I mean, aside from the duplicate items you used to pad the list--Is that what you meant by "bloat?" Your list comes down to "It's bloatware, it doesn't do its job, and I have an issue with the support."
In all seriousness, these are all valid complaints. I suppose you used the appropriate feedback channels to communicate this?
Symantec has seen quite a bit of negative publicity in the past year on slashdot.
I have to wonder how much of it is simply astroturfing by disgruntled former employees? When there's a negative op/ed piece on a "software development and security research" website where none of the SQL even works, I just have to wonder if some no-talent assclown is pissed off because he lost his helpdesk or HR job.
So many people on slashdot seem to have difficulty in dealing with groups of people. I guess it makes it easier to argue.
I was talking to a social sciences professor the other day who believes that people nowadays have a hard time distinguishing between things that exist as an aggregate and things that exist as a gestalt; nor do they understand the appropriate level of complexity at which to analyze things.
Or, in plain english, they think of things like "the government" or "the Church" as giant Transformers that walk around doing things, and they cannot understand when it is appropriate to explain the actions of bodies in terms of the actions of members and when it's appropriate to explain them in terms of the whole.
This is surely correct. At the same time, there are radical differences in the way people with an engineering mentality (programmers, for instance) and people with an synthetic (as opposed to analytical) mentality think about problems. Check out wikipedia articles on top-down and bottom-up analysis, or study the differences in the philosophies of physics and biology (the structure-function paradox). I think it's less an issue of "genius" versus "lesser" minds so much as a gap in understanding, or the ability to understand, certain ways of seeing reality.
Or, the short version, programmers are generally really shitty at modeling real-world phenomena. They all think they're great at it, which is partly why they're so bad. There is almost nothing you can do to convince them otherwise, but again, when they're coding the worm du jour, a security engineer is really glad that they don't understand or care to understand the techniques used to dig them out of the traffic--they're too busy telling everyone it can't be done.
Alas, no. Very, very few members of TMB understand the kind of mathematical traffic analysis that can be used to detect them. As a security professional, I encourage their ignorance (and yours).
Fuck the French and their long-standing anti-Americanism. They should just take their Revolutionary War assistance, Statue of Liberty, legacy as a Cold War ally, and all that other anti-American nonsense and shove it up their collective ass.
Ok. This appears to be a case where what "actually happens" depends upon your point of view. Very weird.
- To the harassed, it may be obnoxious. - To the harasser, it may be a threat.
But to the person making the statements, it's probably not a threat; most Christians I know, even the most obnoxious ones, think they're doing me a genuine favor by telling me about their religion--they believe that I might be damned but it's not something they really want to happen (although, to be sure, there are also plenty of assholes who would love to see themselves justified at everyone else's expense). So, subjectively, it's not a threat, nor can you really percieve it as a threat--simply obnoxious behavior.
As obnoxious, anti-social, and counter-to-society behaviors go, I think you can say a lot against the door-to-door God salesmen...but dressing up the complain in terms of "threat" laws speaks more to the chip on someone's shoulder than how they actually feel. What the CoS is doing to this guy seems pretty threatening and we have plenty of examples from history of Churches doing this (from the Catholic Church persecuting Protestants in Europe all the way to the Unitarians torching convents in New York)--THAT kind of temporal stuff is what we have to worry about, I think. If you can make the case for intimidation or harassment on those terms, fine, but to invoke the law like you're saying is, in my opinion, to twist it.
That's interesting. Out of curiosity, if someone's eternal soul is threatened but they don't believe they even have an eternal soul, can they really say they feel threatened?
I mean, if I came to your door and said "I'm going to blow up your car!" and you didn't own a car, you might think I was a complete asshole and irrational--you might even have a case for me being intimidating and harassing you, but I don't see how it qualifies as a "threat" on its own terms. Maybe there is some subtext I'm missing.
When it comes to issues of intimidation, don't you think there is a difference between "If you don't adhere to my beliefs, I think you're gonna be running through hell with gasoline drawers on" and "If you don't adhere to my beliefs, I'm going to do my best to disenfranchise you politically, interfere with your job, and quite possibly burn your house down?"
These are all things that religious and "non" religious people have done to each other, and it is usually frowned upon whereas anyone making pronouncements about the hereafter is generally accepted.
