Ooops. Do I now need to worry about getting my boyfriend pregnant?
Only if your boyfriend has a working set of ovaries, womb, and vagina. Note that it's a bit like the WoW equipment sets too: you need all pieces to get the big bonus. Just two out of three isn't going to do the trick.
Also that's assuming that you are a man. Fucking someone up the ass with a dildo or strap-on, sadly, misses another piece of the equation, namely the sperm. I'm affraid you can't quite get the synergy effect without that part.
Well, as you've said, you're not the target audience for it.
The target audience obviously isn't anyone who already has an XBox 360, for that matter. It's out to target people -- or at least blunt their arguments -- who've been whining, basically, "the XBox sucks because it doesn't have a HDMI port" or "the XBox sucks because it's too loud for my living room" or "yeah, but the PS3 is _black_". Now MS can tell them, basically, "So buy an Elite then."
It's, if you will, like the pink PSP. It's not there so everyone with a black one will throw it into the garbage bin and run buy a pink one. It's there so maybe some father will go "omg, pink girly PSP" and buy one for his daughter.
The price also isn't always calculated like that. Not everyone who bought an XBox will use it as a HD-DVD player, and not everyone is, basically, "OMG, must have wireless at all cost." I can tell you I'm perfectly content with cables, and haven't used the old XBox or PS2 for DVD playback either. The damn thing is there to play games, show me the games. I'm certainly not going to blow $600 on the PS3 just because it plays Blu-Ray movies.
Here's one thought for you: Splash Conception. A.k.a., anal sex is not 100% reliable as birth control. It only takes one drop of sperm on reaching the vulva, and the spermatozoa's mobility takes it from there.
Then there are things like an elastic hymen, and various other fun ways to end up pregnant while technically a virgin.
And to make it even more fun, think this: they later had to invent an explanation for exactly this kind of thing, namely the succubi and incubi. Virgin virtuous girls (yeah right) were supposedly impregnated by incubi. You don't invent a whole explanation for something that never happened ever since. So basically they knew it happened more than once, and in fact it happened again and again.
So here's what _really_ makes me wonder: why is everyone pretending that something happening all the time is a one-time divine miracle? I mean, hello? It's like proclaiming that there is only one Car made by God himself, and steadfastly refusing to acknowledge all the other cars around you. They can't exist, because God said they don't exist.
I don't know, it's basically fascinating how people can basically force themselves in a thoroughly schizophrenic frame of mind where they believe two completely opposite things at the same time. E.g., simultaneously that (1) Mary's virgin conception was such a unique and inexplicable thing that can only possibly be explained by divine intervention, yet at the same time (2) thousands of other virgin girls got pregnant too, e.g., via incubi. Hello? How can one have unyielding faith that something is unique and non-unique at the same time? Or that it could have been possible only by divine intervention, yet at the same time the same happens without divine intervention all the time? (E.g., via demons.) Mind boggles.
Or maybe that's the ticket. The more absurd and illogical a religion is, the more people will rabidly fight against anyone saying otherwise, because it trips their own insecurity and doubt. Better burn the heretic before he manages to make you think more about that.
The difference is that that media eventually _did_ have to apologize and admit that they faked it. No, it doesn't make them trustworthy, but:
1. it does say that libel laws work. You can't run a major campaign to smear someone's or some company's reputation, let alone something of the calibre of "product X is killing people", and be left alone for long. And I fail to see why they shouldn't apply to bloggers too.
2. Doubly so since it's not even as much a freedom of speech issue for the masses, as in, thousands of people saying what they really think. It's a case of a company basically astroturfing to disguise their smear campaign. Instead of publishing their own lies and opening themselves to a lawsuit, they just hide behind some faceless bloggers to do it. I fail to see why that would give them some kind of immunity.
Especially _if_ you see blogging as some great liberation of the masses and chance to get on your private soapbox and say what you really think, methinks you should be very disgusted by this kind of stuff. It's nothing less than deliberately looting, burning and polluting that medium for some company's profit. It's something that diminishes the value of that resource by a lot, to make a tiny profit for someone. Even as bandits go, this kind of company is the _stupid_ destructive kind of bandit that causes a huge loss for a tiny profit.
And that a lot are willing to just bend over and help spread the damage, if they get paid a few bucks, well, now you see one reason why traditional media has earned a right to have a heartfelt sneer at them.
3. some of the safeguards of traditional media just don't work for bloggers. E.g., the right to have them also publish your response to whatever accusations they made against you, is worthless when it's just some random page someone found while surfing. The chance that someone comes back to a week old post, reads all comments to your own response, is clever enough to skip past the "no, I'm the real Brandybuck and I really make patches that kill people" or "nah, I know Brandybuck, he really makes patches that kill people" trolls, etc, is close to nill. It also places an undue and disproportionate effort on the victim: you don't just have to contact one newspaper to publish your objection to what's been said about you, you have to troll a few thousand blogs. It's an undue waste of your time.
4. sometime at the beginning of the 20'th century the real media discovered that it's actually good for business if they at least pretend they're impartial and only do _reporting_. That's why they have policies like always including an opposite point of view, for example. Or why if it's a personal opinion piece, it tends to be clearly marked as such, and not as news. At any rate, they've distanced themselves quite a lot from the blatant smear campaigns that previously passed for journalism.
That's also another reason why they publish those apologies, btw. It's not just libel laws, it's that the newspaper or TV station itself wants to distance itself quickly from anything that taints that impartiality image they've been building. Even if you're not really impartial, you want to at least look like you are, or it will affect your business big time. So you'll want to distance yourself very fast and very loud from any dumb thing you've done that looks blatantly overtly partisan.
Now that impartiality not entirely true for everyone, of course, but it's still a step up from what happens in the blogs nowadays. Blogs by and large are at the point where journalism was in the 18'th century. Lopsided partisan pieces, ostensibly carrying only half the story, fictional fabricated "news" to support a pre-conception, rumours passed off as "news", mouth-foaming fanboyism, etc. And now a good helping of people just taking the money to copy-and-paste whatever material some astroturfing company gave them, too.
So basically, sorry, but I can see why a professional journalist would sneer at the "I r a journalist 2" blogger gang. Believe neither if you will, but one at least does have some higher quality work to justify that sneer. No, the professional media aren't saints, but it takes an extreme case of OCPD to lump them both in some "neither is perfect, therefore both are equally crap" pot.
1. I wasn't talking about formatting and reinstalling. I was talking about pulling the network cable. There's a difference. Wiping away all evidence _is_ stupid, but containing the attack isn't.
2. No offense, but your examples illustrate precisely what scares me.
So basically a compromised server, where there's a breach in progress, should be left untouched because the boss's powerpoint presentation in on it? I.e., actual confidential data may be leaked, the problem can magnify, the company can open itself to lawsuits in the process, but, hey, his precious presentation is safe. Or isn't, since there's nothing to keep an attacker from messing with that data too. No offense, but that's worth a Dilbert strip, if any manager actually requests something _that_ stupid.
How about just installing a backup on a different machine, if he needs a presentation? I mean, frankly, that server should have been backed up, and anyway you can rebuild a demo system from scratch too if you had to. It's not like a demo actually has productive data or anything. (And if it has, now that's irresponsible. But I digress.) So leaving a hacker claw away at the DMZ from that pwned server just to save the couple of hours worth building a new demo server is... irresponsible.
Ditto for the court order. Courts are not some inflexible arbitrary thing. You can get a deadline extended if you show up with a signed slip of paper from the data forensics firm saying that your financials server had a breech in progress and had to be taken out. God knows SCO got their deadlines extended for years with nothing more than hot air.
In fact, if you _do_ have to submit some data to SEC or to a court, I'd be more worried about that data being tainted by an attack. How do you know it still holds anything even resembling the real data any more, or if maybe it's been defaced to include stuff like a couple million spent on prostitutes for the board members? Keeping the server up for forensics is one thing, but keeping it up because the boss wants to generate a report on a compromised server... well, as I was saying, now _that's_ worth a Dilbert strip.
1. I was assuming a serious breach. If it's a development server, frankly, it has no excuse to have any real data on it, or be accessible from the internet at all. So it would hardly qualify as a security breach, or be possible to breach.
2. Depending on the zone where a server is, leaving it happily running without isolating it, can be an invitation for the problem to magnify. E.g., for most companies there is more than one server in a DMZ: if one is pwned, it can be used as a proxy to attack the others. E.g., that server has access to a database. Don't be surprised if the same database server or cluster hosts more than one database. Just because the compromised server may host, say, some public informational pages about the company's products, don't assume it can't possibly also have access to the online shop database.
3. I still say that a qualified admin should be able to tell that kind of a difference. Unless the company's IT is a a chaotic (evil) disaster, the admin should already know which is the development server and which is the production server. I don't think he has to wait for the CEO to tell him which server is which, or that most CEOs will even know. That's not saying that the CEO is (necessarily) dumb, just that it's not his job. It's like waiting for the general to come tell you who's the designated marksman in each squad: it's just not his job to worry about details at that level.
4. Sad to say, getting a prosecution and a conviction is nowadays 99% pipe dream and fairy tale. Between containing some damage which you know _will_ expand if given enough time, and the off chance that you'll bring a hacker to justice, I dunno, I know what I'd choose. I'd love to see justice served, but at some point you have to be realistic and realize that there's no point in being the martyr (even as a whole company) for a lost cause.
I don't know, their approach seems kinda... dangerous to me, but maybe that just shows that they're the big security gurus and I'm just a lowly coder. Maybe I can learn something from them. Or maybe they're talking out the ass, I dunno.
For starters the advice to wait until the whole team is assembled, including the accountants, lawyers, etc, then holding meetings to determine your strategy, etc, before even unplugging the damn thing... dunno, it seems to me bordering on criminal. Yes, you don't want to let one lone cowboy handle it from end to end, but a trained admin could at the very least be able to unplug the computer from the network and isolate the damage before it goes any worse. Or know enough to decide if it has to be unplugged. But if he thinks it is, it should be step #1 not IIRC step #4 after you're done holding your meetings and informing the employees and having PR draft the vaguely worded announcement that tries to make it sound unimportant to your customers.
Waiting for the designated accountant, and the designated lawyer, and the HR guy, and God knows who else to arrive at the middle of the night and hold their meeting while a breach is in progress and someone is downloading your productive database, seems to me dumb to the extreme. To reuse your example, it's like saying you should keep your hand in the stove until you talked to your lawyer and your doctor and a designated family member, make sure you have a strategy, and only then pull the hand out. By that time, it could be burned to a crisp.
I mean, by the elder Gods, especially when you include such non-techies... surely you've seen these guys when they have to give you a spec for a program. If you wait for them to hold a meeting on such technical issues as "are we in aggreement that we need to unplug the server?", at least one goes into responsibility avoidance mode and refuses to be remembered as the one who took any decision, at least one goes into alpha-dog-pissing-on-everything-to-mark-his-territ ory mode, etc. It's a meeting that could well take hours without going anywhere.
Frankly. I'd rather just trust the "cowboy" admin to know his job well enough, and know whether he needs to unplug the servers because of a serious breach, or just let it be if it's just a DDOS, while the non-techies deal with their own domain of competence. There is _nothing_ a non-techie can add that's meaningful to that kind of an inherently techie decision. Just like you don't have the admins tell the company lawyers what to do, have the decency to not have the admin hang around and wait for the lawyers to tell him what to do. It's not only a better use of the admins' time, it's also a better use of the lawyers' time, who could be doing something that's a better use of _their_ skills in that time.
I'll aggree, though, that the advice at step 1 seems to be dangerously content free. It's something which, although it may sound otherwise, actually noone ever actually did as such. Even if one "cowboy" admin did offer to contain the incident, it's not like someone let him deal with the _whole_ affair, including the HR, legal and financial aspects. Which is the domains they mention that you need on that team. More likely the "cowboy" just dealt with the servers, while the lawyer did his own job, the HR guy did his own, etc. I don't think (m)any people let the admin draft the press release too, for example. So the whole "don't let one 'cowboy' deal with it all" advice is basically like saying "don't try to fly on a broomstick off a bridge": you weren't actually planning to do that anyway, and it's not really giving you any insight you didn't already have.
Finally, I don't know, maybe I'm just paranoid by trade, but the whole thing looks more like PR and a bit of an IT-for-PHBs magazine than anything actually serious about security or IT. It reads like little more than an advertisment for the three companies they mention, with a bit of a scare theme to make you contact them ASAP, than anything else. I'm also a tad cir
Well, if all that doesn't apply to you, as I was saying, kudos and more power to you. You certainly have my respect in that case.
The problem is that a lot of other people, especially in large corporations, don't quite share your views. In a lot of cases, even if the boss wanted to be open, the many layers of management usually mean he has no clue either why some decision was taken. And then there are the many which don't want to in the first place. I've had the dubious honour, for example, to work for a while with a manager who was a yes-man in _both_ directions. Not quite the apex of openness, you know?
At any rate, let me rephrase that then: The more open and fair the setup, well, the less effort will be required to persuade most people.
Well, there is that, but then it's also a gold mine for phishers, spyware, you name it. Telling someone to just download any password manager and be done with it, is probably the most unsafe advice I can think of giving anyone. You give all your passwords to a piece of software, and... have no clue what happens from there. You damn better trust the makers of that software more than you trust your mom, because you just gave them pretty much unrestricted access to your money, data, identity. And trust that when the company is taken over or changes management, the next update doesn't _then_ transmit all your data to them.
