I can see these for line-of-sight air-path or even in-space/on-the-moon mirrors for laser or other mono-frequency communication methods.
If you can make a cheap mirror, can you make a cheap narrow-band filter in these frequencies? I might want to have a room that blocks all frequencies "from DC to daylight and beyond" EXCEPT for a particular frequency that I use to communicate with the outside world with.
By the way, you don't need lasers for effective mono-frequency communication. Imagine Boy Scouts hiking up a mountain with 10 flashlights each with a different color filter on it. They can use "flash light Morse Code" to have 10 simultaneous conversations with another similarly-equipped group of Boy Scouts hiking up another trail (within line-of-sight of course) without interfering with each other as long as the Boy Scouts at the receiving end can tell the colors apart, either with the naked eye or, if they are color-blind, with the aid of an instrument such as a filter that blocks all light not of the desired color. Now extend this to using very-narrow-band-pass filters, tight-beam optics to create low-spread light beam (not as good as a laser, but it would work over reasonably short distances), and sophisticated sensing equipment to account for the signal loss, and you can probably have hundreds if not thousands of different light frequencies, with the transmitters all bundled together in a single location and the receivers all bundled together in a single location.
Even a typical burglary of an upper-middle-class home with $5000 in jewelry pays several thousand percent if you don't factor in the thief's time* and if the thief is never caught**:
* Gross from sale of stolen jewelry on the black market: $500 (or more) * Cost attributable to getaway car, fuel, and driving to/from the meetup with your fence: Under $30.
That's well over a 1650% return right there.
* Assume the thief doesn't value his time, which is likely a valid assumption on our part ** Assume the thief naively believes the risk of getting caught is negligible, which is likely a valid assumption on our part
A major difference between malware and burglary is the risk of serving jail time or paying heavy fines for malware really is close to zero, at least for now. Sigh.
The first studies that showed "password" "0000" "1234" etc. were among the most-common passwords/PINs was published so long ago that I don't remember when it was.
Studies since then and even recent ones keep showing similar results.
PS: It's time for me to change my/. password. I'm trying to decide between passw0rd and 1248, any advice?
1) Keep redundant hardware examples around and make sure your backups are copied to new media frequently enough that you don't lose data,
or, as some have already suggested without saying these exact words:
2) give it up. That is, plan for the development environment to change out from under you.
In the simplest cases, such as running a 16-bit DOS application you wrote in 1990, it may be as simple as finding a modern-ish computer than can boot with an error-free copy of your 1990 DOS 4.0 + Borland Turbo C development environment hard disk and hope that the newfangled UEFI and post-80486-chip and modern chipsets doesn't break your code. Bonus points if your code didn't use any Borland-specific, DOS-specific, or hardware-specific extensions or libraries so it can compile under any modern C compiler on any machine.
Sometimes upper management knows that the combined goals of being on time, on budget, and on quality can't be met, they know the project will fail, they don't really care which way it will fail and they certainly don't want to be seen as "taking ownership" of a doomed project when they can plausibly claim "that was Bob's (the project manager's) project," and they will ignore any information the project manager gives them and just smile a fake smile, and say, perhaps not in so many words, "that's your problem, and your neck on the line if any of these 3 goals are not met. I'll miss your good humor at the next company Christmas party."
In short, you are right on one point: SOMEONE must choose between quality and cost if a deadline is fixed. You are incorrect that the person who realizes there is a problem can always go to management and have them make the decision. Sometimes that decision is forced on the project manager (who may or may not be "in management" in HR terminology) because the higher-ups know the project is doomed, they know who the fall guy will be, and they don't want to be seen doing anything that will cause their careers to be affected. Sigh.
And for god's sake, stop whining about "impossible deadlines." Learn that if date is inflexible, scope and quality are the two metrics that must flex - and learn how to put that decision in front of your managers. Bonus points if you can demonstrate for them the financial impacts of those tradeoffs to assist in their decision making.
Of course, sometimes a deadline really is impossible: Upper management may know good and well that the project will fail, but they've made the decision that it's better in the long run for the company to keep funding it past [some magic date] than to kill it now.
