A lot of manufacturers skrimp on the 60-Hz energy storage capacitor.
True, these do run in the 10 to 100KHz range. I've dissected many failed units. Most fullwave rectify the incoming AC and often store it in 10to 22 uF or so. Hell on the capacitor. While you have peak incoming power, you have light. When the incoming AC goes through zero, you lose light. When the incoming power finally reverses, the inverter starts up again.
Hence, the observed flicker.
Don't come down too hard on the manufacturer, because there is just so much room for electronics in the base of a edison screwbase CFL - hefty electrolytics are voluminous and expensive.
Its a wonder they have done what they have, given the signficant EMI problems the inverters create.
I dissected them after they began to require mechanical taps to get them to illuminate.
Upon careful dissembly of the casing, I discovered the new lead-free solder joints were failing, resulting in needless retirement of otherwise perfectly good electronics and bulb assembly.
all this fuss over a fullblown OS to do simple tasks?
This paradigm was overwhelming to me when I was in corporate... this obsession of making simple things, like tying shoelaces, into a federal affair.
For years, I have used simple microcontrollers, like the PIC or AVR to do this stuff. For microwatts. Highly reliable, and I *know* exactly what I told that microcontroller to do. Simple things, like keep the soda pop cold and nag me if I need to service the vending machine. Tell me whats wrong. That sort of thing.
It puzzles me to see major corps use way, way, way overpowered/overpriced solutions to the simplest stuff.
These days, it only takes a microcontroller to do simple stuff, and yes, given a simple TCPIP stack, it commmunicates with the web, pooh, its not that much more than a UART for serial, no??? Especially given one can use IM type protocols for simple quick messages? Sending email is just a little step up.
I shake my head in pity when I see people trying to use sledgehammers to swat flies.
Is this just me, or does every other thinking person on Slashdot see it too?
As long as I can get onto the cathodes of a CRT, and clip my magnetic current clips onto the deflection yoke, I can recreate RGB analog video as pretty as you please!
Does this mean anybody who was unfortunate enough to have purchased a unit where someone else compromised a key now has a crippled unit? If it takes me a day to take the unit back to the store, will they reimburse me for my time, mileage, and expenses I incur to regain the functionality I paid for?
Or am I, like a Circuit City DIVX disk owner, just dropped, while the smiling business face smugly tells me to open my wallet again and buy another?
I need to know this kind of stuff BEFORE I open my wallet at the cash register. If its finicky technology, I had just as soon spend my hard-earned cash on something else.
I would rather spend my money on a day fishing rather than buying some piece of crap that gives me problems.
Life is just too short to have to deal with all these synthetically manufactured problems, deliberately designed into a product from the get-go.
When I actually spend my hard-earned money to buy thorns in my side, I consider myself even more idiotic than the folks who design and market such crappy stuff.
Weird optical effects occur when media at different densities interact. Commonly known ones are magnifying glasses and the shimmering mirage effects around heated objects.
If I only get a visual, I can not write off the effects of air at different densities causing optical effects to appear, maybe thousands of feet up, reflecting and refracting light from possible far off sources.
In a similar vein, radio amateurs will use anamalous atmospherics which will randomly open up communication windows to far off places and people can open communication links to far off reaches of the world on milliwatts of power ( aka "QRP" ).
When I was a kid, it was fun to sit for hours in front of a little homebrew 1 watt transmitter (made with old radio tubes, no less) and see how far away I could talk to someone, then later we would both exchange postcards (QSL cards) to confirm and serve as proof the communication occurred. We collected these cards much like a baseball enthusiasts collect baseball cards. It was a bragging point to have a wall full of cards from people all over the world, that you talked to ( often just long enough to exchange QSL information before your link died ) to show your friends.
Ahhh, so much for the 50's, and early 60's.
The fun died for me when all the manufacturers got into the game and the whole thing began to hinge on wealth instead of creativity.
Anwyay, I digress... We all know that air of different temperatures abutting can cause weird optical effects, and before I go off claiming some entity traveled light years to get here, I had better be damned sure what I was seeing wasn't air pockets of different temperatures optically mimicking a giant mirror/lens that was giving me the optical illusion of something in the sky which is really something else on the ground, far far away.
It seems all the sciences/engineering/tech fields got hit. Anything where lots of effort went into training.
I can understand the businessmen and their concerns about getting cheaper skilled labor. Its the same concern I have when I can get cheaper stuff.
My main concern is with Congress, and how they've been passing all this one-sided law.
Outsourcing labor, Fine! But what happens if I try to buy a CD which is cheaper in China than here? Can't do that! Its a Violation of some businesses' marketing model. Well whoop-de-do, we have a "marketing model" too! We paid in both time and dollars for our education, and we are paying a hefty income tax if we are making enough to keep a roof over our heads... and that "business model" needs protection too.
Of course, business can get labor somewhere else cheaper. Those people do not have to pay US property or income tax, or have the cost of living overhead we have here. I can get my music cheaper too if I don't have to pay all the RIAA overhead, but somehow skitting around paying the RIAA is considered illegal, but outsourcing skills is simply business. RIAA cannot compete with damned near free. Neither can I. We protect RIAA with DMCA. Either provide me housing, food, and creature comforts at foreign rates and relieve me from taxation - or protect me too, or my kind will cease to exist.
Personally, I am perplexed, as I have a lot of skills in refrigeration design, and its quite obvious to me how to design HVAC systems that take advantage of ice baths to store enthalpy so not only can I time-shift the energies required to transfer enthalpy (BTU's of heat energy) to times of abundant power in the middle of the night, I also take advantage of radiating the unwanted heat to deep-space much more efficiently than when I have a 6,000 degree kelvin heat source overhead during the day.
Not only that, I have a whole bag of evaporative cooler and other tricks in my bag to make SEER soar. There are a whole mess of tricks like using gravitic pressure assist to keep refrigerant from flashing before it hits the thermal expansion valve, or using pipe-in-pipe methods to recycle heat flows. These have to be custom-designed for the application for maximal efficiency.
There is a whole mess of new technology here to be explored. Brand new scroll and screw compressor designs coupled with SEMA motors and International Rectifier drivers, driven with custom programmed AVR micropower controllers. Yes, like Linux, it will take some time to set up, but once its running, and people understand how it works, it will work as long as you want it to. Efficiently. And if something better comes up - if you know how the thing works, its easy enough to integrate it in.
But what happens? The powers that be want an off the shelf box, just like in your field, they want a windows box. Anything so they don't have to understand what they have. Just use it.
We cannot thrive on ignorance!
From what I see, we are rapidly approaching "peak oil" and energy prices will soar. Trying to tell the executives about this is just as hard as selling them on a Linux system. They will pay whatever it takes to have the mainstream unit, no matter how virus prone or inefficient it is. A big company offers them the comfort of being held blameless for going that way, no matter what goes wrong. Its the little guys who stand to profit/lose personally which seem far more likely to adopt innovation than the corporate leviathans.
It seems a shame when I see so many technical people underemployed when I feel our country needs us more than ever. At least the kids can see us and avoid our mistake like the plague, and get their tra
I have NEVER seen an ansi bomb do THAT much destruction!
Although the embedded "echo 'y' | format c:" came close. Remember that one? Deadly.