Plus, even if the company doesn't stoop _that_ low, you just became dependent on that one piece of software. If they start mis-behaving, how much advertising and spying are you going to have to tolerate when the alternative is losing access to every single web site you ever used. See, Claria/Gator and users being reluctant to uninstall their crap even when told it's spyware.
Sure, you could do a bit of research and whatnot, and you probably did yours, but I'm reluctant to push that kind of advice upon someone who, honestly, I have no idea if they do theirs. Plus, it's asking someone to trust a third party blindly. Even if I'd trust some company X _that_ much, I can't ask anyone to do the same.
If that's so, ask the question 'is this science valid,' not 'is this a stereotype?'
Well, the problem is that some people put disproportionate effort into presenting prejudice and stereotypes as somehow hard science. The British went to great lengths to "prove" that the Irish are somehow tiny-brained sub-humans, Nazi Germany produced _tons_ of pseudo-science as to why the Aryan race are super-humans and why Jews and Slavs are sub-humans, etc. All the way back to ancieng Greece, you have people who devoted time, energy and papyrus to "proving" that some people are so sub-human and unable to even take care of themselves, that they really simply belong as slaves. (You can see the same theme being reused as late as the 19'th century southern USA to argue that blacks are mentally no more developped than children, and need a white master to take care of them.)
Not just race, btw. You can see the same about some gender stereotypes: read some medieval texts about, say, witchcraft, and be delighted by such mysogynism as that women are inherently weak, evil, stupid, driven by animalistic instincts/hormones, etc, and they inherently can't say "no" when the devil offers to fuck them in exchange for some powers. All presented as the purest hard fact, and beyond any reasonable doubt.
The fact that someone dresses it in pseudo-science garb doesn't necessarily make it science. All the above mentioned examples were dressed as distorted science too. Ranging from biased samples to outright lies.
E.g., racists in the southern USA cheerfully presented education-biased "IQ tests" pitting the poorest uneducated blacks against the finest handpicked whites, to show that objectively blacks are naturally stupid. Too bad that when the same test compared an average black from the North to an average white from the south, the black actually ended up smarter. The test was just that bad and meaningless.
E.g., those who argued that the Irish are sub-human Neanderthals also pretended to have lots of cranial measurements, proving it beyond any doubt that the Irish just don't have the brain size to be human. Too bad it was false and made up. Etc.
So of course, the question still remains "is this science valid", but science that supposedly incidentally confirms stereotypes should at the very least be more thoroughly scrutinized. And if there are a _ton_ of factors that are conveniently not even mentioned, "is this yet another guy just trying to justify his favourite pre-conception?" is a very valid question to ask.
Or to put it less diplomatically: we simply have entirely too many idiots spending time and spewing bullshit to justify some racist or sexist bias. They don't need more encouragement. It's not being PC, it's just being already sick and tired. It was maybe interesting the first time around, but the 100'th time someone uses bad "science" to justify their being a racist or sexist dick, just isn't funny any more.
Yes, they might still theoretically be right, and noone will suppress them for political corectness or anything. But they damn better have some bullet-proof evidence this time. It damn better not be the same collection of fallacies that's been done to death before. For several thousand years straight.
It's if you will, like the boy who cried wolf. After someone cried wolf 1000 times, you start being, understandably, skeptical. You might even ask him to prove that he even understands what a wolf is or looks like.
_Additionally_ we live in an age of science by PR. There's a lot of bullshit pseudo-science written by PR agencies and signed by some "Dr." or "Prof." that just sells his name for money. Its role isn't to enlighten you to how nature or society work, but to drum up interest in some product someone is selling, or just to promote a frame of mind or habit, or to cause a certain reaction. E.g., you have studies "showing" that cocoa is good for you, paid for by Mars. You have studies showing that the perfect month for a vacation is
So be smart and don't use the same password for your email and for accounts to random web sites.
If you have to re-use passwords, at the very least do something like having half a dozen passwords, one for each category. One for your email, one for web forums, one for work, one for the home computer (but use a firewall anyway), one for PayPal/Ebay/whatever, one for MMOs or whatever. Ok, maybe you don't like having 100 passwords, but you _can_ remember 5-6 passwords, right?
That way if one is compromised, basically the only access they get is within the same category. If someone gets your Slashdot password, they can at most then spam some other forum in your name. Maybe do some spam link. That's not even in the same class as having full access to your email and your address book and the password to your Ebay or PayPal accounts.
For best results, also consider having a different user name for each. E.g., I hope your PayPal account isn't under the username MichaelSmith.
The problem is that if your email is breached, not only can they read your email and spam your friends, they can also use that as a beachhead to get even more stuff. E.g., even if you didn't use the same password on, say, Paypal or Ebay, as long as they have your username and can read your email, it's trivial to just go to PayPal or Ebay and do a "I forgot my password" in your name. Congrats, now there's nothing to stop them from transferring your PayPal money to an account in East Bumfuckistan or from running some scam in your name on Ebay.
So basically please _be_ paranoid about these things. It's not just a case of "bah, all they can do is spam my friends a little" or "bah, none of my emails are secret anyway", as some people seem to assume. Email is used in so many aspects every day, or can be used without raising any alarm flags on the recepients' side, that losing control of it can be pretty much _the_ one most important step you could take towards getting your identity stolen. Do be careful.
While I'll aggree that persuading people _can_ go a long way, if you have that talent, I'd also like to say that most people are better off not even trying.
It's sorta like being funny. Most people think they're hilarious, and that their "cat pooping" video on YouTube, or their "haha, watch me pretend to be a teenage japanese girl" IRC log, is the greatest barrel of laughs in recorded history. Most aren't actually, and their "funny" stuff actually range anywhere from "more boring than watching paint dry" to "bloody stupid."
The same goes for persuasion or motivation. There are a lot of managers who think they're some persuasion ace and that their motivational meetings surely get everyone all psyched up and ready to charge at any problem like the Japanese charged at machinegun nests in WW2. Dilbert's PHB probably thinks that too. In reality, the majority aren't. For some, well, they just illustrate the dictum that when you try too hard to make an impression, that's the impression you make: of trying too hard. Those are the lucky ones, actually. For others, their persuasion attempts or motivational meetings just leave everyone with a sensation ranging from "bored out of my skull" to "the boss is doing ego masturbation in public again" to "I wonder if this is a good time to post my resume on Monster." That bad.
There are people who are good at that kind of thing, but most are definitely not. They just read in some management book that you have to motivate the team by doing this and that. (E.g., holding team-building meetings.) But they have no talent or inclination to do it right. It's like reading somewhere that you should go and write a SF novel: if you don't have the talent, don't expect it to be a success.
And, btw, be aware that anything that happens on the victims'... err... employees' own free time, raises the difficulty dramatically. Team building meetings where you're supposed to sacrifice your own evening for it, well, the boss damn better be a _brilliant_ motivational ace for it to work. Most should not even try, because the result _will_ be a "wtf, the boss stole yet another of my meetings for his own verbal masturbation exercise" disaster. Far from getting someone to appreciate the team more, they tend to have more of a "god, why do I even stay here?" effect.
Of course, very few are lucky to have the input that their clever speech was really a morale disaster. And even fewer are smart enough to not silence the messenger, when they do get the input. So most seem to go through their life with people smiling and nodding and putting a pretense of having bought the deception, and never learn that they'd actually be better off holding their mouth shut.
And for the constructive part, my own impression is that rather than trying to be persuasive, when in doubt, it's better to be just open and fair. You don't have to persuade people as hard to do X, if they know why it has to be done like that. If the boss is privy to information you're not, well, it's often more motivational to just tell you that information than try to snow you with motivational bullshit. (Even if it's something like, true case, "I'm sorry, guys, we had to underestimate the time for this project because we can't afford to lose that customer without going bankrupt." Knowing you can trust someone to be honest like that is worth a lot.) Trust is a very motivating thing. Being fair is another very motivating thing. Knowing that your extra work will at least be noticed, and won't be trumped by favoritsm and nepotism, is motivating enough. Of course words are cheap: noticing that the boss is saying one thing, and then giving special privileges and rewards to his drinking buddy Wally tends to ruin the whole thing.
And if that is the case, pretty much even email works just as well. If people know they can trust you to openly answer any questions and that you _will_ notice the extra effort, well, you don't need to spend much time persuading or motivating them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not accusing you of anything. Maybe you _are_ good at motivating people in person. Kudos and more power to you in that case. Most people aren't. They'd be better served by creating an environment where they don't even have to even try (and miserably fail).
You know, just because you don't understand why the army needs this, doesn't meam they're automatically complete idiots.
Here's a thought for you: any good defense is built in layers. So if one layer fails, the others are there to prevent a complete catastrophe. This doesn't mean they won't enable encryption, maybe even an extra layer of encryption on top of WPA, it means that they'll _also_ have a physical EM shielding layer to pick the slack if someone made a mistake.
Additionally, the army has a long history of using and dealing with counter-measures. You don't see people trying to actively jam your home network, but in case of a war, that's exactly what the army might have to deal with. Whether actual pure jamming, or just an EMP from a nuke frying all your electronics, if the shit hits the fan big time. So when that happens, you'd rather most of it was shortcircuited by the building being a big Faraday cage.
Additionally, the army has to deal with EM radiation out of the building in more ways than some wardriver surfing for porn on your home network. It can be someone intentionally placing a transmitter somewhere, to some spy leaking the encryption keys, to being basically tagged for an EM seeking missile. While a Faraday cage won't make any of those 100% impossible, it gives you one extra chance against it. E.g., if someone left the door open near a repeater, you can notice you suddenly detect EM radiation around a building that was supposed to have none. E.g., sure, someone could climb on the roof and place their emitter for the missile there, but there's a chance someone will see them, whereas a modified laptop/clock/whatever in a drawer might not even get noticed until it's set to activate at midnight in anticipation for an enemy strike. Etc.
Additionally, the army is a bigger target than your home network. A wardriver will just go for whatever unsecured network is in the neighbourhood, and not even bother to crack your encryption. You're not worth it. You're one of millions of networks, each perfectly equivalent to any other, for his purposes. Even with the old WEP, chances are noone stood around long enough to gather packets and crack your keys, because, again, it wasn't worth the effort. A spy isn't as easily deterred. He won't go for Aunt Emma's home network instead. And he can devote disproportionate computing power and manpower to cracking the codes of a potential enemy superpower.
Of course, you can stick your head in the sand, put a big "WAP can't ever be cracked" poster and feel secure. What if you're wrong? Even for WEP it took two years for the vulnerability to be published. Plus, for the standard WW2 example, the Germans didn't think Enigma had been cracked either. (Nor did the civillians in most allied countries, for that matter. It was top secret.) What if some bright chinese mathematician comes up with some brilliant new way to decrypt it? Would you rather bet on that never happening, _or_ have an extra layer of defense just in case? Because from where I stand, given high enough stakes, the latter looks like the much smarter choice.
Basically, get your head out of the ass, and out of the "I'm teh genius, anyone doing things otherwise than me is automatically an idiot" mentality. Most often that should just be your hint that you don't actually understand what's happening there, and you're operating on just wild assumptions and pseudo-data pulled out of the ass to support that "I'm teh genius" preconception. And, as they say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
And what if it is a school for videogaming? (Programming and Animation in particular, such schools exist).
I can't see how having the school _in_ a video game would help with either. You could use a video game as an illustration or assignment, maybe, but having virtual avatars dicking around in a virtual world? Seriously, how's that going to help?
So I wouldn't be turned off just because a student learned through a game (a top freshman or sophomore Naval pilot trained on a Microsoft's Flight Simulator a few years back to win Naval contest that only juniors and seniors won before... can't seem to find the story right now). I remember also a Discovery Channel special where they showed surgeons being trained on a video game.
Except those are very specialized simulators, extremely close to the real thing. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.
Additionally, SL does have the dubious reputation among many people of being basically a 3D cybersex game, and of pink flying penises. Deserved or undeserved, I'm not discussing that at this point. Just that it has it. So while many employers could maybe live with getting your courses online, many _will_ be turned off by such an association. It's basically on par with saying that you got your education at the local brothel. You know, one of the hookers also was good with computers and stuff.
OTOH, the worst classes I have ever taken were online classes. Impersonal, the teacher (in English anyways) seems to grade papers harsher without a face to put to it, lacking in clarification or time the teacher can devote to your question, and all around sucky for areas you aren't naturally good in. No social interaction, etc.
I'm not sure putting a silly avatar on it would help that horribly much. Or not enough to offset the other problems.
So I would ask: does this make sense and how exactly will it help students? Is this just eye candy? Will it put up barriers for education? (I know nothing about 2nd life - Windows Only? Does it require too high end of a computer to run comfortabley?) Make that a consideration. Is the professor going to struggle with this? Could this money be spent in a better way or would it be better not to spend it at all? Is it easy? When your semesters are only 14-15 weeks, you don't want to dick around for a week or two getting things running on either side. Does it or doesn't it make sense? It should be really that simple.
I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.