I once knew of a company that had a 9- or 10-figure project that they knew would fail well before it shipped. It would have saved a lot of money in the very short term just to pull the plug. But they had contractual and/or customer-relationship-face-saving-type obligations to actually ship it. So they funded it until it was (barely) ship-worthy. I don't know if any customers bought it (if they did, it was probably due to their own contractual or face-saving obligations) but for all practical purposes it was DOA and anyone who was involved in the project knew it was "not DOA in name only" well before the project was officially deemed "completed and shipped."
There are also cases - rare I hope - when upper management knows the stated quality/deadline/cost goals can't all be met, they don't care which one fails, and they don't care whose careers are killed in the process as long as it's not their own. In such cases the project manager (who is not upper management) is almost certainly going to be the main "fall guy." In some cases, upper management may be deliberately sitting back and watching the project fail so they can disband that part of the organization and lay everyone (except maybe a few cherry-picked individuals) off rather than having to go through a company-wide layoff and all of the regulatory compliance that this entails.
Don't be standing too close on the outside either. The emotional impact of the your friend's and soon-to-be-former co-worker's careers go SPLAT is no fun either.
I know this doesn't answer your question, but you, and for that matter everyone, should prepare for being caught in a career-derailing recession/squeeze/bubble/whatever while at the same time doing what you need to reach your personal career goals.
Yes, you should be asking your peers (us) "what mistakes should I avoid" and "what looks promising" but you shouldn't neglect the questions of "what will I do if I get squeezed out and am forced into a low-end job for several years and when the economy does recover I basically have to start over with entry-level tech wages? Will I have to sell the house? Will my kids have to go to community college? etc. etc."
One way - perhaps the best way - to prepare for the worst is to live below your means as a lifestyle choice. This is a very realistic option for almost everyone employed full-time in a technical field in the United States. If you don't have an emergency fund of 1-3 months of current living expenses, aggressively save until you do. Then set aside enough extra each month so you have enough cash on hand to last 9-12 months on an "austerity budget" plus enough cash on hand to do a proper job-search and/or get re-trained. The 9-12 month cushion is over and above paying your bills and credit cards on time and contributing a responsible amount towards your retirement and your kids' college fund. Raise your kids so they won't be emotionally burdened if you have to move to a smaller house/cheaper neighborhood/give up cable TV/etc. or if you have to work 2 jobs for awhile. You get the idea.
People who, due to their own shortcomings (such as being heavily distracted by women who are behaving professionally, or inappropriately flirting with women on the job) can't work well with others might be better off in an isolated environment.
With "non-superstars" who could succeed in a variety of careers or for that matter multi-talented "superstars," this is easy: They just need to pick a job or career where they don't have to interact with people or groups that interfere with their productivity or provide an environment in which they will behave unprofessionally, and society doesn't lose much in the process.
With "single-talent superstars," and for that matter people of average talent in one area and practically zero hope of succeeding in any other career path, this becomes a problem:
If we tell a person who is extremely talented in a particular line of work (or of average talent in one line of work but totally untalented at anything else) "sorry, because you can't get along with [women/gays/whatever] there is no good way for you to do your job, pick a different job or a different career," then society loses out on the skills and talents that this person has to offer and/or he would likely wind up on the welfare rolls because he couldn't find a job he could succeed at.
Having said that, the right choice for society may very well to say "we'll accept the loss, go find yourself another job" because the social costs of endorsing "bad behavior" is just too much. But we, as a society, need to make this decision eyes-wide-open. If we just give superstars a free pass on social norms without thinking about it or if we give the person who "can't get any other type of job" a free pass for bad behavior in the workplace, or if we summarily tell them "get lost" without being aware of the costs to society, then it can lead to knee-jerk decisions with possibly undesired consequences.
In short: Some people ARE special, and when the mis-behave we as a society need to decide if it's in everyone's best interest to treat them as "special" or to treat them the same as everyone else. Whichever choice we make, there will be a social cost.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed.
Excess use of pretty colors is frequently a sign of bad design.
Note - I didn't visit the site so I'm not saying that this site has a problem with excess use of pretty colors. I'm just saying that "apart from pretty colors" shouldn't imply that using pretty colors is always a good idea.
Oh wait, that me the dragon was talking about right before I managed to get away. Forgive me for mis-remembering, it was a very busy and not-very-pleasant day.
You have exceeded the limits of my universal translator, and that's even after I installed the Yodaspeak and Tamarian-metaphor-interpretation modules (side-note: the latter is huge, it has to incorporate the entirety of the Tamarian race).
