"Yo yo, man, this President butter is the BOMB man, it's so beautiful, like yellow cake. Margarine is just toxic, it gives me food poisoning. Those trans-fats are a public health issue. I swear, it gives me the runs like salmonella, a real brown out in my pants. I'm in the facility, performing evacuation of my bowels until there's a spillover. Dropping a real dirty bomb, you know what I'm saying?"
I'm told this is ironic because the reason that Huawei got started was because the Chinese did all sorts of experiments with Cisco gear and determined that they couldn't trust them because of all the backdoors they had to accommodate US agencies.
The Chinese needed network gear they could trust, they'd been tearing the Cisco gear down for a while to check them for back doors, so they just went the whole hog and started their own router company.
The main reason that the US *know* that the Huwaei gear has back doors in it is probably because they are the same back doors cloned from the Cisco gear, but with different encryption keys.
The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test. The bidder that won, Transpennine Express, are infamous for having terrible service, half their rolling stock out of order, late trains, cancelled trains, etc.
Yet they were promising more rolling stock, better service, wifi on their trains, coupled with both lower fares, and vastly more profits than the incumbent franchisee. Any school kid could told you that you can't get more, for less. Their bid was just not credible on the surface ; the numbers should have been run three times, with different people doing the calculations.
So why not? Well, you might suspect that the people doing the figuring had some kind of motivation other than doing a good job. Maybe a promise of a big fat payoff.
C# isn't interpreted ; it's compiled to an intermediate language for a virtual machine, and the VM compiles that to native code on the fly. You can also pre-compile it to native code if you desire, but this forgoes certain runtime optimizations possible with the JIT method.
People had the same criticism of VB6, that it was interpreted - even though it used the same compiler as Visual C++. What got it the reputation for sloth were it's runtime libraries, and it's target audience - it's possible to write slow code in any language. Combine immutable String types with an audience of less skilled programmers and you're going to get some really slow programs. But if you did the same things in C, it would be slow too.
You have to release heat. The laws of thermodynamics demand it ; even if you have a fractally complex energy usage system, it has to move outwards, or it will all grind to a halt. So you'd see a large sphere at a temperature somewhere above cosmic background - how far above would depend on the efficiency of their engineering.
The timing may not be important to the server ; it's important to the program that constructs the hardware identifier. I'd imagine that the end result would just be a hash value.
You'd have to lay hands on the original hardware though ; if the differences are non-deterministic you're not going to be able to reproduce the hash of the test results without it. If the test can be varied - ie, if it's a shader program that you can change for each website - then you have to have to record it's output for every scenario possible that you want to fake out. Which means you may as well just steal the guys computer.
Most NICs these days will let you change their MAC address in software.
If this process works by, for example, sending the card an executable shader and examining the output, each site could have it's own program, making it hard to predict what the response for a given card would be, so even if you write an authentication driver that reports whatever you like, you still won't be able to fake it.
The tipping point was Excel 4 though, which had the the ability to export back to Lotus 1-2-3 as well.
This was the point at which people went "Hey, if Excel doesn't work out for us, we have nothing to lose, because we can just go back to Lotus!" ; this perception of risk is the most important barrier to overcome, because middle management will choose the ass-covering option every time.
VBScript isn't an alternative because only IE supports it. TypeScript might be relevant, particularly because as a superset of Javascript, presumably it's easy to pre-process it into plain vanilla Javascript. (quote : "TypeScript compiles to readable, standards-based JavaScript.")
I *hate* writing code in Javascript, precisely because of it's lack of typing and insane OO model. TypeScript sounds like it makes browser programming more accessible to those of us who prefer a more strongly typed language.
In school, Everyone is Special. Everyone gets a prize for participating.
The only prizes I got in school, I damn well worked hard for. I never saw anything in my early years, apart from promotion from a lower class to another, largely because of a lack of the athletic achievement that was essential for our school awards scheme.
Later on, I was the best in school in two out of three of the major sciences, and part of their most successful rowing team ever with trophies from national competitions. Because I studied hard, and trained hard. No-one told us we were special. Once we even got slapped down for skipping out of school in our free periods to go and train.
