Well stated. I'd love to know how they expect their DRM to work with our ears and eyes. Speakers are also analog devices, so it would be very easy to copy the music anyway.
Just play back the music through a speaker, put a resonably decent microphone in front of it, and pipe it to MP3. Done.
This is yet another one of those "copy protection" schemes that will never get off the ground.
Well spoken. As someone who's had the displeasure of having to work with unmaintainable code, it's not fun. In fact I threatened to quit unless they allowed me to write a large portion of the code base from scratch in order to make it scalable and more reliable.
The article is somewhat amusing and does cover some interesting points that I've run into over the years. However, writing unmaintainable code just makes you even more likely to get fired.
Unmaintainable code just leads to bugs that can't be fixed without bringing the rest of the system to its knees.
Re:H1-B holders have less experience
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
My girlfriend is working on an H1-B visa. She already had one extension and just this weekend got the final paperwork for her green card. It will arrive in one year or so. I've had a lot of discussions about her experiences and she knows how badly underpaid she is compared to her peers.
The moment she gets her "get out of jail free" card, she's gone. I don't blame her, either. In her case, she's being taken advantage of really badly.
There were a lot of H1-B sweatshops here in Silicon Valley during the boom period. I saw companies with nothing but H1-B visa holders who were working with horrible conditions knowing that they couldn't leave the company or else they had to so home. Sort of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Having been in this situation before, I would never join another so-called "stealth mode" startup. Why? Here's a few lessons I've learned, most of them at one startup:
1) "Stealth mode" = "Our product is a piece of crap and we want to make it look like the next big thing". 2) Customers? It's the "build it and the customers will come" view of the world. Sooner or later, you need to sell your product to the masses. 3) You're typically not given information about what they're trying to do, even after signing an NDA. If you can't tell me what my job entails, how am I supposed to make an informed career decision to join your company? 4) They have lots of money, but no ability to execute a business plan. 5) After finding out that their product is a piece of crap and won't sell (see #1 and #2), they decide to change the product entirely. Translation: rewrite from scratch. 6) After step 5, perform mass layoffs because the rewrite is also a total failure.
Excellent idea. Unfortunately it has one flaw - it's makes sense.
It never ceases to amazes me that they didn't even bother to encrypt the data.
I would like to see a law that would fine the companies anywhere between $10,000-$100,000 per violation. In tihs case, it would probably put CitiGroup out of business. Then again, i think tihs is the only way that corporate America will get their act together.
However, the only way such a law would be passed by Congress is by attaching it to a another one of those "anti-terrorist/more military spending" bills. Otherwise the lobbies will kill it.
Excellent explanation. You hit the nail right on the head.
There's no substitute for domain knowledge. It makes a huge difference, as I can tell you from my experiences with similar contests like the Mathematical Contest on Modeling. I participated in it for three years, and my school ended up the top ranked school in California one year because we had domain knowledge of graph theory and related math for that year's problem set. The next year we didn't do very well because the problem set was outside of our knowledge. We tried our best, anyway.
I looked at the problems. I could easily do problem D, since I already have knowledge of the perfect shuffle and even wrote programs years ago for that. This requires some number theory and modulo arithmetic.
You can't know everything, as I know that I would probably fail miserably at some of the problems, even through I have an MS in Software Engineering. Does that mean that I'm any less of a software engineer than anyone else? Of course not.
Why am I not surprised to hear that customer service is just reiterating the press release. They'll do anything to prevent people from closing their accounts. If I had something like this happen to me, my money would be out of there in a heartbeat.
I would be interested to hear how this affects their business in the coming weeks once people get word about this. With major banks, they'll usually sweep this under the carpet and forget about it, as the negative press will cause a bigger loss from people moving their money elsewhere, than the act of losing the data itself.
Thankfully we have our law in California that required these companies to disclose any loss of customer data. With all of the recent data loss stories coming out recently, it's about time that we enact some real legislation at the federal level to make companies legally and financially liable for these sort of screw ups. However, I'm not holding my breath as it will most likely wind up watered down to the point of being worthless.
