North of England is probably bleak for CS jobs because a large section of the industry settled a little further north in Central Scotland to form what has been nicknamed as "Silicon Glen". Lucky for me as I live here.
But jobs in IT such as System Administrators and Software Engineering are more or less like any other form of work. You start at the bottom and you gradually work your way up through the career ladder.
So if you want to become a programmer then a CS degree is a requirement. But my advise would be to do a shared subject degree between CS and something else. Most usually a scientific or engineering based subject that you can use along with your CS knowledge to build your career from.
A good porition of the IQ test are asking problem solving questions for various type of problems. As a professional software engineer I am usually solving similar type problems in designing and writing the applications that I work on.
So in considering the fact there is a low female to male ratio throughout the profession the results of this experiment don't really come as any surprise to myself.
Needless to say I have found that women make better project managers than men. This is because they are better organisers and better at dealing with and managing people than say myself.
A major part of the problem is the cost involved in getting the goverment to setup a biometric ID cards along with a national register database. When it comes to rolling out projects that require huge IT infrastructures the public sector in the UK usually ends up becoming a complete farce. Mostly down to bad management and political infighting.
The UK goverment tells us it's going to cost £100 per citizen while the initial report from the London School of Economics tells us it's going to cost closer to £300 per citizen.
We are also told it's to help fight terrorism. But then fail to explain how and why? But off course the UK goverment have been happy enough to let the Jihadie bastards setup shop and practice recruitment and their "trade skills" in our country.
There is also no good arguements why the ID card is better than the photographic driver's license or passport. It's another form of identification on top of these existing methods and not an integration. So my personal feeling on ID card introduction is that it does not provide any real benefits while having a project that is going to cost the tax payer (of which I am one) a huge amount of money for nothing more than a political mess.
I think religous fundamentalism went out of the Japanese people straight after the end of the second world war. Before the Emperor surrendered the Japanese people believed he was a God king and this belief caused them to fight to the very death rather than surrender. So the Japanese already know the price of fundamentalist religious belief.
Just before doing my usual slashdot this morning I had just given my notice period for my job. Now the reason for me moving on is very simple. Better job, better pay, better future career prospects, everything in general. And the job I am leaving is still a rather good C++ programming job but my new job has more C++ and lots of scientific research.
So the main question I asked myself before deciding to move onto pastures new and green was "Will I be happier?". Off course the answer was yes so I made my choice.
And therefore they should have their lives ruined both finicially and professionally because they did something that about 200 millon other people have done around the world. I personally think that the US should pass a law that says any breach of intellectual property law should see the defendant found guility immediately on accusation. They should then be hung, drawn and quartered. It's painful but doesn't take so long.
But instead of making an example of a single person or group of people they should prosecute the entire population. The end result if successful would be civil war or maybe a third world war. But oh well at least it will remove this vermon that is called the human race from this planet.
There has been a case here in Scotland about the murder of a 16-year old girl and the idea in the local press that it was Marilyn Manson music videos that had insighted the murder. I think if someone is psychological ill enough to become deillusional into believing that a game or a piece of music is telling them to go on a killing rampage then it's the person and not the object of their facination that is clearly at fault.
I suppose this another example of looking to blame something that it is easy to paint a picture of being evil rather than dealing with the real problem. So in this particular case the question I would have to beg is "How did a 17 year old get his hands on a gun to shoot these people with?" and "Why did no one see that he had this kind of fixsation?" and not "How did a 17 year old manage to buy an 18 rated video game?".
I prefer that cameras are about the place. But there is a deeper underlying social problem about why the cameras have proved so popular. People feel safer now that the cameras are there because at the end of the day they have proved to be one of the best ways to secure a proper guilty verdict for a crime that they commited. So justice is properly served.
The underlying problem comes from 2 different directions. The first comes from the problem of that spread by political correctness. The public and the police have to be so careful when dealing with yobs because the way their rights and laws are written you can hardly lay a finger on them. The best you "legally" do is to try and talking them down.