I had renamed my format and fdisk command names to mitigate those.
I long for those days where if someone came and messed up my machine, seeing what they did and cleaning up after them was about as simple as mitigating my dog's accidents. It was obvious where the mess was, one just got out the mop or backup disk and cleaned it up. Didn't have to beg someone else for help.
Once the courts decided that Microsoft's "click" agreements and EULAs could legally shield them from product liability, we've had buggy code. I guess we would still have exploding cars if the courts told Ford that they could escape their exploding Pinto tank liability by printing up a little KeyTurn agreement which deemed Ford harmless and you agreed by turning the engine start key.
Just as RIAA is trying to rid the world of piracy by lawsuits, the very same paradigm would be very effective in getting Microsoft and others not to release buggy code that others depend on. But it takes a court system and a Congress that considers our nation's computing infrastructure to be as important as having cars that don't explode.
To me, that should have been part of the DMCA, that is to have companies RESPONSIBLE for the code if they are going to deliberately encrypt/obfuscate it in the light rendering its internal operations opaque to the end user.
But, our Congress is not like my parents. I had to eat my peas if I wanted dessert.
RIAA talked them out of the pea part, and just got the dessert.
I feel the public should hold Congress accountable for this mess, and elect people who WILL codify corporate responsibility into law, just as the RIAA and BSP got Congress to codify the end user's responsibility into law.
Note I never said DMCA was BAD law, I just claim its an UNEQUAL, UNFAIR law because it only represents ONE party's interest.
I think the first "koolaid" was the definable ANSI escape codes. No sooner than those were out, the first "ANSI bombs" appeared. I learned right then and there the danger of letting people run executables in my machine.
I believe the "koolaid of the day" today is Javascript, Media players, and Instant Messenger apps.
Javascript was used to do this particular one. If javascript had not been present here, this would not have happened. I see Javascript to secure computing much as I see a spilled puddle of gasoline to fire safety.
Now, if we could just all agree on a standard public format for images, media, and IM, we could have TRUSTED, PUBLICALLY VERIFIABLE programs to read the file and properly present it as image or sound.
The trusted programs mentioned would be incapable of anything but what they were designed to do.
For years, until this MSIE "proprietary" crap came along, I was used to going to "view document source" if anything didn't render correctly. I could usually spot in a few minutes of seeing the HTML tags what went wrong.
At least I KNEW the worst any webmaster could possibly do to me is give me a page that would not render.
No matter what he did, I could at least see anything he sent me in a text editor, such as if his ad overlaid the text, I could still see all of the text in the source code.
These days, with businessmen embracing all this closed-source hidden stuff, I have no idea what my machine is doing, but I am well aware, via anecdotal evidence typical of what we see here on Slashdot as well as personal experience, that my ignorance *will* be taken advantage of by others, often with hostile intent.
I left a career in this field over a disagreement with "executive row" over this kind of stuff. They wanted to "align themselves with mainstream supported applications", whereas I wanted to know exactly what I was doing. I did not trust walking down blind alleys blindfolded, no matter how much they promised police protection. I wanted to SEE where I was going, because ultimately I am responsible for my fate.
I felt like a fire marshal, paid $10 an hour, trying to tell multimillionaire executives the dangers of puddles of spilled gasoline. They obviously had no idea about the flammability potential of the gasoline, but they could see the cost of cleaning it up, and deemed it more cost efficient to fire a noisy fire marshal than address the spilled gasoline.
I keep hounding on the business types that forcing me to sign a EULA with someone else in order to do business with them does nothing to enhance their business image as a responsible trustworthy business concern, rather it makes them look like a bunch of schoolkids trying to blame missed homework on the dog.
And we pay business executives millions of dollars a year salary and bonuses to use the same paradigm?
Don't we have the wrong kind of people running the place? Their handshake, signature, and about five dollars have about the worth of a cup of Starbucks coffee.
I see this virus problem continuing until we realize, as a society, that businessmen MUST take responsibility for their product, and vote in legislators whill WILL codify this into law, much like businessmen lobbied legislators to draft their concerns into law.
If the current legislators don't see it this way, get them out of office! Impeach if necessary.
We didn't mind trying to impeach even our president for sexual ethics.
Certainly, when people wake up to how much some businesses have used their capacity to influence law to screw us, we can elect someone who we will watch to make sure he kicks the pendulum back. The people have got to be pretty mad first, so no matter what the mediaheads say, thats not the way the polls will go. The people have to be ready to impeach the guy at the drop of a hat if he said he was gonna do it, gets in there, and doesn't. And be ready to impeach any that fight him.
I see legislating enforcement of ignorance, yet at the same time allowing those enforcing ignorance to claim immunity from misperforming product, to be absolutely ludicrous.
Its like having Ford fix the exploding pinto problem by having a "key turn" agreement.. that is that by "inserting the key into the slot, you agree to hold Ford harmless... ". Why do we hound Ford for this, yet let software companies get away with it? Ford made no attempt to hide the design either.
This crap WILL end when we get a congress in that will side with US.
Yeh, although its the "criminal" who does these things... criminals exist - and we should know that by now.
Criminal activity, like fire and corrosion, has existed for as long as we have been here on earth. We should know by now how to intelligently mitigate the ill effects.
Its dangerous not to understand fire and light one. Its dangerous to expose your machine to the internet and not know exactly what its doing.
Your experience mirrors exactly what I studied at an internet security class...
"The iframe contained javascript designed to capture passwords from gmail and other public websites, in essence a browser-based keylogger.
I have been fussing and fuming immensely at internet businesses - especially the financial sector - about the lunacy of having javascript or any other scripting language on a site where personal info is handled. I tell them I consider it "pornsite programming" and has NO business on a legitimate business site.
It is the rootkit/keylogger which is my prime fear. And I know I have left the door wide open when I visit a site where I accept their scripts to run in my machine. I am then wide open for hostile redirection, "drive-by" downloads, and phishing.
The main problem I face is the business people I have to talk to are multimillionaires who may know how to promote an online brokerage, but don't know squat about internet security. Yes. The big-name guys are the worst.
They hire programmers who are far better at making the executive think they are worth a salary than they are about programming. They will do stupid things online like using javascript links instead of simple HTML links to force us to enable scripting. And use crazy things like pop-ups when our browsers have no problem opening up another window in an HTML link.
I feel any financial webmaster who forces javascript on his customers is just about as idiotic as a bank clerk who writes the combination of the safe on the safe, and leaves the key to the bank under the doormat. Its a sure sign that the webmaster has found a boss who hasn't the foggiest concern about security on the internet.
I have had to leave several stockbrokers because of this issue.
I wonder how anyone would hire such ignorance of internet security in a position where he is dealing with money and sensitive information. My only conclusion was that those doing the hiring were just as ignorant, and had no business handling other people's money. My guess is that he probably played a nice game of golf or maybe looked pretty in a suit, and he was paid so much that people will not verify his technical expertise.
I see Javascript on a bank? Geez, put my money in a shoebox and leave it under the bush. Oh yes, be sure to have me agree the EULA which denies any responsibility on their part. Gotta be businesslike, ya know. Its part of that thing called TRUST, meaning I am to HOPE I don't get nailed by a criminal while submitting to their demand that I use risky technologies for their convenience.
