Being completely forbidden by your manager, or the client, from doing it the faster, cheaper, and simpler way in favor of some approach they're more familiar with, and having to work around the crazy in-house architecture they've already deployed and lack willingness or political capital to throw out.
No, they don't. For many low end computers, the clock chip is quite inexpensive, and they're under pretty harsh thermal conditions (dependent on layout, airflow, and heat from the CPU or other energy devouring components. The quartz crystal on your wrist doesn't experience anything like those thermal variations: this is why most computers are expected to synchronize with a master clock, such as an NTP service.
Finding a compiler and build system ancient enough to deal with the no longer POSIX compliant unfrastructure for gcc 2.9x compilers is fraught with pain for inexperienced engineers. Rolling your build environments that far back is _awfully_ painful.
I'd very much like to see Mr. Assange's reports of what happened, and the details of the case. As it is, we're in the position of Americans learning about Afghanistan from Fox News: there is no actual information, only sound bites selected for specific political agendas by people thousands of miles away. For example, does Mr. Assange admit or is it clear that he actually had sex with either of these women? Did they know who he was before they got involved with him in any way, or was this just a casual encounter between consenting adults that went very bad?
For examples of sex gone bad, I actually knew a couple experimenting with bondage where the woman "wanted him to scare her", and he got carried away. They had never set a "safe word" because they were young and foolish, and he broke several of her bones. He then faced rape charges for what looks like from the outside like confusion, and stupidity, not malice. These things happen, unfortunately, even to otherwise smart and intelligent people. And not to make excuses for Mr. Assange, whose work is amazing, but he's in Sweden: wouldn't a call girl be safer? And cheaper than this case's fallout?
You are aware that I and plenty of my Linux using acquantances are often forced to lie? Partly by web services that provide alternative, broken content if we admit we are using FireFox in our browser configuration: partly by hiding our deployed Linux base behind various NAT configurations, which helps protect them from scanning: partly by using robust local firewall configurations that block undesired traffic: partly by de-activating all services that can reach towards our machines, including blocking ICMP packets that ping uses: partly because we use local software repositories, mirrored from the primary ones, to provide better traffic localization when bulk installing machines.
Because we don't have to pay license fees for most Linux distributions, this makes the numbers very difficult to track and to verify. And we're under no legal or licensing compulsion to report how many copies we install, except for the commercial, licensed flavors of Linux, and I frankly find the community support for CentOS to be superior to the commercial support for RedHat. So I strongly suspect that this survey is on the low side compared to the actual numbers installed.
Of course it can. Have you ever participated in a "Neighborhood Watch" program. They're wonderful. They cooperate with the police, who help provide training, set guidelines and local patrol routes where the watches are most likely to be helpful. They don't do arrests, they call the police for that. They do report broken street lights, unlocked doors, and blocked streets that would interfere with emergency vehicles: their best weapon against crime is a notebook (and these days, a cellphone with camera). And they have certainly changed policy, for example as more women participate and sensitivity to date rape and harassment has increased. It's a great way to get to know your neighborhood, and your neighbors who actually care about where they live.
Vigilantism is often described as you are saying, as a dirty word to describe citizens enforcing their politics randomly, without coordination or cooperation with governmental authority or the rest of the community. But political acts like vote monitoring, youth activities such as midnight basketball, and other programs are often "vigilantism" at their best, forms of local support that encourage neighborhood support and awareness rather than criminal enforcement. Even wandering around a city with tape measures and a wheel chair and making sure all the restaurants and public buildings are handicapped accessible could be considered vigilantism, and I've certainly participated in that. (Our participant who lives in a wheelchair was exhausted by the nd of the day, but he reported later that we did get quite a few blocked or badly designed doors fixed.)
A computer is typically _designed_ as a Turing machine. But in the physical world, errors happen. And there is plenty of other non-digital timing and thermal drift to provide fascinating, quantum dominated behavior for the more sophisticated systems. The timing differences between digital signal paths, alone, create fascinating and startling effects that lead to very awkward and expensive processes to discover and correct the resulting "errors".
Dear lord, don't start me going on quantum ray induced errors: I've had to explain to people that the cheapest way to make the device that thermally and radiation resistant was to switch from transistors to vacuum tubes.
