"In the 15 years since, I, my wife, and now 2 kids, have browsed, surfed, and e-mailed without "protection" beyond that firewall, or the one that replaced it in my WAP. We have had to clean a total of 3 malware infections in all that time."
And you don't think that is three too many?
I know people who religiously run Kaspersky, Norton, what have you, and they seem to average more than one infection per 10 years, even with their "protection." It's not like an incurable STD, it's a nuisance, and at worst you'll need to wipe the machine and re-install everything, and if your credit card gets pwned - you get a new one of those too, though I've never seen any system infected that badly - although, back in the day, Stoned was pretty awesome in its persistence.
Honestly, I feel more at risk handing my credit card to a waiter to pay for lunch than I do running a PC without virus protection.
Each to his own though. I just like sleeping well at night...
I got a firewall / router in 1997 about 2 days after my DSL line went in.
In the 15 years since, I, my wife, and now 2 kids, have browsed, surfed, and e-mailed without "protection" beyond that firewall, or the one that replaced it in my WAP. We have had to clean a total of 3 malware infections in all that time.
I like sleeping well at night, too, so I don't spend my time fretting over whether or not the anti-virus software (which I don't have) is up-to-date, functioning properly, and going over its reports of all the scary stuff that's "out there."
Nobody has: stolen our identities, used our credit card numbers, cleaned out our bank account, or sold our home without our knowledge. In fact, other than those 3 "infections" which took about 4 hours each to research and clean, we are not aware of any ill effects of our unprotected computer using lifestyle.
30 person-years of maintaining an anti-virus protection regime would have been costly, far more costly than 12 person-hours.
You couldn't "take" West Virginia with air power, but you could knock it back to the 1800s... (last time I took a WVa exit off the blue ridge parkway, the place felt like it was at least up to the 1920s...)
Howabouts we go with a heavily armed populace instead of a vast military infrastructure? A cannon on every courthouse lawn, a shot tower in every village! Hmmm, still depressing, except on July fourth, I guess.
Isn't that what the Second Amendment was about?
Unfortunately, I think Air power has kind of nullified that, unless you want to give the populace fighter jets too...
Article title assumes e-Prescription systems will solve most problems of the current system.
If rolled out into wide deployment, e-Prescription systems will have a lower success rate than they currently do in the hands of people who want them.
If abused with contempt, e-Prescription will perform worse than current systems, though if implemented with fidelity, the e-system could at least point a finger at the weak link in the chain, if anyone cares enough to analyze the records and develop witch hunt reports.
Yep, I had to fend off Java with a bullwhip in 1999 - it wasn't ready for our level of data crunching then (and, probably still isn't), but my alcoholic ex-salesman CEO had read an article and gotten himself a vision of the future... never mind that C++ is also portable and multi-platform. He was seeing the future where we might run our app on his Palm OS mobile phone.
My bike (10 speed, even) was made in 1978 - it probably weighed twice as much as yours, and the funny thing is, on average (saying nothing about you or me), total weight of bike + rider was less in 1978 than today.
The inductive loops are actually sensitive to *moving* iron, so if you're stuck waiting, try backing up and driving over it again. I could actually set one of those loops off with my bicycle if I rode over it at just the right place and speed, if my approach was too slow, it would never work.
Sorry, but nothing could ever go wrong with such a system, could it?
If you haven't read about the Denver Airport baggage handling system, you should.
I'm confident that I could design a working system such as you are describing, or the Denver baggage system for that matter, if I were "king of the project" and everybody had the good sense to do as I told them to. But, massively expensive projects like those inevitably suffer political pressures and I don't think I would even accept the position of lead designer for such a project where multiple opposing forces are driving dynamic non-negotiable requirements into the system.
Not all central planning traffic control systems are programmed to make your commute go more smoothly. I believe in my county the DOT has made "misery for motorists" a top priority- projects like rebuilding heavily trafficked roads to REDUCE the number of lanes, projects that cut major arteries for months at a time. I don't know if they expect us to take public transit, or just get jobs in other cities, since public transit becomes an unusable joke about 2 miles out of the center of town.
I believe most city traffic lights are now connected to "central planning" systems that do things like synchronize inbound flows in the morning and outbound in the evening, and create green light corridors for presidential motorcades (I know Miami did this in 1987 when I worked at DOT...)
I'm surprised nobody has raised the privacy flag, if you're "booking ahead" with a series of traffic lights, you'd better not be "booking" down the road over the speed limit, or you're effectively signing a confession.
Ah, Slashdot. The world's only technology site populated by Luddites.
Newsflash, buddy... The people you're so terrified of already have helicopters. What's wrong with making flight cheaper and more accessible?
Cheaper and more accessible makes all the difference. What's the difference between a world where handguns cost $50,000 each and a world where handguns cost $25 & up? Both worlds will have handguns, but the distribution and usage patterns will be very different.
You can buy a whole drone system for the cost of operating a small helicopter for a few weeks.
And you *can* pay it off, and people who do so actually own something that is theirs free and clear that they could never have considered having as theirs in one lump payment.