Plus, I see it as more work for the teacher all semester long, if they actually want to simulate all the advantages of a real school. Just seeing the teacher standing there isn't going to do much.
Here's one reason to believe it's wrong: it's already happened before. Repeatedly. So it's not even some guess, it's just having a working memory.
Let's even assume that this company is genuinely honest and believes in that model. Tough luck, HP isn't. HP is at this time little more than an overpriced ink and paper company, and the printers are sold under price to get you hooked on buying their ink. So what happens is:
1. Company X hits the market with a great new printer that costs $200 and ink costing $0.4 per ml. (Which is what $20 per 50ml cartridge means.)
2. HP makes a clone that costs $100 and gouges you for a hefty $4 per ml for ink.
Watch lemmings flock to get HP's version because it's cheaper.
Better yet, HP is teh big brand name and has seemingly endless advertising money, while Company X is the new kid on the block and noone's heard of them. Let's buy a HP for mom's photos, they're probably better, right? Or for that matter, let's buy a whole bunch of HPs for the office, because they're such a big company, while Company X could go bankrupt by tomorrow. And nothing scares the pants off management more than dealing with a small company that could be gone overnight.
And if Company X is not gone overnight, eventually it gets tired of having its sales undercut by HP crap, so it pulls the same stunt. Or it gets bought by HP. Or it goes big enough to go public, and Wall Street starts screaming for blood because the shares aren't growing as fast as they'd like. Or whatever. Cue new Deluxe model which costs $100 for the printer and $4 for the ink. And the old one is silently phased out, to make room for the new models.
Guess what causes the fires? That's right, "improving the network". What does the study show about network engineer's inability to keep their grubby paws out of things that are working perfectly fine thank you very much.
And there you have it, the much saner explanation of why people would rather stick to fighting fires than improve something: it's not lack of creativity, it's that someone will blame you if anything, no matter how unrelated, goes wrong. If there's a fire, you have your excuse. If you just tweaked the firewall on your own, and an entirely unrelated intranet (i.e., not even accessed through that firewall) server crashes, it's you who's to blame.
And it's not just the network. There are other things that don't just work and stay working, but actually need constant monitoring and occasionally tweaking, or you _will_ get a fire. E.g., if an application server's utilization is constantly climbing, someone _should_ monitor it and notice the problem long before it becomes basically "slashdotted". If you just wait until there's a fire, and just stick to keeping your grubby paws off it until it's too late, then, frankly, you're dong a crap job. E.g., if a database is doing more full table scans than it should, then your job as a DBA should be to notice the problem long before there's a fire. Maybe the cache needs to be tweaked, or maybe the indexes or statistics need to be rebuilt, or maybe you should just notify the developpers that their SQL statements are crap. Keeping your grubby paws off it until there's a fire -- e.g., everyone's transactions start getting timeouts -- is, frankly, doing a crap job. Your job should be to help prevent the fire in the first place. And that goes for the developpers and maintenance engineers too, btw, not just the IT guys.
Except there too you're to blame if you did anything and anything else went wrong. If you just optimized one of the company's programs or the database, you're suddenly the one to blame if anything even unrelated goes wrong. E.g., you optimized the templates for generating HTML? Congrats, now you're to blame every time the user sees an error page. Even if in reality at that time the messaging system croaked, or whatever. The question will always first be if it's your change that caused it. Sometimes even if some unrelated program running on the same server, if it happened after your deployment, the first assumption will be, basically, Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It must be because of what you did.
Additionally, if we're talking IT, a lot of companies have implemented a thoroughly counter-productive policy where you can't do anything without writing an invoice to someone. The mis-guided idea is to gauge the need for an IT department and make those guys justify their salary. The result invariably is that noone does anything any more unless explicitly being asked to, by someone they can get money from. Suddenly if you need, say, an Apache server, you have to personally talk to the server admins, and to the network admins, and to the MQ admins, and the Apache admins, and everything else. You can no longer talk to just one guy and have him ask the others for the details, because every single one of those guys need to justify their salaries by sending you a bill.
At any rate, that's the end of showing any initiative or creativity right there. Why bother tweaking the database server on your own? It's outright counter-productive. It's something you could be writing a bill for, if they just wait until someone else requests it. Just stick your head in the sand until there's a fire to fight.
Basically, blaming it on lack of creativity is somewhat missing the point.
Some people would be creative all right, and are creative in their free time all right. They write fan stories, write their own cool programs or libraries, try to code their own game or mod, are "wizards" (coders) on some MUD, role-play, etc. They don't reall
Fair point, it certainly isn't in the same league with Daikatana.
Speaking of which, much as I will admit that Sony was as inept as it gets when talking about the PS3, and it did generate its own backlash, I still think Daikatana beats that hands down and should deserve to be number 1. I don't know how many still remember it fully, but the backlash was _massive_. Sony so far got a milder "well, fuck Sony and their console, the Wii (or XBox) is better anyway" reaction, but Daikatana managed to create a wave of pure Sith-like hatred. Suddenly everything that John Romero did, or his girlfriend did, or that he even had a girlfriend, was blown out of proportion and presented like an abhomination of such proportions never seen since WW2, and as the work of the Antichrist.
While Daikatana was a thoroughly mediocre game, maybe deserving a 50% score and to be quietly forgotten, the reaction was such that people had decided it's the worst game ever made, in fact a thorough abhomination of a game, before even trying the demo. (Sucky as that demo was.) People were posting venomous anti-Daikatana stuff and demanding John Romero's head on a pike without even having seen more than a couple of screenshots. (And for that matter, how about paying for a game before having any _demands_ from the developpers?) I've personally known a couple of people who were ranting and raving about what a piece of shit Daikatana was, but hadn't actually played the game or the demo, and in fact refused to even try it.
And speaking of the demo, ok, maybe it's not PR as such, but it was a thoroughly uninspired move on its own. See, most of Daikatana's levels were actually fairly nice. E.g., the ancient Greece levels actually looked pretty good. But it started with some thoroughly uninspired swamp levels, which were, well, ugly and uninspired. Bad move on its own, since the first levels are what gets people hooked or gets them to throw away the game before getting any further. The worst move however, was that those levels were chosen as the demo levels. So even if someone did decide to play the demo, it would only help convince them to _not_ buy the game.
Daikatana wasn't just blamed for sinking Ion Storm, it pretty much _did_ sink Ion Storm. The negative reputation of Daikatana and "Ion Storm killed Looking Glass" part of the backlash, also tainted Anachronox. (Not the greatest RPG ever, to be sure, but not quite deserving the "if it's from Ion Storm it's another abhomination" reaction some people had, either.) Even releasing Deus Ex under the Ion Storm name didn't do much, except create a "yeah, but it's the _other_ Ion Storm" reaction. And I wouldn't be surprised if it still sold somewhat less copies than it would otherwise have.
Basically, sorry, even Sony's handicapped management and insulting interviews didn't manage to create _that_ kind of backlash yet. Negative publicity and resentment, ok, they did cause. But nowhere _near_ Daikatana scale.
Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricular activities depend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?
The problem there is that you expect them to be sane and logical about it. If they actually wanted to block "bad content", there would have been lots of other possibilities, like just blocking the porn sites at the proxy. Most companies do that.
In reality it's a knee jerk "think of the children!" (well, ok, the students) solution, based on little more than some "back in my day we didn't have these newfangled computers and everything was soo much better" nostalgia.
Logical? It doesn't even actually solve even the problem of "bad content", as there's still nothing to prevent one from downloading that earlier. It's not even based on any kind of study showing that the decline in grades is actually any different between a group which had its internet connection removed, compared to a control study who didn't. Is it actually based on the Internet, or maybe it's just that as the "me wanna be a rich computer guy too" explosion hit India, and the explosion of universities offering quick IT training, now enrollment isn't exactly limited to the top smartest and/or most passionate people any more? They don't know, but they're implementing a solution based on wild assumptions anyway.
It's just the same kind of nostalgia-tinted goggles, and/or fear of the new, that you can actually see all over the world. "Aaauuugh! Kids these days are into X, that will be the fall of civilization as we know it! We didn't have X back in our days, and look how much better everything was back then!" Where X even in the USA included at various points: comics, rock-and-roll music, tabletop games, computer games, etc, etc, etc. At every single bloody step there was some new uber-threat that would destroy civilization as a whole... except that always failed to actually happen, or indeed make any noticeable difference. In India's case X is simply "using the Internet", but otherwise the scare is exactly the same.
The problem with such nostalgia-based reactions is that nostalgia always presents stuff through rose-coloured glasses. We don't remember what it really was like X decades ago, we remember some idealized, sanitized version where everything was happier, the grass was greener, the sky was clearer, all students were the very incarnation of virtue and non-stop study, and the neighbours were all one big happy family. It never was like that, we just filtered out the bad parts, or re-painted them in a bright rose colour.
Hence any reaction or measure based on that kind of inherently bullshit invented "data", ends up nothing more than a case of GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out.)
Worse yet, wasting time and energy on such bullshit measures just serves to divert time, energy and attention from the _real_ problems and causes. E.g., these guys instead of actually spending some time figuring out what the real problems are, just did a feel-good bullshit measure and can rest for the next few years until it becomes obvious that it didn't work. In the meantime, _if_ there is an actual problem at work there, it can continue to have the same effect or even worsen.
If that was true, NVIDIA & ATI wouldn't even have written their binary drivers. But they did, and they maintain them, and Intel even wrote an open-source one !
The way I heard that story, ATI made the binary drivers at all, again, because a large OEM told them something to the effect of "we need Linux drivers to sell Linux servers." I.e., again, the loud mouthed hobbysts had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and the whole action was driven by OEMs.
What you're missing is that Linux isn't easily segmented into markets. The "hobbyists" are the ones fixing the bugs for the pro market, and the pro market just wants something working and maintained, so keeping the hobbyists happy is important. The natural tendency towards free drivers is slow, but that will happen.
No offense, but dream on. The guys who take the decisions for the pro market usually only care about numbers, and, if you'll pardon the cuss, don't give a flying fuck about whether some of us whiny nerds are happy or not. I'll dare say that 99% of what's being bought and sold has nothing to do with whether some nerd was getting a boner about it, but with whether the nice salesman promised the moon and played a mean game of golf. If nerds had anything to do with it, we wouldn't have a thriving buzzword-driven snake-oil market in the first place.
I'm a nerd myself, so don't take it as an insult, but the world _doesn't_ revolve around us. You may have imagined that whole economies revolve around listening to sages like yourself, but they don't. They revolve around who did the CEO play golf with, and what ludicrious savings/ROI/TCO/whatever and buzzwords the nice salesman in a suit promised.
Even when a corporation adopted Linux, it had nothing to do with listening to the local nerds ranting and raving, but with some salesman from, say, IBM coming and saying something like, "see, if you bought our big Power 5 computers running Linux, you'd get sooo much more performance and stability out of the WebSphere we sold you last month." While we nerds were just ranting and raving about boycotting the evil MS, the nice salesman came and said magic words like "TCO", "ROI", "synergy", "support contract", and the like. _That_ is what changed management's mind.
_Some_ companies listen to their nerds, yes, but they tend to be small, and far and few in between. While they do somewhat enlarge the market share that depends on the opinion of those disgruntled hobbysts, it's still a tiny market share.
I doubt that it would work. As far as ATI is concerned, the market for people who are (A) building their computer from components, _and_ (B) run Linux on it, _and_ (C) didn't buy a cheap 9200 or 5200, is very very very small. Especially look at that last part. Keeping even 1000 people satisfied when they bought the cheapest chip and made you barely a couple of bucks each, hardly justifies the salaries of a driver team.
I know, we all like to think that the customer is king, and that just because you have a proof of purchase for an old $30 graphics card, it means that a major corporation must bend over backwards for you and catter to your every whim. They should instantly hire a big team to code whatever you fancy today, open-source all their programs... Why, they should even come over and do your laundry. Dream on.
When cattering to mass-markets, you have to think in terms of ROI. If it costs X dollars to do something, will you even get those X dollars back? Is it likely that you'll even make a profit? If not, it's actually smarter to ignore that market segment.
Drivers nowadays are complex and expensive things, and frankly the Linux hobbyist market is tiny. And then they're likely to buy the lowest end card, or not even that as they're busy bitching about how binary drivers are evil.
So, basically, fully expect someone at ATI to at most have a chuckle as they dump your letter into the garbage bin.
OEM's are a whole other affair, because they move millions of boxes. If one of those says "we need linux drivers", then:
A. they probably know what their many corporate customers want. Dunno, maybe some major corporation or government department decided to standardize their desktop on Linux and actually needs 3D accelerated drivers. Basically if a big OEM bitches, they probably aren't doing it out of zealotry and fanboyism, but they know something about demand that you don't. You listen and take notes when those guys speak. And,
B. even if not, you want to listen to those anyway, because they're the guys who make your money. They're the "R" in "ROI". The last thing you want is Dell or IBM (Lenovo) standardizing exclusively on nVidia cards because you told them to fuck off when they complained that lack of Linux drivers hamstrings their server sales. If that were to happen, you'll see a big dip on your income chart, and the mere rumour would make your shares dive and the shareholders demand blood and rolling heads.
Basically you'll have a chance with your proofs of purchase when you fit at least one of the two criteria, preferrably both.