Because the time wasted in the patent office on such "revolutionary" patents was finally noticed as ridiculously expensive and generating nothing, and put the patent examiners in the unenviable position of having to explain what was wrong with each and every patent. It was too much work for no measurable benefit, besides that of educating some of the applicants in how not to confuse yourself with bad math or poor measurement technique.
Your workplace typically has far, far more bandwidth than your home, and a decent proxy server, and often has better computer screens and video cards than people who pay for home hardware can afford. That can provide a much better porn experience. And many porn sites do not easily support downloading the content, prefering to stream it live: technically sophisticated users can usually save it, but that's often considerable extra work.
I've actually gotten censured for having porn on the screen, even though it was becausae I was tracing spam being sent through a partner's mail server and tracing back the links and weirdness in the web page source code to analyze the company to send court orders to. I was in a discreet location checking the content, and when discreetly confronted about this had the email history and previous complaints to managers from me about the issues. But I was experienced enough to know to keep all that history.
The real conclusion from that is you have to CYA. Not only be innocent, but be able to prove it if you do anything that can be misinterpreted. I was lucky: the person who reported me, and hadn't believed my explanation of the material, learned a valuable lesson. And I got more support for setting up a DMZ for people to use their home laptops in, and keep them off the work network connecton, and to _not_ monitor that.
Yes, let's leave you not knowing and continuing to drive, or forget what checks you've signed, or whether your spouse is allergic to peanuts when you make her a sandwich, and leave you without a chance organize your finances, any insurance, and a living will for a years long debilitating illness.
Then you can get promoted to middle management, where you can cut costs by discarding that "unnecessary testing".
When you're in a crowded place, like a small winter hut with lots of other warm bodies, it's a serious benefit: more sleep means you need less food in winter, and you're better rested for t he day's needs.
People can also lean what sounds are "safe" and what requires "waking up right now": ask anyone who's babysat children for extended periods, or whose partner snores.
Everest is... an exceptional climb, with its cold, snow, constantly shifting icy surfaces, and poor oxygen at altitude. If you've got a robot that can climb that all the way from the base, or even a crew of robots that can climb it with even 10 times the total mass of support gear and expendable supplies like fuel and oxygen that humans use, I'll be quite empressed.
This is sadly true. I have a number of critical paperwork handling work applications which do not work properly on IE 8 or Firefox or any sane modern browser. And I have others that will no longer run on IE 6, so I need 2 desktop environments, and 2 licenses for them, just to push the paperwork.
Yet I still get angry glares from some of our own corporate staff at software presentations when I ask "does it run on Firefox" or "does it run on Linux"? It's especially sad when I ask "which version of Java does it require", because the "write once run everywhere" sometimes breaks down.
The necessary technological change is about as likely. Given the prevalence of "web bugs", the one-pixel transparent images used to track web use by downloading images from a third party web server, and the third party management of cookies used to share data, and all the other technologies, there's no "browser setting" that will fix it all. Even insisting that all web content come from the same hostname when viewing a page breaks down when that server can simply proxy the requests for content to a third party and pass along the connecting IP or session information in the format of the proxied request.
Changing the browsers might help, but the less reputable websites will certainly ignore the rules and use the remaining technologies.
Sadly true. Peter Hagelstein keeps writing about this in Analog, but they kept mislabeling his stories as "science fact" instead of as a continuing novella.
The difference is "we can't hire the best people, because we treat them like disposable light bulbs". They can't publish, and they can't discuss their work with their professional peers in academia or industry.
The "mission" to improve cybersecurity is, in many cases, directly opposed the the "national security" requirement of being able to intercept all communications. This has been played out repeatedly in the restrictions on the export of encryption, the Patriot Act, the prosecution of Phil Zimmerman, and the poorly executed monitoring of attendees at DefCon events.
Until these issues are resolved, it's difficult if not impossible to actually provide security.
Seriously, first step, back up *EVERYTHING*. This includes your programs and your data.
Then see if your ancient programs can be run inside a useful modern emulation enviornment, like "dosbox" or "freedos". That can buy you another 10 years.
It also buys you access to the data without using your ancient hardware: you can read the backups and play with the data much more safely, to try and decode the format. Given the software's age, it's unlikely to be more sophistated than a very simply index and tables that may be decodable with a good editor.
