Because if Facebook added that service, this third-party wouldn't be able to tell which pictures you're looking at. I mean, did you think they wouldn't keep track of which IP addresses and which browsers request which image keys?
As it turns out she was probably a thief, or very very careless, but clearly no one knew that when the decision was made. All in all I'd say a better "lesson learned" from that one is "be upfront with your employees about major changes in their careers due to company action, and help them in every reasonable way to adjust to the changes you caused." Not: " Watch your evil employees like hawks when you're about to screw them to make sure they don't screw you first."
Hah! As if! I mean, just compare these two quotes from the article:
"Sally," a systems administrator and a database manager, had been with a Fortune 500 consumer products company for 10 years and was one of its most trusted and capable IT workers... She was known as a pinch-hitter -- someone who was able to help solve all kinds of problems.
And then:
Eventually, they traced the sabotage to Sally and confronted her. In return for Sally's agreement to help fix the systems, the company did not prosecute her. In addition, Sally had to agree never to talk publicly about the incident. "They didn't want her going on Oprah and talking about how she broke the backbone of a Fortune 500 company."
Look: They "traced" the sabotage to Sally. They said "We will sue you if you don't help us fix it". Sally, who is currently unemployed (hell, she might even have retired, especially after 10 years at a high-paying job) and in any case can't afford a Fortune 500-caliber legal team, agreed. They said "Don't tell anyone about it ever". That is literally all the information that is presented; the narrative structure forces the reader to assume that Sally actually sabotaged their systems, but what evidence of that is there?
Read between the lines here - some other employee(s) left the logic bombs behind, the company decided that A. Sally made a good scapegoat because she is apparently magic and B. Sally was awesome at fixing shit, so therefore C. They would get her to help fix their shit for free by threatening to sue her.
I mean, come on! How does that make any sense as presented? Evil bastard sets off "logic bombs" (what are those, by the way?) in the servers; you go back to evil bastard and say "fix this or we're gonna sue you!"; evil bastard nicely fixes everything for you without setting up more "logic bombs" that this time will wait a bit longer to go off. Does that sound plausible at all? Does that sound like the actions of an entity that actually believes evil bastard is really an evil bastard?
Things change fast sure, but by that token, not all of the changes are permanent or important. I'm not averse to learning new stuff if it's proven, but I don't go running after new stuff simply because it's there.
Actually, in IT, I've come to find that quite often something that people tout as being new isn't so much "new new" as "so old it's new again". I mean, for instance, LINQ is awesome - but it's not significantly different from stuff that functional languages were doing ages ago, mixed in with SQL.
Science should STFU about religion and Religion should STFU about Science.
I totally agree with that. Here's a list of scientific claims that religions should stop making (primarily Christianity, since that's what I'm familiar with):
1. Adam and Eve did not exist. This is simply unsupported and unsupportable by modern genetic evidence. Therefore, as a direct consequence, the concept of "original sin" is at best a metaphor for some unknown other thing. 2. Noah's Flood did not happen as a global event, though of course it probably did happen on some scale (much like the way that fish your Uncle Ernie once hooked gets bigger every year). 3. There is no evidence so far that any miracles have ever occurred. Every single "miraculous" event on record is on par with either Paul Bunyan or Uri Geller. 4. There is, furthermore, no evidence whatsoever that God has or has ever actually answered any prayers. We've even done a medical study on this, and found no effect. 5. Jesus most likely did not come back from the dead. I mean seriously folks, even back then your evidence consisted of A. an empty grave, B. a bunch of people who were personally invested in him not dying seeing him up and about and C. some dude who got whacked on the head falling off his horse claiming to have seen him. Maybe if he'd stuck around in Jerusalem for a couple of years afterwards you could have a case, but as it is there's just nothing there. 6. Muhammad didn't have a flying horse. Just throwing that out there.
Here's Isaac Asimov in 1989, talking about how global warming is A. something we should be worrying about right now (e.g, in 1989), and B. that he's been talking about how greenhouse gasses are something we should have been worrying about for the last 20 years.
The media just seized on the whole "we're entering another ice age" thing in the '70s.
This can only be used for piracy in a manner similar to PC game rips -- you have to rip the game to HDD then crack it's executable. It would be easy to detect the use of a pirate game for online play, at least for new games -- require some hash of the executable be sent ot the game server.
How is that easy? If I have control of the console, I get to determine what it sends to the server. That means that I can make it send a fake hash of the real executable value. It's actually pretty much impossible to verify that a computer under someone else's control is trustworthy - it's like asking a person "are you lying right now?"