So the "legal" choice for the average member of the public is to be nice to them and understanding. Off course they can stab your guts, rip off your head and skull fuck you. Its got to the point where social services are recommending to judges that prison sentences should not be handed down for violent murder but given community service or fines.
If I tried to defend myself then I run the risk of being sent to prison, having my career runined and sued for endless damages. Personally I no longer care about those consequences because if someone is going to try and kill me then I will kill them straight back. I like to do deal with people based on how they treat other people.
This leads into the second problem which is the profession that was supposed to be law has turned itself into a hippocritcal mob. Basically the law profession has forgotten a mere concept called "The spirit of the law". That is to use the laws that have been passed for the intention for which they were past.
Or more the point that I am making about lawyers is that the law should be there to protect and support the vicitm. Not to be used as an excuse to take the vicitim to court and try destroy his/her life.
Now the specifics of the arguement above are a symptom of a deeper social problem more flowing from political correctness than doing what is actually right. So I come full circle back to the cameras. Politians don't mind this state of play because by using cameras the goverment are seen to be protecting people. They also like political correctness because they don't go offending anyone. So given that they encourage the apathy of the public and that in "protecting" their citizens they are sliping in an Orwellian society.
There is one comforting fact though. If anyone is caught abusing this power they will experience the social equivalent of being hung-drawn and quatered. The tabloid press in this country can be a nice balancing force at times because the people with the power still fear those wanting to publish a dirty story on them.
Well not being the orginal poster of the comment I can't say how many women were in his maths class. As for my maths major the ratio was about 1:1 where as in my C.S. major was about 1:50. This was at Strathclyde Uni about 6 years ago. This pattern was repeated for all the years above and below me through out the time of my degree.
When it comes to man and woman being different there is almost universal agreement, by people who live in the real world (outside of political correctness), on this. However it is just as equally true that men and women are about 99.5% the same - DNA, enviorment, language, learning etc, etc, etc.
Now I could prob write a fair essay about the differences. But I won't, there is code to write, and I'm not playing hit the flamebait today;)
I don't think there is much doubt there are too few female C.S. But I can't quite buy the arguement the article is making by saying that is mostly down to a matter of confidence. If confidence is a major playing factor in woman dropping out of C.S. courses then why does this same logic not apply to other courses?
In writing this I have tried to think up a number of arguements to try and explain this. However all these arguements can easyily be swept aside with simple counter-examples. One of the strongest counter-examples I was thinking about was mathematics where the population split in students is about 1:1 between men and women which shares many of the same logical displines and grounding as C.S.
Basically I can't suggest an arguement that shows that men have a better preposition for computers than woman. Actually I think that many of the talents that are required by a good engineer are more prevalent in woman than in men.
My personal belief is that there is 2 fundamental socialogical problems here.
The first is the stigmatization of computers within society. Just consider the stereotypical image of the "computer nerd". Now considering women pay far more attention to their image than men, then this negative press about computers has stopped many women actually getting into computers. (Remember : Its one thing to be seen working with computers, its something else to get into them).
The second has been the constant low number of women in C.S. as compared to other subjects. Over the past century or so the female ratio in most subjects has increased until it has become 1:1. In short, no particular subject stood out as being more intimidating than the other, when considering this as a reason. However since its creation as a subject C.S. has had a very high male ratio probably for no better reason that it was just boys with toys getting into a field that held a world of fasination.
> If you can't finish something, you'll never succeed at anything.
Leonardo da Vinci was notorious for not finishing off what he had started. It still didn't stop him from being considered one of the greatest minds of all time.
Having designed and written a mp3 decoder and now working on a vorbis decoder I can't say I'm that suprised by vorbis coming out on top.
From a technological standpoint the Vorbis codec has 10 years of audio compression R&D in it since MP3 was invented.
MP3 is a subband DCT based codec using fixed window length. Vorbis is also DCT based but encodes an approximation to the orginal frame's spectral curve and also uses variable length window length.
