Sorry, but this can't be generalized. I do work in the games industry as a Lead of programmers, mostly men but some women.
I can speak for our whole game team to say that there is no such harassment. Those cases are very bad indeed, but it's not like this happens everywhere in the game industry on a regular basis.
In our company, this kind of behaviour would get you fired for sure.
Some advice for programmers trying to do interface design: Don't. Leave question like this to an interface designer. If you can't afford one, or you want to do it anway, a good book for starters is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, it's not even expensive.
Further, stop treating users as a problem in the system. Every user has his own model on how the system works. This model is very likely very different from the programmers model. Your task as an interface designer is to teach the user enough about the system (or it's model), so he can use the system successfully. Error messages don't help very much, as you've figured out, users don't read them. The lesson is, don't try to force the user to read error messages, instead find other ways to communicate the model.
Often, it's a good idea to think about the problem in an abstract way. For example, we have a similar problem at the place I work. There are two doors next to each other, one you should use, the other one you mustn't because it triggers the alarm. They tried to fix it by attaching a sign saying not to use that door. Needless to say, it didn't work, because noone read the sign. Just like your error messages, this sign was completely ignored. It's not wrong of the users to ignore the sign, quite the opposite: We have to filter out information to survive. If you pass through your environment, you too ignore information, i. e. I don't think you read every sign in your proximity. I have no idea why they couldn't come up with a better solution for the door: Locking it would be very easy. Even better, by removing the door handles it would be very clear that the door can't be used.
One major problem of captchas is that usually blind users can't solve the captcha. So you effectively lock out disabled persons from your website, a fact that is rarely mentioned in association with captchas. I think disabled people have enough problems already, there's no reason to further annoy them with captchas (I'm even annoyed by them as a not-disabled person).
Although it's not about programming, I'd recommend "The design of everyday things" by Donald A. Norman. It gives a good idea on how to design user interfaces (including, but not limited to software). It's really well-written and nice to read, wether or not you know something about user interface design.
My grandfather would agree that most soldiers weren't "fully-fledged" nazis (being still alive at the age of almost 90). He had to fight in WWII, and with "had to" I mean they didn't give him a choice. It was either you fight for the nazis or you get a bullet through your head. It wasn't like you could apply for service in the army, and they would kindly let you in, instead they grabbed everyone who could hold a rifle. He and his father actually were against Hitler, and tried not to support him. The result: His father got into a camp were they beat him up until he changed his mind, my grandfather had to stand (like in not allowed to sit down) in class because he refused to join the Hitler Jugend. Maybe, with the internet, they could've organized some resistance. On the other hand, there's a great risk involved in doing something like that in countries ruled by a crazy dictator.
However, I don't think that those devices actually work by reading brain waves. Anyone who has worked with an EEG knows how motionless you have to sit in order to measure brainwaves. When we do experiments the subjects have to avoid muscle and eye movement as much as possible. Every movement of eyes or muscles exceeds any brain wave by magnitudes. There's a reflex that causes your eyes to move upward when closing them. So you also have to blink as few times as you can, which makes the procedure even less pleasant
Playing games this way would be very uncomfortable over an extended period of time. Also, I think only moving the mouse could induce head movement enough to interfere with brain wave measurement.
I've had a look at the forum thread linked at the very end of the article. Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. It seems that after that NVidia put in some more checks than only the PCI ID. As reported in the thread, there's no performance increase in professional 3D apps, and OpenGL is broken.
Thanks for this interesting posting. Although wine can be easily installed on Ubuntu, I can - unlike other people posting here - see the more general point you are making.
At least as a private person. You just have to not register your PC. That's right just lie to them, they have no way to find out if you have a computer or not. I guess this works as long as you are not running a business, as it's very hard to believe that a business does not have a single PC:-).
Some explanation: I'm not agains laws in general. I try to be as lawful as possible. That's not easy in germany, as we have a law for everything. Especially this fee is extremely stupid, so I'll just ignore it. I do not watch TV or hear german radio on my PC. I also don't have a TV set, as there's nothing worth to watch on TV. I don't pay for nothing.
