This is like the electric company charging me per light.
I think we agree that this is a specious argument. The underlying issue, however, is not. Presently, cable modem service (to extend your electricity analogy) is like giving you a wire on the grid for $50/mo. You can use as much or as little as you want for the $50/mo. Whether you use that solely to open the cold can of pork and beans you eat each evening, or whether you want to light up a stadium every night. The trouble is that there's a fixed charge for bandwidth that they buy, and if everyone is trying to light up a stadium, they'll go out of business quite quickly as demand far outstrips supply, or rather, capacity to buy supply.
A more reasoned response would be to throttle after a certain transfer threshold, unless you pay for not being throttled. Their (recurring) cost is usage sensitive, their present pricing is not--therin lies the problem.
Let me see if I have this straight... I'll assume for the time being you're using Windows because in my experience, RR won't touch Unix. You call Road Runner, which your brother pays for, because you didn't remember ipconfig/winipcfg. You ask them how to get an IP address on a system that they never installed their client on. You all but admit to using multiple systems with their service, which is a big no-no in most of their service areas without paying for the privilege. Worst of all, you called them to ask rather than take the time to RTFM. All you need to do is search for it. It's the second hit on a search of the help for "release IP address", first hit on "renew IP address".
After all this, you whine about them asking a lot of questions about the system? Remember: Most clueful people would sooner choke themselves with cat5 than they would work first level support for a consumer ISP. The way I see it, you were fortunate that you got your question answered so quickly. Most first level people are doing good to pronounce the things they see in the checklist properly, let alone answer something that's not on the troubleshooting flowchart.
I never said it wasn't web monkey's fault. Yes, anyone who would do something like this doesn't deserve even the title of web monkey. This is simply a reaction, like a provider filtering inbound port 80 to staunch code red's effects.
Credit card numbers follow a known format (mod10). It should be simple, but somewhat intensive as far as search engines go, to scan content, look for 16 digit numeric strings, and run a mod10 on them. If it comes back true, don't put it into the index.
Man, and here I come to find out that the infamous "permanent record" that they always threatened you with back in school wan't real until now.
From the article: schools and social services already had information about young children in danger of becoming criminals but at the moment they did not share this with the police.
With good reason. Social Services treats, schools both treat and punish, and police punish. Absent a crime, treatment is what you get, not punishment.
"We are aware of examples from within London where caring professionals have been told in confidence by children that they have been victims of quite serious crimes."
And the operative word is, yes, CONFIDENCE. If the kid wanted to go to the police, they should go to the police, or be directed to do so. Legislatively forcing them to do so is a Bad Thing.
Don't take a law that's designed to stop malicious people and extrapolate it into something that's going to take ones and zeros and make them illegal.
I'm sure this statement would've been much comfort to Dmitry Skylarov as he spent weeks in jail. Obviously he's one of those malicious people that laws are supposed to go after. Just because a law isn't intended to do one thing doesn't it mean it won't be used anyway.
Simply talking about hacking or trying to figure out how things work isn't going to land you in prison.
Sure thing. I'm sure that Steve Jackson will back this one all the way.
I don't particularly like to work with people who are Coders only
I think that's a pretty fair statement for any developer. Coders care about functionality. Developers care about functionality, supportability, performance, stability, and all those other "little" things. This is, of course, the problem with contracting out development. Typically, it's going to be to coders, not developers.
As to all those other things, other people should be involved. Analysts in analysis, architects in design, business analysts in requirements, and users in testing. In most places I've worked, as is your experience, that kind of thing falls to the developers, to the detriment of the code.
As developers now tend to be the most expensive part of a project
Now that we've done away with those silly things like analysis, design, requirements gathering, integrated testing, et al, I guess that does just leave developers holding the bag.
I received an email with the subject "Good Times", and I opened it. My browser popped open, and sent me to a site that had the headline, "See what really happens 'behind closed doors' when John Ashcroft and George Bush get together." My firewall picked up something weird, but I don't know anything about that, because I was already getting ready to format my disk.
Yanno, MST3K ruined me. Now, I sit and make comments more than I ever did before it...
Remember when, in ID, the president said, "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not go down without a fight!"? I always say "I will not eat them, Sam I am. I will not eat, green eggs and ham."
At least Rat Shack will let you not give your info, when you say you'd rather not. When pressed, I usually start "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue". Most of the time, they take a clue and stop asking. One guy at an appliance store once, however, just didn't get it. "Washington DC, huh? You just visiting here?" It somewhat pained me when I told him that he had the choice of bothering the president, not bothering me, or not making a comission. Needless to say, he took option B.
A more reasoned response would be to do the homework ahead of time. Find out what their corporate headquarters address is, and what the CEO's name is, and use that.