Then translator did make this out though:
"Mod parent post down"
"#UNCLEARCONTEXT# Operating System"
"#UNCLEARMEANING# Possible reference to poster making many recent repeated arguments related to either the current topic of discussion, BSDI, or both, and a possible relationship between the current topic of discussion and BSDI"
"#SPECULATIONCONTINGENTONPREVIOUSUNCLEARTRANSLATION# Possible insult related to the possible many recent repeated arguments mentioned above"
If you will kindly let me know what additional modules I need to install in my universal translator, I will be able to understand you better. Thank you.
Maybe, but you'll have to have an awfully attractive proposal and back it with heavyweight talent that already had a good reputation for delivering the goods.
For example, if a major video card vendor went belly-up for reasons not related to their tech (i.e. for plain old poor business practices) and their best coders banded together and started a kickstarter with a goal of $5B above and beyond the $1B they were personally tossing into the pot, they'd get my attention. But then again, they probably would be looking for traditional venture capital funding rather than kickstarter-type funding.
Because in 10 years, I can't be sure that a "hack-resistant" car lock on the 2015 car buy today will be any stronger than these garage-door openers are now.
If someone says that a bug trashes an application so badly that the "only" way to fix it is reinstalling the program, they are usually mistaken, at least for programs and OSes that don't rely on signed code or similar mechanisms that thwart partial repairs.
I see this bug has a fix. If it did not, you could probably make your own fix by doing a before-and-after comparison of key files and key regristry/system settings, then publish your results.
Slashdot Mirror
They want their bytecode back.
There's no known fix at the moment, aside from avoiding insecure Wi-Fi networks or switching phones.
In other words, there are at least two known fixes.
"Dear Samsung, I am returning my phone and buying another brand because...."
I can see these for line-of-sight air-path or even in-space/on-the-moon mirrors for laser or other mono-frequency communication methods.
If you can make a cheap mirror, can you make a cheap narrow-band filter in these frequencies? I might want to have a room that blocks all frequencies "from DC to daylight and beyond" EXCEPT for a particular frequency that I use to communicate with the outside world with.
By the way, you don't need lasers for effective mono-frequency communication. Imagine Boy Scouts hiking up a mountain with 10 flashlights each with a different color filter on it. They can use "flash light Morse Code" to have 10 simultaneous conversations with another similarly-equipped group of Boy Scouts hiking up another trail (within line-of-sight of course) without interfering with each other as long as the Boy Scouts at the receiving end can tell the colors apart, either with the naked eye or, if they are color-blind, with the aid of an instrument such as a filter that blocks all light not of the desired color. Now extend this to using very-narrow-band-pass filters, tight-beam optics to create low-spread light beam (not as good as a laser, but it would work over reasonably short distances), and sophisticated sensing equipment to account for the signal loss, and you can probably have hundreds if not thousands of different light frequencies, with the transmitters all bundled together in a single location and the receivers all bundled together in a single location.
If it didn't, people wouldn't do it.
Even a typical burglary of an upper-middle-class home with $5000 in jewelry pays several thousand percent if you don't factor in the thief's time* and if the thief is never caught**:
* Gross from sale of stolen jewelry on the black market: $500 (or more)
* Cost attributable to getaway car, fuel, and driving to/from the meetup with your fence: Under $30.
That's well over a 1650% return right there.
* Assume the thief doesn't value his time, which is likely a valid assumption on our part
** Assume the thief naively believes the risk of getting caught is negligible, which is likely a valid assumption on our part
A major difference between malware and burglary is the risk of serving jail time or paying heavy fines for malware really is close to zero, at least for now. Sigh.
The first studies that showed "password" "0000" "1234" etc. were among the most-common passwords/PINs was published so long ago that I don't remember when it was.
Studies since then and even recent ones keep showing similar results.
PS: It's time for me to change my /. password. I'm trying to decide between passw0rd and 1248, any advice?
1) Keep redundant hardware examples around and make sure your backups are copied to new media frequently enough that you don't lose data,
or, as some have already suggested without saying these exact words:
2) give it up. That is, plan for the development environment to change out from under you.