It's called the Nobel Disease. The Nobel Prize is one of the highest prizes awarded in science, so it seems like some scientists think that once they have it, the only way to top their previous work is to escape the confines of reality entirely.
It's like saying that a particular model of car has been recalled because of faulty brakes and then NOBODY buying a car ever again. It's that ridiculous.
The thing is, though, that people aren't inherently scared of cars. This whole antivax manufactroversy only got traction because a large portion of the population is simply scared shitless of needles. Like, completely and unreasonably unhinged when presented with something long and pointy that's meant to go in your arm. Do not want to the max extreme sort of thing.
Essentially, a lot of people were just looking for some excuse, any excuse, to justify to themselves why they shouldn't vaccinate their children - and Jenny McCarthy handed them one on a silver platter.
According to people like Murdoch, it is because they have worked harder than all of us and are much more savvy; but the truth is it is because good fortune (luck) has graced them in life. I'm not sure of how many potential *Murdochs* there are out there, but I am sure there are hundreds, just like all the talented people unveiled by shows like American Idol who to that point had not made it, only because they had not gotten lucky yet.
Hundreds? If Rupert Murdoch is one in a million, there's seven thousand people who are just as capable of achievement as he was out there. It just turns out that most of those potential new Rupert Murdochs aren't going to get the opportunities he had - not everyone can be the son of Keith Murdoch, the owner of an already successful newspaper empire.
Buyout candidates have been doing this for longer than I've been alive and for some reason it still seems to fool potential buyers.
Because of what the grandparent poster was referring to -
Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?
By laying off half their workforce, MySpace is saying "Look - the people who are still here? They're dedicated and awesome developers. They're dedicated, because otherwise they would have left already; they're awesome, because otherwise we would have fired them (after all, we have no reason to keep on chaff at this point). Buy us, and you'll get a pre-screened workforce of awesome and dedicated developers, which is worth quite a lot."
Companies spend a lot of money trying to hire competent people. What MySpace is doing right now is saying "here's the cream of our crop, ready to be slurped up if you buy us".
Small-yet-critical-detail -- he was beaten and detained by Kuwaiti's in a Kuwaiti jail.
Kuwaitis are not the United States Government and Kuwati jails aren't policed by Americans.
You're right, that makes perfect sense because
A. After the first Gulf War, Kuwait isn't essentially an American protectorate and B. The USG is flipping out about this kid, demanding answers, and immediately bringing him home as soon as they're able - like you would expect them to do if any foreign country held and tortured an American citizen of their own accord.
That kid is an American citizen who was, apparently, detained and beaten in Kuwait because the United States Government thought he might know something. If my government gets its hand on Assange, do you think the result will be much different?
You mean states like Bavaria in Germany or Flanders in Belgium? They not only have no 'conceal-carry' law, but have lower murder rates then any state in the US.
That's correlation but not causation.
I love it - your counter-example is invalid because I don't understand statistics! So instead I'm gonna talk about something completely different! Take that!
Many people fail to understand that for the same reason they fail to understand that states which enact conceal-carry laws experience lower rates of violent crime. That is, it goes against their religion because certainly no contact with the facts would cause one to miss the point. The point is: criminals love helpless targets who can't effectively fight back. Criminals really hate facing targets that are as well armed as they are, or better armed, because at this point their instinct for self-preservation kicks in.
You know, without actual statistics you're just making shit up. I mean, it's entirely possible that increased concealed carry rates mean that criminals are more willing to use more force - e.g, to bring a gun to what they know might turn out to be a gun fight, instead of just a knife.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but all you have here are baseless assertions.
Tenure makes excellent sense in a university, where people with doctorates in the field may be doing controversial research or discovering uncomfortable facts and should not have to worry about political pressure being applied to their university as a result of what they're doing.
Why do teachers, who do no research, get the same benefit? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Of course there were also idiots who complained that the game was too hard because they couldn't beat the AI at "hard" difficulty, and needed someone to explain to them that they could set the difficulty to "normal" or "easy". You just need to be able to recognize the idiots and trolls and tune them out.
I think that's exactly what's going on here. Jeff Vogel didn't spend his formative years reading the Internet like a lot of the younger game developers out there, so he doesn't have a good built-in signal/noise filter in his head. That's what I get from reading the post, at least - he's saying "don't read what the Internets says about your game, you'll just drive yourself crazy".
Autism prevalence is increasing. Not just the absolute number of cases, but the rate among the general population. I've yet to see a single study that says otherwise... can you provide a cite for your oddball claim? The increase is definitely NOT proportional to our population growth.