Everything we do is a tradeoff. Most people would agree that researching space is a better deal than, say, building excessive cars that may allow you to conquer the wilderness while simultaneously killing the wilderness. If you're trying to set up environmentalists as luddites--"They're in the wrong because they don't want us to go into space, so I'll side with people who maybe pollute and do nothing, but at least I have my research"--I just gotta tell you, you're making a huge mistake.
I think typically it's better to engineer your solutions so that fewer solutions are needed downstream, no matter how easy they might be, rather than to rely on them. Which is to say, it probably makes more sense to avoid pollution now than to count on dealing with the effects 10 years down the road being simple.
I must've missed what your job was in a previous post so some of this is going past me. But I can say that I work remotely 3/4 of the time--the rest of the time I bike in. I suppose I'm losing points for supporting the evil bike industry or something, but if your job is an environmental "problem" I don't think you get bonus points for walking:)
1. Complexity. A small change in one part of the system leads to drastic changes in other parts. Even without the doomsday scenarios, the weather is shittier, there are more disease agents, and life is all 'round less pleasant. It's not "destroying the world," it's "Making it worse for ourselves."
2. Look on a USGS map of a coastline. The part where the level is "0" is the average location of the boundary between the ocean and the land. Now go back up to the land until you find some point that says "2." This is two feet above sea level. Where I live this is, in many areas, the difference of several blocks (this knowledge comes in very handy during discussions of "Hurricane coming, where should I move the car?"). So, what was once a residential area is now a swamp. Meaning, now that the weather is nastier, it's going to be even worse.
That's quite a breadth of experience. How many times in your career have you observed someone being told "Yeah, we can't get to that today. Maybe tomorrow," while the IT staff surf the web and bullshit?
In my experience (just 8 years), numerous IT staffs get outsourced because they fail to meet expectations. I figure a lot of this is because IT gets asked to do unreasonable stuff on a shoestring budget. On the other hand, while good IT staff make everything happen, 90% of IT guys in my experience are lazy and incompetent. So now "Bob" from India gets his shot. Sucks, but suprises me not in the least.
Your understanding of how this works is a bit superficial. The Department of Defense, for instance, farms out network security to (among others) CACI, AT&T, McAfee, Symantec, and EDS. Even at NSA or CIA you will find a huge population of contractors, subcontractors, and subs of subs of subs. What you will usually find is a bunch of personnel from different "body shops" under the direction of a Government Serviceperson or military member. It's not "Hey, let's give AT&T access to classified material," more like "Hey, let's let AT&T grow and train security professionals that meet our criteria, and if they can provide some who can pass specific background checks, we'll pay their salaries to do what we tell them." Aside from HR support, AT&T provides no direction and has little or no control over these contractors. The motivation for a corporate entity is due diligence to shareholders versus national security, but I don't see why the same model cannot be applied.
When I say "at will" I mean "without effort".. which is pretty much the standard definition of "at will".
Does that mean that people who stay fat because they don't want the expend the effort to lose weight (diet, workouts, etc.) have no will?
To me "at will" implies that I have the will to accomplish something in the first place...not that it's necessarily going to be easy. Having will is, I think, more about overcoming challenges than not having any.
Wow, I'm surprised both by the depth of the answer and my own ability to understand it:)
So in essence we can get "good enough" approximations. Is there evidence that you can get significantly more explanatory power by trying to take into account all the additonal factors? Is it a problem of observation (data acq) or of processing power?
When I ask this I'm thinking of a note in Brian Goodwin's book How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, in which the author (very gently IMO) takes proponents of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (such as Dawkins) to task for ignoring additional factors that lend theories of evolution vastly increased explanatory power. Is this also going on in physics?
Isn't there some value in trying to apply the methods? Most of the advances in analytical technique in biology in the past 100 years seem to have been applications of techniques that originated in physics and engineering circles.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. What's it like never having made a mistake?
You must produce the most elegant and error-free code imaginable. Can I study at your feet?
Can you elaborate on some of those?
I mean, aside from the duplicate items you used to pad the list--Is that what you meant by "bloat?" Your list comes down to "It's bloatware, it doesn't do its job, and I have an issue with the support."
In all seriousness, these are all valid complaints. I suppose you used the appropriate feedback channels to communicate this?
Symantec has seen quite a bit of negative publicity in the past year on slashdot.