There's one more reason not to use "information" aquired by torture beyond the fact that it's illegal, and it's quite obvious I think: Under torture you'll say anything. You'll probably give false information because you are guilty but don't want to admit it. You maybe confess although you are innocent, just to get out of the situation. I don't think this is a valid method to get information, you'll get something but not information. But this maybe is the less important reason, the other is the one I already explained.
You're probably right about many points and I admit that I mixed things that should not be mixed. Let me elaborate. First, as I posted earlier, I'm not from the US so I have a different undestanding about some things. To some part I applied my understanding of law to the US law. This is confusing and a bad idea.
I'll try to explain with an example. Let's imagine you're living in the US, and someone brings up a civil case against you, maybe similar to this one. You were smart enough to encrypt your data. In the US, you have to hand your keys over to the court civil cases, and only there. If this belongs to witnessing against yourself or providing evidence against yourself maybe is not as easy to decide, but from what you've written this seems to be belong into the latter category (in the US). If the same thing happenes to you in my country, you don't have to give up your encryption keys.
I think this is wrong for the reasons I stated, but still legal in the US. It has further practical implications. Let's imagine you're in a criminal case. Someone wants evidence against you, but it is on an encrypted disk. Obviously he just has to find someone that brings up a civil case against you where you have to give up your keys, and can then use that same evidence against you in the criminal case. In the end, you helped the court to get evidence against yourself.
The UK is heading to the same direction and has brought up a new law: They can put you into jail for 2 years (if i remember correctly) if you don't hand over the keys. Not surprisingly this law came up in the name of fighting terrorism.
Further we should distinguish between applied law (jurisdiction) and the discussion if this law is good,bad,right,wrong or practically useful and so on which belongs into the realm of legislation. I did mix this up a bit. The judge applied law as it is, still I think this law is wrong for the reasons I stated.
You've caught me with my last statement - it was an emotional trick to get attention. Or was it ? On one hand yes, but on the other hand this maybe is not that far if you let fundamental christians run the government. Christians have proven throughout history to be violent, I have no doubt that they will reinvent the inqusition once they gain enough power (just my personal opinion). It surely isn't the next step, that was the trick about it, but possibly the end of many many small steps if you continue that road.
On the other hand I'm not from the US, and as far as I know this basic principle also applies to civil cases in my country.
The basic problem here is that you can get the evidence in a civil case (like keys to an encrypted partition) from that person, and then use it against him in a criminal case.
I think most posters here are missing one fact: The evidence she destroyed was evidence against herself.
One of the basic ideas of a constitutional state is that a human is treated as a human and is not degraded to a tool. This is exactly what would've happened if she did not wipe those files: By providing evidence against herself, she would've been used as a tool against herself. It is one of her basic rights to deny having to provide evidence against herself.
It maybe is a "disregard for the judicial process", but I think the stronger harm for the "judicial process" is forcing someone to provide evidence against him- or herself. This is such a fundamental idea that I really don't get how the judge missed it.
Is the next step torturing someone until he provides evidence against himself ?
I think 2 out of 18 is much. Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive type of cancer. The glia cells in the brain just grow and grow and grow constantly at an amzing speed. Removing the tumor itself doesn't help at all as the cancer cell grows through the surrounding brain tissues, it spreads all over the brain. It will grow back within weeks. Believe me, I've seen it myself. My mother did live almost a year after diagnosis, which is long for this kind of cancer.
There's quite an easy solution for this. It's used at our university for the offices of employees. Some time ago you could just plug in a PC, assign a valid IP-address and use the net, authorisation was done by physical access to the room, or lack thereof. Then I had to install a new PC, plugged the network in, but nothing worked. It took me some time to figure out that the network port was blocked, because a new MAC address was seen on this port. That's true, once they detect any new MAC address, they completely shut off that port. You have to phone the helpdesk and explain why there's a new MAC address (= new PC) on that port. Usually you can't use a hubs/switches, as only one MAC address is allowed per port (there are some exceptions though).
