out the noise when really necessary. I have no problem getting deep into code in our open plan office, and neither does anyone else. When you're an engineering department the whole open plan is quiet anyway.
Cubicles are almost exclusively a US thing as far as I can tell. The UK norm is to have senior management in offices and everyone else open plan. It's much better for collaboration, it's much better for morale.
it's much better for not having asshat coworkers playing radios in their cubicles, for not having people hide away and do bugger all for days, for a myriad of things.
Cubicles are isolated and depressing. Embrace the european style.
As for no set desks - well that's a little tricky for engineers who have multiple workstations, and I'm not sure it's the best idea, but scrapping cubicles is definitely good.
BTW, i work for a huge multinational you _have_ heard of, not some little startup, this is not new.
"Yeah, imagine that, they want people to actually pay for games."
There are many, many of us who would like more access to our hardware for legitimate, non copyright-infringing uses. Unless of course you mean "they want to force people to pay for dames and not use the 360 for anything else", which is probably the most accurate.
It's like one of those things that happens when you're a kid.
Jimmy next door gets a really shiny toy. All the kids in school look at how shiny it is and think it's the best thing ever, so they cry to mommy and daddy to get them one because it's THE BEST THING EVER!
Then two weeks later Jimmy gets bored of it. By then more kids are showing all their friends how great it is and the toy becomes one of the most popular around, despite everyone getting bored of it real fast.
Wii sports is fantastic. For a while. And I have yet to find a properly compelling game for the Wii otherwise. It sits, like a shiny toy, in the corner. Everyone that comes round wants to play it, has a lot of fun and gets their own. Two weeks later it's doing the same as ours - Nothing.
I've got more use out of the 360 than either the Wii or PS3. I have a feeling that'll switch to the PS3 in the longer term.
"Oh, please. Windows can be cracked, and has been cracked, simply by pointing at a compromised web page."
Yes, and you have to get me to do that. If I'm a terrorist that's concerned about my privacy, I'm not going to be visiting any websites that I get spammed with, and I'm most likely not using IE either.
"You haven't been paying attention to the news, lately, haven't you?"
Do enlighten me, I know the british government are trying to squeeze keys out of people who may not have them, but otherwise...
They are clever enough to introduce trapdoors in something most people never even think of checking. Why? Because they understand the game: in crypto, it does not matter if your software is iron-clad if your random number generator has been compromised. And so on and so forth, all the way down to the bare metal.
I have no doubt that they're good. I have a lot of doubts that there's much they can do against modern crypto. And the bare metal is not as important as you think. Back to AES - so long as your machine, whatever it is, isn't compromised and it can do the calculations correctly, you're safe. if you have shared the key with your correspondant in a secure (offline) way, and used a reasonable cipher feedback mode then there's not a single thing they can do if all they have is the data transmitted back and forth.
Sorry, I'm sure they are good, but the extreme reverence for these people is unwarranted.
"Which is in fact identical to AES. Except that the original supported more different block sizes."
Oh I know, I just thought maybe the paranoid types might trust the cipher as issued by an academic rather than the one the US government eventually issued and accepted as AES!
"According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype."
Roll your own, use a publicly available AES implementation, or Rijndael's original cipher. Also, the NSA aren't quite as clever as you think. Pretty good I'm sure, but the level of paranoia about them is nuts.
"And, then, according to this other article, it does not matter what technologies you use, if your CPU is wide open to analysis and crypto attacks."
Got any further details on that one? Sounds really interesting and I'd quite like to read the theory in more depth.
"And, of course, there is the question of using a 'secure' communication system on a completely insecure operating system, such as Windows."
There's no reason at all not to be able to do secure comms on windows. And if it's behind NAT then there's no reason that it should be compromised either. Any OS surely has the capability to intercept and record audio from the sound card, but will present different difficulties in gaining access and/or installing the software.
"the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) may not have the means to decipher your skype communications right now. But it's getting there, thank yo uvery much"
I would dispute this. Unless they can come into your house and gain physical access to your PC whilst you're out.
"And there are agencies out there who certainly can, and will."
(which is where they are) they probably behead you for using BitTorrent.
Also, I'd rather she be the one to decide to make the leap to the dark side, or be pissed off with the record companies. I don't want to be a dodgy abstraction layer!