In the simplest cases, such as running a 16-bit DOS application you wrote in 1990, it may be as simple as finding a modern-ish computer than can boot with an error-free copy of your 1990 DOS 4.0 + Borland Turbo C development environment hard disk and hope that the newfangled UEFI and post-80486-chip and modern chipsets doesn't break your code. Bonus points if your code didn't use any Borland-specific, DOS-specific, or hardware-specific extensions or libraries so it can compile under any modern C compiler on any machine.
connection is provided contingent to using THIER router.
Wait, is that even legal?
I should have been more clearer:
Sometimes upper management knows that the combined goals of being on time, on budget, and on quality can't be met, they know the project will fail, they don't really care which way it will fail and they certainly don't want to be seen as "taking ownership" of a doomed project when they can plausibly claim "that was Bob's (the project manager's) project," and they will ignore any information the project manager gives them and just smile a fake smile, and say, perhaps not in so many words, "that's your problem, and your neck on the line if any of these 3 goals are not met. I'll miss your good humor at the next company Christmas party."
In short, you are right on one point: SOMEONE must choose between quality and cost if a deadline is fixed. You are incorrect that the person who realizes there is a problem can always go to management and have them make the decision. Sometimes that decision is forced on the project manager (who may or may not be "in management" in HR terminology) because the higher-ups know the project is doomed, they know who the fall guy will be, and they don't want to be seen doing anything that will cause their careers to be affected. Sigh.
And for god's sake, stop whining about "impossible deadlines." Learn that if date is inflexible, scope and quality are the two metrics that must flex - and learn how to put that decision in front of your managers. Bonus points if you can demonstrate for them the financial impacts of those tradeoffs to assist in their decision making.
Of course, sometimes a deadline really is impossible: Upper management may know good and well that the project will fail, but they've made the decision that it's better in the long run for the company to keep funding it past [some magic date] than to kill it now.
I once knew of a company that had a 9- or 10-figure project that they knew would fail well before it shipped. It would have saved a lot of money in the very short term just to pull the plug. But they had contractual and/or customer-relationship-face-saving-type obligations to actually ship it. So they funded it until it was (barely) ship-worthy. I don't know if any customers bought it (if they did, it was probably due to their own contractual or face-saving obligations) but for all practical purposes it was DOA and anyone who was involved in the project knew it was "not DOA in name only" well before the project was officially deemed "completed and shipped."
There are also cases - rare I hope - when upper management knows the stated quality/deadline/cost goals can't all be met, they don't care which one fails, and they don't care whose careers are killed in the process as long as it's not their own. In such cases the project manager (who is not upper management) is almost certainly going to be the main "fall guy." In some cases, upper management may be deliberately sitting back and watching the project fail so they can disband that part of the organization and lay everyone (except maybe a few cherry-picked individuals) off rather than having to go through a company-wide layoff and all of the regulatory compliance that this entails.
Don't be inside the bubble when it burst.
Don't be standing too close on the outside either. The emotional impact of the your friend's and soon-to-be-former co-worker's careers go SPLAT is no fun either.
I know this doesn't answer your question, but you, and for that matter everyone, should prepare for being caught in a career-derailing recession/squeeze/bubble/whatever while at the same time doing what you need to reach your personal career goals.
Yes, you should be asking your peers (us) "what mistakes should I avoid" and "what looks promising" but you shouldn't neglect the questions of "what will I do if I get squeezed out and am forced into a low-end job for several years and when the economy does recover I basically have to start over with entry-level tech wages? Will I have to sell the house? Will my kids have to go to community college? etc. etc."
One way - perhaps the best way - to prepare for the worst is to live below your means as a lifestyle choice. This is a very realistic option for almost everyone employed full-time in a technical field in the United States. If you don't have an emergency fund of 1-3 months of current living expenses, aggressively save until you do. Then set aside enough extra each month so you have enough cash on hand to last 9-12 months on an "austerity budget" plus enough cash on hand to do a proper job-search and/or get re-trained. The 9-12 month cushion is over and above paying your bills and credit cards on time and contributing a responsible amount towards your retirement and your kids' college fund. Raise your kids so they won't be emotionally burdened if you have to move to a smaller house/cheaper neighborhood/give up cable TV/etc. or if you have to work 2 jobs for awhile. You get the idea.
... regulatory compliance.
I give credit to the lead in the solder for the hardware lasting that long.
Remote, as in from China. Sigh.