I have to wonder how much of it is simply astroturfing by disgruntled former employees? When there's a negative op/ed piece on a "software development and security research" website where none of the SQL even works, I just have to wonder if some no-talent assclown is pissed off because he lost his helpdesk or HR job.
So many people on slashdot seem to have difficulty in dealing with groups of people. I guess it makes it easier to argue.
I was talking to a social sciences professor the other day who believes that people nowadays have a hard time distinguishing between things that exist as an aggregate and things that exist as a gestalt; nor do they understand the appropriate level of complexity at which to analyze things.
Or, in plain english, they think of things like "the government" or "the Church" as giant Transformers that walk around doing things, and they cannot understand when it is appropriate to explain the actions of bodies in terms of the actions of members and when it's appropriate to explain them in terms of the whole.
I just thought you might find this interesting.
This is surely correct. At the same time, there are radical differences in the way people with an engineering mentality (programmers, for instance) and people with an synthetic (as opposed to analytical) mentality think about problems. Check out wikipedia articles on top-down and bottom-up analysis, or study the differences in the philosophies of physics and biology (the structure-function paradox). I think it's less an issue of "genius" versus "lesser" minds so much as a gap in understanding, or the ability to understand, certain ways of seeing reality.
Or, the short version, programmers are generally really shitty at modeling real-world phenomena. They all think they're great at it, which is partly why they're so bad. There is almost nothing you can do to convince them otherwise, but again, when they're coding the worm du jour, a security engineer is really glad that they don't understand or care to understand the techniques used to dig them out of the traffic--they're too busy telling everyone it can't be done.
Alas, no. Very, very few members of TMB understand the kind of mathematical traffic analysis that can be used to detect them. As a security professional, I encourage their ignorance (and yours).
I can't understand how everyone else can't despise how ubiquitous the ipod has become.
Totally. Hating something because it's popular makes perfect sense.
Fuck the French and their long-standing anti-Americanism. They should just take their Revolutionary War assistance, Statue of Liberty, legacy as a Cold War ally, and all that other anti-American nonsense and shove it up their collective ass.
Ok. This appears to be a case where what "actually happens" depends upon your point of view. Very weird.
- To the harassed, it may be obnoxious.
- To the harasser, it may be a threat.
But to the person making the statements, it's probably not a threat; most Christians I know, even the most obnoxious ones, think they're doing me a genuine favor by telling me about their religion--they believe that I might be damned but it's not something they really want to happen (although, to be sure, there are also plenty of assholes who would love to see themselves justified at everyone else's expense). So, subjectively, it's not a threat, nor can you really percieve it as a threat--simply obnoxious behavior.
As obnoxious, anti-social, and counter-to-society behaviors go, I think you can say a lot against the door-to-door God salesmen...but dressing up the complain in terms of "threat" laws speaks more to the chip on someone's shoulder than how they actually feel. What the CoS is doing to this guy seems pretty threatening and we have plenty of examples from history of Churches doing this (from the Catholic Church persecuting Protestants in Europe all the way to the Unitarians torching convents in New York)--THAT kind of temporal stuff is what we have to worry about, I think. If you can make the case for intimidation or harassment on those terms, fine, but to invoke the law like you're saying is, in my opinion, to twist it.
That's interesting. Out of curiosity, if someone's eternal soul is threatened but they don't believe they even have an eternal soul, can they really say they feel threatened?
I mean, if I came to your door and said "I'm going to blow up your car!" and you didn't own a car, you might think I was a complete asshole and irrational--you might even have a case for me being intimidating and harassing you, but I don't see how it qualifies as a "threat" on its own terms. Maybe there is some subtext I'm missing.
When it comes to issues of intimidation, don't you think there is a difference between "If you don't adhere to my beliefs, I think you're gonna be running through hell with gasoline drawers on" and "If you don't adhere to my beliefs, I'm going to do my best to disenfranchise you politically, interfere with your job, and quite possibly burn your house down?"
These are all things that religious and "non" religious people have done to each other, and it is usually frowned upon whereas anyone making pronouncements about the hereafter is generally accepted.
Everything we do is a tradeoff. Most people would agree that researching space is a better deal than, say, building excessive cars that may allow you to conquer the wilderness while simultaneously killing the wilderness. If you're trying to set up environmentalists as luddites--"They're in the wrong because they don't want us to go into space, so I'll side with people who maybe pollute and do nothing, but at least I have my research"--I just gotta tell you, you're making a huge mistake.