This is just unacceptable and in my opinion shows how incompetant and unprofessional they are.
You hit the nail right on the head. Most of these competitions don't really test skill, it's whether or not you can solve a pre-fabbed problem.
I would love to see a competition where they provided a problem, but you had to come up with a set of user requirements, architecture design, class design, unit testing, etc. You would have to provide all of the standard deliverables expected from the SDLC.
Then the entries would be judged by creativity, source code maintainability, quality of the devilerables and how well the end product works in the "real world".
That's what I'm going through right now for my MS. In order to get the degree, we're required to create a project from the ground up, and provide all of the documentation, architecture, classes, testing, etc. and end up with a high quality product.
Sure, we've made some mistakes, but it's been a very good learning experience. Definitely more valuable than this so-called competition.
Doesn't surprise me one bit...
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Never underestimate the power of social engineering. My sister's identity was recenty stolen, but thankfully they caught is idiots in the act courtesy of an alert bank teller who got suspicious. The bank (located in Ohio) called my sister and asked her where she was (California). When she told her they propmtly got the people arrested. As how it got out there, who knows.
I'm pretty anal about filling out web forms with fake info, and I also have a very assertive stance with my privacy. It's amazing the amount of flack I get from people when I tell them that I won't give them my personal information or that it's none of their business.
It's amazing how quick they change their tune when you tell them that you're taking your money elsewhere.
I agree with the OP above. Sonoma State (another Cal State school) and pretty much all of the UC campuses (as far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong) all use your SSN as your student ID.
I did my grad school at Santa Clara University and you're just assigned a random number. They even go out of their way to tell you to use your student ID and not your SSN.
It's really annoying when your SSN is so blatently abused like this.
I loved that show when it was on. Just comical. Even my parents found it amusing to watch. It was educational while very entertaining with it's bizarre humor.
Bill Nye is drab and boring by comparison. Then again, what do you expect from Disney...
Ditto - that's why I voted against this act. It got passed solely because of scare tactics, which works very well on the typical California voter, err...idiot, because they can't make an informed decision.
This is ripe for abuse. Naturally they claim "...it's for the children..." and people just eat it up. Just disgusting.
I'm just waiting for some fallout from this law. Watch us end up with some rich person getting their DNA out of the databases because of their wealth, while the typical Joe-Blow get screwed...
I walked out of one interview with a company a while back where my first hour was with two of their Senior QA engineers. They interviewed me together.
They didn't do any warm up questions ("Tell me about yourself", etc.), they just started hammering me with technical question after question non-stop for 20 minutes. I was being beat like a drum.
It was clear they they just wanted to gang up on me and beat me up. I asked questions about the company, their work, etc. and all I got were the textbook-style replies from them. They were obviously not interested in talking with me at all, and gave me a very cold reception throughout the entire interview. We were all done in 30 minutes, even after all of my questions. I couldn't get anything out of them.
I got to talk to the manager and I told him "I don't want the job". The look on his face was worthy of a "Kodak moment". I explained to him what had happened and he wasn't pleased. Apparently another candidate the prior day also got pissed and left.
Then these companies wonder why they're having trouble hiring....
The irony is that already some Indian outsourcing firms have already started outsourcing work to China.
I had a reference for this from a month ago, but I can't find it. It didn't surprise me one bit because China is much cheaper than India by a longshot.
This project is somewhat amusing. After trying it out a bit I've definitely noticed that it's dog slow. I have a 2Ghz Athlon with 1GB of memory and it's still lethargic. Simply unacceptable.
This is really nothing more than a glorified "MFC Scribble 2.0" application. I'll stick with PaintShop Pro or GIMP, thanks.
What really gets me is that this was a senior project for a CS grad? This isn't exactly the type of project I would expect, but then again Microsoft is supporting it....
That letter literally stunk of double talk. It will be the same conditions as usual. This is nothing more than typical PR.