In using the source from the vorbis library and the decoder specification to help guide its development I have to say it is a real joy to code. The people at xiph.org have really done a first class job and have approached some of the problems of audio codec design with some of the best lateral thinking that I have ever seen.
Believe me! Coming from me that is very rare praise.
Well that publication has changed my whole presception about the origins of open source. By applying the rigid scientific premise of proving their given statement by reiteration of the orginal hypothesis.
WOW! Its pure genius. I mean even Einstein could never have thought it up.
*Bow down worshipping* - were not worthy! were not worthy! were not worthy!:~$ sarcasm off
So if you are ever comfronted with truely great works of stupidity, like this one clearly is, just use sarcasm.
I remember doing anatomy pratical in 1st year medicine with the slow and careful dissection of a human corpse. It now seems so obvious to me not install a motherboard, CPU, HD etc etc. And then put Linux on to it.
Mind you at the time of doing my Anatomy class Linux was just been born. Could have put on MS Windows and invented the 1st human borg.;)
As a software engineer outside of academic channels the publication of computer science papers online has been invalueable to someone myself. Previously if I wanted to lookup work done on a particular subject I would have to try and get access to the university libraries to find the publication I was intrested in.
As more and more journals are appearing online and via searchable databases using a web interface this has allowed me to find the required papers I need for my work much easier.
The result is that I'm able to write better software that has been greatly enriched by the work done by the academics publishing these papers.
I feel I should just point out that any code that I write based on a particular piece of work is properly credited for. I have never liked taking credit for something that someone else has spent a good deal of time and effert on. I'm an engineer not someone in marketing.;-)
Just be careful when u told to click the left mouse button that u get the right mouse. Don't think "Squeebles" will take be poked in the eye very well.;)
A real problem comes when the manager in charge has blagged his way into the position and not got there by excelling in software engineering. Unfortunately most managers that I have encountered belonging to the latter.
Also I have been unfortunate enough to be under such a manager. Basically he tried to micro manage everything we did, did not listen to any of the engineers on his team, told lies to the upper management about our work and shat on us when he got any pressure from above.
Under his "managed engineering process" the quality and amount of work took a huge nose dive.
I quite agree and its an arguement I've been having alot. I live in the UK where there is a culture of greed about property value. Basically the combination of:
- Low intrest rates. - The over investment in property to try and spin a profit. - A culture obsessed with house buying (just look at the nightly TV viewing). - The banks encourging people to lie about their income so they can have a bigger mortgage.
Has forced house prices up by about 17-18% year on year for last 5 years. The intrest rate currently runs at about 4%.
To give you an idea of the difference between house prices between the UK and France I could either buy, for the same money, a very nice rather luxerious villa in France, or a single bedroom flat in some rundown neighbourhood.
Off course it stands to reason that by the laws of econmics this cycle of greed cannot continue and the house market has to coming crashing down. So until then I'm renting. But it doesn't stop constant pressure on me from my family to get a house and me arguing this point.
I was wondering if NASA has actually disclosed the details of what they believe was the malfunction of the Spirit rover?
As someone who has developed backup and recovery systems for embedded systems using vxWorks and flash memory I have my own theory of what could have gone wrong.
There is an intermitant problem that can occur when using a combination of vxWorks 5.5, dosFs2 and flash memory.
The problem goes like this : When file A is written to flash memory formatted with a FAT16 table the FAT table is updated to say which disk clusters are occupied by file A, and hence no longer available as free disk space. So when file B starts writing to the hard disk it checks what clusters are free to write to.
Now a timing problem can occur when a process writing files in a sequential order closes the file handle to A and opens a new handle for B and starts writting to B. The problem exists because the clusters used by A have not been updated to the FAT in time before file B starts writing. The consequence of this is that some of the data belonging to A is overwritten hence breaking the chain. Once this has occurred the FAT and file A cluster chain are corrupt. Once this corruption occurs more corruptions occur with rate of corruption errors growing expotentially until the flash memory can longer function for disk I/O.
Now as the problem only occurs rarely it is very hard to reproduce in a lab. Also as the rate of corruption is expotential then catching the orginal culprit is even harder. I have spent weeks just trying to catch and diagnosis the problem before eventually catching it.