I find it very scary when I am held hostage to enforced ignorance ( IP law ) of how my stuff works. It could be as simple as a farmer seeing his corn field on fire, yet not being allowed to know that if he turned his irrigation system on, it would put it out.
If we are so anxious to legally protect IP, then also make the purveyor of said protected IP legally responsible for what it does, just as a parent is responsible for what his kids do, and we will see virus vulnerabilities plummet.
Wouldn't it just break your heart to have your nice new battery, just purchased with your brand new car, exchanged for an old one, well used, on your first "fillup"?
I had that same feeling when I took the tanks for my brand new welding apparatus to be filled.
I wish I could have given you all of my modpoint allocation for that.
Unfortunately, its not my time for mods. Nevertheless I do want to thank you for your post.
You described exactly how I felt in the aerospace business.
Upon layoff, I took a much less paying, but much more satisfying job.
Incidentally, your parent sure reminds me of my old boss.
I was not happy there at all. So professional, so sterile, so friendless, so lonely. All suit-and-tie. Corporate. Everything was snarled in paperwork and permissions.
I felt I was only an automaton.
The company paid big bucks for management consultants to teach the mamagers to act that way. In a Stanley Milgram sort of way, they were just trying to be obedient.
"In the case of a Spanish company, an employee was forced into planting a wireless access point in one of the development labs. The employee had lied about his educational background on his resume, and criminals threatened to expose him if he didn't cooperate by planting the device"
Just say, so far, this guy has had an exemplary performance record...
Then this comes up.
If the guy would have went to his boss and explained his situation, would his boss nail him on the spot ( thereby opening his company for a rehire which may not be as forthcoming )? Or will he be understanding that making one's resume as juicy as possible for the lure of hire is much like a "campaign promise"?
Not that I advocate lying on resumes, but I have seen where honesty gets you if you are dead honest. From my corporate experience, no one likes a "boy scout" and looks for someone to "take risks" and "think outside the box".
It always seems the boss will find out anyway about any untruths on the resume and can later hold these findings with great power over the hiree.
See, this is what happens when we do not fund our organizations sufficiently. They do the best with what they have.
I am still miffed after reading another story elsewhere about what we pay football coaches versus what we pay the president of the college.
We'll get what we pay for. Maybe the average American feels tougher football games are more important to our society than scientific research.
Most do not want to take the time to study science... but in the end, its the laws of nature ( applied science ) that will determine the temperature of my house, the operation of my car, and whether or not I eat. In short, my whole life is determined by my and other's knowledge of applying science.
Maybe pretty pictures of the stars isn't deemed particulary useful. The pictures are only the frosting. The important thing to me is gaining more and more understanding of materials and physics governing them. Technologies developed are useful for many things, especially medical and agricultural.
I feel that as an intelligent species, it behooves us to understand the universe around us and our place in it. By observing phenomena happening somewhere else, it will help us to intelligently react if it happens to us.
It started off saying "At AT&T, we are committed to bringing you great service.", followed by the usual corporate marketdroid head-farts telling me that "Now is the perfect time to switch to a new AT&T package that better fits your needs!".
The back of the postcard was full of rate changes. All nasty increases.
I was already pissed at SBC for getting into bed with YAHOO, requiring me to load proprietary YAHOO portal software on my machine. This resulted in my dropping PacBell, which I have had for five years as my ISP.
Now this.
And they have the nerve to give me their "bargain rates" of $24 and $26 a month for their bundles? Geez, they oughta just go ahead and throw in high speed DSL at those rates!!! This is likely to be just another "AT&T Price" which is apt to double in a year anyway.
Companies like AT&T are one of the main reasons I distrust MegaBusiness. They have the chutzpah to mail out all kinds of demands to customers in order to do business with them. They think 30% hikes are easy to swallow? I know I am talking peanuts in comparison to the salary and benefits AT&T is paying that marketdroid who sent me this card. AT&T Executives can sit in their boardroom shaking hands. I have made it my business to get AT&T out of my life as much as I can.
Irregardless, I will be dropping Caller ID, even though I did like it. Damm, I can buy an answering machine for less than two month's CallerID fee.
I know where I stand with AT&T. Absolutely useless. I am one of millions of proles dutifully getting our checkbooks out every month and returning a check with our statements. Why would a multibillion dollar corporation want me or my lousy twenty dollar check? Why would some corporate executive piss off millions of paying customers.... I get the idea his hand was itching something terrible and he needed a handshake from some man wearing a suit.
What would THEY do if I sent them a postcard saying I will pay 30% LESS? I didn't because I wanted to keep doing business with them. They DO have the chutzpah to send ME such a card.
Being a successful corporate executive these days appears to me to be highly related to one's skill in finding a person who will pay them a salary far beyond the benefit they provide. Its having the "people skills" to lead the man who approves their job to keep them, even while they shit on their customers.
The boardroom votes over a long corporate table. The proles vote over their checkbook and pen.
Both decide if its worth it to do business with the other.
As long as the game is in play, AT&T gets paid monthly. With their card, they raise. Do I fold or call? They have initiated endgame.
In short, this kind of shit requires a CEO at the top who completely disregards his customers, and is willing to risk longterm customer relationships over a marketing ploy. Do you wanna kill the geese laying the golden eggs?
Today, the barbeque, tomorrow, the famine.
I am now investigating any alternative I have to AT&T for land lines. I am of the opinion that land lines, even though they have existed for years, may just be completely economically obsolete. I hope Wal Mart decides to run a cellphone service, as I think they are one of the very few concerns out there which has enough capital to start such a system and do it right.
Given the importance the computational infrastructure is to our society, as it now maintains hospital records, medical equipment, flight safety, industrial operations, personal histories, damn near our entire economic data, how much is it worth that we thoroughly understand this technology?
Is it really worth it, for the priviledge of a few for the use of exacting payment for content, to legislatively mandate ignorance of this technology?
Today, viruses are rampaging our networks. Supposedly "top secure" ways of selling somebody something without giving it to them, are cracked and made public within days of release. Our top business systems are violated within days of release. Aren't we chasing after wind? Ignorance only makes us vulnerable to others with wisdom. People who are not compelled to live under our law reign free, unfettered by our laws. Only the law abiding citizenry will adopt ignorance.
While our wisest minds in Washington ponder law to restrict knowledge of our computational infrastructure, other equally brilliant minds in countries eager to collapse us by rendering our technologies useless can use our ignorance to their advantage.
A typical instance of this in history is how Alexander the Great rendered a far more powerful adversary helpless by causing his adversaries infrastructure ( his elephants ) to malfunction ( by blinding and stampeding them ). His adversary now had his hands full with his problem elephants while Alexander took control.
When we do not understand our own technology, our business leaders are going to be completely powerless to control anything if their communications infrastructure has just about the same effectiveness as giving a child a toy steering wheel in a car.
I hate to see so much of our technologies being so centered aroung hanging itself up if something isn't just right. All this secret-keeping. Its enough to give any computer engineer the CIA Heebie-Jeebies ( as related in that movie release "The Good Shepherd", when nobody could trust nobody. I know we love to talk "trust", but frankly, EULA's instill about as much trust in me about as much as a pre-nuptial agreement instills a sense of love. If you want TRUST, then be RESPONSIBLE for it, not deny it in a EULA.