Well, that's what gets me wondering. Mind you, I'm against piracy, but, starting with the least important:
4. It's a measure that doesn't even work, and is so easily circumvented it's not even funny. As you noted. You don't even need to get a dedicated external HDD, just use your iPod/Zen/whatever. Or use an USB stick or card. E.g., there are 4GB memory card for the PSP, and they're smaller than a stamp. And the PSP has an USB port too. So if you brought a portable console along for the long airplane trip, you could fill its memory card with whatever pirated stuff you wish. Then if you're paranoid, swap it with a card with only saved games, and put the one full of pirated stuff in a pocket of a folded shirt in the luggage.
3. It has a ton of false positives, as noted. Polycarbonate is more common than some people think. Chances are you have a cheap Bic pen made of that stuff, or a case for that PSP, or God knows what else. So what are they going to do? Search everyone who's brought along a couple of cheap ballpoint pens? Geesh. Plus, what about stuff that's not pirated, but is on CDR anyway. What if you're going to meet an overseas customers and brought a couple of CDRs with your demos or sources? (Laptops get stolen or damaged, so I wouldn't have any important stuff _only_ on the laptop.) Is everyone going on such a business trip going to be searched and delayed trying to explain the guards that that's not pirated stuff?
2. It's a waste of everyone's money, time and nerves. (Whether paid out of your tax money as part of airport security, or by the airlines out of your ticket price, it is your money.) I mean, wtf, I can understand sniffing and having security guards searching people when it's about a bomb threat. But for a fucking CD? Gimme a break. Waste my time and money when it's something that could bring the fucking plane down and kill everyone, not when it's about lining the BSA's or RIAA's pockets. Wasting my time and money just for a few bucks of corporate profits, is outright insulting.
And inconvenience and delay it will be. With a suspected bomb, most of the time it can be anything between just taking it out of the luggage to show it's just a camera and putting it in a sort of a sniffing machine. There, case solved. But with software, someone has to unpack it, examine the contents, maybe even install it to prove it's your newest program for your overseas corporate customers and not some pirated program. Or how about music? Are they going to listen to every track to make sure it's just me and a couple of friends singing, and not some renamed ripped song? Do they have to compare the lyrics to make sure I'm not singing some copyrighted song there? What about photos or videos? Do they have to watch it all to make sure it's really my vacation photos/videos or something ripped off DVD and disguised by appending 10 minutes of home video at the beginning?
Or will it, more likely, end up just taking a lot of time scratching their heads and a lot of trying to bully someone into admitting it's pirated stuff?
1. It takes away manpower from the real threats. Sorry, but if this doubles the false positives, there's no way I can believe that everyone will double the number of guards and rooms and everything. So basically the guards, even if there is a token increase in their numbers, will have to deal with more cases each, and spend more time on each case. (See above.) So every such "let's do something good for the BSA and RIAA" case, is less manpower -- and for that matter, more annoyed/bored manpower -- for watching out for the real suspects. So basically they're asking me to _also_ accept less actual security so they can protect some corporations' interests. Geesh.
Dunno about trap, or it's just that MS no longer pays him to do PR.
It's funny how a lot of people previously were taking it as the truth, _whole_ truth, and nothing but the truth, just because he's such a hip blogger. I even remember getting modded down and getting some annoyed responses before, when I pointed out that it was his paid job to show the good parts only. "Noo, it must be all spontaneous and 100% the complete uncensored, unbiased picture, because he says so! He's so hip and irreverent that he even bravely told Ballmer to write a memo that's good for PR! He said that MS lets him write whatever he wants, good or bad, so if he doesn't show anything bad, surely nothing bad exists at MS." Not an exact quote, because I'm too lazy to search for the thread right now, but that was the general gist of it.
Now it turns out that when his paycheck no longer depends on MS, he suddenly discovers some bad things about MS too. Who would have imagined that?
So let me just say again, to everoyne: Look folks, do exercise some healthy skepticism when a conflict of interest is _that_ blatant. When people's paychecks depend on the King (or CEO, or whatever) liking what they write, there's rarely even a need to put an explicit "thou shalt present me as the Messiah" clause in their contract. Either they figure it out on their own (like this guy seems to), or natural selection takes care of it.
You can see that from ancient times to the present day. From the Pharaoh's scribes in the Old Kingdom to Pravda (or Faux News) journalists in the 20'th century to paid corporate PR/astroturfing/whatever, the same theme is there: the Pharaoh/Emperor/King/Beloved President/CEO/whatever is nothing short of perfect, and the enemy/competition/etc are a bunch of vampires or sloped-forehead orcs. And that those who didn't figure out that that's what's expected from them, found themselves "restructured" out. (Though, depending on the time and place, that could mean more fun HR personnel management methods, like beaheading, feeding someone to the crocodiles, or putting them at the top of a sharp stake. How's that for upwards mobility in the organization?;)
And that when you're interviewed by the CEO's/president's/etc personal pet PR guy, you put on your best smiling face and proclaim yourself happier than a dog in a cat show. When the guys from Pravda came to Ivan Ivanovich's door, what do you think Ivan said? "Oh, I'm so unhappy under the communist party's rule"? Heh. Most of those interviews weren't scripted either, just everyone knew that it's not like it would even make it to print if they don't say what's expected of them. So what makes anyone think that when Ballmer's personal blogger entered someone's office anything fundamentally different happened?
Briefly, take your infos from less biased sources.
More like if parents actually had time for the kid. Now I know that an anecdote isn't exactly data, but let me tell you how it worked for me.
I learned to read and write long before I got to school, because my grandma took the time to teach me that, and to make it interesting. I can't remember much from that age (she started with it when I was 2-3 years old), but from what I'm told it involved pictures of animals whose name started with that letter, and stuff like that. Kids are pretty much pre-programmed to hang around and learn from a parent or, in this case, substitute parent, so playing some game with letters with grandma and getting lots of attention, hey, it must have been fun times.
I already had basic understanding skills in English and French by the age of 7. No, I couldn't have written Les Miserables, but it was a start, you know? Grandma is again responsible for French, using some Pif comics as material. Kids like to be told stories, you know? _Illustrated_ stories with a cat and a dog doing mean things to each other? You tell me if that doesn't sound like fun. Plus, again, hey, I was getting lots of attention from grandma. Mom and her English language tapes are responsible for English, but again, some time doing it together was involved. (It worked too. I think I'm doing decently in English, wouldn't you say?)
Incidentally, in school, I have grandma to thank for another piece of wisdom, which strangely enough the school didn't teach me. School told me to just keep reading something again and again until it's memorized. Except at some point you feel like your head is numb, and keeping at it any longer isn't getting you any further. It just gets you more frustrated. I can see how lots of kids just concluded that learning is boring, and gave up. Grandma gave me this little piece of advice: so take a 10 second break. Nowadays I know that that's just enough to flush the brain's shortest term buffer. Why couldn't school teach me that? She also helped check my homework and stuff.
At some point, you know, a kid gets to ask stuff like "why is the sky blue?" My parents, bless their nerdy souls, gave me some physics books. You'd be surprised how I could accept the real explanation just as well as other kids accept the fairy tale versions. The whole family, all the way to the great grandma, also were always available to talk about it, which is always a plus. In retrospect, it might have been a tad boring to listen to a kid ranting and raving about a transformer, but someone or another always had time for that. I should be thankful.
Dad also helped provide some maths knowledge needed there, such as teaching me to do a derivative, and how to get there by way of really small delta X... in elementary school. It helped with, for example, understanding mechanics early.
Computers... ok, now for that one I didn't need any special encouragement. It was experimenting with something and seeing some results, which is fun. Still, in retrospect, it wasn't as much spontaneous interest in programming, as Dad showing me how some small BASIC programs are entered and run. I was pretty quick to get interested from there. At some point, basic was kinda slow, so Dad gave me the CPU instruction set manuals and a very quick introduction to Assembly. And to translating it all to hex by hand, because the old ZX-81 had 1k memory total, and an assembler just didn't fit in there. It would be another half a decade until I understood _why_ assembly is faster than BASIC, or how does the computer understand either of them, but it got me happily coding away anyway.
By contrast, the things I was the _least_ interested in was the stuff that just came pretty much by royal decree, so to speak. (Not meaning actually from a king, but from any authority figure, parents included.)
So exactly what are you going to solve by just turning off the TV? "Young man, go to your room and don't come out until you've done your homework." Damn, if that had been all the parent input and attention I got, I'd probably be w
Well, noone denies that better tools would increase productivity. That much is obvious. And, yes, as I was saying before, the interest exists, so I'm not surprised that IBM would be interested. Everyone else is.
The only question is what would be a better tool. So far noone managed to come up with something visual that actually works better. So far all those visual tools worked worse.
So far the tools that _do_ work are more along the lines of doing the clerical work for you. E.g., that you can CTRL-click in Eclipse and instantly see what that called function does. Or that you can CTRL-space and see all the method names starting with "get", instead of having to manually grep the file. It's stuff that saves time by elliminating the chores, not stuff that puts pretty management-ready graphics on it.
And to address your point about pretty 3D animations: it doesn't scale. Watching the flow go slowly around a loop is ok for a 10 line piece of code, but it's a nightmare for a 10,000,000 line program. Trying to follow that going around in 3D would be like trying to see what every single person in New York is doing.
It also solves the awfully wrong problem. The problem _isn't_ seeing that that one is a loop. The problem is understanding what all the other called functions do, and who else calls this function. E.g., if I see someone else's program send a "MyCustomGUIEvent", who's listening for it and what do _they_ do? In detail. Does one of them set some global variable and could be responsible for the race condition we're having? What other piece of program thought they'd take a nasty shortcut and call this unrelated function just for the side-effects?
The problem with maintenance is that basically it's like trying to see the Sixtine Chapel through a cardboard tube that lets you see a square inch at a time. You can see very well that, say, that's a fingernail, but what's the bigger scene there. What are the implications of changing that finger to be bent instead of straight? Would it ruin the whole scene? _That_ is the problem.
What's _really_ missing is the _big_ picture, not cutesy representations of what the current function does. The problem isn't telling that a "for" is a loop, and frankly anyone who needs cutesy animations to realize it's a loop can go back to MacDonalds. What's missing is all that other stuff that this loop triggers, some of it burried under 20 levels of calls within calls.
And if you need to see the exact flow, including going into whatever functions within functions are called there, we already have a tool for that: it's called a debugger. It does just that. It's slow and tedious, but it already does just that. And watching it in 3D would make it no less slow and tedious, since it restricts your scope even more.
But other than that, don't let me stop you. If you honestly think that watching some animated toon walking around the loop in, say, 10 seconds is better than reading the "for" in a fraction of a second, sure, go ahead and try. Several others have already tried and failed, but, hey, who knows? Maybe you're the one who gets it right:)
Frankly, I fail to see what the fundamental problem is. Those people just chose to communicate with people they have nothing in common with, or whose personality they don't match. The same would have happened IRL or on IRC or whatever.
E.g., I've had a RL friend who is, sad to say, an OCPD case. His world has no shades between perfect and crap. E.g., he was proud for example of saving and reloading before _each_ _move_ in turn based strategy game, until he got the perfect result. Not because he actually needed that to win, but because his victory simply _had_ to be perfect. Anyone playing otherwise was doing a crap job in his book. E.g., he quit games just because they were too large to be sure he fully explored, and he never knew if he had found every single chest. That was a requirement in his mind.
It went ok in person, but it went downhill _fast_ when I moved away and we switched to emails. His view of the world had no shades of grey between answering every single point (including filler or rhetorical question) in an email, and basically ignoring it. If I said something like "you know how it goes", he actually had to answer that in detail, and make it clear whether he knew how it goes or not, and how much. Unfortunately he expected the same from me. If he said that his new job pays well and isn't too far from home, and I only commented about the pay, that was for him a major faux pas: he actually expected a whole treatise about the pros and cons of travelling a longer distance. So he grew discontent very fast over my not answering half the sentences in his email in detail, and that was the end of it.
E.g., I had a co-worker who was a gamer, and liked to talk about games. It looks like the perfect match, since I'm a gamer too, and I like to talk about games too. Unfortunately, in his case "games" meant exclusively "CounterStrike" and most of the time the same map, and doing the same things over and over again, because that's what got him the most points. So every day he'd tell me how he cleverly climbed the same bloody ladder, dropped down the same bloody vent, crawled through the same bloody tunnel, and 50% of the times shot some guy crouching in the same bloody corner. Oh, it was interesting to hear it the first time. But after a month it was quite literally less fun than root canal or watching paint dry. But by now, since I had already made the mistake of being the only one who listened to him, he was coming to me like a lost puppy every day, and resisted any diplomatic hints that I'm not interested. (And trust me, my "diplomacy" isn't very subtle.) I had to pretty much flip out at him to get him to stop, and that was the end of that.
E.g., "chatty". Heh. You'll have to meet grandma IRL some day. In her view of the world, shutting up ranks up there as the greatest callamity that could befall anyone. If two people are in the same room, or for that matter anywhere in the same neighbourhood, it's pretty much an axiom that they'll spend their time talking to each other. It doesn't matter about what topic, the purpose is to talk, topics or information are entirely irrelevant details there. I can just see her "twitting about twitter", or discussing dinner or commercials, if that was what it took to get a conversation. It has nothing to do with being a "newb". That's just her personality type. _Extreme_ extrovert.