Declan McCullagh's Politech has a post with a reply from the spammer. In it, he says "Therefore,
consequential and more severe actions will now be initiated and followed through to conclusion. An acceptable conclusion is no longer a removal of the Web page."
Yeah, I know it's lame. That's why I just replied instead of creating a new thread. Wil, you thoroughly changed my mind. I didn't suffer from WAD (Wesley Association Disorder), but I didn't know that you were one of the "people like us" (the typical slashdot geek). Thanks for a great interview.
I'd say we ended up winning our battle. The first pass was that no one would be local admin, no one could install software, and no one could twiddle the registry. It turns out they couldn't figure out how to give someone local admin on their own system, and not every other boxen in the company. Apparently, after nearly relentless pressure from the development side, they only have two things they're going to ask of us: Run login scripts (to get anti-virus updates), and if you run a personal firewall, let through a few specific hosts/ports for reporting purposes. All in all, it looks like it's pretty agreeable.
They did tell us that while we have the right to run our own boxes, we also have the responsibility of running our own boxes. If you don't keep your patches up, or you abuse the privileges, they will come after you, and come after you mightily.
The Bill of Rights is a list of limitations on the federal government.
True, but you don't hand over all your rights when you walk through your employer's door either. Unless conspicuously stated, they can't listen in on your phone calls, watch your net usage, or anything like that. They can't discriminate against you because the DOL says so. So yes, while this is not a constitutional issue, there are still some protections afforded you as an employee by the government. Fortunately (in this case, I'd have to think), this is not one of them.
Re:Possibly unpopular opinion, but here goes
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 2
I'll bite on this one... My manager came from the technical ranks. He's not the best pure tech, but having worked with him in group situations, I'd rather be him than me. Me, I'll usually pound someone into submission technically. It gets the job done, but not always the fastest. It earns credibility, so long as it's not vicious enough to be seen as personal.
My manager, however, will simply ask questions. He'll give you just enough rope to hang yourself. Once he's asked enough questions, everyone will see his perspective and sometimes even act upon it. Given the choice between his approach and mine, I'd take his any day. Unfortunately, I lack the ability to subtly play dumb.
Not all management is worthless. Believe me, I've had my share of bad managers. The good ones, from the developer's perspective, leave the developers to develop and shield them from the corporate BS while doing it. In all my outward facing responsibilities, that's what I've tried to do. The less they need concern themselves with the politically correct answer and more with the technologically correct one, the better for all involved.
That does sound more like code-optimisation:) That's one of the "fire-fighting" roles, i.e, the customer demands a factor 2 speedup or memory consumption reduced by 50%
Heh. Did this just last week with a project in serious trouble. A DB read was taking 25-30 seconds. I was called in, found a massive memory leak, and a way of dealing with the process that cut it by 10x in time, even before addressing the leak itself.
Re:a question for the young genius.
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Dude, do you what a vagina is?
I believe it's a custom part of the female model of homo sapiens. It serves two purposes, one being an input port, the other being an output port. It functions primarily as part of the reproductive process of the species. It was designed for maximum flexibility, yielding to objects both small (like your penis), and large, such as a baby. Typically, the output method of the vagina forces it to operate much closer to maximum spec than does the input method. Like all body parts, it requires regular care and maintenence. Although it is capable of sequential serial input from multiple devices, the controlling system generally prefers utilizing fewer input devices over a longer term. The input/output ratio is heavily weighted towards the input process, as the output process uses many more system resources, both short and long term.
No, getting a girlfriend is your next logical step.
Shit. This isn't going to make my wife very happy...
Re:How to keep your hand in coding? Wait for crise
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 2
Ummm, yeah. None of the projects I've been involved in have ever had a 30 hour death march leading to implementation. Twice. In one week.
Seriously though, excellent point. Thank you. It's something I've done unconsciously for the most part, but will try to keep more conscious of in the future.
This is great. I think I'm going to post it in my cubicle.:)
Seriously though, you know nothing about what I've done with my life/career. For all you know, I may have been freelancing since I was 12 (I have), I may have been working in IT since I was 16 (I have), and I may have been developing since I was 14 (again, I have). I don't claim to have the most knowledge (I don't), and I don't claim to have the most experience (again, I don't), but I do have the ability to see both the forest and the trees at the same time, which from my experience is pretty damn unique in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
This is like the electric company charging me per light.
I think we agree that this is a specious argument. The underlying issue, however, is not. Presently, cable modem service (to extend your electricity analogy) is like giving you a wire on the grid for $50/mo. You can use as much or as little as you want for the $50/mo. Whether you use that solely to open the cold can of pork and beans you eat each evening, or whether you want to light up a stadium every night. The trouble is that there's a fixed charge for bandwidth that they buy, and if everyone is trying to light up a stadium, they'll go out of business quite quickly as demand far outstrips supply, or rather, capacity to buy supply.