I would hate to have future civilizations digging up the remains of our civilzation, only to discover our civilization was done in by ignorance of how their own technology worked ( as in the theme of many Star Trek episodes ) and deduce we we became ignorant of our own support technology for a song. Literally.
I just hope that our genetic engineers figure out some way of finding the way alfafa generates the nitrogen-fixing nodules, and can splice whatever it is in alfafa which lets it fix atmospheric nitrogen, into corn, wheat, rice, etc.
Use Magnetic Sensors. A compass, actually, but sends its directional data like a mouse.
Just twist it in the air, it will sense the directional of the Earth's magnetic field through it and respond as a mouse would have responded to motion on a pad.
If this hasn't been done before, now you all can consider it PRIOR ART.
When I was asked for a sample how I code, I brought in my project code ( all of it ) from a data structures class I had just taken at the local college.
I was working on proprietary stuff at work, but I felt the class stuff was general enough - as from the talk we had, I felt he just wanted to see if I wrote clean maintainable code. I could really see where he was coming from, as I have seen other classmates work, and would have been extremely miffed if someone handed the mess to me in exchange for a paycheck. Not many of us wrote clean code. ( Or, at least it didn't *look* clean! )
Turns out I did not get the job, but it was for other things. I didn't really wanna get into pure coding, aa my love is designing physics gizmos. The job was pure coding.
I can't blame an employer one bit for wanting a sample. Badly written code may be coaxed into working, but trying to modify or debug badly written code is a nightmare. Its often best to throw the whole damned thing away and start over.
I have no doubt we are going to face warmer and warmer weather. Like you point out, Siberia may well become the world's new bread basket.
Sometimes I feel as if I am standing on a highway, and off in the distance, there is this big truck heading right for me. In about three minutes, its gonna be right on me! What do I do????
Well, realizing what it is, and what rules it will follow, I am gonna get my ass off the highway, and watch it pass.
As we deplete our oil resources ( which is a far greater concern to me right now ) we may find the increased insolation a blessing - if we can figure out how to use it.
And there's the key as far as I am concerned.
In all of our history, we - as a people, have thrived by using our intelligence to direct natural laws to produce a desired outcome. This is one helluva time to stop doing that.
Thats very similar to what I am doing now, except its K-Meleon.
My main intent on posting was to express my disdain for this kind of programming on a business site. I'ts not gonna ruin my life if someone hacked my MySpace account and screwed around my site... but once money has been transferred, there are some real concerns if I ever get it back.
There are a lot of graduates of business schools out there, now running financial companies, who are apparently completely ignorant of the risks of virus-prone programming techniques. They don't seem to be aware that this is people's life savings they are dealing with.
I consider these business executives much like my neighbor, who had locked herself out of her bedroom. She is not a "mechanical person", and thought the lock would deter the curious renters she had sharing the house with her. In a way, she was relieved that I was able defeat her lock in about ten seconds after using the side of a soda-pop bottle as a shim between the door and jamb.
Yet she was alarmed when she realized she had spent all these years thinking the lock was actually protecting her.
Big corporations may have the marketing and finances to promote their product, but when one knows how to spoof their system, one loses confidence in that company.
The kind of lock I trust is the one I can't figure out how to bypass, and neither can I find anyone else who can either.
Of course, anything is breakable. I like the kind that its so hard to do it that you are going to be discovered while you are trying to do it so I can still "get back in" if I had to.
I may argue with them at first, but I find it much easer to just do business elsewhere where people take their role seriously, not as some risk they can transfer away use of some cleverly worded language in their contract.
When I found I could control my retirement savings after leaving my last company, I tried to use their online tools with no success. I roamed the net for days trying to find anyone that had a viable internet interface that did not demand I do the things that has really messed me up in the past.
In a way, its like my boots. If I ever step in mud, I end up spending a lot of time outside, with a stick, trying to get the muck out of all the grooves in the soles. So I end up avoiding stepping in muck if I can at all help it.
I have also learned that people can really muck my machine up if I enable Javascript. For the same reason, I avoid it.
I view a business which requires me to use Javascript on his site much like I view a business which places a large tray of muck at his front door, which I must step through if I intend to do business with him. I will gladly drive across town to avoid that tray of muck.
Large companies can say thats its MY fault for having shoes that muck up, but its MY money, and if he makes his business too hard to deal with, I will either decide to forgo any benefit derived from doing business with him, or use whatever alternatives that don't require me to go out of my way so much to accomodate them.
It was over a year ago when I initiated the account transfers. I remember trying the incumbent Fidelity first with no luck. I tried Dad's Merrill Lynch and got hung up too. I tried Schwab and got hung up there as well, and even Scottrade hung up on me on some damn form that seemed to take forever and a day to straighten out.
When I finally traced the problem to the whole form being rejected because of the syntax of the date code ( and of course, it would never tell me what the problem was, it would just reject the whole form and return me to the logon page ), I was furious that they would have such finickycode on their system. I figured the only way I could really convince them to clean up their code was to shanghai their CEO, and have his year's pay dependent on HIM finding out how to get the machine to accept the damned form sans javascript.
I have wrote them numerous letters about using clean display-only HTML so I can't be spoofed nearly as easily. Also robustness. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to use finicky banking software. Would YOU put your money in a disappearing piggy-bank?
Its that I want to make damned sure that when I am conducting financial business, I want to see ONLY that which THEY send me, not what some script is doing. I resent any other crap running in my machine just as I would resent some stranger watching over my shoulder while I am transacting my business. And I resent anything in my machine that can overwrite my URL bar and send me to places unknown.
Admittedly, I agree with just about everyone here that Yahoo, which I consider the originator of the internet search, let themselves go to pot. I felt they let their databases rot and their correlators lounge around with trivia while their web designers filled their web pages with all sorts of irrevelant junk, supposedly to amuse me and market to me while I was trying to find something.
Apparently, some people who knew how to "do it right", did so, and called their work "Google".
I began losing respect for Yahoo when they ganged up with SBC to force me to use some proprietary software in my machine, which I perceived as a lock-in to the Yahoo portal, as well as a likely data-mining opportunity to snoop my machine.
Of all the Yahoo offerings, I like Finance.yahoo.com the best.
They have not yet implemented technologies which require me to enable Javascript, then use that technology to hound the living daylights out of me. When they do, I will no longer use their site.
I used to find Groups.yahoo.com extremely valuable, but slowly but surely they have been requiring javascript more and more to access mundane functions... but if I enable javascript I am going to be pelted with God-knows-what that I didn't order, and have no idea what the window is programmed to do should I click on it.
Its really hard to tell a big organization what really irks me off. Its much better is someone like Google actually shows them how its done.
I have NEVER had any problems accessing Google from ANYTHING, because Google adheres to WEB STANDARDS. Trying to communicate to many businesses is a royal pain when they adopt weird extensions which screw up my end.
It wasn't easy trying to find a decent internet stockbroker! All the "big guys" adopt untenable crap on their end which forces me to be vulnerable to all sorts of mischief.