Absolutely. Angle the sail, so that the reflected optical pressure slows its orbit, and it will spiral in towards the Sun quite effectiely, until and unless the pressure suspends it off the Sun's surface without orbital motion (which is pretty darn close and likely to shread the sail), and it will then spiral back out the other way.
Or computerized games instead of books, moving families around and splitting them up instead of having neighborhoods where kids can play with each other might have consequences? Or that decades of teaching to standardized tests and "adjusting" the tests to assure increasing scores might have finally topped out?
There are so many ways to interpret such results, it's amazing.
The landfills are full. They're overflowing, and it's getting into the groundwater. We're also using much higher amounts of fascinating and previously very expensive toxins such as mercury and chromium in the manufacture of household goods, and creating fascinating and useful toxins such as PCB's (which are mostly outlawed in the US but heavily used in manufacturing in India).
This isn't merely a "recycling to preserve resources" issue, although copper, gold, platinum, and varous rare earths used in transformers have become increasingly expensive and valuable to recycle. It's a poison control issue, and while humanitarian concerns make it wise to consider the fate of those who handle these toxins, it's also important to remember that they grow food we buy in some of these places, and they will _lie_ aobut the toxin levels of what they sell.
Police work being dangerous isn't an excuse: but it does help explain why they're so touchy on duty. And who calls a waiter over to break up a domestic dispute, or serve a warrant on a gun owner?
Slow down. First, I'm known among my circle of technical peers for my excessive honesty about such issues. Second. I didn't say "taking machines". I was referring to the unfortunately common practice of getting the latest, hosttest, most video enabled machine for individual IT engineer use that is aimed at making games run well and wastes quite a lot of money doing so. It's unfortunately common practice.
It's also not isolated to IT: have you looked at the silly high end phones common to the sales staff in large corporations?
It's hard. How well do you or I, as technical people, police ourselves for fraudulent claims to management, lies to clients, or "re-allocating" equipment to give ourselves the hottest desktops in order to play games after hours? Or violate password policies to use the same password everywhere, and use our privileges to reset them to their previous value?
And this is why they don't want photography in public places. For example, when beating suspects with handcuffs on their knuckles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ2cLyblhpc.
Slashdot Mirror
You've left out number 3:
Being completely forbidden by your manager, or the client, from doing it the faster, cheaper, and simpler way in favor of some approach they're more familiar with, and having to work around the crazy in-house architecture they've already deployed and lack willingness or political capital to throw out.
No, they don't. For many low end computers, the clock chip is quite inexpensive, and they're under pretty harsh thermal conditions (dependent on layout, airflow, and heat from the CPU or other energy devouring components. The quartz crystal on your wrist doesn't experience anything like those thermal variations: this is why most computers are expected to synchronize with a master clock, such as an NTP service.
Finding a compiler and build system ancient enough to deal with the no longer POSIX compliant unfrastructure for gcc 2.9x compilers is fraught with pain for inexperienced engineers. Rolling your build environments that far back is _awfully_ painful.
I'd very much like to see Mr. Assange's reports of what happened, and the details of the case. As it is, we're in the position of Americans learning about Afghanistan from Fox News: there is no actual information, only sound bites selected for specific political agendas by people thousands of miles away. For example, does Mr. Assange admit or is it clear that he actually had sex with either of these women? Did they know who he was before they got involved with him in any way, or was this just a casual encounter between consenting adults that went very bad?
For examples of sex gone bad, I actually knew a couple experimenting with bondage where the woman "wanted him to scare her", and he got carried away. They had never set a "safe word" because they were young and foolish, and he broke several of her bones. He then faced rape charges for what looks like from the outside like confusion, and stupidity, not malice. These things happen, unfortunately, even to otherwise smart and intelligent people. And not to make excuses for Mr. Assange, whose work is amazing, but he's in Sweden: wouldn't a call girl be safer? And cheaper than this case's fallout?
Time to switch to "Kingdom of Loathing", everyone?
You are aware that I and plenty of my Linux using acquantances are often forced to lie? Partly by web services that provide alternative, broken content if we admit we are using FireFox in our browser configuration: partly by hiding our deployed Linux base behind various NAT configurations, which helps protect them from scanning: partly by using robust local firewall configurations that block undesired traffic: partly by de-activating all services that can reach towards our machines, including blocking ICMP packets that ping uses: partly because we use local software repositories, mirrored from the primary ones, to provide better traffic localization when bulk installing machines.