Interesting thing about how that works out... if you live in an area with any kind of growth, after dilligently paying your mortgage for 30 years (at a fixed monthly rate), just about when you get it paid off, your taxes will have increased to almost as much as your mortgage payment was.
Funny what inflation can do over a 30 year time span.
As a 'person of age' I can tell you startups have no time for people of age. You are instantly assumed to be an unimaginitive cobol crunching crankpot. I don't know if it's more or less true for a 'regional city.'
If that's not really true of you, then you need to look for work within the community of people who know that you're better than that.
Or, I have occasionally invited myself into smaller places for interviews - you don't get the interview 3/4 times, but if you've done a decent amount of research about the small company they're often impressed enough to give you the interview, then 4/5 times it's not a good fit and you or the company decide against it, but if you're actively looking for work it's just like a sales job - 19 dead ends for each payoff.
This is not universal. Startups pay squat until they raise funding, at which time they are often still very small teams moving very quickly, but their compensation package moves from 90% equity to 90% cash. If you want some financial comfort and security, take a job at a promising startup that has recently raised enough money for it to run for a year or two without revenue. You'll get decent equity, more or less market salary, and a job that doesn't totally suck.
Concur, I've done it a couple of times. Haven't had the homerun hit come around yet, but at least there's always another startup around the corner to jump to, and compared to my college classmates who went to work for Motorola, Southern Bell, etc. my pay has kept pace and occasionally exceeded theirs - for 20+ years now.
Unfortunately, most VCs are just as technologically clueless as the management. Plus they don't want seasoned developers with years of experience and the skills to know what to do (and the balls to do it), they want kids who'll work for stock options instead of cash.
Not always true, a pre-VC startup paid to move me and the family across the country, gave me a 20% raise in salary (from an already good level), and a 0.5% stake in the company - they wanted me to manage the room full of kids they were hiring to work for cheap.
Game development may sound fun, but as people who have actually done it for a living are going to point out, this is not the job for someone who has a mortgage or a family as a consideration. It doesn't pay well, it demands long hours, and the risk of losing your job is through the roof compared to basically anywhere else in the computer industry.
Depends on how you go about it, if you're going to start at entry level with an existing firm, yeah, the bottom of that pyramid has a lot of stuff rolling downhill onto it.
If you can get in at a higher level, as a partner in a startup, it can be a lot of fun. Of course, startup games development is more than a little risky...
Slashdot Mirror
And you don't think that is three too many?
I know people who religiously run Kaspersky, Norton, what have you, and they seem to average more than one infection per 10 years, even with their "protection." It's not like an incurable STD, it's a nuisance, and at worst you'll need to wipe the machine and re-install everything, and if your credit card gets pwned - you get a new one of those too, though I've never seen any system infected that badly - although, back in the day, Stoned was pretty awesome in its persistence.
Honestly, I feel more at risk handing my credit card to a waiter to pay for lunch than I do running a PC without virus protection.
Each to his own though. I just like sleeping well at night...
I got a firewall / router in 1997 about 2 days after my DSL line went in.
In the 15 years since, I, my wife, and now 2 kids, have browsed, surfed, and e-mailed without "protection" beyond that firewall, or the one that replaced it in my WAP. We have had to clean a total of 3 malware infections in all that time.
I like sleeping well at night, too, so I don't spend my time fretting over whether or not the anti-virus software (which I don't have) is up-to-date, functioning properly, and going over its reports of all the scary stuff that's "out there."
Nobody has: stolen our identities, used our credit card numbers, cleaned out our bank account, or sold our home without our knowledge. In fact, other than those 3 "infections" which took about 4 hours each to research and clean, we are not aware of any ill effects of our unprotected computer using lifestyle.
30 person-years of maintaining an anti-virus protection regime would have been costly, far more costly than 12 person-hours.
Watch the movie "Helvetica" regarding design swings from baroque to simplistic and back. The pendulum seems to have a period of about 15-25 years.
You couldn't "take" West Virginia with air power, but you could knock it back to the 1800s... (last time I took a WVa exit off the blue ridge parkway, the place felt like it was at least up to the 1920s...)
Howabouts we go with a heavily armed populace instead of a vast military infrastructure? A cannon on every courthouse lawn, a shot tower in every village! Hmmm, still depressing, except on July fourth, I guess.
Isn't that what the Second Amendment was about?
Unfortunately, I think Air power has kind of nullified that, unless you want to give the populace fighter jets too...
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=29390955
Article title assumes e-Prescription systems will solve most problems of the current system.
If rolled out into wide deployment, e-Prescription systems will have a lower success rate than they currently do in the hands of people who want them.
If abused with contempt, e-Prescription will perform worse than current systems, though if implemented with fidelity, the e-system could at least point a finger at the weak link in the chain, if anyone cares enough to analyze the records and develop witch hunt reports.
You thought the interstate highway system was built for civilian purposes?
Yep, I had to fend off Java with a bullwhip in 1999 - it wasn't ready for our level of data crunching then (and, probably still isn't), but my alcoholic ex-salesman CEO had read an article and gotten himself a vision of the future... never mind that C++ is also portable and multi-platform. He was seeing the future where we might run our app on his Palm OS mobile phone.