While this article recommends using MAC addresses as access control, I think in most cases this is just wrong. But in this particular case it does sense: Once an employee plugs in an access point, they'll detect that additional MAC address. Spoofing the address on your wireless card won't help, as only one MAC address is allowed, but two are detected (wireless card + Access Point).
If you have to install new PCs, this is quite annoying. I'm happy if the old PC has a network card that I can take out and put into the new PC, so the address doesn't change (I know spoofing is possible, but I don't think they like it:).
At home I'm using WEP, but unlike the article recommends not for security. I'm just being friendly to my neighbours, so their windows systems won't autoconnect and get an IP address, which they couldn't use for anything: Without a connection to my VPN, there's no internet.
Electo-shock is an exaggeration I think. Electric stimulation maybe is more adequate.
Basically a hole is drilled into your had and an electrode is inserted. Using MRI it is navigated to an exact location in your head (chosen depending on your mental disorder). The electrode is connected to an electrical "pacemaker" that sends specific electric pulses into your brain.
Deep Brain stimulation can also be used to treat OCD. It's still being researched, but there are first tests on human patients. It seems to work quite good.
It can also be used to treat Parkinson in late stages.
Avoid paypal if you can. They are not a bank and so are not regulated in a way banks are. When signing up you basically agree that they can do with your money what they want, like freezing your account, fining you or whatever. Of course, they decide what surpicious activity is. I think a judge should decide if this is to be done, not some employee of paypal.
For example they held back a lot of donated money for Katrina victims:
MAybe someone wrote it already, but I haven't yet found it. There's quite an easy solution, unfortunately I'm missing a word as I'm not a native speaker. I'm talking about those multisocket things that have a plug on one end of the wire and multiple sockets on the other end of the wire (sorry, can anyone tell me the right word ?). They are available with switches too, at least where I live (germany that is). That switch will turn all sockets on and off at the same time.
For example my PC, monitor, speaker system and some more PC-periphals are hooked to one of these things. So I can switch them off all at once without having to use some master-slave socket or other complicated stuff. Just one switch and all devices are - really - off. The same should be possible for TV, VCR, DVD-Players and so on. Often the VCR is the problem as it looses it's time setting when powered off too long.
I'm not an expert, but I read that sitting in front of a monitor for a long time has (at least) two effects on your eyes:
- you blink less often which dries your eyes. This in turn allows bacterias and things like that to enter your eyes, causing deseases.
- you fixiate a near point (your monitor) for a long time, so your eye muscles have to work very long. A muscle contracted for an extended period of time changes from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism that produces acid in the muscle.
You should avoid both of this by
- training yourself to blink often (wasn't there a slashdot story about a program that generates stimuli that after some training make you blink automatically ?).
- Relax your eye muscles from time to time by looking away from your monitor and fixiating a far point (for example the sky if possible).
A program like workrave might help, not only your eyes but also your hands/arms to avoid RSI.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, as I said I'm not an expert.
What a sophisticated answer. I did not say it's the ultimate truth. Keep it easy. I'm not sure if you understood what I tried to say.
I don't have numbers, so I can't say how many security holes are found in IE compared to other browsers (take into account that IE is much longer there than for example Firefox).
On the other hand, ask Diebold how many security problems there are in their voting machines: None. We know there are severe problems, yet they claim there are none. Do you still trust software which doesn't have security problems ?
Maybe I didn't express it clear enough: Those indicators don't show how good the security itself is, but how good the process of improving security works. In the end, a software which gets faster and better improved will be more secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else misread?
Sorry, but this can't be generalized. I do work in the games industry as a Lead of programmers, mostly men but some women. I can speak for our whole game team to say that there is no such harassment. Those cases are very bad indeed, but it's not like this happens everywhere in the game industry on a regular basis. In our company, this kind of behaviour would get you fired for sure.