People who, due to their own shortcomings (such as being heavily distracted by women who are behaving professionally, or inappropriately flirting with women on the job) can't work well with others might be better off in an isolated environment.
With "non-superstars" who could succeed in a variety of careers or for that matter multi-talented "superstars," this is easy: They just need to pick a job or career where they don't have to interact with people or groups that interfere with their productivity or provide an environment in which they will behave unprofessionally, and society doesn't lose much in the process.
With "single-talent superstars," and for that matter people of average talent in one area and practically zero hope of succeeding in any other career path, this becomes a problem:
If we tell a person who is extremely talented in a particular line of work (or of average talent in one line of work but totally untalented at anything else) "sorry, because you can't get along with [women/gays/whatever] there is no good way for you to do your job, pick a different job or a different career," then society loses out on the skills and talents that this person has to offer and/or he would likely wind up on the welfare rolls because he couldn't find a job he could succeed at.
Having said that, the right choice for society may very well to say "we'll accept the loss, go find yourself another job" because the social costs of endorsing "bad behavior" is just too much. But we, as a society, need to make this decision eyes-wide-open. If we just give superstars a free pass on social norms without thinking about it or if we give the person who "can't get any other type of job" a free pass for bad behavior in the workplace, or if we summarily tell them "get lost" without being aware of the costs to society, then it can lead to knee-jerk decisions with possibly undesired consequences.
In short: Some people ARE special, and when the mis-behave we as a society need to decide if it's in everyone's best interest to treat them as "special" or to treat them the same as everyone else. Whichever choice we make, there will be a social cost.
Some tasks that may just be too sensitive to put on non-isolated networks except in extreme, carefully-controlled circumstances.
If you don't get the reference,
1) see https://scifi.stackexchange.co... .
2) What are you doing on Slashdot?
"Kill me now, please kill me now."
I hope Ren understands just who it is he is experimenting on.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed.
Excess use of pretty colors is frequently a sign of bad design.
Note - I didn't visit the site so I'm not saying that this site has a problem with excess use of pretty colors. I'm just saying that "apart from pretty colors" shouldn't imply that using pretty colors is always a good idea.
... is crunchy and goes good with ketchup.
Oh wait, that me the dragon was talking about right before I managed to get away. Forgive me for mis-remembering, it was a very busy and not-very-pleasant day.
You have exceeded the limits of my universal translator, and that's even after I installed the Yodaspeak and Tamarian-metaphor-interpretation modules (side-note: the latter is huge, it has to incorporate the entirety of the Tamarian race).
Then translator did make this out though:
"Mod parent post down"
"#UNCLEARCONTEXT# Operating System"
"#UNCLEARMEANING# Possible reference to poster making many recent repeated arguments related to either the current topic of discussion, BSDI, or both, and a possible relationship between the current topic of discussion and BSDI"
"#SPECULATIONCONTINGENTONPREVIOUSUNCLEARTRANSLATION# Possible insult related to the possible many recent repeated arguments mentioned above"
If you will kindly let me know what additional modules I need to install in my universal translator, I will be able to understand you better. Thank you.
I can't tell if this was written by a computer or a person smoking something while reminiscing about pop-culture references from the past few decades.
If you are a person, what are you smoking and where can I get some?
Maybe, but you'll have to have an awfully attractive proposal and back it with heavyweight talent that already had a good reputation for delivering the goods.
For example, if a major video card vendor went belly-up for reasons not related to their tech (i.e. for plain old poor business practices) and their best coders banded together and started a kickstarter with a goal of $5B above and beyond the $1B they were personally tossing into the pot, they'd get my attention. But then again, they probably would be looking for traditional venture capital funding rather than kickstarter-type funding.
Because in 10 years, I can't be sure that a "hack-resistant" car lock on the 2015 car buy today will be any stronger than these garage-door openers are now.
If someone says that a bug trashes an application so badly that the "only" way to fix it is reinstalling the program, they are usually mistaken, at least for programs and OSes that don't rely on signed code or similar mechanisms that thwart partial repairs.
I see this bug has a fix. If it did not, you could probably make your own fix by doing a before-and-after comparison of key files and key regristry/system settings, then publish your results.
For a minute I thought "shutdown -f" meant "--f_ckthisweareneverpoweringonagain"
Then I read the freakin man page.