So basically, heh, so why is this a technology or online issue anyway? People are people. The Internet may allow some extremely timid, but socially inept, people to make more conversation than IRL, but then again it won't be any different from befriending them IRL. I can't see how's it any different if the chat is over Twitter than in person or over ICQ.
In any case, just like IRL, you end up with people whose interests don't match yours, and whose personality doesn't match yours. And you have to prune the set a bit, and avoid or get rid of the people you're not interested in. I don't know what ever gave anyone the idea that they can just add lots of random people to their friends list, and expect it to work perfectly just like that. I mean, shouldn't it be common sense that it won't?
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Only if your boyfriend has a working set of ovaries, womb, and vagina. Note that it's a bit like the WoW equipment sets too: you need all pieces to get the big bonus. Just two out of three isn't going to do the trick.
Also that's assuming that you are a man. Fucking someone up the ass with a dildo or strap-on, sadly, misses another piece of the equation, namely the sperm. I'm affraid you can't quite get the synergy effect without that part.
Well, as you've said, you're not the target audience for it.
The target audience obviously isn't anyone who already has an XBox 360, for that matter. It's out to target people -- or at least blunt their arguments -- who've been whining, basically, "the XBox sucks because it doesn't have a HDMI port" or "the XBox sucks because it's too loud for my living room" or "yeah, but the PS3 is _black_". Now MS can tell them, basically, "So buy an Elite then."
It's, if you will, like the pink PSP. It's not there so everyone with a black one will throw it into the garbage bin and run buy a pink one. It's there so maybe some father will go "omg, pink girly PSP" and buy one for his daughter.
The price also isn't always calculated like that. Not everyone who bought an XBox will use it as a HD-DVD player, and not everyone is, basically, "OMG, must have wireless at all cost." I can tell you I'm perfectly content with cables, and haven't used the old XBox or PS2 for DVD playback either. The damn thing is there to play games, show me the games. I'm certainly not going to blow $600 on the PS3 just because it plays Blu-Ray movies.
Here's one thought for you: Splash Conception. A.k.a., anal sex is not 100% reliable as birth control. It only takes one drop of sperm on reaching the vulva, and the spermatozoa's mobility takes it from there.
Then there are things like an elastic hymen, and various other fun ways to end up pregnant while technically a virgin.
And to make it even more fun, think this: they later had to invent an explanation for exactly this kind of thing, namely the succubi and incubi. Virgin virtuous girls (yeah right) were supposedly impregnated by incubi. You don't invent a whole explanation for something that never happened ever since. So basically they knew it happened more than once, and in fact it happened again and again.
So here's what _really_ makes me wonder: why is everyone pretending that something happening all the time is a one-time divine miracle? I mean, hello? It's like proclaiming that there is only one Car made by God himself, and steadfastly refusing to acknowledge all the other cars around you. They can't exist, because God said they don't exist.
I don't know, it's basically fascinating how people can basically force themselves in a thoroughly schizophrenic frame of mind where they believe two completely opposite things at the same time. E.g., simultaneously that (1) Mary's virgin conception was such a unique and inexplicable thing that can only possibly be explained by divine intervention, yet at the same time (2) thousands of other virgin girls got pregnant too, e.g., via incubi. Hello? How can one have unyielding faith that something is unique and non-unique at the same time? Or that it could have been possible only by divine intervention, yet at the same time the same happens without divine intervention all the time? (E.g., via demons.) Mind boggles.
Or maybe that's the ticket. The more absurd and illogical a religion is, the more people will rabidly fight against anyone saying otherwise, because it trips their own insecurity and doubt. Better burn the heretic before he manages to make you think more about that.
The difference is that that media eventually _did_ have to apologize and admit that they faked it. No, it doesn't make them trustworthy, but:
1. it does say that libel laws work. You can't run a major campaign to smear someone's or some company's reputation, let alone something of the calibre of "product X is killing people", and be left alone for long. And I fail to see why they shouldn't apply to bloggers too.
2. Doubly so since it's not even as much a freedom of speech issue for the masses, as in, thousands of people saying what they really think. It's a case of a company basically astroturfing to disguise their smear campaign. Instead of publishing their own lies and opening themselves to a lawsuit, they just hide behind some faceless bloggers to do it. I fail to see why that would give them some kind of immunity.
Especially _if_ you see blogging as some great liberation of the masses and chance to get on your private soapbox and say what you really think, methinks you should be very disgusted by this kind of stuff. It's nothing less than deliberately looting, burning and polluting that medium for some company's profit. It's something that diminishes the value of that resource by a lot, to make a tiny profit for someone. Even as bandits go, this kind of company is the _stupid_ destructive kind of bandit that causes a huge loss for a tiny profit.
And that a lot are willing to just bend over and help spread the damage, if they get paid a few bucks, well, now you see one reason why traditional media has earned a right to have a heartfelt sneer at them.
3. some of the safeguards of traditional media just don't work for bloggers. E.g., the right to have them also publish your response to whatever accusations they made against you, is worthless when it's just some random page someone found while surfing. The chance that someone comes back to a week old post, reads all comments to your own response, is clever enough to skip past the "no, I'm the real Brandybuck and I really make patches that kill people" or "nah, I know Brandybuck, he really makes patches that kill people" trolls, etc, is close to nill. It also places an undue and disproportionate effort on the victim: you don't just have to contact one newspaper to publish your objection to what's been said about you, you have to troll a few thousand blogs. It's an undue waste of your time.
4. sometime at the beginning of the 20'th century the real media discovered that it's actually good for business if they at least pretend they're impartial and only do _reporting_. That's why they have policies like always including an opposite point of view, for example. Or why if it's a personal opinion piece, it tends to be clearly marked as such, and not as news. At any rate, they've distanced themselves quite a lot from the blatant smear campaigns that previously passed for journalism.
That's also another reason why they publish those apologies, btw. It's not just libel laws, it's that the newspaper or TV station itself wants to distance itself quickly from anything that taints that impartiality image they've been building. Even if you're not really impartial, you want to at least look like you are, or it will affect your business big time. So you'll want to distance yourself very fast and very loud from any dumb thing you've done that looks blatantly overtly partisan.
Now that impartiality not entirely true for everyone, of course, but it's still a step up from what happens in the blogs nowadays. Blogs by and large are at the point where journalism was in the 18'th century. Lopsided partisan pieces, ostensibly carrying only half the story, fictional fabricated "news" to support a pre-conception, rumours passed off as "news", mouth-foaming fanboyism, etc. And now a good helping of people just taking the money to copy-and-paste whatever material some astroturfing company gave them, too.
So basically, sorry, but I can see why a professional journalist would sneer at the "I r a journalist 2" blogger gang. Believe neither if you will, but one at least does have some higher quality work to justify that sneer. No, the professional media aren't saints, but it takes an extreme case of OCPD to lump them both in some "neither is perfect, therefore both are equally crap" pot.
1. I wasn't talking about formatting and reinstalling. I was talking about pulling the network cable. There's a difference. Wiping away all evidence _is_ stupid, but containing the attack isn't.
2. No offense, but your examples illustrate precisely what scares me.
So basically a compromised server, where there's a breach in progress, should be left untouched because the boss's powerpoint presentation in on it? I.e., actual confidential data may be leaked, the problem can magnify, the company can open itself to lawsuits in the process, but, hey, his precious presentation is safe. Or isn't, since there's nothing to keep an attacker from messing with that data too. No offense, but that's worth a Dilbert strip, if any manager actually requests something _that_ stupid.
How about just installing a backup on a different machine, if he needs a presentation? I mean, frankly, that server should have been backed up, and anyway you can rebuild a demo system from scratch too if you had to. It's not like a demo actually has productive data or anything. (And if it has, now that's irresponsible. But I digress.) So leaving a hacker claw away at the DMZ from that pwned server just to save the couple of hours worth building a new demo server is... irresponsible.
Ditto for the court order. Courts are not some inflexible arbitrary thing. You can get a deadline extended if you show up with a signed slip of paper from the data forensics firm saying that your financials server had a breech in progress and had to be taken out. God knows SCO got their deadlines extended for years with nothing more than hot air.
In fact, if you _do_ have to submit some data to SEC or to a court, I'd be more worried about that data being tainted by an attack. How do you know it still holds anything even resembling the real data any more, or if maybe it's been defaced to include stuff like a couple million spent on prostitutes for the board members? Keeping the server up for forensics is one thing, but keeping it up because the boss wants to generate a report on a compromised server... well, as I was saying, now _that's_ worth a Dilbert strip.
1. I was assuming a serious breach. If it's a development server, frankly, it has no excuse to have any real data on it, or be accessible from the internet at all. So it would hardly qualify as a security breach, or be possible to breach.
2. Depending on the zone where a server is, leaving it happily running without isolating it, can be an invitation for the problem to magnify. E.g., for most companies there is more than one server in a DMZ: if one is pwned, it can be used as a proxy to attack the others. E.g., that server has access to a database. Don't be surprised if the same database server or cluster hosts more than one database. Just because the compromised server may host, say, some public informational pages about the company's products, don't assume it can't possibly also have access to the online shop database.
3. I still say that a qualified admin should be able to tell that kind of a difference. Unless the company's IT is a a chaotic (evil) disaster, the admin should already know which is the development server and which is the production server. I don't think he has to wait for the CEO to tell him which server is which, or that most CEOs will even know. That's not saying that the CEO is (necessarily) dumb, just that it's not his job. It's like waiting for the general to come tell you who's the designated marksman in each squad: it's just not his job to worry about details at that level.
4. Sad to say, getting a prosecution and a conviction is nowadays 99% pipe dream and fairy tale. Between containing some damage which you know _will_ expand if given enough time, and the off chance that you'll bring a hacker to justice, I dunno, I know what I'd choose. I'd love to see justice served, but at some point you have to be realistic and realize that there's no point in being the martyr (even as a whole company) for a lost cause.
I don't know, their approach seems kinda... dangerous to me, but maybe that just shows that they're the big security gurus and I'm just a lowly coder. Maybe I can learn something from them. Or maybe they're talking out the ass, I dunno.
For starters the advice to wait until the whole team is assembled, including the accountants, lawyers, etc, then holding meetings to determine your strategy, etc, before even unplugging the damn thing... dunno, it seems to me bordering on criminal. Yes, you don't want to let one lone cowboy handle it from end to end, but a trained admin could at the very least be able to unplug the computer from the network and isolate the damage before it goes any worse. Or know enough to decide if it has to be unplugged. But if he thinks it is, it should be step #1 not IIRC step #4 after you're done holding your meetings and informing the employees and having PR draft the vaguely worded announcement that tries to make it sound unimportant to your customers.
Waiting for the designated accountant, and the designated lawyer, and the HR guy, and God knows who else to arrive at the middle of the night and hold their meeting while a breach is in progress and someone is downloading your productive database, seems to me dumb to the extreme. To reuse your example, it's like saying you should keep your hand in the stove until you talked to your lawyer and your doctor and a designated family member, make sure you have a strategy, and only then pull the hand out. By that time, it could be burned to a crisp.
I mean, by the elder Gods, especially when you include such non-techies... surely you've seen these guys when they have to give you a spec for a program. If you wait for them to hold a meeting on such technical issues as "are we in aggreement that we need to unplug the server?", at least one goes into responsibility avoidance mode and refuses to be remembered as the one who took any decision, at least one goes into alpha-dog-pissing-on-everything-to-mark-his-territ ory mode, etc. It's a meeting that could well take hours without going anywhere.
Frankly. I'd rather just trust the "cowboy" admin to know his job well enough, and know whether he needs to unplug the servers because of a serious breach, or just let it be if it's just a DDOS, while the non-techies deal with their own domain of competence. There is _nothing_ a non-techie can add that's meaningful to that kind of an inherently techie decision. Just like you don't have the admins tell the company lawyers what to do, have the decency to not have the admin hang around and wait for the lawyers to tell him what to do. It's not only a better use of the admins' time, it's also a better use of the lawyers' time, who could be doing something that's a better use of _their_ skills in that time.
I'll aggree, though, that the advice at step 1 seems to be dangerously content free. It's something which, although it may sound otherwise, actually noone ever actually did as such. Even if one "cowboy" admin did offer to contain the incident, it's not like someone let him deal with the _whole_ affair, including the HR, legal and financial aspects. Which is the domains they mention that you need on that team. More likely the "cowboy" just dealt with the servers, while the lawyer did his own job, the HR guy did his own, etc. I don't think (m)any people let the admin draft the press release too, for example. So the whole "don't let one 'cowboy' deal with it all" advice is basically like saying "don't try to fly on a broomstick off a bridge": you weren't actually planning to do that anyway, and it's not really giving you any insight you didn't already have.
Finally, I don't know, maybe I'm just paranoid by trade, but the whole thing looks more like PR and a bit of an IT-for-PHBs magazine than anything actually serious about security or IT. It reads like little more than an advertisment for the three companies they mention, with a bit of a scare theme to make you contact them ASAP, than anything else. I'm also a tad cir
Well, if all that doesn't apply to you, as I was saying, kudos and more power to you. You certainly have my respect in that case.