I'm British, we've caused tremendous amounts of harm all over the world and probably several genocides. I just find it rather delightful that every year American families gather together in a festival to give thanks and celebrate friendship, family and a spirit of kindness and sharing, brought about by an incident involving people their ancestors more-or-less wiped out and stole the land from.
It's especially piquant that American children put on theatrical productions about how kind the indians were and how everyone was great friends.
Why is it self-righteous to point out the hypocracy and idiocy inherent in the tradition?
I'm not saying you shouldn't spend quality time with your family, just pointing out how ridiculous it is to someone who had no idea what the tradition was or how it started, on account of not being american (which I'm not either).
My stepmother is NOT tech literate. Not in the slightest.
She likes shiny things and the other day she asked me to put her "Shakira" CD on to her MP3 player. The DRM on it prevented me from doing so, not by any program (I know to hold down shift!) but by the method of the tracks being dodgy and extra data in place to throw off CDROM drives. Well anyway, long story short CDEX wasn't having it and I had to go and say to her that it couldn't be done because the record company have put some protection on there that stops you copying the data to your computer and mp3 player.
Now, whether she went away from that exchange thinking that computers aren't as good as people say, or that this whole MP3 business is a croc, or she went away thinking that copying it for personal use is illegal anyway, or whether she actually got the point that the record companies were preventing her from using the product she purched in a legitimate way, I don't know.
Either way though, she's going to buy less CDs because they're not as useful to her as she thought.
You know, that time when Americans give thanks to the native american indians who helped them survive over winter when they were new immigrants to the continent.
Generally very little mention is made of what happened next and how the new immigrants proceeded to usurp the native's land and make a good attempt at exterminating them. Perhaps we should have called them "naive american indians instead", for helping the white man survive and get a foothold.
It's a goldmine of data on the NSLU2. I installed debian on my tow, but there are other good things to do with them as well. Unslung is supposed to pretty good if you want to keep things simple. But if you're as much of a Linux FanBoy as you say - go for the Debian.
I have one doing mailserver/webserver/samba/ssh tunnels etc running off a 4G flash drive (if you're putting swap on there, try to get a fast flash drive like a corsair voyager or something). The other does media serving and bittorrent via torrentflux.
Mine both run full installs of Debian for arm. They're great, very reliable. Not a lot of processing power but one of them happily does web/mail/samba/ssh and a couple of other bits, whilst the other does media serving and torrent downloads. Oh, and the second has a wireless card now too.
Mine has. Install debian, add wireless USB card. Easy.
"no sata"
get a USB Sata enclosure...
"only usb (cabling hassle)." It's not that bad
"Lame." Far from it, it's a very low power-usage server that (with debian) can do samba, mail, web serving, torrent downloads, media serving, lots of things. Very capable little box and dirt cheap for purchase and electricity.
"That is, something other than a "free market economy." Even if technology is involved in that sort of planning, this GMP lends credence to the saying that "the green tree has red roots." Maybe it'd be more accurate to talk about a dispute of capitalism versus socialism, or what Virginia Postrel called "dynamism" versus "statism.""
well, that's an entirely different issue. Your comment on "the green tree has red roots" is both telling and amusing -
Do you really think the market driven capitalist systems has taken us to good places as far as food distribution and ecology are concerned?
Whilst it has provided leaps and bounds of progress, we end up with poverty over a large portion of the earth and excess in other places, not to mention pollution and atmospheric content change which the moneymakers continue to try to deny and/or ignore where they can.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no communist, I love individualism to much for that, but neither do I think the market is an unmitigated good.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to shut out the noise when really necessary. I have no problem getting deep into code in our open plan office, and neither does anyone else. When you're an engineering department the whole open plan is quiet anyway.
just don't put sales in the same room/floor.
Cubicles are almost exclusively a US thing as far as I can tell. The UK norm is to have senior management in offices and everyone else open plan. It's much better for collaboration, it's much better for morale.
it's much better for not having asshat coworkers playing radios in their cubicles, for not having people hide away and do bugger all for days, for a myriad of things.
Cubicles are isolated and depressing. Embrace the european style.
As for no set desks - well that's a little tricky for engineers who have multiple workstations, and I'm not sure it's the best idea, but scrapping cubicles is definitely good.
BTW, i work for a huge multinational you _have_ heard of, not some little startup, this is not new.
"Yeah, imagine that, they want people to actually pay for games."