Unfortunately once the flash had started to become corrupt the only way to correct it was to reformat the flash memory.
As for solving the problem, before closing the handle of a file that had been written to flash memory was done an ioctl call would be made to the dosFs2 library to write the size of the file to the disk. Once this solution was is in place the problem never raised its head again.
Can someone answer this for me. The TOS talks about copyright protection on images taken from the 19th century. So even with recent copyright extentions these works are over 100 years old and should now be in the public domain. So why would such a document that has been drafted by legal professional still say that these works are protected by copyright laws and are not in public domain?
And another slight point, even by visiting the web site would put the viewer in breech of the TOS as the images from the site would be cached by both browsers and web cacheses like squid. Hence the images would be saved via HTTP.
In majority of the jobs and software projects that I've ever worked the concept of security and intgerity has never been of much a concern to management. More an afterthought. Now to be clear most of the projects I'm talking about here are embedded network components and servers.
I've always seen it as my responsiblity to try and write code that is secure. At the end of the day I'm trying to protect against such attacks. But even for all my diligence there is going to be some sort of mistake that can be exploited.
And for anyone who thinks for a second that I've been sloppy then just consider the OpenSSL library and the number of security holes found in it over the last year. This has been written by experts in computer security and cryptology, yet exploits and vunerablities are still found in it.
Now add to this managements concern to ship the project early or by certain unreasonable deadline, even if the system is plagued with bugs.
So when the product ships, a security hole exploited in it and the exploit traced back to a certain piece of code. Who should take the fall for it?
I'm sure there a number of projects out there that try to make patching and update a standard process. However I've seen a patching solution that is as the HTTP protocol is to the web. Or in otherwords are there any RFC's, ISO or such that go to making a patching standard.
Slashdot Mirror
North of England is probably bleak for CS jobs because a large section of the industry settled a little further north in Central Scotland to form what has been nicknamed as "Silicon Glen". Lucky for me as I live here.
But jobs in IT such as System Administrators and Software Engineering are more or less like any other form of work. You start at the bottom and you gradually work your way up through the career ladder.
So if you want to become a programmer then a CS degree is a requirement. But my advise would be to do a shared subject degree between CS and something else. Most usually a scientific or engineering based subject that you can use along with your CS knowledge to build your career from.
A good porition of the IQ test are asking problem solving questions for various type of problems. As a professional software engineer I am usually solving similar type problems in designing and writing the applications that I work on.
So in considering the fact there is a low female to male ratio throughout the profession the results of this experiment don't really come as any surprise to myself.
Needless to say I have found that women make better project managers than men. This is because they are better organisers and better at dealing with and managing people than say myself.
So what you are saying is that the tests in used in this experiment were all written by white males on a biased platform?
A major part of the problem is the cost involved in getting the goverment to setup a biometric ID cards along with a national register database. When it comes to rolling out projects that require huge IT infrastructures the public sector in the UK usually ends up becoming a complete farce. Mostly down to bad management and political infighting.
The UK goverment tells us it's going to cost £100 per citizen while the initial report from the London School of Economics tells us it's going to cost closer to £300 per citizen.
We are also told it's to help fight terrorism. But then fail to explain how and why? But off course the UK goverment have been happy enough to let the Jihadie bastards setup shop and practice recruitment and their "trade skills" in our country.
There is also no good arguements why the ID card is better than the photographic driver's license or passport. It's another form of identification on top of these existing methods and not an integration. So my personal feeling on ID card introduction is that it does not provide any real benefits while having a project that is going to cost the tax payer (of which I am one) a huge amount of money for nothing more than a political mess.
I think religous fundamentalism went out of the Japanese people straight after the end of the second world war. Before the Emperor surrendered the Japanese people believed he was a God king and this belief caused them to fight to the very death rather than surrender. So the Japanese already know the price of fundamentalist religious belief.