What? ...wait, what? No, really.
I think typically it's better to engineer your solutions so that fewer solutions are needed downstream, no matter how easy they might be, rather than to rely on them. Which is to say, it probably makes more sense to avoid pollution now than to count on dealing with the effects 10 years down the road being simple.
:)
I must've missed what your job was in a previous post so some of this is going past me. But I can say that I work remotely 3/4 of the time--the rest of the time I bike in. I suppose I'm losing points for supporting the evil bike industry or something, but if your job is an environmental "problem" I don't think you get bonus points for walking
Damn those UN flunkies and their "Let's not choke to death on our on industrial feces" bias!
1. Complexity. A small change in one part of the system leads to drastic changes in other parts. Even without the doomsday scenarios, the weather is shittier, there are more disease agents, and life is all 'round less pleasant. It's not "destroying the world," it's "Making it worse for ourselves."
2. Look on a USGS map of a coastline. The part where the level is "0" is the average location of the boundary between the ocean and the land. Now go back up to the land until you find some point that says "2." This is two feet above sea level. Where I live this is, in many areas, the difference of several blocks (this knowledge comes in very handy during discussions of "Hurricane coming, where should I move the car?"). So, what was once a residential area is now a swamp. Meaning, now that the weather is nastier, it's going to be even worse.
There is a difference between "Here is money. Go study global warming," and "Here is some money. Write me a paper that says Global Warming is a myth."
I wonder if you simply cannot appreciate the difference, or if you don't want other people to see it.
In other words, are you dumb, or also paid?
Wait. Did you just boil this down to "The reason the guy didn't go on the trip is because he's stupid?"
You, sir, lose the thread.
Heh. Bravo.
This is a variation on the fact that I was never a popular kid in high school...but the popular kids now mow my lawn.
That's quite a breadth of experience. How many times in your career have you observed someone being told "Yeah, we can't get to that today. Maybe tomorrow," while the IT staff surf the web and bullshit?
In my experience (just 8 years), numerous IT staffs get outsourced because they fail to meet expectations. I figure a lot of this is because IT gets asked to do unreasonable stuff on a shoestring budget. On the other hand, while good IT staff make everything happen, 90% of IT guys in my experience are lazy and incompetent. So now "Bob" from India gets his shot. Sucks, but suprises me not in the least.
Your understanding of how this works is a bit superficial. The Department of Defense, for instance, farms out network security to (among others) CACI, AT&T, McAfee, Symantec, and EDS. Even at NSA or CIA you will find a huge population of contractors, subcontractors, and subs of subs of subs. What you will usually find is a bunch of personnel from different "body shops" under the direction of a Government Serviceperson or military member. It's not "Hey, let's give AT&T access to classified material," more like "Hey, let's let AT&T grow and train security professionals that meet our criteria, and if they can provide some who can pass specific background checks, we'll pay their salaries to do what we tell them." Aside from HR support, AT&T provides no direction and has little or no control over these contractors. The motivation for a corporate entity is due diligence to shareholders versus national security, but I don't see why the same model cannot be applied.
Yes...you could also answer a book on "How to Build a Bicycle" with directions to the nearest bike store.
You might do this if you Just Don't Get It.
When I say "at will" I mean "without effort".. which is pretty much the standard definition of "at will".
Does that mean that people who stay fat because they don't want the expend the effort to lose weight (diet, workouts, etc.) have no will?
To me "at will" implies that I have the will to accomplish something in the first place...not that it's necessarily going to be easy. Having will is, I think, more about overcoming challenges than not having any.
Wow, I'm surprised both by the depth of the answer and my own ability to understand it :)
So in essence we can get "good enough" approximations. Is there evidence that you can get significantly more explanatory power by trying to take into account all the additonal factors? Is it a problem of observation (data acq) or of processing power?
When I ask this I'm thinking of a note in Brian Goodwin's book How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, in which the author (very gently IMO) takes proponents of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (such as Dawkins) to task for ignoring additional factors that lend theories of evolution vastly increased explanatory power. Is this also going on in physics?
Isn't there some value in trying to apply the methods? Most of the advances in analytical technique in biology in the past 100 years seem to have been applications of techniques that originated in physics and engineering circles.