A more reasoned response would be to throttle after a certain transfer threshold, unless you pay for not being throttled. Their (recurring) cost is usage sensitive, their present pricing is not--therin lies the problem.
Let me see if I have this straight... I'll assume for the time being you're using Windows because in my experience, RR won't touch Unix. You call Road Runner, which your brother pays for, because you didn't remember ipconfig/winipcfg. You ask them how to get an IP address on a system that they never installed their client on. You all but admit to using multiple systems with their service, which is a big no-no in most of their service areas without paying for the privilege. Worst of all, you called them to ask rather than take the time to RTFM. All you need to do is search for it. It's the second hit on a search of the help for "release IP address", first hit on "renew IP address".
After all this, you whine about them asking a lot of questions about the system? Remember: Most clueful people would sooner choke themselves with cat5 than they would work first level support for a consumer ISP. The way I see it, you were fortunate that you got your question answered so quickly. Most first level people are doing good to pronounce the things they see in the checklist properly, let alone answer something that's not on the troubleshooting flowchart.
I never said it wasn't web monkey's fault. Yes, anyone who would do something like this doesn't deserve even the title of web monkey. This is simply a reaction, like a provider filtering inbound port 80 to staunch code red's effects.
Credit card numbers follow a known format (mod10). It should be simple, but somewhat intensive as far as search engines go, to scan content, look for 16 digit numeric strings, and run a mod10 on them. If it comes back true, don't put it into the index.
By contrast this is a secret database, used only by the police for surviellance purposes.
And that's precisely what's so creepy about this. Of course, all police are incorruptible, and no policeman would EVER abuse law enforcement databases.
For so much as talking back to your teacher,
Man, and here I come to find out that the infamous "permanent record" that they always threatened you with back in school wan't real until now.
From the article: schools and social services already had information about young children in danger of becoming criminals but at the moment they did not share this with the police.
With good reason. Social Services treats, schools both treat and punish, and police punish. Absent a crime, treatment is what you get, not punishment.
"We are aware of examples from within London where caring professionals have been told in confidence by children that they have been victims of quite serious crimes."
And the operative word is, yes, CONFIDENCE. If the kid wanted to go to the police, they should go to the police, or be directed to do so. Legislatively forcing them to do so is a Bad Thing.
99.8% uptime? Now, even DNA is more reliable than Windows.
Don't take a law that's designed to stop malicious people and extrapolate it into something that's going to take ones and zeros and make them illegal.
I'm sure this statement would've been much comfort to Dmitry Skylarov as he spent weeks in jail. Obviously he's one of those malicious people that laws are supposed to go after. Just because a law isn't intended to do one thing doesn't it mean it won't be used anyway.
Simply talking about hacking or trying to figure out how things work isn't going to land you in prison.
Sure thing. I'm sure that Steve Jackson will back this one all the way.
I don't particularly like to work with people who are Coders only
I think that's a pretty fair statement for any developer. Coders care about functionality. Developers care about functionality, supportability, performance, stability, and all those other "little" things. This is, of course, the problem with contracting out development. Typically, it's going to be to coders, not developers.
As to all those other things, other people should be involved. Analysts in analysis, architects in design, business analysts in requirements, and users in testing. In most places I've worked, as is your experience, that kind of thing falls to the developers, to the detriment of the code.
As developers now tend to be the most expensive part of a project
Now that we've done away with those silly things like analysis, design, requirements gathering, integrated testing, et al, I guess that does just leave developers holding the bag.
I received an email with the subject "Good Times", and I opened it. My browser popped open, and sent me to a site that had the headline, "See what really happens 'behind closed doors' when John Ashcroft and George Bush get together." My firewall picked up something weird, but I don't know anything about that, because I was already getting ready to format my disk.
YES YES YES YES! That was GREAT!
What I want to see MST3Ked are "Independence Day"
Yanno, MST3K ruined me. Now, I sit and make comments more than I ever did before it...
Remember when, in ID, the president said, "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not go down without a fight!"? I always say "I will not eat them, Sam I am. I will not eat, green eggs and ham."
God forbid you share your name with Radio Shack.
At least Rat Shack will let you not give your info, when you say you'd rather not. When pressed, I usually start "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue". Most of the time, they take a clue and stop asking. One guy at an appliance store once, however, just didn't get it. "Washington DC, huh? You just visiting here?" It somewhat pained me when I told him that he had the choice of bothering the president, not bothering me, or not making a comission. Needless to say, he took option B.