There are many, many of us who would like more access to our hardware for legitimate, non copyright-infringing uses. Unless of course you mean "they want to force people to pay for dames and not use the 360 for anything else", which is probably the most accurate.
It's like one of those things that happens when you're a kid.
Jimmy next door gets a really shiny toy. All the kids in school look at how shiny it is and think it's the best thing ever, so they cry to mommy and daddy to get them one because it's THE BEST THING EVER!
Then two weeks later Jimmy gets bored of it. By then more kids are showing all their friends how great it is and the toy becomes one of the most popular around, despite everyone getting bored of it real fast.
Wii sports is fantastic. For a while. And I have yet to find a properly compelling game for the Wii otherwise. It sits, like a shiny toy, in the corner. Everyone that comes round wants to play it, has a lot of fun and gets their own. Two weeks later it's doing the same as ours - Nothing.
I've got more use out of the 360 than either the Wii or PS3. I have a feeling that'll switch to the PS3 in the longer term.
I happen to believe that intelligence is fairly predetermined (and yes, there are things you can do to encourage its use).
I also happen to believe I have a lot of it, so no defeatism here!
Sorry to piss on your "Sony and the PS3 are dying" rant, but in the EU the PS3 has been outselling the xBox for some time now.
So maybe they won't "win", whatever that means, in the US, but they certainly aren't doing that badly elsewhere.
"Meanwhile, gun crime in Britain is growing rapidly"
Actually, media coverage of gun crime is growing rapidly. This may be due to the ages of the people involved (getting younger all the time).
Gun crime itself is on a downward trend in the UK.
"Oh, please. Windows can be cracked, and has been cracked, simply by pointing at a compromised web page."
Yes, and you have to get me to do that. If I'm a terrorist that's concerned about my privacy, I'm not going to be visiting any websites that I get spammed with, and I'm most likely not using IE either.
"You haven't been paying attention to the news, lately, haven't you?"
Do enlighten me, I know the british government are trying to squeeze keys out of people who may not have them, but otherwise...
They are clever enough to introduce trapdoors in something most people never even think of checking. Why? Because they understand the game: in crypto, it does not matter if your software is iron-clad if your random number generator has been compromised. And so on and so forth, all the way down to the bare metal.
I have no doubt that they're good. I have a lot of doubts that there's much they can do against modern crypto. And the bare metal is not as important as you think. Back to AES - so long as your machine, whatever it is, isn't compromised and it can do the calculations correctly, you're safe. if you have shared the key with your correspondant in a secure (offline) way, and used a reasonable cipher feedback mode then there's not a single thing they can do if all they have is the data transmitted back and forth.
Sorry, I'm sure they are good, but the extreme reverence for these people is unwarranted.
"Which is in fact identical to AES. Except that the original supported more different block sizes."
Oh I know, I just thought maybe the paranoid types might trust the cipher as issued by an academic rather than the one the US government eventually issued and accepted as AES!
"According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype."
Roll your own, use a publicly available AES implementation, or Rijndael's original cipher. Also, the NSA aren't quite as clever as you think. Pretty good I'm sure, but the level of paranoia about them is nuts.
"And, then, according to this other article, it does not matter what technologies you use, if your CPU is wide open to analysis and crypto attacks."
Got any further details on that one? Sounds really interesting and I'd quite like to read the theory in more depth.
"And, of course, there is the question of using a 'secure' communication system on a completely insecure operating system, such as Windows."
There's no reason at all not to be able to do secure comms on windows. And if it's behind NAT then there's no reason that it should be compromised either. Any OS surely has the capability to intercept and record audio from the sound card, but will present different difficulties in gaining access and/or installing the software.
"the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) may not have the means to decipher your skype communications right now. But it's getting there, thank yo uvery much"
I would dispute this. Unless they can come into your house and gain physical access to your PC whilst you're out.
"And there are agencies out there who certainly can, and will."
I don't think so.
(which is where they are) they probably behead you for using BitTorrent.
Also, I'd rather she be the one to decide to make the leap to the dark side, or be pissed off with the record companies. I don't want to be a dodgy abstraction layer!
My dear boy,
I'm British, we've caused tremendous amounts of harm all over the world and probably several genocides. I just find it rather delightful that every year American families gather together in a festival to give thanks and celebrate friendship, family and a spirit of kindness and sharing, brought about by an incident involving people their ancestors more-or-less wiped out and stole the land from.