Some advice for programmers trying to do interface design: Don't. Leave question like this to an interface designer. If you can't afford one, or you want to do it anway, a good book for starters is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, it's not even expensive. Further, stop treating users as a problem in the system. Every user has his own model on how the system works. This model is very likely very different from the programmers model. Your task as an interface designer is to teach the user enough about the system (or it's model), so he can use the system successfully. Error messages don't help very much, as you've figured out, users don't read them. The lesson is, don't try to force the user to read error messages, instead find other ways to communicate the model. Often, it's a good idea to think about the problem in an abstract way. For example, we have a similar problem at the place I work. There are two doors next to each other, one you should use, the other one you mustn't because it triggers the alarm. They tried to fix it by attaching a sign saying not to use that door. Needless to say, it didn't work, because noone read the sign. Just like your error messages, this sign was completely ignored. It's not wrong of the users to ignore the sign, quite the opposite: We have to filter out information to survive. If you pass through your environment, you too ignore information, i. e. I don't think you read every sign in your proximity. I have no idea why they couldn't come up with a better solution for the door: Locking it would be very easy. Even better, by removing the door handles it would be very clear that the door can't be used.
One major problem of captchas is that usually blind users can't solve the captcha. So you effectively lock out disabled persons from your website, a fact that is rarely mentioned in association with captchas. I think disabled people have enough problems already, there's no reason to further annoy them with captchas (I'm even annoyed by them as a not-disabled person).
Although it's not about programming, I'd recommend "The design of everyday things" by Donald A. Norman. It gives a good idea on how to design user interfaces (including, but not limited to software). It's really well-written and nice to read, wether or not you know something about user interface design.
My grandfather would agree that most soldiers weren't "fully-fledged" nazis (being still alive at the age of almost 90). He had to fight in WWII, and with "had to" I mean they didn't give him a choice. It was either you fight for the nazis or you get a bullet through your head. It wasn't like you could apply for service in the army, and they would kindly let you in, instead they grabbed everyone who could hold a rifle. He and his father actually were against Hitler, and tried not to support him. The result: His father got into a camp were they beat him up until he changed his mind, my grandfather had to stand (like in not allowed to sit down) in class because he refused to join the Hitler Jugend. Maybe, with the internet, they could've organized some resistance. On the other hand, there's a great risk involved in doing something like that in countries ruled by a crazy dictator.
No, I did not read TFA.
However, I don't think that those devices actually work by reading brain waves. Anyone who has worked with an EEG knows how motionless you have to sit in order to measure brainwaves. When we do experiments the subjects have to avoid muscle and eye movement as much as possible. Every movement of eyes or muscles exceeds any brain wave by magnitudes. There's a reflex that causes your eyes to move upward when closing them. So you also have to blink as few times as you can, which makes the procedure even less pleasant
Playing games this way would be very uncomfortable over an extended period of time. Also, I think only moving the mouse could induce head movement enough to interfere with brain wave measurement.
It will also work if you put it somewhere in the garden behind something where you don't see it. Just run the wire into the house and you are fine.
I've had a look at the forum thread linked at the very end of the article. Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series. It seems that after that NVidia put in some more checks than only the PCI ID. As reported in the thread, there's no performance increase in professional 3D apps, and OpenGL is broken.
Thanks for this interesting posting. Although wine can be easily installed on Ubuntu, I can - unlike other people posting here - see the more general point you are making.
At least as a private person. You just have to not register your PC. That's right just lie to them, they have no way to find out if you have a computer or not. I guess this works as long as you are not running a business, as it's very hard to believe that a business does not have a single PC :-).
Some explanation: I'm not agains laws in general. I try to be as lawful as possible. That's not easy in germany, as we have a law for everything. Especially this fee is extremely stupid, so I'll just ignore it. I do not watch TV or hear german radio on my PC. I also don't have a TV set, as there's nothing worth to watch on TV. I don't pay for nothing.
That's what I read. I guess that happens if you spend too much time on slashdot.