A more reasoned response would be to do the homework ahead of time. Find out what their corporate headquarters address is, and what the CEO's name is, and use that.
Declan McCullagh's Politech has a post with a reply from the spammer. In it, he says "Therefore,
consequential and more severe actions will now be initiated and followed through to conclusion. An acceptable conclusion is no longer a removal of the Web page."
Want some cheese with that whine?
I believe that RDBMS's should add functionality to read/write XML, especially as the XML Schema recommendations is basically done.
Oh, like Microsoft SQL? I know, I know. Mod me down, but MS has been on XML like Justice on an antitrust suit.
That's an awesome interview!
<aol>me too!</aol>
Yeah, I know it's lame. That's why I just replied instead of creating a new thread. Wil, you thoroughly changed my mind. I didn't suffer from WAD (Wesley Association Disorder), but I didn't know that you were one of the "people like us" (the typical slashdot geek). Thanks for a great interview.
I'd say we ended up winning our battle. The first pass was that no one would be local admin, no one could install software, and no one could twiddle the registry. It turns out they couldn't figure out how to give someone local admin on their own system, and not every other boxen in the company. Apparently, after nearly relentless pressure from the development side, they only have two things they're going to ask of us: Run login scripts (to get anti-virus updates), and if you run a personal firewall, let through a few specific hosts/ports for reporting purposes. All in all, it looks like it's pretty agreeable.
They did tell us that while we have the right to run our own boxes, we also have the responsibility of running our own boxes. If you don't keep your patches up, or you abuse the privileges, they will come after you, and come after you mightily.
The Bill of Rights is a list of limitations on the federal government.
True, but you don't hand over all your rights when you walk through your employer's door either. Unless conspicuously stated, they can't listen in on your phone calls, watch your net usage, or anything like that. They can't discriminate against you because the DOL says so. So yes, while this is not a constitutional issue, there are still some protections afforded you as an employee by the government. Fortunately (in this case, I'd have to think), this is not one of them.
I'll bite on this one... My manager came from the technical ranks. He's not the best pure tech, but having worked with him in group situations, I'd rather be him than me. Me, I'll usually pound someone into submission technically. It gets the job done, but not always the fastest. It earns credibility, so long as it's not vicious enough to be seen as personal.
My manager, however, will simply ask questions. He'll give you just enough rope to hang yourself. Once he's asked enough questions, everyone will see his perspective and sometimes even act upon it. Given the choice between his approach and mine, I'd take his any day. Unfortunately, I lack the ability to subtly play dumb.
Not all management is worthless. Believe me, I've had my share of bad managers. The good ones, from the developer's perspective, leave the developers to develop and shield them from the corporate BS while doing it. In all my outward facing responsibilities, that's what I've tried to do. The less they need concern themselves with the politically correct answer and more with the technologically correct one, the better for all involved.
That does sound more like code-optimisation :) That's one of the "fire-fighting" roles, i.e, the customer demands a factor 2 speedup or memory consumption reduced by 50%
Heh. Did this just last week with a project in serious trouble. A DB read was taking 25-30 seconds. I was called in, found a massive memory leak, and a way of dealing with the process that cut it by 10x in time, even before addressing the leak itself.
Dude, do you what a vagina is?
I believe it's a custom part of the female model of homo sapiens. It serves two purposes, one being an input port, the other being an output port. It functions primarily as part of the reproductive process of the species. It was designed for maximum flexibility, yielding to objects both small (like your penis), and large, such as a baby. Typically, the output method of the vagina forces it to operate much closer to maximum spec than does the input method. Like all body parts, it requires regular care and maintenence. Although it is capable of sequential serial input from multiple devices, the controlling system generally prefers utilizing fewer input devices over a longer term. The input/output ratio is heavily weighted towards the input process, as the output process uses many more system resources, both short and long term.
No, getting a girlfriend is your next logical step.
Shit. This isn't going to make my wife very happy...
Ummm, yeah. None of the projects I've been involved in have ever had a 30 hour death march leading to implementation. Twice. In one week.
Seriously though, excellent point. Thank you. It's something I've done unconsciously for the most part, but will try to keep more conscious of in the future.
I'm 28 and I think that I'm really awesome.
:)
This is great. I think I'm going to post it in my cubicle.
Seriously though, you know nothing about what I've done with my life/career. For all you know, I may have been freelancing since I was 12 (I have), I may have been working in IT since I was 16 (I have), and I may have been developing since I was 14 (again, I have). I don't claim to have the most knowledge (I don't), and I don't claim to have the most experience (again, I don't), but I do have the ability to see both the forest and the trees at the same time, which from my experience is pretty damn unique in the field.