Uhh yeah that shit's called diagnostic substitution - where in the 1950s and 60s a kid with autism would just have been diagnosed as "stupid and lazy" or maybe with some other neurological malfunction, now they're autistic. The true incidence rate of autism hasn't increased.
Though I do agree that the GP is completely wrong and kinda stupid, since he apparently doesn't understand the difference between an increase per capita and an increase in total.
I totally agree. To make it even better, you should remap the keys; there's a lot of unused modifier space on the keyboard. For instance, I have alt-backspace set to tab (for tab completion in a shell, natch) and shift-backspace set to Esc (for Vim, good luck using Emacs on such a tiny keyboard), alt- and shift- the various arrow keys set to things like brackets and pipes, and I've remapped the./:/? button so that it has periods in alt-mode as well as normal mode (for entering decimal numbers in to Octave and R - I just turn on alt-lock and I can do numerical entry easily, since all the numbers are in alt-mode, as well as period and the various mathematical operators). It works really well, to the point where I've written small scripts while bored. Hell, half my Slashdot posts these days come from it, HTML formatting included! It's better than Angry Birds any day.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if Facebook added that service, this third-party wouldn't be able to tell which pictures you're looking at. I mean, did you think they wouldn't keep track of which IP addresses and which browsers request which image keys?
Hah! As if! I mean, just compare these two quotes from the article:
And then:
Look: They "traced" the sabotage to Sally. They said "We will sue you if you don't help us fix it". Sally, who is currently unemployed (hell, she might even have retired, especially after 10 years at a high-paying job) and in any case can't afford a Fortune 500-caliber legal team, agreed. They said "Don't tell anyone about it ever". That is literally all the information that is presented; the narrative structure forces the reader to assume that Sally actually sabotaged their systems, but what evidence of that is there?
Read between the lines here - some other employee(s) left the logic bombs behind, the company decided that A. Sally made a good scapegoat because she is apparently magic and B. Sally was awesome at fixing shit, so therefore C. They would get her to help fix their shit for free by threatening to sue her.
I mean, come on! How does that make any sense as presented? Evil bastard sets off "logic bombs" (what are those, by the way?) in the servers; you go back to evil bastard and say "fix this or we're gonna sue you!"; evil bastard nicely fixes everything for you without setting up more "logic bombs" that this time will wait a bit longer to go off. Does that sound plausible at all? Does that sound like the actions of an entity that actually believes evil bastard is really an evil bastard?
Actually, in IT, I've come to find that quite often something that people tout as being new isn't so much "new new" as "so old it's new again". I mean, for instance, LINQ is awesome - but it's not significantly different from stuff that functional languages were doing ages ago, mixed in with SQL.
I totally agree with that. Here's a list of scientific claims that religions should stop making (primarily Christianity, since that's what I'm familiar with):
1. Adam and Eve did not exist. This is simply unsupported and unsupportable by modern genetic evidence. Therefore, as a direct consequence, the concept of "original sin" is at best a metaphor for some unknown other thing.
2. Noah's Flood did not happen as a global event, though of course it probably did happen on some scale (much like the way that fish your Uncle Ernie once hooked gets bigger every year).
3. There is no evidence so far that any miracles have ever occurred. Every single "miraculous" event on record is on par with either Paul Bunyan or Uri Geller.
4. There is, furthermore, no evidence whatsoever that God has or has ever actually answered any prayers. We've even done a medical study on this, and found no effect.
5. Jesus most likely did not come back from the dead. I mean seriously folks, even back then your evidence consisted of A. an empty grave, B. a bunch of people who were personally invested in him not dying seeing him up and about and C. some dude who got whacked on the head falling off his horse claiming to have seen him. Maybe if he'd stuck around in Jerusalem for a couple of years afterwards you could have a case, but as it is there's just nothing there.
6. Muhammad didn't have a flying horse. Just throwing that out there.
Yeah that didn't actually happen.
Here's Isaac Asimov in 1989, talking about how global warming is A. something we should be worrying about right now (e.g, in 1989), and B. that he's been talking about how greenhouse gasses are something we should have been worrying about for the last 20 years.
The media just seized on the whole "we're entering another ice age" thing in the '70s.
It's a seriously old idea - the anime Dead Leaves had a guy with a TV for a head in 2004, and I'm sure that wasn't the first time at all.
I think what's kinda interesting here is that it's realtime, but honestly it doesn't look good enough for that to really matter.
How is that easy? If I have control of the console, I get to determine what it sends to the server. That means that I can make it send a fake hash of the real executable value. It's actually pretty much impossible to verify that a computer under someone else's control is trustworthy - it's like asking a person "are you lying right now?"