We had a something like this when I worked at Wolfram Research. The head HR droid was whining to the local paper about being unable to hire "qualified developers", and the story ended up in one ofthe prominent sections.
The next day a programmer who interviewed there wrote a very enlightening editorial that did a nasty slam dunk on Wolfram. I forget what it said word for word, but the final sentence was along the lines of "...in terms of salary, Wolfram isn't paying their programmers enough. I interviewed there and they tied for lowest. I went elsewhere."
Needless to say that editorial was prominently displayed throughout the company. Very amusing.
Having visited Shanghai last December, I can definitely say that the list in the article is very accurate.
Asian countries in general are literally years ahead of us on cellular technology - I loved the cell phone coverage, had only one dead zone and that was in an area with concrete around me, which I pretty much expected. Nothing like that here in the US, which is crappy at best.
The transit cards were great. No fumbling around with different tickets for train, bus, etc. like over here.
Interesting about tailoring - I got a custom fit tuxedo from a department store for $450US, including paying extra for the "good" fabric. They handled all of the tailoring for free, as a couple of changes were needed after it was done. It was done very quickly, too.
Very true - consider the source. Anything from CNet, ZDnet, etc. is crap. Been that way for years. I also remember some BS from some idiot at CNet that the floppy was dead.
Last I checked, we're still using them to boot machines, even from CD's - you still need a boot floppy image (at least for the El Torito method, anyway).
After watching the video, I'd say that must be the lamest roller coaster ride ever. If you're going to make something the fastest, tallest, etc. at least make the ride exciting.
Just up and down? BFD. I'll take the wooden coaster "Little Dipper" at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk over that piece of crap any day.
Slashdot Mirror
Well stated. I'd love to know how they expect their DRM to work with our ears and eyes. Speakers are also analog devices, so it would be very easy to copy the music anyway.
Just play back the music through a speaker, put a resonably decent microphone in front of it, and pipe it to MP3. Done.
This is yet another one of those "copy protection" schemes that will never get off the ground.
Well spoken. As someone who's had the displeasure of having to work with unmaintainable code, it's not fun. In fact I threatened to quit unless they allowed me to write a large portion of the code base from scratch in order to make it scalable and more reliable.
The article is somewhat amusing and does cover some interesting points that I've run into over the years. However, writing unmaintainable code just makes you even more likely to get fired.
Unmaintainable code just leads to bugs that can't be fixed without bringing the rest of the system to its knees.
My girlfriend is working on an H1-B visa. She already had one extension and just this weekend got the final paperwork for her green card. It will arrive in one year or so. I've had a lot of discussions about her experiences and she knows how badly underpaid she is compared to her peers.
The moment she gets her "get out of jail free" card, she's gone. I don't blame her, either. In her case, she's being taken advantage of really badly.
There were a lot of H1-B sweatshops here in Silicon Valley during the boom period. I saw companies with nothing but H1-B visa holders who were working with horrible conditions knowing that they couldn't leave the company or else they had to so home. Sort of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Having been in this situation before, I would never join another so-called "stealth mode" startup. Why? Here's a few lessons I've learned, most of them at one startup:
1) "Stealth mode" = "Our product is a piece of crap and we want to make it look like the next big thing".
2) Customers? It's the "build it and the customers will come" view of the world. Sooner or later, you need to sell your product to the masses.
3) You're typically not given information about what they're trying to do, even after signing an NDA. If you can't tell me what my job entails, how am I supposed to make an informed career decision to join your company?
4) They have lots of money, but no ability to execute a business plan.
5) After finding out that their product is a piece of crap and won't sell (see #1 and #2), they decide to change the product entirely. Translation: rewrite from scratch.
6) After step 5, perform mass layoffs because the rewrite is also a total failure.
In the SF Bay Area, the latest estimates are around 70% of all homes are being purchased with interest only loans.
Just insane. I'm just holding onto my money and waiting for the fallout that will result when interest rates rise and people lose their shirts.
Excellent idea. Unfortunately it has one flaw - it's makes sense.
It never ceases to amazes me that they didn't even bother to encrypt the data.