The problem is that a lot of other people, especially in large corporations, don't quite share your views. In a lot of cases, even if the boss wanted to be open, the many layers of management usually mean he has no clue either why some decision was taken. And then there are the many which don't want to in the first place. I've had the dubious honour, for example, to work for a while with a manager who was a yes-man in _both_ directions. Not quite the apex of openness, you know?
At any rate, let me rephrase that then: The more open and fair the setup, well, the less effort will be required to persuade most people.
Well, there is that, but then it's also a gold mine for phishers, spyware, you name it. Telling someone to just download any password manager and be done with it, is probably the most unsafe advice I can think of giving anyone. You give all your passwords to a piece of software, and... have no clue what happens from there. You damn better trust the makers of that software more than you trust your mom, because you just gave them pretty much unrestricted access to your money, data, identity. And trust that when the company is taken over or changes management, the next update doesn't _then_ transmit all your data to them.
Plus, even if the company doesn't stoop _that_ low, you just became dependent on that one piece of software. If they start mis-behaving, how much advertising and spying are you going to have to tolerate when the alternative is losing access to every single web site you ever used. See, Claria/Gator and users being reluctant to uninstall their crap even when told it's spyware.
Sure, you could do a bit of research and whatnot, and you probably did yours, but I'm reluctant to push that kind of advice upon someone who, honestly, I have no idea if they do theirs. Plus, it's asking someone to trust a third party blindly. Even if I'd trust some company X _that_ much, I can't ask anyone to do the same.
Well, the problem is that some people put disproportionate effort into presenting prejudice and stereotypes as somehow hard science. The British went to great lengths to "prove" that the Irish are somehow tiny-brained sub-humans, Nazi Germany produced _tons_ of pseudo-science as to why the Aryan race are super-humans and why Jews and Slavs are sub-humans, etc. All the way back to ancieng Greece, you have people who devoted time, energy and papyrus to "proving" that some people are so sub-human and unable to even take care of themselves, that they really simply belong as slaves. (You can see the same theme being reused as late as the 19'th century southern USA to argue that blacks are mentally no more developped than children, and need a white master to take care of them.)
Not just race, btw. You can see the same about some gender stereotypes: read some medieval texts about, say, witchcraft, and be delighted by such mysogynism as that women are inherently weak, evil, stupid, driven by animalistic instincts/hormones, etc, and they inherently can't say "no" when the devil offers to fuck them in exchange for some powers. All presented as the purest hard fact, and beyond any reasonable doubt.
The fact that someone dresses it in pseudo-science garb doesn't necessarily make it science. All the above mentioned examples were dressed as distorted science too. Ranging from biased samples to outright lies.
E.g., racists in the southern USA cheerfully presented education-biased "IQ tests" pitting the poorest uneducated blacks against the finest handpicked whites, to show that objectively blacks are naturally stupid. Too bad that when the same test compared an average black from the North to an average white from the south, the black actually ended up smarter. The test was just that bad and meaningless.
E.g., those who argued that the Irish are sub-human Neanderthals also pretended to have lots of cranial measurements, proving it beyond any doubt that the Irish just don't have the brain size to be human. Too bad it was false and made up. Etc.
So of course, the question still remains "is this science valid", but science that supposedly incidentally confirms stereotypes should at the very least be more thoroughly scrutinized. And if there are a _ton_ of factors that are conveniently not even mentioned, "is this yet another guy just trying to justify his favourite pre-conception?" is a very valid question to ask.
Or to put it less diplomatically: we simply have entirely too many idiots spending time and spewing bullshit to justify some racist or sexist bias. They don't need more encouragement. It's not being PC, it's just being already sick and tired. It was maybe interesting the first time around, but the 100'th time someone uses bad "science" to justify their being a racist or sexist dick, just isn't funny any more.
Yes, they might still theoretically be right, and noone will suppress them for political corectness or anything. But they damn better have some bullet-proof evidence this time. It damn better not be the same collection of fallacies that's been done to death before. For several thousand years straight.
It's if you will, like the boy who cried wolf. After someone cried wolf 1000 times, you start being, understandably, skeptical. You might even ask him to prove that he even understands what a wolf is or looks like.
_Additionally_ we live in an age of science by PR. There's a lot of bullshit pseudo-science written by PR agencies and signed by some "Dr." or "Prof." that just sells his name for money. Its role isn't to enlighten you to how nature or society work, but to drum up interest in some product someone is selling, or just to promote a frame of mind or habit, or to cause a certain reaction. E.g., you have studies "showing" that cocoa is good for you, paid for by Mars. You have studies showing that the perfect month for a vacation is
So be smart and don't use the same password for your email and for accounts to random web sites.
If you have to re-use passwords, at the very least do something like having half a dozen passwords, one for each category. One for your email, one for web forums, one for work, one for the home computer (but use a firewall anyway), one for PayPal/Ebay/whatever, one for MMOs or whatever. Ok, maybe you don't like having 100 passwords, but you _can_ remember 5-6 passwords, right?
That way if one is compromised, basically the only access they get is within the same category. If someone gets your Slashdot password, they can at most then spam some other forum in your name. Maybe do some spam link. That's not even in the same class as having full access to your email and your address book and the password to your Ebay or PayPal accounts.
For best results, also consider having a different user name for each. E.g., I hope your PayPal account isn't under the username MichaelSmith.
The problem is that if your email is breached, not only can they read your email and spam your friends, they can also use that as a beachhead to get even more stuff. E.g., even if you didn't use the same password on, say, Paypal or Ebay, as long as they have your username and can read your email, it's trivial to just go to PayPal or Ebay and do a "I forgot my password" in your name. Congrats, now there's nothing to stop them from transferring your PayPal money to an account in East Bumfuckistan or from running some scam in your name on Ebay.
So basically please _be_ paranoid about these things. It's not just a case of "bah, all they can do is spam my friends a little" or "bah, none of my emails are secret anyway", as some people seem to assume. Email is used in so many aspects every day, or can be used without raising any alarm flags on the recepients' side, that losing control of it can be pretty much _the_ one most important step you could take towards getting your identity stolen. Do be careful.
While I'll aggree that persuading people _can_ go a long way, if you have that talent, I'd also like to say that most people are better off not even trying.
It's sorta like being funny. Most people think they're hilarious, and that their "cat pooping" video on YouTube, or their "haha, watch me pretend to be a teenage japanese girl" IRC log, is the greatest barrel of laughs in recorded history. Most aren't actually, and their "funny" stuff actually range anywhere from "more boring than watching paint dry" to "bloody stupid."
The same goes for persuasion or motivation. There are a lot of managers who think they're some persuasion ace and that their motivational meetings surely get everyone all psyched up and ready to charge at any problem like the Japanese charged at machinegun nests in WW2. Dilbert's PHB probably thinks that too. In reality, the majority aren't. For some, well, they just illustrate the dictum that when you try too hard to make an impression, that's the impression you make: of trying too hard. Those are the lucky ones, actually. For others, their persuasion attempts or motivational meetings just leave everyone with a sensation ranging from "bored out of my skull" to "the boss is doing ego masturbation in public again" to "I wonder if this is a good time to post my resume on Monster." That bad.
There are people who are good at that kind of thing, but most are definitely not. They just read in some management book that you have to motivate the team by doing this and that. (E.g., holding team-building meetings.) But they have no talent or inclination to do it right. It's like reading somewhere that you should go and write a SF novel: if you don't have the talent, don't expect it to be a success.
And, btw, be aware that anything that happens on the victims'... err... employees' own free time, raises the difficulty dramatically. Team building meetings where you're supposed to sacrifice your own evening for it, well, the boss damn better be a _brilliant_ motivational ace for it to work. Most should not even try, because the result _will_ be a "wtf, the boss stole yet another of my meetings for his own verbal masturbation exercise" disaster. Far from getting someone to appreciate the team more, they tend to have more of a "god, why do I even stay here?" effect.
Of course, very few are lucky to have the input that their clever speech was really a morale disaster. And even fewer are smart enough to not silence the messenger, when they do get the input. So most seem to go through their life with people smiling and nodding and putting a pretense of having bought the deception, and never learn that they'd actually be better off holding their mouth shut.
And for the constructive part, my own impression is that rather than trying to be persuasive, when in doubt, it's better to be just open and fair. You don't have to persuade people as hard to do X, if they know why it has to be done like that. If the boss is privy to information you're not, well, it's often more motivational to just tell you that information than try to snow you with motivational bullshit. (Even if it's something like, true case, "I'm sorry, guys, we had to underestimate the time for this project because we can't afford to lose that customer without going bankrupt." Knowing you can trust someone to be honest like that is worth a lot.) Trust is a very motivating thing. Being fair is another very motivating thing. Knowing that your extra work will at least be noticed, and won't be trumped by favoritsm and nepotism, is motivating enough. Of course words are cheap: noticing that the boss is saying one thing, and then giving special privileges and rewards to his drinking buddy Wally tends to ruin the whole thing.
And if that is the case, pretty much even email works just as well. If people know they can trust you to openly answer any questions and that you _will_ notice the extra effort, well, you don't need to spend much time persuading or motivating them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not accusing you of anything. Maybe you _are_ good at motivating people in person. Kudos and more power to you in that case. Most people aren't. They'd be better served by creating an environment where they don't even have to even try (and miserably fail).
You know, just because you don't understand why the army needs this, doesn't meam they're automatically complete idiots.
Here's a thought for you: any good defense is built in layers. So if one layer fails, the others are there to prevent a complete catastrophe. This doesn't mean they won't enable encryption, maybe even an extra layer of encryption on top of WPA, it means that they'll _also_ have a physical EM shielding layer to pick the slack if someone made a mistake.
Additionally, the army has a long history of using and dealing with counter-measures. You don't see people trying to actively jam your home network, but in case of a war, that's exactly what the army might have to deal with. Whether actual pure jamming, or just an EMP from a nuke frying all your electronics, if the shit hits the fan big time. So when that happens, you'd rather most of it was shortcircuited by the building being a big Faraday cage.
Additionally, the army has to deal with EM radiation out of the building in more ways than some wardriver surfing for porn on your home network. It can be someone intentionally placing a transmitter somewhere, to some spy leaking the encryption keys, to being basically tagged for an EM seeking missile. While a Faraday cage won't make any of those 100% impossible, it gives you one extra chance against it. E.g., if someone left the door open near a repeater, you can notice you suddenly detect EM radiation around a building that was supposed to have none. E.g., sure, someone could climb on the roof and place their emitter for the missile there, but there's a chance someone will see them, whereas a modified laptop/clock/whatever in a drawer might not even get noticed until it's set to activate at midnight in anticipation for an enemy strike. Etc.
Additionally, the army is a bigger target than your home network. A wardriver will just go for whatever unsecured network is in the neighbourhood, and not even bother to crack your encryption. You're not worth it. You're one of millions of networks, each perfectly equivalent to any other, for his purposes. Even with the old WEP, chances are noone stood around long enough to gather packets and crack your keys, because, again, it wasn't worth the effort. A spy isn't as easily deterred. He won't go for Aunt Emma's home network instead. And he can devote disproportionate computing power and manpower to cracking the codes of a potential enemy superpower.
Of course, you can stick your head in the sand, put a big "WAP can't ever be cracked" poster and feel secure. What if you're wrong? Even for WEP it took two years for the vulnerability to be published. Plus, for the standard WW2 example, the Germans didn't think Enigma had been cracked either. (Nor did the civillians in most allied countries, for that matter. It was top secret.) What if some bright chinese mathematician comes up with some brilliant new way to decrypt it? Would you rather bet on that never happening, _or_ have an extra layer of defense just in case? Because from where I stand, given high enough stakes, the latter looks like the much smarter choice.
Basically, get your head out of the ass, and out of the "I'm teh genius, anyone doing things otherwise than me is automatically an idiot" mentality. Most often that should just be your hint that you don't actually understand what's happening there, and you're operating on just wild assumptions and pseudo-data pulled out of the ass to support that "I'm teh genius" preconception. And, as they say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
I can't see how having the school _in_ a video game would help with either. You could use a video game as an illustration or assignment, maybe, but having virtual avatars dicking around in a virtual world? Seriously, how's that going to help?
Except those are very specialized simulators, extremely close to the real thing. I can't see how playing any game would help programming in the same way. If you play MS Flight Sim, you might actually learn something about airplanes, but if you click around a virtual classroom in Second Life, all you've learned from there is to click around in a game. Maybe a valuable skill for something else, but it won't make you a better programmer no matter how you want to slice it.
Additionally, SL does have the dubious reputation among many people of being basically a 3D cybersex game, and of pink flying penises. Deserved or undeserved, I'm not discussing that at this point. Just that it has it. So while many employers could maybe live with getting your courses online, many _will_ be turned off by such an association. It's basically on par with saying that you got your education at the local brothel. You know, one of the hookers also was good with computers and stuff.
I'm not sure putting a silly avatar on it would help that horribly much. Or not enough to offset the other problems.
I'm guessing it would take a lot more than a week or two, including dealing with disruptions, pranks and whatnot. The pink flying penises aren't just a wisecrack, that's just what happened to someone's press release in SL.
Plus, I see it as more work for the teacher all semester long, if they actually want to simulate all the advantages of a real school. Just seeing the teacher standing there isn't going to do much.