More investments could have been made in my confidence. I think I would have done better at school, and in life, if people had realised that the reason I was an early underachiever was mostly because I was bored stiff most of the time, and accommodated this instead of just punishing it. The problem being, just as Syndrome says in The Incredibles - "When everyone is super, then no-one will be."
Even children know it - praise that is unearned is worthless. The more you hand it out, the more you devalue the currency.
You generate all these little hits of dopamine. Teachers feel they have to because they are competing with videogames and social networking, which have the same low-investment small-reward mechanics.
And then you grow up, go to work, and become an adult, and employers wonder why their employees can't focus on anything, and constantly goof off on social networks. The smart ones are talking about "gamification" to combat this - turning work tasks into the same low-investment, small-reward mechanic. The problem is that I'm betting the more worthwhile things are not this kind of task. STEM disciplines need extended concentration and focus. Management doesn't - low-investment ("Hey, get back to work!") - small-reward (worker scuttles away from water cooler).
You only need one good teacher to make one good book, and release it under a Creative Commons license though. We're in an era where technology makes this easier than ever before.
For homework questions, how about you just write one, and release it. Even if only a few teachers do this, there should be enough questions on a given topic to keep the students busy for years.
Quants are what happens when good mathematicians turn to the Dark Side. Instead of working on creating value, they are employed inventing ways to hide value.
Given time, your average engineer (I'm not talking about the Asberger's end of the spectrum here) could probably learn how to do a manager's job.
There's no way in hell the average manager could do the average engineers job.
You could swap an average manager out for another average manager and barely notice. If you swap out your engineer, be prepared for your project to stall, crash, and burn, because you just did the equivalent of deleting the libraries folder from your application and expecting the new kid to rewrite it from scratch.
But the manager makes more than the engineer, even though he's more replaceable, because his skillset means he has more capital with the real power in the company - the sociopath making all the strategic decisions.
At Stark Enterprises you have to compete with JARVIS though. Which would pretty much limit your job opportunities to Eye Candy for Tony, or the guy who makes annoying kinetic sculptures for the desk of Pepper Potts.
Yes, he was an idiot. But the offence he was convicted of will place him on the Sex Offenders Register for a minimum of 10 years ; he can basically kiss goodbye to his job, or any job working with minors. He probably won't even be allowed back into a swimming pool, as an "area frequented by children".
See a poster above - outside the USA it's very normal for children of all ages to transport themselves to places. I was catching a bus home from school by the time I was 9.
If this guy was their swimming coach, then he had a perfectly justifiable reason for having their numbers in his phone, even if it was just so he knew which one of his team was texting him to say that she couldn't come to a training session.
Yes, he screwed up. But it doesn't justify the offence he was convicted of, which will place him on the offenders register for a minimum of 10 years, and has therefore completely destroyed his chosen career.
The ruination of a man's life is a hard price to pay for a social faux-pas.
The usual standard for a statistical "proof" is held to be a 95% confidence, or a p value of 0.05 that the hypothesis is wrong.
Using a 99% confidence interval is skewing the numbers away from the usually accepted standard of proof, which makes me suspicious about the motives of the person proposing it.
Until 2010, the NHS had an "Enterprise Wide Agreement" or bulk licensing deal with Microsoft, which covered Office.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation would indicate that the costs of this would run to the order of £100M or thereabouts each year. I think the Document Foundation would wet themselves with glee if you chipped in £5M worth of development effort, each year, to LibreOffice. And I think you'd have a lot of influence over which features got developed.
You could even lowball it for a few years to pay for the inevitable training and support issues you'd have initially.
"The even better part - should your needs grow, Perforce will have their foot in the door, and management will see the benefits of paying them a license fee to reduce risk, even if the geeks tell them they could just migrate to something else."
Slashdot Mirror
In innocent ways as well..
"Yo yo, man, this President butter is the BOMB man, it's so beautiful, like yellow cake. Margarine is just toxic, it gives me food poisoning. Those trans-fats are a public health issue. I swear, it gives me the runs like salmonella, a real brown out in my pants. I'm in the facility, performing evacuation of my bowels until there's a spillover. Dropping a real dirty bomb, you know what I'm saying?"