Scottrade is the best I have found so far, and even they require Javascript enabled if I wanna BUY anything. All the "big boys" ( Fidelity, Schwab, Merrill Lynch, etc. ) REQUIRED IE, rendering them useless to me. With all those Javascript phishing tools floating around out there, one would think a FINANCIAL INSTITUTION would be leery of using such pornsite-like programming on their site.
Lengthy letters to them regarding my concerns of my vulnerabilities to phishing attacks when I have scripting enabled have had no effect.
I can't force them to use standard HTML protocols.
I hope they won't be surprised that if Google opens a web brokerage that uses pure HTML protocols, where I know my URL bar is not being overwritten, and know exactly where a link is going to send me, I will go to them.
Google is succeeding for a reason. They are doing things RIGHT.
And they are big enough now that Microsoft cannot buy them and force them to use "Microsoft proprietary" protocols - like we discussed in another forum on Slashdot - where things have grown so big and cantankerous that trying to make them secure is damn near impossible.
Its the same old thing. Businesses get so big their leaders determine that they "make the market" instead of "meet the needs of the market", then flounder around while the smaller businesses which are not big enough to "make the market" absorb the big business's customer base.
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True, these do run in the 10 to 100KHz range. I've dissected many failed units. Most fullwave rectify the incoming AC and often store it in 10to 22 uF or so. Hell on the capacitor. While you have peak incoming power, you have light. When the incoming AC goes through zero, you lose light. When the incoming power finally reverses, the inverter starts up again.
Hence, the observed flicker.
Don't come down too hard on the manufacturer, because there is just so much room for electronics in the base of a edison screwbase CFL - hefty electrolytics are voluminous and expensive.
Its a wonder they have done what they have, given the signficant EMI problems the inverters create.
I dissected them after they began to require mechanical taps to get them to illuminate.
Upon careful dissembly of the casing, I discovered the new lead-free solder joints were failing, resulting in needless retirement of otherwise perfectly good electronics and bulb assembly.
Well, so much for good intentions.
This paradigm was overwhelming to me when I was in corporate... this obsession of making simple things, like tying shoelaces, into a federal affair.
For years, I have used simple microcontrollers, like the PIC or AVR to do this stuff. For microwatts. Highly reliable, and I *know* exactly what I told that microcontroller to do. Simple things, like keep the soda pop cold and nag me if I need to service the vending machine. Tell me whats wrong. That sort of thing.
It puzzles me to see major corps use way, way, way overpowered/overpriced solutions to the simplest stuff.
These days, it only takes a microcontroller to do simple stuff, and yes, given a simple TCPIP stack, it commmunicates with the web, pooh, its not that much more than a UART for serial, no??? Especially given one can use IM type protocols for simple quick messages? Sending email is just a little step up.
I shake my head in pity when I see people trying to use sledgehammers to swat flies.
Is this just me, or does every other thinking person on Slashdot see it too?
Or am I, like a Circuit City DIVX disk owner, just dropped, while the smiling business face smugly tells me to open my wallet again and buy another?
I need to know this kind of stuff BEFORE I open my wallet at the cash register. If its finicky technology, I had just as soon spend my hard-earned cash on something else.
I would rather spend my money on a day fishing rather than buying some piece of crap that gives me problems.
Life is just too short to have to deal with all these synthetically manufactured problems, deliberately designed into a product from the get-go.
When I actually spend my hard-earned money to buy thorns in my side, I consider myself even more idiotic than the folks who design and market such crappy stuff.
If I only get a visual, I can not write off the effects of air at different densities causing optical effects to appear, maybe thousands of feet up, reflecting and refracting light from possible far off sources.
In a similar vein, radio amateurs will use anamalous atmospherics which will randomly open up communication windows to far off places and people can open communication links to far off reaches of the world on milliwatts of power ( aka "QRP" ).
When I was a kid, it was fun to sit for hours in front of a little homebrew 1 watt transmitter (made with old radio tubes, no less) and see how far away I could talk to someone, then later we would both exchange postcards (QSL cards) to confirm and serve as proof the communication occurred. We collected these cards much like a baseball enthusiasts collect baseball cards. It was a bragging point to have a wall full of cards from people all over the world, that you talked to ( often just long enough to exchange QSL information before your link died ) to show your friends.
Ahhh, so much for the 50's, and early 60's.
The fun died for me when all the manufacturers got into the game and the whole thing began to hinge on wealth instead of creativity.
Anwyay, I digress... We all know that air of different temperatures abutting can cause weird optical effects, and before I go off claiming some entity traveled light years to get here, I had better be damned sure what I was seeing wasn't air pockets of different temperatures optically mimicking a giant mirror/lens that was giving me the optical illusion of something in the sky which is really something else on the ground, far far away.
It seems all the sciences/engineering/tech fields got hit. Anything where lots of effort went into training.
I can understand the businessmen and their concerns about getting cheaper skilled labor. Its the same concern I have when I can get cheaper stuff.
My main concern is with Congress, and how they've been passing all this one-sided law.
Outsourcing labor, Fine! But what happens if I try to buy a CD which is cheaper in China than here? Can't do that! Its a Violation of some businesses' marketing model. Well whoop-de-do, we have a "marketing model" too! We paid in both time and dollars for our education, and we are paying a hefty income tax if we are making enough to keep a roof over our heads... and that "business model" needs protection too.
Of course, business can get labor somewhere else cheaper. Those people do not have to pay US property or income tax, or have the cost of living overhead we have here. I can get my music cheaper too if I don't have to pay all the RIAA overhead, but somehow skitting around paying the RIAA is considered illegal, but outsourcing skills is simply business. RIAA cannot compete with damned near free. Neither can I. We protect RIAA with DMCA. Either provide me housing, food, and creature comforts at foreign rates and relieve me from taxation - or protect me too, or my kind will cease to exist.
Personally, I am perplexed, as I have a lot of skills in refrigeration design, and its quite obvious to me how to design HVAC systems that take advantage of ice baths to store enthalpy so not only can I time-shift the energies required to transfer enthalpy (BTU's of heat energy) to times of abundant power in the middle of the night, I also take advantage of radiating the unwanted heat to deep-space much more efficiently than when I have a 6,000 degree kelvin heat source overhead during the day.
Not only that, I have a whole bag of evaporative cooler and other tricks in my bag to make SEER soar. There are a whole mess of tricks like using gravitic pressure assist to keep refrigerant from flashing before it hits the thermal expansion valve, or using pipe-in-pipe methods to recycle heat flows. These have to be custom-designed for the application for maximal efficiency.
There is a whole mess of new technology here to be explored. Brand new scroll and screw compressor designs coupled with SEMA motors and International Rectifier drivers, driven with custom programmed AVR micropower controllers. Yes, like Linux, it will take some time to set up, but once its running, and people understand how it works, it will work as long as you want it to. Efficiently. And if something better comes up - if you know how the thing works, its easy enough to integrate it in.
But what happens? The powers that be want an off the shelf box, just like in your field, they want a windows box. Anything so they don't have to understand what they have. Just use it.
We cannot thrive on ignorance!
From what I see, we are rapidly approaching "peak oil" and energy prices will soar. Trying to tell the executives about this is just as hard as selling them on a Linux system. They will pay whatever it takes to have the mainstream unit, no matter how virus prone or inefficient it is. A big company offers them the comfort of being held blameless for going that way, no matter what goes wrong. Its the little guys who stand to profit/lose personally which seem far more likely to adopt innovation than the corporate leviathans.