Because we don't have to pay license fees for most Linux distributions, this makes the numbers very difficult to track and to verify. And we're under no legal or licensing compulsion to report how many copies we install, except for the commercial, licensed flavors of Linux, and I frankly find the community support for CentOS to be superior to the commercial support for RedHat. So I strongly suspect that this survey is on the low side compared to the actual numbers installed.
Of course it can. Have you ever participated in a "Neighborhood Watch" program. They're wonderful. They cooperate with the police, who help provide training, set guidelines and local patrol routes where the watches are most likely to be helpful. They don't do arrests, they call the police for that. They do report broken street lights, unlocked doors, and blocked streets that would interfere with emergency vehicles: their best weapon against crime is a notebook (and these days, a cellphone with camera). And they have certainly changed policy, for example as more women participate and sensitivity to date rape and harassment has increased. It's a great way to get to know your neighborhood, and your neighbors who actually care about where they live.
Vigilantism is often described as you are saying, as a dirty word to describe citizens enforcing their politics randomly, without coordination or cooperation with governmental authority or the rest of the community. But political acts like vote monitoring, youth activities such as midnight basketball, and other programs are often "vigilantism" at their best, forms of local support that encourage neighborhood support and awareness rather than criminal enforcement. Even wandering around a city with tape measures and a wheel chair and making sure all the restaurants and public buildings are handicapped accessible could be considered vigilantism, and I've certainly participated in that. (Our participant who lives in a wheelchair was exhausted by the nd of the day, but he reported later that we did get quite a few blocked or badly designed doors fixed.)
A computer is typically _designed_ as a Turing machine. But in the physical world, errors happen. And there is plenty of other non-digital timing and thermal drift to provide fascinating, quantum dominated behavior for the more sophisticated systems. The timing differences between digital signal paths, alone, create fascinating and startling effects that lead to very awkward and expensive processes to discover and correct the resulting "errors".
Dear lord, don't start me going on quantum ray induced errors: I've had to explain to people that the cheapest way to make the device that thermally and radiation resistant was to switch from transistors to vacuum tubes.
Because the time wasted in the patent office on such "revolutionary" patents was finally noticed as ridiculously expensive and generating nothing, and put the patent examiners in the unenviable position of having to explain what was wrong with each and every patent. It was too much work for no measurable benefit, besides that of educating some of the applicants in how not to confuse yourself with bad math or poor measurement technique.
Your workplace typically has far, far more bandwidth than your home, and a decent proxy server, and often has better computer screens and video cards than people who pay for home hardware can afford. That can provide a much better porn experience. And many porn sites do not easily support downloading the content, prefering to stream it live: technically sophisticated users can usually save it, but that's often considerable extra work.
I've actually gotten censured for having porn on the screen, even though it was becausae I was tracing spam being sent through a partner's mail server and tracing back the links and weirdness in the web page source code to analyze the company to send court orders to. I was in a discreet location checking the content, and when discreetly confronted about this had the email history and previous complaints to managers from me about the issues. But I was experienced enough to know to keep all that history.
The real conclusion from that is you have to CYA. Not only be innocent, but be able to prove it if you do anything that can be misinterpreted. I was lucky: the person who reported me, and hadn't believed my explanation of the material, learned a valuable lesson. And I got more support for setting up a DMZ for people to use their home laptops in, and keep them off the work network connecton, and to _not_ monitor that.
Yes, let's leave you not knowing and continuing to drive, or forget what checks you've signed, or whether your spouse is allergic to peanuts when you make her a sandwich, and leave you without a chance organize your finances, any insurance, and a living will for a years long debilitating illness.
Then you can get promoted to middle management, where you can cut costs by discarding that "unnecessary testing".
When you're in a crowded place, like a small winter hut with lots of other warm bodies, it's a serious benefit: more sleep means you need less food in winter, and you're better rested for t he day's needs.
People can also lean what sounds are "safe" and what requires "waking up right now": ask anyone who's babysat children for extended periods, or whose partner snores.
Everest is... an exceptional climb, with its cold, snow, constantly shifting icy surfaces, and poor oxygen at altitude. If you've got a robot that can climb that all the way from the base, or even a crew of robots that can climb it with even 10 times the total mass of support gear and expendable supplies like fuel and oxygen that humans use, I'll be quite empressed.