Just before doing my usual slashdot this morning I had just given my notice period for my job. Now the reason for me moving on is very simple. Better job, better pay, better future career prospects, everything in general. And the job I am leaving is still a rather good C++ programming job but my new job has more C++ and lots of scientific research.
So the main question I asked myself before deciding to move onto pastures new and green was "Will I be happier?". Off course the answer was yes so I made my choice.
And therefore they should have their lives ruined both finicially and professionally because they did something that about 200 millon other people have done around the world. I personally think that the US should pass a law that says any breach of intellectual property law should see the defendant found guility immediately on accusation. They should then be hung, drawn and quartered. It's painful but doesn't take so long.
But instead of making an example of a single person or group of people they should prosecute the entire population. The end result if successful would be civil war or maybe a third world war. But oh well at least it will remove this vermon that is called the human race from this planet.
There has been a case here in Scotland about the murder of a 16-year old girl and the idea in the local press that it was Marilyn Manson music videos that had insighted the murder. I think if someone is psychological ill enough to become deillusional into believing that a game or a piece of music is telling them to go on a killing rampage then it's the person and not the object of their facination that is clearly at fault.
I suppose this another example of looking to blame something that it is easy to paint a picture of being evil rather than dealing with the real problem. So in this particular case the question I would have to beg is "How did a 17 year old get his hands on a gun to shoot these people with?" and "Why did no one see that he had this kind of fixsation?" and not "How did a 17 year old manage to buy an 18 rated video game?".
I prefer that cameras are about the place. But there is a deeper underlying social problem about why the cameras have proved so popular. People feel safer now that the cameras are there because at the end of the day they have proved to be one of the best ways to secure a proper guilty verdict for a crime that they commited. So justice is properly served.
The underlying problem comes from 2 different directions. The first comes from the problem of that spread by political correctness. The public and the police have to be so careful when dealing with yobs because the way their rights and laws are written you can hardly lay a finger on them. The best you "legally" do is to try and talking them down.
So the "legal" choice for the average member of the public is to be nice to them and understanding. Off course they can stab your guts, rip off your head and skull fuck you. Its got to the point where social services are recommending to judges that prison sentences should not be handed down for violent murder but given community service or fines.
If I tried to defend myself then I run the risk of being sent to prison, having my career runined and sued for endless damages. Personally I no longer care about those consequences because if someone is going to try and kill me then I will kill them straight back. I like to do deal with people based on how they treat other people.
This leads into the second problem which is the profession that was supposed to be law has turned itself into a hippocritcal mob. Basically the law profession has forgotten a mere concept called "The spirit of the law". That is to use the laws that have been passed for the intention for which they were past.
Or more the point that I am making about lawyers is that the law should be there to protect and support the vicitm. Not to be used as an excuse to take the vicitim to court and try destroy his/her life.
Now the specifics of the arguement above are a symptom of a deeper social problem more flowing from political correctness than doing what is actually right. So I come full circle back to the cameras. Politians don't mind this state of play because by using cameras the goverment are seen to be protecting people. They also like political correctness because they don't go offending anyone. So given that they encourage the apathy of the public and that in "protecting" their citizens they are sliping in an Orwellian society.
There is one comforting fact though. If anyone is caught abusing this power they will experience the social equivalent of being hung-drawn and quatered. The tabloid press in this country can be a nice balancing force at times because the people with the power still fear those wanting to publish a dirty story on them.
Well not being the orginal poster of the comment I can't say how many women were in his maths class. As for my maths major the ratio was about 1:1 where as in my C.S. major was about 1:50. This was at Strathclyde Uni about 6 years ago. This pattern was repeated for all the years above and below me through out the time of my degree. When it comes to man and woman being different there is almost universal agreement, by people who live in the real world (outside of political correctness), on this. However it is just as equally true that men and women are about 99.5% the same - DNA, enviorment, language, learning etc, etc, etc. Now I could prob write a fair essay about the differences. But I won't, there is code to write, and I'm not playing hit the flamebait today ;)
I don't think there is much doubt there are too few female C.S. But I can't quite buy the arguement the article is making by saying that is mostly down to a matter of confidence. If confidence is a major playing factor in woman dropping out of C.S. courses then why does this same logic not apply to other courses?