It's called the Nobel Disease. The Nobel Prize is one of the highest prizes awarded in science, so it seems like some scientists think that once they have it, the only way to top their previous work is to escape the confines of reality entirely.
It doesn't turn out well, most of the time.
The thing is, though, that people aren't inherently scared of cars. This whole antivax manufactroversy only got traction because a large portion of the population is simply scared shitless of needles. Like, completely and unreasonably unhinged when presented with something long and pointy that's meant to go in your arm. Do not want to the max extreme sort of thing.
Essentially, a lot of people were just looking for some excuse, any excuse, to justify to themselves why they shouldn't vaccinate their children - and Jenny McCarthy handed them one on a silver platter.
Hundreds? If Rupert Murdoch is one in a million, there's seven thousand people who are just as capable of achievement as he was out there. It just turns out that most of those potential new Rupert Murdochs aren't going to get the opportunities he had - not everyone can be the son of Keith Murdoch, the owner of an already successful newspaper empire.
Because of what the grandparent poster was referring to -
By laying off half their workforce, MySpace is saying "Look - the people who are still here? They're dedicated and awesome developers. They're dedicated, because otherwise they would have left already; they're awesome, because otherwise we would have fired them (after all, we have no reason to keep on chaff at this point). Buy us, and you'll get a pre-screened workforce of awesome and dedicated developers, which is worth quite a lot."
Companies spend a lot of money trying to hire competent people. What MySpace is doing right now is saying "here's the cream of our crop, ready to be slurped up if you buy us".
You're right, that makes perfect sense because
A. After the first Gulf War, Kuwait isn't essentially an American protectorate and
B. The USG is flipping out about this kid, demanding answers, and immediately bringing him home as soon as they're able - like you would expect them to do if any foreign country held and tortured an American citizen of their own accord.
Oh wait no neither of those things are true.
Yeah, the United States Government never does that sort of thing, not even to American citizens!
Oh wait...
That kid is an American citizen who was, apparently, detained and beaten in Kuwait because the United States Government thought he might know something. If my government gets its hand on Assange, do you think the result will be much different?
Preventing change from ever happening is a very effective way of controlling it.
It's not open source, but I believe there is a webservice for that over here.
I love it - your counter-example is invalid because I don't understand statistics! So instead I'm gonna talk about something completely different! Take that!
You know, without actual statistics you're just making shit up. I mean, it's entirely possible that increased concealed carry rates mean that criminals are more willing to use more force - e.g, to bring a gun to what they know might turn out to be a gun fight, instead of just a knife.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but all you have here are baseless assertions.
Tenure makes excellent sense in a university, where people with doctorates in the field may be doing controversial research or discovering uncomfortable facts and should not have to worry about political pressure being applied to their university as a result of what they're doing.
Why do teachers, who do no research, get the same benefit? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Well, let's just say that I read Slashdot and leave it at that, shall we? :)
I think that's exactly what's going on here. Jeff Vogel didn't spend his formative years reading the Internet like a lot of the younger game developers out there, so he doesn't have a good built-in signal/noise filter in his head. That's what I get from reading the post, at least - he's saying "don't read what the Internets says about your game, you'll just drive yourself crazy".
You mean they didn't just reskin Blades of Exile and re-release it? Weird.
Good grief, I had a link for "diagnostic substitution" but it got eaten - it went here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism#Changes_with_time
Uhh yeah that shit's called diagnostic substitution - where in the 1950s and 60s a kid with autism would just have been diagnosed as "stupid and lazy" or maybe with some other neurological malfunction, now they're autistic. The true incidence rate of autism hasn't increased.
Though I do agree that the GP is completely wrong and kinda stupid, since he apparently doesn't understand the difference between an increase per capita and an increase in total.
I totally agree. To make it even better, you should remap the keys; there's a lot of unused modifier space on the keyboard. For instance, I have alt-backspace set to tab (for tab completion in a shell, natch) and shift-backspace set to Esc (for Vim, good luck using Emacs on such a tiny keyboard), alt- and shift- the various arrow keys set to things like brackets and pipes, and I've remapped the ./:/? button so that it has periods in alt-mode as well as normal mode (for entering decimal numbers in to Octave and R - I just turn on alt-lock and I can do numerical entry easily, since all the numbers are in alt-mode, as well as period and the various mathematical operators). It works really well, to the point where I've written small scripts while bored. Hell, half my Slashdot posts these days come from it, HTML formatting included! It's better than Angry Birds any day.