(selected words from this list
I find it gratifying that in the whole world with internet access, only 7,400 people are nuts enough to have signed the petition on that one.
Probably because they are on a FAT32 file system ; all files are presumed to be executable.
I'm told this is ironic because the reason that Huawei got started was because the Chinese did all sorts of experiments with Cisco gear and determined that they couldn't trust them because of all the backdoors they had to accommodate US agencies.
The Chinese needed network gear they could trust, they'd been tearing the Cisco gear down for a while to check them for back doors, so they just went the whole hog and started their own router company.
The main reason that the US *know* that the Huwaei gear has back doors in it is probably because they are the same back doors cloned from the Cisco gear, but with different encryption keys.
A convenient scapegoat.
The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test. The bidder that won, Transpennine Express, are infamous for having terrible service, half their rolling stock out of order, late trains, cancelled trains, etc.
Yet they were promising more rolling stock, better service, wifi on their trains, coupled with both lower fares, and vastly more profits than the incumbent franchisee. Any school kid could told you that you can't get more, for less. Their bid was just not credible on the surface ; the numbers should have been run three times, with different people doing the calculations.
So why not? Well, you might suspect that the people doing the figuring had some kind of motivation other than doing a good job. Maybe a promise of a big fat payoff.
C# isn't interpreted ; it's compiled to an intermediate language for a virtual machine, and the VM compiles that to native code on the fly. You can also pre-compile it to native code if you desire, but this forgoes certain runtime optimizations possible with the JIT method.
People had the same criticism of VB6, that it was interpreted - even though it used the same compiler as Visual C++. What got it the reputation for sloth were it's runtime libraries, and it's target audience - it's possible to write slow code in any language. Combine immutable String types with an audience of less skilled programmers and you're going to get some really slow programs. But if you did the same things in C, it would be slow too.
You have to release heat. The laws of thermodynamics demand it ; even if you have a fractally complex energy usage system, it has to move outwards, or it will all grind to a halt. So you'd see a large sphere at a temperature somewhere above cosmic background - how far above would depend on the efficiency of their engineering.
I don't know - it's a free / open source mind mapping tool he recommends.
The timing may not be important to the server ; it's important to the program that constructs the hardware identifier. I'd imagine that the end result would just be a hash value.
You'd have to lay hands on the original hardware though ; if the differences are non-deterministic you're not going to be able to reproduce the hash of the test results without it. If the test can be varied - ie, if it's a shader program that you can change for each website - then you have to have to record it's output for every scenario possible that you want to fake out. Which means you may as well just steal the guys computer.
Most NICs these days will let you change their MAC address in software.
If this process works by, for example, sending the card an executable shader and examining the output, each site could have it's own program, making it hard to predict what the response for a given card would be, so even if you write an authentication driver that reports whatever you like, you still won't be able to fake it.
The Apache license is more free in the sense that it permits someone receiving your code to take away that freedom.
The GPL preserves the freedom as the software moves from hand to hand.
The tipping point was Excel 4 though, which had the the ability to export back to Lotus 1-2-3 as well.
This was the point at which people went "Hey, if Excel doesn't work out for us, we have nothing to lose, because we can just go back to Lotus!" ; this perception of risk is the most important barrier to overcome, because middle management will choose the ass-covering option every time.
VBScript isn't an alternative because only IE supports it. TypeScript might be relevant, particularly because as a superset of Javascript, presumably it's easy to pre-process it into plain vanilla Javascript. (quote : "TypeScript compiles to readable, standards-based JavaScript.")
I *hate* writing code in Javascript, precisely because of it's lack of typing and insane OO model. TypeScript sounds like it makes browser programming more accessible to those of us who prefer a more strongly typed language.
Yup, get 'em while they're young.
I blame the western culture of "special".
In school, Everyone is Special. Everyone gets a prize for participating.
The only prizes I got in school, I damn well worked hard for. I never saw anything in my early years, apart from promotion from a lower class to another, largely because of a lack of the athletic achievement that was essential for our school awards scheme.