This is sadly true. I have a number of critical paperwork handling work applications which do not work properly on IE 8 or Firefox or any sane modern browser. And I have others that will no longer run on IE 6, so I need 2 desktop environments, and 2 licenses for them, just to push the paperwork.
Yet I still get angry glares from some of our own corporate staff at software presentations when I ask "does it run on Firefox" or "does it run on Linux"? It's especially sad when I ask "which version of Java does it require", because the "write once run everywhere" sometimes breaks down.
The necessary technological change is about as likely. Given the prevalence of "web bugs", the one-pixel transparent images used to track web use by downloading images from a third party web server, and the third party management of cookies used to share data, and all the other technologies, there's no "browser setting" that will fix it all. Even insisting that all web content come from the same hostname when viewing a page breaks down when that server can simply proxy the requests for content to a third party and pass along the connecting IP or session information in the format of the proxied request.
Changing the browsers might help, but the less reputable websites will certainly ignore the rules and use the remaining technologies.
Sadly true. Peter Hagelstein keeps writing about this in Analog, but they kept mislabeling his stories as "science fact" instead of as a continuing novella.
The difference is "we can't hire the best people, because we treat them like disposable light bulbs". They can't publish, and they can't discuss their work with their professional peers in academia or industry.
The "mission" to improve cybersecurity is, in many cases, directly opposed the the "national security" requirement of being able to intercept all communications. This has been played out repeatedly in the restrictions on the export of encryption, the Patriot Act, the prosecution of Phil Zimmerman, and the poorly executed monitoring of attendees at DefCon events.
Until these issues are resolved, it's difficult if not impossible to actually provide security.
Seriously, first step, back up *EVERYTHING*. This includes your programs and your data.
Then see if your ancient programs can be run inside a useful modern emulation enviornment, like "dosbox" or "freedos". That can buy you another 10 years.
It also buys you access to the data without using your ancient hardware: you can read the backups and play with the data much more safely, to try and decode the format. Given the software's age, it's unlikely to be more sophistated than a very simply index and tables that may be decodable with a good editor.
Absolutely. Angle the sail, so that the reflected optical pressure slows its orbit, and it will spiral in towards the Sun quite effectiely, until and unless the pressure suspends it off the Sun's surface without orbital motion (which is pretty darn close and likely to shread the sail), and it will then spiral back out the other way.
Or computerized games instead of books, moving families around and splitting them up instead of having neighborhoods where kids can play with each other might have consequences? Or that decades of teaching to standardized tests and "adjusting" the tests to assure increasing scores might have finally topped out?
There are so many ways to interpret such results, it's amazing.
The landfills are full. They're overflowing, and it's getting into the groundwater. We're also using much higher amounts of fascinating and previously very expensive toxins such as mercury and chromium in the manufacture of household goods, and creating fascinating and useful toxins such as PCB's (which are mostly outlawed in the US but heavily used in manufacturing in India).
This isn't merely a "recycling to preserve resources" issue, although copper, gold, platinum, and varous rare earths used in transformers have become increasingly expensive and valuable to recycle. It's a poison control issue, and while humanitarian concerns make it wise to consider the fate of those who handle these toxins, it's also important to remember that they grow food we buy in some of these places, and they will _lie_ aobut the toxin levels of what they sell.
That's because they wouldn't get good tips?
Police work being dangerous isn't an excuse: but it does help explain why they're so touchy on duty. And who calls a waiter over to break up a domestic dispute, or serve a warrant on a gun owner?
Slow down. First, I'm known among my circle of technical peers for my excessive honesty about such issues. Second. I didn't say "taking machines". I was referring to the unfortunately common practice of getting the latest, hosttest, most video enabled machine for individual IT engineer use that is aimed at making games run well and wastes quite a lot of money doing so. It's unfortunately common practice.
It's also not isolated to IT: have you looked at the silly high end phones common to the sales staff in large corporations?
It's hard. How well do you or I, as technical people, police ourselves for fraudulent claims to management, lies to clients, or "re-allocating" equipment to give ourselves the hottest desktops in order to play games after hours? Or violate password policies to use the same password everywhere, and use our privileges to reset them to their previous value?
And this is why they don't want photography in public places. For example, when beating suspects with handcuffs on their knuckles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ2cLyblhpc.