I would like to see a law that would fine the companies anywhere between $10,000-$100,000 per violation. In tihs case, it would probably put CitiGroup out of business. Then again, i think tihs is the only way that corporate America will get their act together.
However, the only way such a law would be passed by Congress is by attaching it to a another one of those "anti-terrorist/more military spending" bills. Otherwise the lobbies will kill it.
Sad, but true.
Excellent explanation. You hit the nail right on the head.
There's no substitute for domain knowledge. It makes a huge difference, as I can tell you from my experiences with similar contests like the Mathematical Contest on Modeling. I participated in it for three years, and my school ended up the top ranked school in California one year because we had domain knowledge of graph theory and related math for that year's problem set. The next year we didn't do very well because the problem set was outside of our knowledge. We tried our best, anyway.
I looked at the problems. I could easily do problem D, since I already have knowledge of the perfect shuffle and even wrote programs years ago for that. This requires some number theory and modulo arithmetic.
You can't know everything, as I know that I would probably fail miserably at some of the problems, even through I have an MS in Software Engineering. Does that mean that I'm any less of a software engineer than anyone else? Of course not.
We're definitly comparing apples to oranges.
The web site got /.'d fast. This is what I see now. I love explanation #2. Just comical.
If he wanted traffic to his web site, he got it! As the saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for".
Account Suspended
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Mod parent up.
Why am I not surprised to hear that customer service is just reiterating the press release. They'll do anything to prevent people from closing their accounts. If I had something like this happen to me, my money would be out of there in a heartbeat.
I would be interested to hear how this affects their business in the coming weeks once people get word about this. With major banks, they'll usually sweep this under the carpet and forget about it, as the negative press will cause a bigger loss from people moving their money elsewhere, than the act of losing the data itself.
Thankfully we have our law in California that required these companies to disclose any loss of customer data. With all of the recent data loss stories coming out recently, it's about time that we enact some real legislation at the federal level to make companies legally and financially liable for these sort of screw ups. However, I'm not holding my breath as it will most likely wind up watered down to the point of being worthless.
This is just unacceptable and in my opinion shows how incompetant and unprofessional they are.
You hit the nail right on the head. Most of these competitions don't really test skill, it's whether or not you can solve a pre-fabbed problem.
I would love to see a competition where they provided a problem, but you had to come up with a set of user requirements, architecture design, class design, unit testing, etc. You would have to provide all of the standard deliverables expected from the SDLC.
Then the entries would be judged by creativity, source code maintainability, quality of the devilerables and how well the end product works in the "real world".
That's what I'm going through right now for my MS. In order to get the degree, we're required to create a project from the ground up, and provide all of the documentation, architecture, classes, testing, etc. and end up with a high quality product.
Sure, we've made some mistakes, but it's been a very good learning experience. Definitely more valuable than this so-called competition.
Never underestimate the power of social engineering. My sister's identity was recenty stolen, but thankfully they caught is idiots in the act courtesy of an alert bank teller who got suspicious. The bank (located in Ohio) called my sister and asked her where she was (California). When she told her they propmtly got the people arrested. As how it got out there, who knows.
I'm pretty anal about filling out web forms with fake info, and I also have a very assertive stance with my privacy. It's amazing the amount of flack I get from people when I tell them that I won't give them my personal information or that it's none of their business.
It's amazing how quick they change their tune when you tell them that you're taking your money elsewhere.
I agree with the OP above. Sonoma State (another Cal State school) and pretty much all of the UC campuses (as far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong) all use your SSN as your student ID.
I did my grad school at Santa Clara University and you're just assigned a random number. They even go out of their way to tell you to use your student ID and not your SSN.
It's really annoying when your SSN is so blatently abused like this.
I loved that show when it was on. Just comical. Even my parents found it amusing to watch. It was educational while very entertaining with it's bizarre humor.
Bill Nye is drab and boring by comparison. Then again, what do you expect from Disney...
Ditto - that's why I voted against this act. It got passed solely because of scare tactics, which works very well on the typical California voter, err...idiot, because they can't make an informed decision.