It seems a shame when I see so many technical people underemployed when I feel our country needs us more than ever. At least the kids can see us and avoid our mistake like the plague, and get their tra
I have NEVER seen an ansi bomb do THAT much destruction!
Although the embedded "echo 'y' | format c:" came close. Remember that one? Deadly.
I had renamed my format and fdisk command names to mitigate those.
I long for those days where if someone came and messed up my machine, seeing what they did and cleaning up after them was about as simple as mitigating my dog's accidents. It was obvious where the mess was, one just got out the mop or backup disk and cleaned it up. Didn't have to beg someone else for help.
Once the courts decided that Microsoft's "click" agreements and EULAs could legally shield them from product liability, we've had buggy code. I guess we would still have exploding cars if the courts told Ford that they could escape their exploding Pinto tank liability by printing up a little KeyTurn agreement which deemed Ford harmless and you agreed by turning the engine start key.
Just as RIAA is trying to rid the world of piracy by lawsuits, the very same paradigm would be very effective in getting Microsoft and others not to release buggy code that others depend on. But it takes a court system and a Congress that considers our nation's computing infrastructure to be as important as having cars that don't explode.
To me, that should have been part of the DMCA, that is to have companies RESPONSIBLE for the code if they are going to deliberately encrypt/obfuscate it in the light rendering its internal operations opaque to the end user.
But, our Congress is not like my parents. I had to eat my peas if I wanted dessert.
RIAA talked them out of the pea part, and just got the dessert.
I feel the public should hold Congress accountable for this mess, and elect people who WILL codify corporate responsibility into law, just as the RIAA and BSP got Congress to codify the end user's responsibility into law.
Note I never said DMCA was BAD law, I just claim its an UNEQUAL, UNFAIR law because it only represents ONE party's interest.
I believe the "koolaid of the day" today is Javascript, Media players, and Instant Messenger apps.
Javascript was used to do this particular one. If javascript had not been present here, this would not have happened. I see Javascript to secure computing much as I see a spilled puddle of gasoline to fire safety.
Now, if we could just all agree on a standard public format for images, media, and IM, we could have TRUSTED, PUBLICALLY VERIFIABLE programs to read the file and properly present it as image or sound.
The trusted programs mentioned would be incapable of anything but what they were designed to do.
You are so right.
For years, until this MSIE "proprietary" crap came along, I was used to going to "view document source" if anything didn't render correctly. I could usually spot in a few minutes of seeing the HTML tags what went wrong.
At least I KNEW the worst any webmaster could possibly do to me is give me a page that would not render.
No matter what he did, I could at least see anything he sent me in a text editor, such as if his ad overlaid the text, I could still see all of the text in the source code.
These days, with businessmen embracing all this closed-source hidden stuff, I have no idea what my machine is doing, but I am well aware, via anecdotal evidence typical of what we see here on Slashdot as well as personal experience, that my ignorance *will* be taken advantage of by others, often with hostile intent.
I left a career in this field over a disagreement with "executive row" over this kind of stuff. They wanted to "align themselves with mainstream supported applications", whereas I wanted to know exactly what I was doing. I did not trust walking down blind alleys blindfolded, no matter how much they promised police protection. I wanted to SEE where I was going, because ultimately I am responsible for my fate.
I felt like a fire marshal, paid $10 an hour, trying to tell multimillionaire executives the dangers of puddles of spilled gasoline. They obviously had no idea about the flammability potential of the gasoline, but they could see the cost of cleaning it up, and deemed it more cost efficient to fire a noisy fire marshal than address the spilled gasoline.
I keep hounding on the business types that forcing me to sign a EULA with someone else in order to do business with them does nothing to enhance their business image as a responsible trustworthy business concern, rather it makes them look like a bunch of schoolkids trying to blame missed homework on the dog.
And we pay business executives millions of dollars a year salary and bonuses to use the same paradigm?
Don't we have the wrong kind of people running the place? Their handshake, signature, and about five dollars have about the worth of a cup of Starbucks coffee.
I see this virus problem continuing until we realize, as a society, that businessmen MUST take responsibility for their product, and vote in legislators whill WILL codify this into law, much like businessmen lobbied legislators to draft their concerns into law.
If the current legislators don't see it this way, get them out of office! Impeach if necessary.
We didn't mind trying to impeach even our president for sexual ethics.
Certainly, when people wake up to how much some businesses have used their capacity to influence law to screw us, we can elect someone who we will watch to make sure he kicks the pendulum back. The people have got to be pretty mad first, so no matter what the mediaheads say, thats not the way the polls will go. The people have to be ready to impeach the guy at the drop of a hat if he said he was gonna do it, gets in there, and doesn't. And be ready to impeach any that fight him.
I see legislating enforcement of ignorance, yet at the same time allowing those enforcing ignorance to claim immunity from misperforming product, to be absolutely ludicrous.
Its like having Ford fix the exploding pinto problem by having a "key turn" agreement.. that is that by "inserting the key into the slot, you agree to hold Ford harmless... ". Why do we hound Ford for this, yet let software companies get away with it? Ford made no attempt to hide the design either.
This crap WILL end when we get a congress in that will side with US.
Liability will enforce Responsibility.
Criminal activity, like fire and corrosion, has existed for as long as we have been here on earth. We should know by now how to intelligently mitigate the ill effects.
Its dangerous not to understand fire and light one. Its dangerous to expose your machine to the internet and not know exactly what its doing.
Your experience mirrors exactly what I studied at an internet security class...
I have been fussing and fuming immensely at internet businesses - especially the financial sector - about the lunacy of having javascript or any other scripting language on a site where personal info is handled. I tell them I consider it "pornsite programming" and has NO business on a legitimate business site.It is the rootkit/keylogger which is my prime fear. And I know I have left the door wide open when I visit a site where I accept their scripts to run in my machine. I am then wide open for hostile redirection, "drive-by" downloads, and phishing.
The main problem I face is the business people I have to talk to are multimillionaires who may know how to promote an online brokerage, but don't know squat about internet security. Yes. The big-name guys are the worst.
They hire programmers who are far better at making the executive think they are worth a salary than they are about programming. They will do stupid things online like using javascript links instead of simple HTML links to force us to enable scripting. And use crazy things like pop-ups when our browsers have no problem opening up another window in an HTML link.
I feel any financial webmaster who forces javascript on his customers is just about as idiotic as a bank clerk who writes the combination of the safe on the safe, and leaves the key to the bank under the doormat. Its a sure sign that the webmaster has found a boss who hasn't the foggiest concern about security on the internet.
I have had to leave several stockbrokers because of this issue.
I wonder how anyone would hire such ignorance of internet security in a position where he is dealing with money and sensitive information. My only conclusion was that those doing the hiring were just as ignorant, and had no business handling other people's money. My guess is that he probably played a nice game of golf or maybe looked pretty in a suit, and he was paid so much that people will not verify his technical expertise.
I see Javascript on a bank? Geez, put my money in a shoebox and leave it under the bush. Oh yes, be sure to have me agree the EULA which denies any responsibility on their part. Gotta be businesslike, ya know. Its part of that thing called TRUST, meaning I am to HOPE I don't get nailed by a criminal while submitting to their demand that I use risky technologies for their convenience.