See the February 19, 2012 Dilbert for some insight on where this is going:
http://www.dilbert.com/
My bike (10 speed, even) was made in 1978 - it probably weighed twice as much as yours, and the funny thing is, on average (saying nothing about you or me), total weight of bike + rider was less in 1978 than today.
in Soviet Russia, red light district finds you.
http://www.themirt.com/
They ^^^ actually work, if you're stupid enough to use them.
The inductive loops are actually sensitive to *moving* iron, so if you're stuck waiting, try backing up and driving over it again. I could actually set one of those loops off with my bicycle if I rode over it at just the right place and speed, if my approach was too slow, it would never work.
Sorry, but nothing could ever go wrong with such a system, could it?
If you haven't read about the Denver Airport baggage handling system, you should.
I'm confident that I could design a working system such as you are describing, or the Denver baggage system for that matter, if I were "king of the project" and everybody had the good sense to do as I told them to. But, massively expensive projects like those inevitably suffer political pressures and I don't think I would even accept the position of lead designer for such a project where multiple opposing forces are driving dynamic non-negotiable requirements into the system.
Not all central planning traffic control systems are programmed to make your commute go more smoothly. I believe in my county the DOT has made "misery for motorists" a top priority- projects like rebuilding heavily trafficked roads to REDUCE the number of lanes, projects that cut major arteries for months at a time. I don't know if they expect us to take public transit, or just get jobs in other cities, since public transit becomes an unusable joke about 2 miles out of the center of town.
I believe most city traffic lights are now connected to "central planning" systems that do things like synchronize inbound flows in the morning and outbound in the evening, and create green light corridors for presidential motorcades (I know Miami did this in 1987 when I worked at DOT...)
I'm surprised nobody has raised the privacy flag, if you're "booking ahead" with a series of traffic lights, you'd better not be "booking" down the road over the speed limit, or you're effectively signing a confession.
Ah, Slashdot. The world's only technology site populated by Luddites.
Newsflash, buddy... The people you're so terrified of already have helicopters. What's wrong with making flight cheaper and more accessible?
Cheaper and more accessible makes all the difference. What's the difference between a world where handguns cost $50,000 each and a world where handguns cost $25 & up? Both worlds will have handguns, but the distribution and usage patterns will be very different.
You can buy a whole drone system for the cost of operating a small helicopter for a few weeks.
Go get some clue.
I know of a programmer who quit his job to wait tables at high end restaurants. He said he made roughly as much money and liked it more.
I know bank presidents who do the same thing "in season" in Florida - they say the pay is better...
And you *can* pay it off, and people who do so actually own something that is theirs free and clear that they could never have considered having as theirs in one lump payment.
Interesting thing about how that works out... if you live in an area with any kind of growth, after dilligently paying your mortgage for 30 years (at a fixed monthly rate), just about when you get it paid off, your taxes will have increased to almost as much as your mortgage payment was.
Funny what inflation can do over a 30 year time span.
>on a given project for most of the past 20 years
As a 'person of age' I can tell you startups have no time for people of age. You are instantly assumed to be an unimaginitive cobol crunching crankpot. I don't know if it's more or less true for a 'regional city.'
If that's not really true of you, then you need to look for work within the community of people who know that you're better than that.
Or, I have occasionally invited myself into smaller places for interviews - you don't get the interview 3/4 times, but if you've done a decent amount of research about the small company they're often impressed enough to give you the interview, then 4/5 times it's not a good fit and you or the company decide against it, but if you're actively looking for work it's just like a sales job - 19 dead ends for each payoff.
This is not universal. Startups pay squat until they raise funding, at which time they are often still very small teams moving very quickly, but their compensation package moves from 90% equity to 90% cash. If you want some financial comfort and security, take a job at a promising startup that has recently raised enough money for it to run for a year or two without revenue. You'll get decent equity, more or less market salary, and a job that doesn't totally suck.
Concur, I've done it a couple of times. Haven't had the homerun hit come around yet, but at least there's always another startup around the corner to jump to, and compared to my college classmates who went to work for Motorola, Southern Bell, etc. my pay has kept pace and occasionally exceeded theirs - for 20+ years now.
Unfortunately, most VCs are just as technologically clueless as the management. Plus they don't want seasoned developers with years of experience and the skills to know what to do (and the balls to do it), they want kids who'll work for stock options instead of cash.
Not always true, a pre-VC startup paid to move me and the family across the country, gave me a 20% raise in salary (from an already good level), and a 0.5% stake in the company - they wanted me to manage the room full of kids they were hiring to work for cheap.
Game development may sound fun, but as people who have actually done it for a living are going to point out, this is not the job for someone who has a mortgage or a family as a consideration. It doesn't pay well, it demands long hours, and the risk of losing your job is through the roof compared to basically anywhere else in the computer industry.
Depends on how you go about it, if you're going to start at entry level with an existing firm, yeah, the bottom of that pyramid has a lot of stuff rolling downhill onto it.
If you can get in at a higher level, as a partner in a startup, it can be a lot of fun. Of course, startup games development is more than a little risky...