It's especially piquant that American children put on theatrical productions about how kind the indians were and how everyone was great friends.
the whole thing's hilarious!
Why is it self-righteous to point out the hypocracy and idiocy inherent in the tradition?
I'm not saying you shouldn't spend quality time with your family, just pointing out how ridiculous it is to someone who had no idea what the tradition was or how it started, on account of not being american (which I'm not either).
My stepmother is NOT tech literate. Not in the slightest.
She likes shiny things and the other day she asked me to put her "Shakira" CD on to her MP3 player.
The DRM on it prevented me from doing so, not by any program (I know to hold down shift!) but by the method of the tracks being dodgy and extra data in place to throw off CDROM drives. Well anyway, long story short CDEX wasn't having it and I had to go and say to her that it couldn't be done because the record company have put some protection on there that stops you copying the data to your computer and mp3 player.
Now, whether she went away from that exchange thinking that computers aren't as good as people say, or that this whole MP3 business is a croc, or she went away thinking that copying it for personal use is illegal anyway, or whether she actually got the point that the record companies were preventing her from using the product she purched in a legitimate way, I don't know.
Either way though, she's going to buy less CDs because they're not as useful to her as she thought.
You know, that time when Americans give thanks to the native american indians who helped them survive over winter when they were new immigrants to the continent.
Generally very little mention is made of what happened next and how the new immigrants proceeded to usurp the native's land and make a good attempt at exterminating them. Perhaps we should have called them "naive american indians instead", for helping the white man survive and get a foothold.
But duck fat potatos are a thing of beauty. And probably heart attacks.
Give it a try (duck or goose), your vegetable oil roast potatos will seem rather second rate afterwards.
I never considered "iceweasel" to be name calling, merely an amusing name for an unofficial firefox.
Ah well.
The very point of debian is free software. If they can't use the firefox name on their own build then using something else is fine.
/usr/games/fortune?)
Why is iceweasel bad?
Do you know the Matt Groening quote about iceweasels? (Have you been reading your
Where's the insult?
It's not schoolyard politics. Debian has a philosophy and criticising them for sticking to it is the childish thing.
Linux isn't officially supported by anyone much, other than the linux companies.
Does that really matter to you?
I'm genuinely interested, 'cos the first thing I do when I buy hardware is hack the crap out of it and not worry about manufacturer support.
nslu2-linux.org
It's a goldmine of data on the NSLU2. I installed debian on my tow, but there are other good things to do with them as well. Unslung is supposed to pretty good if you want to keep things simple. But if you're as much of a Linux FanBoy as you say - go for the Debian.
I have one doing mailserver/webserver/samba/ssh tunnels etc running off a 4G flash drive (if you're putting swap on there, try to get a fast flash drive like a corsair voyager or something). The other does media serving and bittorrent via torrentflux.
But then upgrading the firmware and installing linux isn't everyone's cup of tea.
OTOH I never bought any movie twice, and I tended to buy trashy UMD movies second hand anyway.
Mine both run full installs of Debian for arm. They're great, very reliable. Not a lot of processing power but one of them happily does web/mail/samba/ssh and a couple of other bits, whilst the other does media serving and torrent downloads. Oh, and the second has a wireless card now too.
"No Gigabit"
True
"No wireless"
Mine has. Install debian, add wireless USB card. Easy.
"no sata"
get a USB Sata enclosure...
"only usb (cabling hassle)."
It's not that bad
"Lame."
Far from it, it's a very low power-usage server that (with debian) can do samba, mail, web serving, torrent downloads, media serving, lots of things. Very capable little box and dirt cheap for purchase and electricity.
"That is, something other than a "free market economy." Even if technology is involved in that sort of planning, this GMP lends credence to the saying that "the green tree has red roots." Maybe it'd be more accurate to talk about a dispute of capitalism versus socialism, or what Virginia Postrel called "dynamism" versus "statism.""
well, that's an entirely different issue. Your comment on "the green tree has red roots" is both telling and amusing -
Do you really think the market driven capitalist systems has taken us to good places as far as food distribution and ecology are concerned?
Whilst it has provided leaps and bounds of progress, we end up with poverty over a large portion of the earth and excess in other places, not to mention pollution and atmospheric content change which the moneymakers continue to try to deny and/or ignore where they can.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no communist, I love individualism to much for that, but neither do I think the market is an unmitigated good.