This is ripe for abuse. Naturally they claim "...it's for the children..." and people just eat it up. Just disgusting.
I'm just waiting for some fallout from this law. Watch us end up with some rich person getting their DNA out of the databases because of their wealth, while the typical Joe-Blow get screwed...
I walked out of one interview with a company a while back where my first hour was with two of their Senior QA engineers. They interviewed me together.
They didn't do any warm up questions ("Tell me about yourself", etc.), they just started hammering me with technical question after question non-stop for 20 minutes. I was being beat like a drum.
It was clear they they just wanted to gang up on me and beat me up. I asked questions about the company, their work, etc. and all I got were the textbook-style replies from them. They were obviously not interested in talking with me at all, and gave me a very cold reception throughout the entire interview. We were all done in 30 minutes, even after all of my questions. I couldn't get anything out of them.
I got to talk to the manager and I told him "I don't want the job". The look on his face was worthy of a "Kodak moment". I explained to him what had happened and he wasn't pleased. Apparently another candidate the prior day also got pissed and left.
Then these companies wonder why they're having trouble hiring....
The irony is that already some Indian outsourcing firms have already started outsourcing work to China.
I had a reference for this from a month ago, but I can't find it. It didn't surprise me one bit because China is much cheaper than India by a longshot.
This project is somewhat amusing. After trying it out a bit I've definitely noticed that it's dog slow. I have a 2Ghz Athlon with 1GB of memory and it's still lethargic. Simply unacceptable.
This is really nothing more than a glorified "MFC Scribble 2.0" application. I'll stick with PaintShop Pro or GIMP, thanks.
What really gets me is that this was a senior project for a CS grad? This isn't exactly the type of project I would expect, but then again Microsoft is supporting it....
That letter literally stunk of double talk. It will be the same conditions as usual. This is nothing more than typical PR.
We had a something like this when I worked at Wolfram Research. The head HR droid was whining to the local paper about being unable to hire "qualified developers", and the story ended up in one ofthe prominent sections.
The next day a programmer who interviewed there wrote a very enlightening editorial that did a nasty slam dunk on Wolfram. I forget what it said word for word, but the final sentence was along the lines of "...in terms of salary, Wolfram isn't paying their programmers enough. I interviewed there and they tied for lowest. I went elsewhere."
Needless to say that editorial was prominently displayed throughout the company. Very amusing.
Having visited Shanghai last December, I can definitely say that the list in the article is very accurate.
Asian countries in general are literally years ahead of us on cellular technology - I loved the cell phone coverage, had only one dead zone and that was in an area with concrete around me, which I pretty much expected. Nothing like that here in the US, which is crappy at best.
The transit cards were great. No fumbling around with different tickets for train, bus, etc. like over here.
Interesting about tailoring - I got a custom fit tuxedo from a department store for $450US, including paying extra for the "good" fabric. They handled all of the tailoring for free, as a couple of changes were needed after it was done. It was done very quickly, too.
We could learn a lot from other countries.
MP3 files are dying? Yeah right...
Very true - consider the source. Anything from CNet, ZDnet, etc. is crap. Been that way for years. I also remember some BS from some idiot at CNet that the floppy was dead.
Last I checked, we're still using them to boot machines, even from CD's - you still need a boot floppy image (at least for the El Torito method, anyway).
I guess these people have never heard of something called the AC power cord, either....
Just pull the plug! How hard is that?
Reminds me of an old joke:
Save gas - fart in a jar
Nah...now about Pong?
Ditto. Micron has had these available in their laptops for at least 3 to 4 years that I can remember.
IBM is just like Apple - all flash, no substance, 2 years behind the rest of the world. But hey, doesn't that new laptop design look cool?
After watching the video, I'd say that must be the lamest roller coaster ride ever. If you're going to make something the fastest, tallest, etc. at least make the ride exciting.
Just up and down? BFD. I'll take the wooden coaster "Little Dipper" at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk over that piece of crap any day.