Here's one reason to believe it's wrong: it's already happened before. Repeatedly. So it's not even some guess, it's just having a working memory.
Let's even assume that this company is genuinely honest and believes in that model. Tough luck, HP isn't. HP is at this time little more than an overpriced ink and paper company, and the printers are sold under price to get you hooked on buying their ink. So what happens is:
1. Company X hits the market with a great new printer that costs $200 and ink costing $0.4 per ml. (Which is what $20 per 50ml cartridge means.)
2. HP makes a clone that costs $100 and gouges you for a hefty $4 per ml for ink.
Watch lemmings flock to get HP's version because it's cheaper.
Better yet, HP is teh big brand name and has seemingly endless advertising money, while Company X is the new kid on the block and noone's heard of them. Let's buy a HP for mom's photos, they're probably better, right? Or for that matter, let's buy a whole bunch of HPs for the office, because they're such a big company, while Company X could go bankrupt by tomorrow. And nothing scares the pants off management more than dealing with a small company that could be gone overnight.
And if Company X is not gone overnight, eventually it gets tired of having its sales undercut by HP crap, so it pulls the same stunt. Or it gets bought by HP. Or it goes big enough to go public, and Wall Street starts screaming for blood because the shares aren't growing as fast as they'd like. Or whatever. Cue new Deluxe model which costs $100 for the printer and $4 for the ink. And the old one is silently phased out, to make room for the new models.
And there you have it, the much saner explanation of why people would rather stick to fighting fires than improve something: it's not lack of creativity, it's that someone will blame you if anything, no matter how unrelated, goes wrong. If there's a fire, you have your excuse. If you just tweaked the firewall on your own, and an entirely unrelated intranet (i.e., not even accessed through that firewall) server crashes, it's you who's to blame.
And it's not just the network. There are other things that don't just work and stay working, but actually need constant monitoring and occasionally tweaking, or you _will_ get a fire. E.g., if an application server's utilization is constantly climbing, someone _should_ monitor it and notice the problem long before it becomes basically "slashdotted". If you just wait until there's a fire, and just stick to keeping your grubby paws off it until it's too late, then, frankly, you're dong a crap job. E.g., if a database is doing more full table scans than it should, then your job as a DBA should be to notice the problem long before there's a fire. Maybe the cache needs to be tweaked, or maybe the indexes or statistics need to be rebuilt, or maybe you should just notify the developpers that their SQL statements are crap. Keeping your grubby paws off it until there's a fire -- e.g., everyone's transactions start getting timeouts -- is, frankly, doing a crap job. Your job should be to help prevent the fire in the first place. And that goes for the developpers and maintenance engineers too, btw, not just the IT guys.
Except there too you're to blame if you did anything and anything else went wrong. If you just optimized one of the company's programs or the database, you're suddenly the one to blame if anything even unrelated goes wrong. E.g., you optimized the templates for generating HTML? Congrats, now you're to blame every time the user sees an error page. Even if in reality at that time the messaging system croaked, or whatever. The question will always first be if it's your change that caused it. Sometimes even if some unrelated program running on the same server, if it happened after your deployment, the first assumption will be, basically, Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It must be because of what you did.
Additionally, if we're talking IT, a lot of companies have implemented a thoroughly counter-productive policy where you can't do anything without writing an invoice to someone. The mis-guided idea is to gauge the need for an IT department and make those guys justify their salary. The result invariably is that noone does anything any more unless explicitly being asked to, by someone they can get money from. Suddenly if you need, say, an Apache server, you have to personally talk to the server admins, and to the network admins, and to the MQ admins, and the Apache admins, and everything else. You can no longer talk to just one guy and have him ask the others for the details, because every single one of those guys need to justify their salaries by sending you a bill.
At any rate, that's the end of showing any initiative or creativity right there. Why bother tweaking the database server on your own? It's outright counter-productive. It's something you could be writing a bill for, if they just wait until someone else requests it. Just stick your head in the sand until there's a fire to fight.
Basically, blaming it on lack of creativity is somewhat missing the point.
Some people would be creative all right, and are creative in their free time all right. They write fan stories, write their own cool programs or libraries, try to code their own game or mod, are "wizards" (coders) on some MUD, role-play, etc. They don't reall
Fair point, it certainly isn't in the same league with Daikatana.
Speaking of which, much as I will admit that Sony was as inept as it gets when talking about the PS3, and it did generate its own backlash, I still think Daikatana beats that hands down and should deserve to be number 1. I don't know how many still remember it fully, but the backlash was _massive_. Sony so far got a milder "well, fuck Sony and their console, the Wii (or XBox) is better anyway" reaction, but Daikatana managed to create a wave of pure Sith-like hatred. Suddenly everything that John Romero did, or his girlfriend did, or that he even had a girlfriend, was blown out of proportion and presented like an abhomination of such proportions never seen since WW2, and as the work of the Antichrist.
While Daikatana was a thoroughly mediocre game, maybe deserving a 50% score and to be quietly forgotten, the reaction was such that people had decided it's the worst game ever made, in fact a thorough abhomination of a game, before even trying the demo. (Sucky as that demo was.) People were posting venomous anti-Daikatana stuff and demanding John Romero's head on a pike without even having seen more than a couple of screenshots. (And for that matter, how about paying for a game before having any _demands_ from the developpers?) I've personally known a couple of people who were ranting and raving about what a piece of shit Daikatana was, but hadn't actually played the game or the demo, and in fact refused to even try it.
And speaking of the demo, ok, maybe it's not PR as such, but it was a thoroughly uninspired move on its own. See, most of Daikatana's levels were actually fairly nice. E.g., the ancient Greece levels actually looked pretty good. But it started with some thoroughly uninspired swamp levels, which were, well, ugly and uninspired. Bad move on its own, since the first levels are what gets people hooked or gets them to throw away the game before getting any further. The worst move however, was that those levels were chosen as the demo levels. So even if someone did decide to play the demo, it would only help convince them to _not_ buy the game.
Daikatana wasn't just blamed for sinking Ion Storm, it pretty much _did_ sink Ion Storm. The negative reputation of Daikatana and "Ion Storm killed Looking Glass" part of the backlash, also tainted Anachronox. (Not the greatest RPG ever, to be sure, but not quite deserving the "if it's from Ion Storm it's another abhomination" reaction some people had, either.) Even releasing Deus Ex under the Ion Storm name didn't do much, except create a "yeah, but it's the _other_ Ion Storm" reaction. And I wouldn't be surprised if it still sold somewhat less copies than it would otherwise have.
Basically, sorry, even Sony's handicapped management and insulting interviews didn't manage to create _that_ kind of backlash yet. Negative publicity and resentment, ok, they did cause. But nowhere _near_ Daikatana scale.
The problem there is that you expect them to be sane and logical about it. If they actually wanted to block "bad content", there would have been lots of other possibilities, like just blocking the porn sites at the proxy. Most companies do that.
In reality it's a knee jerk "think of the children!" (well, ok, the students) solution, based on little more than some "back in my day we didn't have these newfangled computers and everything was soo much better" nostalgia.
Logical? It doesn't even actually solve even the problem of "bad content", as there's still nothing to prevent one from downloading that earlier. It's not even based on any kind of study showing that the decline in grades is actually any different between a group which had its internet connection removed, compared to a control study who didn't. Is it actually based on the Internet, or maybe it's just that as the "me wanna be a rich computer guy too" explosion hit India, and the explosion of universities offering quick IT training, now enrollment isn't exactly limited to the top smartest and/or most passionate people any more? They don't know, but they're implementing a solution based on wild assumptions anyway.
It's just the same kind of nostalgia-tinted goggles, and/or fear of the new, that you can actually see all over the world. "Aaauuugh! Kids these days are into X, that will be the fall of civilization as we know it! We didn't have X back in our days, and look how much better everything was back then!" Where X even in the USA included at various points: comics, rock-and-roll music, tabletop games, computer games, etc, etc, etc. At every single bloody step there was some new uber-threat that would destroy civilization as a whole... except that always failed to actually happen, or indeed make any noticeable difference. In India's case X is simply "using the Internet", but otherwise the scare is exactly the same.
The problem with such nostalgia-based reactions is that nostalgia always presents stuff through rose-coloured glasses. We don't remember what it really was like X decades ago, we remember some idealized, sanitized version where everything was happier, the grass was greener, the sky was clearer, all students were the very incarnation of virtue and non-stop study, and the neighbours were all one big happy family. It never was like that, we just filtered out the bad parts, or re-painted them in a bright rose colour.
Hence any reaction or measure based on that kind of inherently bullshit invented "data", ends up nothing more than a case of GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out.)
Worse yet, wasting time and energy on such bullshit measures just serves to divert time, energy and attention from the _real_ problems and causes. E.g., these guys instead of actually spending some time figuring out what the real problems are, just did a feel-good bullshit measure and can rest for the next few years until it becomes obvious that it didn't work. In the meantime, _if_ there is an actual problem at work there, it can continue to have the same effect or even worsen.
The way I heard that story, ATI made the binary drivers at all, again, because a large OEM told them something to the effect of "we need Linux drivers to sell Linux servers." I.e., again, the loud mouthed hobbysts had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and the whole action was driven by OEMs.
No offense, but dream on. The guys who take the decisions for the pro market usually only care about numbers, and, if you'll pardon the cuss, don't give a flying fuck about whether some of us whiny nerds are happy or not. I'll dare say that 99% of what's being bought and sold has nothing to do with whether some nerd was getting a boner about it, but with whether the nice salesman promised the moon and played a mean game of golf. If nerds had anything to do with it, we wouldn't have a thriving buzzword-driven snake-oil market in the first place.
I'm a nerd myself, so don't take it as an insult, but the world _doesn't_ revolve around us. You may have imagined that whole economies revolve around listening to sages like yourself, but they don't. They revolve around who did the CEO play golf with, and what ludicrious savings/ROI/TCO/whatever and buzzwords the nice salesman in a suit promised.
Even when a corporation adopted Linux, it had nothing to do with listening to the local nerds ranting and raving, but with some salesman from, say, IBM coming and saying something like, "see, if you bought our big Power 5 computers running Linux, you'd get sooo much more performance and stability out of the WebSphere we sold you last month." While we nerds were just ranting and raving about boycotting the evil MS, the nice salesman came and said magic words like "TCO", "ROI", "synergy", "support contract", and the like. _That_ is what changed management's mind.
_Some_ companies listen to their nerds, yes, but they tend to be small, and far and few in between. While they do somewhat enlarge the market share that depends on the opinion of those disgruntled hobbysts, it's still a tiny market share.
I doubt that it would work. As far as ATI is concerned, the market for people who are (A) building their computer from components, _and_ (B) run Linux on it, _and_ (C) didn't buy a cheap 9200 or 5200, is very very very small. Especially look at that last part. Keeping even 1000 people satisfied when they bought the cheapest chip and made you barely a couple of bucks each, hardly justifies the salaries of a driver team.
I know, we all like to think that the customer is king, and that just because you have a proof of purchase for an old $30 graphics card, it means that a major corporation must bend over backwards for you and catter to your every whim. They should instantly hire a big team to code whatever you fancy today, open-source all their programs... Why, they should even come over and do your laundry. Dream on.
When cattering to mass-markets, you have to think in terms of ROI. If it costs X dollars to do something, will you even get those X dollars back? Is it likely that you'll even make a profit? If not, it's actually smarter to ignore that market segment.
Drivers nowadays are complex and expensive things, and frankly the Linux hobbyist market is tiny. And then they're likely to buy the lowest end card, or not even that as they're busy bitching about how binary drivers are evil.
So, basically, fully expect someone at ATI to at most have a chuckle as they dump your letter into the garbage bin.
OEM's are a whole other affair, because they move millions of boxes. If one of those says "we need linux drivers", then:
A. they probably know what their many corporate customers want. Dunno, maybe some major corporation or government department decided to standardize their desktop on Linux and actually needs 3D accelerated drivers. Basically if a big OEM bitches, they probably aren't doing it out of zealotry and fanboyism, but they know something about demand that you don't. You listen and take notes when those guys speak. And,
B. even if not, you want to listen to those anyway, because they're the guys who make your money. They're the "R" in "ROI". The last thing you want is Dell or IBM (Lenovo) standardizing exclusively on nVidia cards because you told them to fuck off when they complained that lack of Linux drivers hamstrings their server sales. If that were to happen, you'll see a big dip on your income chart, and the mere rumour would make your shares dive and the shareholders demand blood and rolling heads.
Basically you'll have a chance with your proofs of purchase when you fit at least one of the two criteria, preferrably both.
Well, that's what gets me wondering. Mind you, I'm against piracy, but, starting with the least important:
4. It's a measure that doesn't even work, and is so easily circumvented it's not even funny. As you noted. You don't even need to get a dedicated external HDD, just use your iPod/Zen/whatever. Or use an USB stick or card. E.g., there are 4GB memory card for the PSP, and they're smaller than a stamp. And the PSP has an USB port too. So if you brought a portable console along for the long airplane trip, you could fill its memory card with whatever pirated stuff you wish. Then if you're paranoid, swap it with a card with only saved games, and put the one full of pirated stuff in a pocket of a folded shirt in the luggage.