In writing this I have tried to think up a number of arguements to try and explain this. However all these arguements can easyily be swept aside with simple counter-examples. One of the strongest counter-examples I was thinking about was mathematics where the population split in students is about 1:1 between men and women which shares many of the same logical displines and grounding as C.S.
Basically I can't suggest an arguement that shows that men have a better preposition for computers than woman. Actually I think that many of the talents that are required by a good engineer are more prevalent in woman than in men.
My personal belief is that there is 2 fundamental socialogical problems here.
The first is the stigmatization of computers within society. Just consider the stereotypical image of the "computer nerd". Now considering women pay far more attention to their image than men, then this negative press about computers has stopped many women actually getting into computers. (Remember : Its one thing to be seen working with computers, its something else to get into them).
The second has been the constant low number of women in C.S. as compared to other subjects. Over the past century or so the female ratio in most subjects has increased until it has become 1:1. In short, no particular subject stood out as being more intimidating than the other, when considering this as a reason. However since its creation as a subject C.S. has had a very high male ratio probably for no better reason that it was just boys with toys getting into a field that held a world of fasination.
> If you can't finish something, you'll never succeed at anything.
Leonardo da Vinci was notorious for not finishing off what he had started. It still didn't stop him from being considered one of the greatest minds of all time.
Having designed and written a mp3 decoder and now working on a vorbis decoder I can't say I'm that suprised by vorbis coming out on top.
From a technological standpoint the Vorbis codec has 10 years of audio compression R&D in it since MP3 was invented.
MP3 is a subband DCT based codec using fixed window length. Vorbis is also DCT based but encodes an approximation to the orginal frame's spectral curve and also uses variable length window length.
In using the source from the vorbis library and the decoder specification to help guide its development I have to say it is a real joy to code. The people at xiph.org have really done a first class job and have approached some of the problems of audio codec design with some of the best lateral thinking that I have ever seen.
Believe me! Coming from me that is very rare praise.
Well that publication has changed my whole presception about the origins of open source. By applying the rigid scientific premise of proving their given statement by reiteration of the orginal hypothesis.
:~$ sarcasm off
WOW! Its pure genius. I mean even Einstein could never have thought it up.
*Bow down worshipping* - were not worthy! were not worthy! were not worthy!
So if you are ever comfronted with truely great works of stupidity, like this one clearly is, just use sarcasm.
I remember doing anatomy pratical in 1st year medicine with the slow and careful dissection of a human corpse. It now seems so obvious to me not install a motherboard, CPU, HD etc etc. And then put Linux on to it.
;)
Mind you at the time of doing my Anatomy class Linux was just been born. Could have put on MS Windows and invented the 1st human borg.
As a software engineer outside of academic channels the publication of computer science papers online has been invalueable to someone myself. Previously if I wanted to lookup work done on a particular subject I would have to try and get access to the university libraries to find the publication I was intrested in.
;-)
As more and more journals are appearing online and via searchable databases using a web interface this has allowed me to find the required papers I need for my work much easier.
The result is that I'm able to write better software that has been greatly enriched by the work done by the academics publishing these papers.
I feel I should just point out that any code that I write based on a particular piece of work is properly credited for. I have never liked taking credit for something that someone else has spent a good deal of time and effert on. I'm an engineer not someone in marketing.
Just be careful when u told to click the left mouse button that u get the right mouse. Don't think "Squeebles" will take be poked in the eye very well. ;)
There is a similar piece over at The Times
A real problem comes when the manager in charge has blagged his way into the position and not got there by excelling in software engineering. Unfortunately most managers that I have encountered belonging to the latter.
Also I have been unfortunate enough to be under such a manager. Basically he tried to micro manage everything we did, did not listen to any of the engineers on his team, told lies to the upper management about our work and shat on us when he got any pressure from above.
Under his "managed engineering process" the quality and amount of work took a huge nose dive.