I find it very scary when I am held hostage to enforced ignorance ( IP law ) of how my stuff works. It could be as simple as a farmer seeing his corn field on fire, yet not being allowed to know that if he turned his irrigation system on, it would put it out.
If we are so anxious to legally protect IP, then also make the purveyor of said protected IP legally responsible for what it does, just as a parent is responsible for what his kids do, and we will see virus vulnerabilities plummet.
Thousands of hits here
I had that same feeling when I took the tanks for my brand new welding apparatus to be filled.
Unfortunately, its not my time for mods. Nevertheless I do want to thank you for your post.
You described exactly how I felt in the aerospace business.
Upon layoff, I took a much less paying, but much more satisfying job.
Incidentally, your parent sure reminds me of my old boss.
I was not happy there at all. So professional, so sterile, so friendless, so lonely. All suit-and-tie. Corporate. Everything was snarled in paperwork and permissions.
I felt I was only an automaton.
The company paid big bucks for management consultants to teach the mamagers to act that way. In a Stanley Milgram sort of way, they were just trying to be obedient.
Just say, so far, this guy has had an exemplary performance record...
Then this comes up.
If the guy would have went to his boss and explained his situation, would his boss nail him on the spot ( thereby opening his company for a rehire which may not be as forthcoming )? Or will he be understanding that making one's resume as juicy as possible for the lure of hire is much like a "campaign promise"?
Not that I advocate lying on resumes, but I have seen where honesty gets you if you are dead honest. From my corporate experience, no one likes a "boy scout" and looks for someone to "take risks" and "think outside the box".
It always seems the boss will find out anyway about any untruths on the resume and can later hold these findings with great power over the hiree.
I am still miffed after reading another story elsewhere about what we pay football coaches versus what we pay the president of the college.
We'll get what we pay for. Maybe the average American feels tougher football games are more important to our society than scientific research.
Most do not want to take the time to study science... but in the end, its the laws of nature ( applied science ) that will determine the temperature of my house, the operation of my car, and whether or not I eat. In short, my whole life is determined by my and other's knowledge of applying science.
Maybe pretty pictures of the stars isn't deemed particulary useful. The pictures are only the frosting. The important thing to me is gaining more and more understanding of materials and physics governing them. Technologies developed are useful for many things, especially medical and agricultural.
I feel that as an intelligent species, it behooves us to understand the universe around us and our place in it. By observing phenomena happening somewhere else, it will help us to intelligently react if it happens to us.
It started off saying "At AT&T, we are committed to bringing you great service.", followed by the usual corporate marketdroid head-farts telling me that "Now is the perfect time to switch to a new AT&T package that better fits your needs!".
The back of the postcard was full of rate changes. All nasty increases.
I was already pissed at SBC for getting into bed with YAHOO, requiring me to load proprietary YAHOO portal software on my machine. This resulted in my dropping PacBell, which I have had for five years as my ISP.
Now this.
And they have the nerve to give me their "bargain rates" of $24 and $26 a month for their bundles? Geez, they oughta just go ahead and throw in high speed DSL at those rates!!! This is likely to be just another "AT&T Price" which is apt to double in a year anyway.
Companies like AT&T are one of the main reasons I distrust MegaBusiness. They have the chutzpah to mail out all kinds of demands to customers in order to do business with them. They think 30% hikes are easy to swallow? I know I am talking peanuts in comparison to the salary and benefits AT&T is paying that marketdroid who sent me this card. AT&T Executives can sit in their boardroom shaking hands. I have made it my business to get AT&T out of my life as much as I can.
Irregardless, I will be dropping Caller ID, even though I did like it. Damm, I can buy an answering machine for less than two month's CallerID fee.
I know where I stand with AT&T. Absolutely useless. I am one of millions of proles dutifully getting our checkbooks out every month and returning a check with our statements. Why would a multibillion dollar corporation want me or my lousy twenty dollar check? Why would some corporate executive piss off millions of paying customers.... I get the idea his hand was itching something terrible and he needed a handshake from some man wearing a suit.
What would THEY do if I sent them a postcard saying I will pay 30% LESS? I didn't because I wanted to keep doing business with them. They DO have the chutzpah to send ME such a card.
Being a successful corporate executive these days appears to me to be highly related to one's skill in finding a person who will pay them a salary far beyond the benefit they provide. Its having the "people skills" to lead the man who approves their job to keep them, even while they shit on their customers.
The boardroom votes over a long corporate table. The proles vote over their checkbook and pen.
Both decide if its worth it to do business with the other.
As long as the game is in play, AT&T gets paid monthly. With their card, they raise. Do I fold or call? They have initiated endgame.
In short, this kind of shit requires a CEO at the top who completely disregards his customers, and is willing to risk longterm customer relationships over a marketing ploy. Do you wanna kill the geese laying the golden eggs?
Today, the barbeque, tomorrow, the famine.
I am now investigating any alternative I have to AT&T for land lines. I am of the opinion that land lines, even though they have existed for years, may just be completely economically obsolete. I hope Wal Mart decides to run a cellphone service, as I think they are one of the very few concerns out there which has enough capital to start such a system and do it right.
Your Rate Increase. Delivered. AT&T.
Is it really worth it, for the priviledge of a few for the use of exacting payment for content, to legislatively mandate ignorance of this technology?
Today, viruses are rampaging our networks. Supposedly "top secure" ways of selling somebody something without giving it to them, are cracked and made public within days of release. Our top business systems are violated within days of release. Aren't we chasing after wind? Ignorance only makes us vulnerable to others with wisdom. People who are not compelled to live under our law reign free, unfettered by our laws. Only the law abiding citizenry will adopt ignorance.
While our wisest minds in Washington ponder law to restrict knowledge of our computational infrastructure, other equally brilliant minds in countries eager to collapse us by rendering our technologies useless can use our ignorance to their advantage.
A typical instance of this in history is how Alexander the Great rendered a far more powerful adversary helpless by causing his adversaries infrastructure ( his elephants ) to malfunction ( by blinding and stampeding them ). His adversary now had his hands full with his problem elephants while Alexander took control.
When we do not understand our own technology, our business leaders are going to be completely powerless to control anything if their communications infrastructure has just about the same effectiveness as giving a child a toy steering wheel in a car.
I hate to see so much of our technologies being so centered aroung hanging itself up if something isn't just right. All this secret-keeping. Its enough to give any computer engineer the CIA Heebie-Jeebies ( as related in that movie release "The Good Shepherd", when nobody could trust nobody. I know we love to talk "trust", but frankly, EULA's instill about as much trust in me about as much as a pre-nuptial agreement instills a sense of love. If you want TRUST, then be RESPONSIBLE for it, not deny it in a EULA.
I would hate to have future civilizations digging up the remains of our civilzation, only to discover our civilization was done in by ignorance of how their own technology worked ( as in the theme of many Star Trek episodes ) and deduce we we became ignorant of our own support technology for a song. Literally.
Use Magnetic Sensors. A compass, actually, but sends its directional data like a mouse.
Just twist it in the air, it will sense the directional of the Earth's magnetic field through it and respond as a mouse would have responded to motion on a pad.