3. It has a ton of false positives, as noted. Polycarbonate is more common than some people think. Chances are you have a cheap Bic pen made of that stuff, or a case for that PSP, or God knows what else. So what are they going to do? Search everyone who's brought along a couple of cheap ballpoint pens? Geesh. Plus, what about stuff that's not pirated, but is on CDR anyway. What if you're going to meet an overseas customers and brought a couple of CDRs with your demos or sources? (Laptops get stolen or damaged, so I wouldn't have any important stuff _only_ on the laptop.) Is everyone going on such a business trip going to be searched and delayed trying to explain the guards that that's not pirated stuff?
2. It's a waste of everyone's money, time and nerves. (Whether paid out of your tax money as part of airport security, or by the airlines out of your ticket price, it is your money.) I mean, wtf, I can understand sniffing and having security guards searching people when it's about a bomb threat. But for a fucking CD? Gimme a break. Waste my time and money when it's something that could bring the fucking plane down and kill everyone, not when it's about lining the BSA's or RIAA's pockets. Wasting my time and money just for a few bucks of corporate profits, is outright insulting.
And inconvenience and delay it will be. With a suspected bomb, most of the time it can be anything between just taking it out of the luggage to show it's just a camera and putting it in a sort of a sniffing machine. There, case solved. But with software, someone has to unpack it, examine the contents, maybe even install it to prove it's your newest program for your overseas corporate customers and not some pirated program. Or how about music? Are they going to listen to every track to make sure it's just me and a couple of friends singing, and not some renamed ripped song? Do they have to compare the lyrics to make sure I'm not singing some copyrighted song there? What about photos or videos? Do they have to watch it all to make sure it's really my vacation photos/videos or something ripped off DVD and disguised by appending 10 minutes of home video at the beginning?
Or will it, more likely, end up just taking a lot of time scratching their heads and a lot of trying to bully someone into admitting it's pirated stuff?
1. It takes away manpower from the real threats. Sorry, but if this doubles the false positives, there's no way I can believe that everyone will double the number of guards and rooms and everything. So basically the guards, even if there is a token increase in their numbers, will have to deal with more cases each, and spend more time on each case. (See above.) So every such "let's do something good for the BSA and RIAA" case, is less manpower -- and for that matter, more annoyed/bored manpower -- for watching out for the real suspects. So basically they're asking me to _also_ accept less actual security so they can protect some corporations' interests. Geesh.
Dunno about trap, or it's just that MS no longer pays him to do PR.
It's funny how a lot of people previously were taking it as the truth, _whole_ truth, and nothing but the truth, just because he's such a hip blogger. I even remember getting modded down and getting some annoyed responses before, when I pointed out that it was his paid job to show the good parts only. "Noo, it must be all spontaneous and 100% the complete uncensored, unbiased picture, because he says so! He's so hip and irreverent that he even bravely told Ballmer to write a memo that's good for PR! He said that MS lets him write whatever he wants, good or bad, so if he doesn't show anything bad, surely nothing bad exists at MS." Not an exact quote, because I'm too lazy to search for the thread right now, but that was the general gist of it.
Now it turns out that when his paycheck no longer depends on MS, he suddenly discovers some bad things about MS too. Who would have imagined that?
So let me just say again, to everoyne: Look folks, do exercise some healthy skepticism when a conflict of interest is _that_ blatant. When people's paychecks depend on the King (or CEO, or whatever) liking what they write, there's rarely even a need to put an explicit "thou shalt present me as the Messiah" clause in their contract. Either they figure it out on their own (like this guy seems to), or natural selection takes care of it.
You can see that from ancient times to the present day. From the Pharaoh's scribes in the Old Kingdom to Pravda (or Faux News) journalists in the 20'th century to paid corporate PR/astroturfing/whatever, the same theme is there: the Pharaoh/Emperor/King/Beloved President/CEO/whatever is nothing short of perfect, and the enemy/competition/etc are a bunch of vampires or sloped-forehead orcs. And that those who didn't figure out that that's what's expected from them, found themselves "restructured" out. (Though, depending on the time and place, that could mean more fun HR personnel management methods, like beaheading, feeding someone to the crocodiles, or putting them at the top of a sharp stake. How's that for upwards mobility in the organization?;)
And that when you're interviewed by the CEO's/president's/etc personal pet PR guy, you put on your best smiling face and proclaim yourself happier than a dog in a cat show. When the guys from Pravda came to Ivan Ivanovich's door, what do you think Ivan said? "Oh, I'm so unhappy under the communist party's rule"? Heh. Most of those interviews weren't scripted either, just everyone knew that it's not like it would even make it to print if they don't say what's expected of them. So what makes anyone think that when Ballmer's personal blogger entered someone's office anything fundamentally different happened?
Briefly, take your infos from less biased sources.
More like if parents actually had time for the kid. Now I know that an anecdote isn't exactly data, but let me tell you how it worked for me.
I learned to read and write long before I got to school, because my grandma took the time to teach me that, and to make it interesting. I can't remember much from that age (she started with it when I was 2-3 years old), but from what I'm told it involved pictures of animals whose name started with that letter, and stuff like that. Kids are pretty much pre-programmed to hang around and learn from a parent or, in this case, substitute parent, so playing some game with letters with grandma and getting lots of attention, hey, it must have been fun times.
I already had basic understanding skills in English and French by the age of 7. No, I couldn't have written Les Miserables, but it was a start, you know? Grandma is again responsible for French, using some Pif comics as material. Kids like to be told stories, you know? _Illustrated_ stories with a cat and a dog doing mean things to each other? You tell me if that doesn't sound like fun. Plus, again, hey, I was getting lots of attention from grandma. Mom and her English language tapes are responsible for English, but again, some time doing it together was involved. (It worked too. I think I'm doing decently in English, wouldn't you say?)
Incidentally, in school, I have grandma to thank for another piece of wisdom, which strangely enough the school didn't teach me. School told me to just keep reading something again and again until it's memorized. Except at some point you feel like your head is numb, and keeping at it any longer isn't getting you any further. It just gets you more frustrated. I can see how lots of kids just concluded that learning is boring, and gave up. Grandma gave me this little piece of advice: so take a 10 second break. Nowadays I know that that's just enough to flush the brain's shortest term buffer. Why couldn't school teach me that? She also helped check my homework and stuff.
At some point, you know, a kid gets to ask stuff like "why is the sky blue?" My parents, bless their nerdy souls, gave me some physics books. You'd be surprised how I could accept the real explanation just as well as other kids accept the fairy tale versions. The whole family, all the way to the great grandma, also were always available to talk about it, which is always a plus. In retrospect, it might have been a tad boring to listen to a kid ranting and raving about a transformer, but someone or another always had time for that. I should be thankful.
Dad also helped provide some maths knowledge needed there, such as teaching me to do a derivative, and how to get there by way of really small delta X... in elementary school. It helped with, for example, understanding mechanics early.
Computers... ok, now for that one I didn't need any special encouragement. It was experimenting with something and seeing some results, which is fun. Still, in retrospect, it wasn't as much spontaneous interest in programming, as Dad showing me how some small BASIC programs are entered and run. I was pretty quick to get interested from there. At some point, basic was kinda slow, so Dad gave me the CPU instruction set manuals and a very quick introduction to Assembly. And to translating it all to hex by hand, because the old ZX-81 had 1k memory total, and an assembler just didn't fit in there. It would be another half a decade until I understood _why_ assembly is faster than BASIC, or how does the computer understand either of them, but it got me happily coding away anyway.
By contrast, the things I was the _least_ interested in was the stuff that just came pretty much by royal decree, so to speak. (Not meaning actually from a king, but from any authority figure, parents included.)
So exactly what are you going to solve by just turning off the TV? "Young man, go to your room and don't come out until you've done your homework." Damn, if that had been all the parent input and attention I got, I'd probably be w
Well, noone denies that better tools would increase productivity. That much is obvious. And, yes, as I was saying before, the interest exists, so I'm not surprised that IBM would be interested. Everyone else is.
:)
The only question is what would be a better tool. So far noone managed to come up with something visual that actually works better. So far all those visual tools worked worse.
So far the tools that _do_ work are more along the lines of doing the clerical work for you. E.g., that you can CTRL-click in Eclipse and instantly see what that called function does. Or that you can CTRL-space and see all the method names starting with "get", instead of having to manually grep the file. It's stuff that saves time by elliminating the chores, not stuff that puts pretty management-ready graphics on it.
And to address your point about pretty 3D animations: it doesn't scale. Watching the flow go slowly around a loop is ok for a 10 line piece of code, but it's a nightmare for a 10,000,000 line program. Trying to follow that going around in 3D would be like trying to see what every single person in New York is doing.
It also solves the awfully wrong problem. The problem _isn't_ seeing that that one is a loop. The problem is understanding what all the other called functions do, and who else calls this function. E.g., if I see someone else's program send a "MyCustomGUIEvent", who's listening for it and what do _they_ do? In detail. Does one of them set some global variable and could be responsible for the race condition we're having? What other piece of program thought they'd take a nasty shortcut and call this unrelated function just for the side-effects?
The problem with maintenance is that basically it's like trying to see the Sixtine Chapel through a cardboard tube that lets you see a square inch at a time. You can see very well that, say, that's a fingernail, but what's the bigger scene there. What are the implications of changing that finger to be bent instead of straight? Would it ruin the whole scene? _That_ is the problem.
What's _really_ missing is the _big_ picture, not cutesy representations of what the current function does. The problem isn't telling that a "for" is a loop, and frankly anyone who needs cutesy animations to realize it's a loop can go back to MacDonalds. What's missing is all that other stuff that this loop triggers, some of it burried under 20 levels of calls within calls.
And if you need to see the exact flow, including going into whatever functions within functions are called there, we already have a tool for that: it's called a debugger. It does just that. It's slow and tedious, but it already does just that. And watching it in 3D would make it no less slow and tedious, since it restricts your scope even more.
But other than that, don't let me stop you. If you honestly think that watching some animated toon walking around the loop in, say, 10 seconds is better than reading the "for" in a fraction of a second, sure, go ahead and try. Several others have already tried and failed, but, hey, who knows? Maybe you're the one who gets it right
Frankly, I fail to see what the fundamental problem is. Those people just chose to communicate with people they have nothing in common with, or whose personality they don't match. The same would have happened IRL or on IRC or whatever.
E.g., I've had a RL friend who is, sad to say, an OCPD case. His world has no shades between perfect and crap. E.g., he was proud for example of saving and reloading before _each_ _move_ in turn based strategy game, until he got the perfect result. Not because he actually needed that to win, but because his victory simply _had_ to be perfect. Anyone playing otherwise was doing a crap job in his book. E.g., he quit games just because they were too large to be sure he fully explored, and he never knew if he had found every single chest. That was a requirement in his mind.
It went ok in person, but it went downhill _fast_ when I moved away and we switched to emails. His view of the world had no shades of grey between answering every single point (including filler or rhetorical question) in an email, and basically ignoring it. If I said something like "you know how it goes", he actually had to answer that in detail, and make it clear whether he knew how it goes or not, and how much. Unfortunately he expected the same from me. If he said that his new job pays well and isn't too far from home, and I only commented about the pay, that was for him a major faux pas: he actually expected a whole treatise about the pros and cons of travelling a longer distance. So he grew discontent very fast over my not answering half the sentences in his email in detail, and that was the end of it.
E.g., I had a co-worker who was a gamer, and liked to talk about games. It looks like the perfect match, since I'm a gamer too, and I like to talk about games too. Unfortunately, in his case "games" meant exclusively "CounterStrike" and most of the time the same map, and doing the same things over and over again, because that's what got him the most points. So every day he'd tell me how he cleverly climbed the same bloody ladder, dropped down the same bloody vent, crawled through the same bloody tunnel, and 50% of the times shot some guy crouching in the same bloody corner. Oh, it was interesting to hear it the first time. But after a month it was quite literally less fun than root canal or watching paint dry. But by now, since I had already made the mistake of being the only one who listened to him, he was coming to me like a lost puppy every day, and resisted any diplomatic hints that I'm not interested. (And trust me, my "diplomacy" isn't very subtle.) I had to pretty much flip out at him to get him to stop, and that was the end of that.
E.g., "chatty". Heh. You'll have to meet grandma IRL some day. In her view of the world, shutting up ranks up there as the greatest callamity that could befall anyone. If two people are in the same room, or for that matter anywhere in the same neighbourhood, it's pretty much an axiom that they'll spend their time talking to each other. It doesn't matter about what topic, the purpose is to talk, topics or information are entirely irrelevant details there. I can just see her "twitting about twitter", or discussing dinner or commercials, if that was what it took to get a conversation. It has nothing to do with being a "newb". That's just her personality type. _Extreme_ extrovert.
So basically, heh, so why is this a technology or online issue anyway? People are people. The Internet may allow some extremely timid, but socially inept, people to make more conversation than IRL, but then again it won't be any different from befriending them IRL. I can't see how's it any different if the chat is over Twitter than in person or over ICQ.
In any case, just like IRL, you end up with people whose interests don't match yours, and whose personality doesn't match yours. And you have to prune the set a bit, and avoid or get rid of the people you're not interested in. I don't know what ever gave anyone the idea that they can just add lots of random people to their friends list, and expect it to work perfectly just like that. I mean, shouldn't it be common sense that it won't?