I quite agree and its an arguement I've been having alot. I live in the UK where there is a culture of greed about property value. Basically the combination of:
- Low intrest rates.
- The over investment in property to try and spin a profit.
- A culture obsessed with house buying (just look at the nightly TV viewing).
- The banks encourging people to lie about their income so they can have a bigger mortgage.
Has forced house prices up by about 17-18% year on year for last 5 years. The intrest rate currently runs at about 4%.
To give you an idea of the difference between house prices between the UK and France I could either buy, for the same money, a very nice rather luxerious villa in France, or a single bedroom flat in some rundown neighbourhood.
Off course it stands to reason that by the laws of econmics this cycle of greed cannot continue and the house market has to coming crashing down. So until then I'm renting. But it doesn't stop constant pressure on me from my family to get a house and me arguing this point.
I was wondering if NASA has actually disclosed the details of what they believe was the malfunction of the Spirit rover?
As someone who has developed backup and recovery systems for embedded systems using vxWorks and flash memory I have my own theory of what could have gone wrong.
There is an intermitant problem that can occur when using a combination of vxWorks 5.5, dosFs2 and flash memory.
The problem goes like this : When file A is written to flash memory formatted with a FAT16 table the FAT table is updated to say which disk clusters are occupied by file A, and hence no longer available as free disk space. So when file B starts writing to the hard disk it checks what clusters are free to write to.
Now a timing problem can occur when a process writing files in a sequential order closes the file handle to A and opens a new handle for B and starts writting to B. The problem exists because the clusters used by A have not been updated to the FAT in time before file B starts writing. The consequence of this is that some of the data belonging to A is overwritten hence breaking the chain. Once this has occurred the FAT and file A cluster chain are corrupt. Once this corruption occurs more corruptions occur with rate of corruption errors growing expotentially until the flash memory can longer function for disk I/O.
Now as the problem only occurs rarely it is very hard to reproduce in a lab. Also as the rate of corruption is expotential then catching the orginal culprit is even harder. I have spent weeks just trying to catch and diagnosis the problem before eventually catching it.
Unfortunately once the flash had started to become corrupt the only way to correct it was to reformat the flash memory.
As for solving the problem, before closing the handle of a file that had been written to flash memory was done an ioctl call would be made to the dosFs2 library to write the size of the file to the disk. Once this solution was is in place the problem never raised its head again.
Can someone answer this for me. The TOS talks about copyright protection on images taken from the 19th century. So even with recent copyright extentions these works are over 100 years old and should now be in the public domain. So why would such a document that has been drafted by legal professional still say that these works are protected by copyright laws and are not in public domain?
And another slight point, even by visiting the web site would put the viewer in breech of the TOS as the images from the site would be cached by both browsers and web cacheses like squid. Hence the images would be saved via HTTP.
Our last P.M. came out with a good saying when his leadership position was challenged from within his own politcal party.
"Put up or shut up"
I think this applies equally as much to SCO. All this ranting and raving and not a scrap of actual proof that has survived scrutiny.
In majority of the jobs and software projects that I've ever worked the concept of security and intgerity has never been of much a concern to management. More an afterthought. Now to be clear most of the projects I'm talking about here are embedded network components and servers.
I've always seen it as my responsiblity to try and write code that is secure. At the end of the day I'm trying to protect against such attacks. But even for all my diligence there is going to be some sort of mistake that can be exploited.
And for anyone who thinks for a second that I've been sloppy then just consider the OpenSSL library and the number of security holes found in it over the last year. This has been written by experts in computer security and cryptology, yet exploits and vunerablities are still found in it.
Now add to this managements concern to ship the project early or by certain unreasonable deadline, even if the system is plagued with bugs.
So when the product ships, a security hole exploited in it and the exploit traced back to a certain piece of code. Who should take the fall for it?
I'm sure there a number of projects out there that try to make patching and update a standard process. However I've seen a patching solution that is as the HTTP protocol is to the web. Or in otherwords are there any RFC's, ISO or such that go to making a patching standard.