Later on, I was the best in school in two out of three of the major sciences, and part of their most successful rowing team ever with trophies from national competitions. Because I studied hard, and trained hard. No-one told us we were special. Once we even got slapped down for skipping out of school in our free periods to go and train.
More investments could have been made in my confidence. I think I would have done better at school, and in life, if people had realised that the reason I was an early underachiever was mostly because I was bored stiff most of the time, and accommodated this instead of just punishing it. The problem being, just as Syndrome says in The Incredibles - "When everyone is super, then no-one will be."
Even children know it - praise that is unearned is worthless. The more you hand it out, the more you devalue the currency.
You generate all these little hits of dopamine. Teachers feel they have to because they are competing with videogames and social networking, which have the same low-investment small-reward mechanics.
And then you grow up, go to work, and become an adult, and employers wonder why their employees can't focus on anything, and constantly goof off on social networks. The smart ones are talking about "gamification" to combat this - turning work tasks into the same low-investment, small-reward mechanic. The problem is that I'm betting the more worthwhile things are not this kind of task. STEM disciplines need extended concentration and focus. Management doesn't - low-investment ("Hey, get back to work!") - small-reward (worker scuttles away from water cooler).
You only need one good teacher to make one good book, and release it under a Creative Commons license though. We're in an era where technology makes this easier than ever before.
For homework questions, how about you just write one, and release it. Even if only a few teachers do this, there should be enough questions on a given topic to keep the students busy for years.
Quants are what happens when good mathematicians turn to the Dark Side. Instead of working on creating value, they are employed inventing ways to hide value.
They're terribly paid for what they are.
Given time, your average engineer (I'm not talking about the Asberger's end of the spectrum here) could probably learn how to do a manager's job.
There's no way in hell the average manager could do the average engineers job.
You could swap an average manager out for another average manager and barely notice. If you swap out your engineer, be prepared for your project to stall, crash, and burn, because you just did the equivalent of deleting the libraries folder from your application and expecting the new kid to rewrite it from scratch.
But the manager makes more than the engineer, even though he's more replaceable, because his skillset means he has more capital with the real power in the company - the sociopath making all the strategic decisions.
At Stark Enterprises you have to compete with JARVIS though. Which would pretty much limit your job opportunities to Eye Candy for Tony, or the guy who makes annoying kinetic sculptures for the desk of Pepper Potts.
Yes, he was an idiot. But the offence he was convicted of will place him on the Sex Offenders Register for a minimum of 10 years ; he can basically kiss goodbye to his job, or any job working with minors. He probably won't even be allowed back into a swimming pool, as an "area frequented by children".
His life has been ruined by a social faux-pas.
See a poster above - outside the USA it's very normal for children of all ages to transport themselves to places. I was catching a bus home from school by the time I was 9.
If this guy was their swimming coach, then he had a perfectly justifiable reason for having their numbers in his phone, even if it was just so he knew which one of his team was texting him to say that she couldn't come to a training session.
Yes, he screwed up. But it doesn't justify the offence he was convicted of, which will place him on the offenders register for a minimum of 10 years, and has therefore completely destroyed his chosen career.
The ruination of a man's life is a hard price to pay for a social faux-pas.
The usual standard for a statistical "proof" is held to be a 95% confidence, or a p value of 0.05 that the hypothesis is wrong.
Using a 99% confidence interval is skewing the numbers away from the usually accepted standard of proof, which makes me suspicious about the motives of the person proposing it.
Until 2010, the NHS had an "Enterprise Wide Agreement" or bulk licensing deal with Microsoft, which covered Office.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation would indicate that the costs of this would run to the order of £100M or thereabouts each year. I think the Document Foundation would wet themselves with glee if you chipped in £5M worth of development effort, each year, to LibreOffice. And I think you'd have a lot of influence over which features got developed.
You could even lowball it for a few years to pay for the inevitable training and support issues you'd have initially.
"The even better part - should your needs grow, Perforce will have their foot in the door, and management will see the benefits of paying them a license fee to reduce risk, even if the geeks tell them they could just migrate to something else."
Free with a capital F? Hardly.