If this hasn't been done before, now you all can consider it PRIOR ART.
Slashdot will log and timestamp this. Have at it!
When I was asked for a sample how I code, I brought in my project code ( all of it ) from a data structures class I had just taken at the local college.
I was working on proprietary stuff at work, but I felt the class stuff was general enough - as from the talk we had, I felt he just wanted to see if I wrote clean maintainable code. I could really see where he was coming from, as I have seen other classmates work, and would have been extremely miffed if someone handed the mess to me in exchange for a paycheck. Not many of us wrote clean code. ( Or, at least it didn't *look* clean! )
Turns out I did not get the job, but it was for other things. I didn't really wanna get into pure coding, aa my love is designing physics gizmos. The job was pure coding.
I can't blame an employer one bit for wanting a sample. Badly written code may be coaxed into working, but trying to modify or debug badly written code is a nightmare. Its often best to throw the whole damned thing away and start over.
I have no doubt we are going to face warmer and warmer weather. Like you point out, Siberia may well become the world's new bread basket.
Sometimes I feel as if I am standing on a highway, and off in the distance, there is this big truck heading right for me. In about three minutes, its gonna be right on me! What do I do????
Well, realizing what it is, and what rules it will follow, I am gonna get my ass off the highway, and watch it pass.
As we deplete our oil resources ( which is a far greater concern to me right now ) we may find the increased insolation a blessing - if we can figure out how to use it.
And there's the key as far as I am concerned.
In all of our history, we - as a people, have thrived by using our intelligence to direct natural laws to produce a desired outcome. This is one helluva time to stop doing that.
Thats very similar to what I am doing now, except its K-Meleon.
My main intent on posting was to express my disdain for this kind of programming on a business site. I'ts not gonna ruin my life if someone hacked my MySpace account and screwed around my site... but once money has been transferred, there are some real concerns if I ever get it back.
There are a lot of graduates of business schools out there, now running financial companies, who are apparently completely ignorant of the risks of virus-prone programming techniques. They don't seem to be aware that this is people's life savings they are dealing with.
I consider these business executives much like my neighbor, who had locked herself out of her bedroom. She is not a "mechanical person", and thought the lock would deter the curious renters she had sharing the house with her. In a way, she was relieved that I was able defeat her lock in about ten seconds after using the side of a soda-pop bottle as a shim between the door and jamb.
Yet she was alarmed when she realized she had spent all these years thinking the lock was actually protecting her.
Big corporations may have the marketing and finances to promote their product, but when one knows how to spoof their system, one loses confidence in that company.
The kind of lock I trust is the one I can't figure out how to bypass, and neither can I find anyone else who can either.
Of course, anything is breakable. I like the kind that its so hard to do it that you are going to be discovered while you are trying to do it so I can still "get back in" if I had to.
I may argue with them at first, but I find it much easer to just do business elsewhere where people take their role seriously, not as some risk they can transfer away use of some cleverly worded language in their contract.
In a way, its like my boots. If I ever step in mud, I end up spending a lot of time outside, with a stick, trying to get the muck out of all the grooves in the soles. So I end up avoiding stepping in muck if I can at all help it.
I have also learned that people can really muck my machine up if I enable Javascript. For the same reason, I avoid it.
I view a business which requires me to use Javascript on his site much like I view a business which places a large tray of muck at his front door, which I must step through if I intend to do business with him. I will gladly drive across town to avoid that tray of muck.
Large companies can say thats its MY fault for having shoes that muck up, but its MY money, and if he makes his business too hard to deal with, I will either decide to forgo any benefit derived from doing business with him, or use whatever alternatives that don't require me to go out of my way so much to accomodate them.
It was over a year ago when I initiated the account transfers. I remember trying the incumbent Fidelity first with no luck. I tried Dad's Merrill Lynch and got hung up too. I tried Schwab and got hung up there as well, and even Scottrade hung up on me on some damn form that seemed to take forever and a day to straighten out.
When I finally traced the problem to the whole form being rejected because of the syntax of the date code ( and of course, it would never tell me what the problem was, it would just reject the whole form and return me to the logon page ), I was furious that they would have such finickycode on their system. I figured the only way I could really convince them to clean up their code was to shanghai their CEO, and have his year's pay dependent on HIM finding out how to get the machine to accept the damned form sans javascript.
I have wrote them numerous letters about using clean display-only HTML so I can't be spoofed nearly as easily. Also robustness. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to use finicky banking software. Would YOU put your money in a disappearing piggy-bank?
Its that I want to make damned sure that when I am conducting financial business, I want to see ONLY that which THEY send me, not what some script is doing. I resent any other crap running in my machine just as I would resent some stranger watching over my shoulder while I am transacting my business. And I resent anything in my machine that can overwrite my URL bar and send me to places unknown.
Apparently, some people who knew how to "do it right", did so, and called their work "Google".
I began losing respect for Yahoo when they ganged up with SBC to force me to use some proprietary software in my machine, which I perceived as a lock-in to the Yahoo portal, as well as a likely data-mining opportunity to snoop my machine.
Of all the Yahoo offerings, I like Finance.yahoo.com the best.
Here's an example report of some mutual funds I have been tracking. I like it because it gives me a clean display of what I want.
They have not yet implemented technologies which require me to enable Javascript, then use that technology to hound the living daylights out of me. When they do, I will no longer use their site.
I used to find Groups.yahoo.com extremely valuable, but slowly but surely they have been requiring javascript more and more to access mundane functions... but if I enable javascript I am going to be pelted with God-knows-what that I didn't order, and have no idea what the window is programmed to do should I click on it.
Its really hard to tell a big organization what really irks me off. Its much better is someone like Google actually shows them how its done.
I have NEVER had any problems accessing Google from ANYTHING, because Google adheres to WEB STANDARDS. Trying to communicate to many businesses is a royal pain when they adopt weird extensions which screw up my end.
It wasn't easy trying to find a decent internet stockbroker! All the "big guys" adopt untenable crap on their end which forces me to be vulnerable to all sorts of mischief.
Scottrade is the best I have found so far, and even they require Javascript enabled if I wanna BUY anything. All the "big boys" ( Fidelity, Schwab, Merrill Lynch, etc. ) REQUIRED IE, rendering them useless to me. With all those Javascript phishing tools floating around out there, one would think a FINANCIAL INSTITUTION would be leery of using such pornsite-like programming on their site.
Lengthy letters to them regarding my concerns of my vulnerabilities to phishing attacks when I have scripting enabled have had no effect.
I can't force them to use standard HTML protocols.
I hope they won't be surprised that if Google opens a web brokerage that uses pure HTML protocols, where I know my URL bar is not being overwritten, and know exactly where a link is going to send me, I will go to them.
Google is succeeding for a reason. They are doing things RIGHT.
And they are big enough now that Microsoft cannot buy them and force them to use "Microsoft proprietary" protocols - like we discussed in another forum on Slashdot - where things have grown so big and cantankerous that trying to make them secure is damn near impossible.
Its the same old thing. Businesses get so big their leaders determine that they "make the market" instead of "meet the needs of the market", then flounder around while the smaller businesses which are not big enough to "make the market" absorb the big business's customer base.