There's one more reason not to use "information" aquired by torture beyond the fact that it's illegal, and it's quite obvious I think: Under torture you'll say anything. You'll probably give false information because you are guilty but don't want to admit it. You maybe confess although you are innocent, just to get out of the situation. I don't think this is a valid method to get information, you'll get something but not information. But this maybe is the less important reason, the other is the one I already explained.
You're probably right about many points and I admit that I mixed things that should not be mixed. Let me elaborate. First, as I posted earlier, I'm not from the US so I have a different undestanding about some things. To some part I applied my understanding of law to the US law. This is confusing and a bad idea.
I'll try to explain with an example. Let's imagine you're living in the US, and someone brings up a civil case against you, maybe similar to this one. You were smart enough to encrypt your data. In the US, you have to hand your keys over to the court civil cases, and only there. If this belongs to witnessing against yourself or providing evidence against yourself maybe is not as easy to decide, but from what you've written this seems to be belong into the latter category (in the US). If the same thing happenes to you in my country, you don't have to give up your encryption keys.
I think this is wrong for the reasons I stated, but still legal in the US. It has further practical implications. Let's imagine you're in a criminal case. Someone wants evidence against you, but it is on an encrypted disk. Obviously he just has to find someone that brings up a civil case against you where you have to give up your keys, and can then use that same evidence against you in the criminal case. In the end, you helped the court to get evidence against yourself.
The UK is heading to the same direction and has brought up a new law: They can put you into jail for 2 years (if i remember correctly) if you don't hand over the keys. Not surprisingly this law came up in the name of fighting terrorism.
Further we should distinguish between applied law (jurisdiction) and the discussion if this law is good,bad,right,wrong or practically useful and so on which belongs into the realm of legislation. I did mix this up a bit. The judge applied law as it is, still I think this law is wrong for the reasons I stated.
You've caught me with my last statement - it was an emotional trick to get attention. Or was it ? On one hand yes, but on the other hand this maybe is not that far if you let fundamental christians run the government. Christians have proven throughout history to be violent, I have no doubt that they will reinvent the inqusition once they gain enough power (just my personal opinion). It surely isn't the next step, that was the trick about it, but possibly the end of many many small steps if you continue that road.
Yeah you're right I somewhat missed that.
On the other hand I'm not from the US, and as far as I know this basic principle also applies to civil cases in my country.
The basic problem here is that you can get the evidence in a civil case (like keys to an encrypted partition) from that person, and then use it against him in a criminal case.
I think most posters here are missing one fact: The evidence she destroyed was evidence against herself.
One of the basic ideas of a constitutional state is that a human is treated as a human and is not degraded to a tool. This is exactly what would've happened if she did not wipe those files: By providing evidence against herself, she would've been used as a tool against herself. It is one of her basic rights to deny having to provide evidence against herself.
It maybe is a "disregard for the judicial process", but I think the stronger harm for the "judicial process" is forcing someone to provide evidence against him- or herself. This is such a fundamental idea that I really don't get how the judge missed it.
Is the next step torturing someone until he provides evidence against himself ?
I think 2 out of 18 is much. Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive type of cancer. The glia cells in the brain just grow and grow and grow constantly at an amzing speed. Removing the tumor itself doesn't help at all as the cancer cell grows through the surrounding brain tissues, it spreads all over the brain. It will grow back within weeks. Believe me, I've seen it myself. My mother did live almost a year after diagnosis, which is long for this kind of cancer.
There's quite an easy solution for this. It's used at our university for the offices of employees. Some time ago you could just plug in a PC, assign a valid IP-address and use the net, authorisation was done by physical access to the room, or lack thereof. Then I had to install a new PC, plugged the network in, but nothing worked. It took me some time to figure out that the network port was blocked, because a new MAC address was seen on this port. That's true, once they detect any new MAC address, they completely shut off that port. You have to phone the helpdesk and explain why there's a new MAC address (= new PC) on that port. Usually you can't use a hubs/switches, as only one MAC address is allowed per port (there are some exceptions though). While this article recommends using MAC addresses as access control, I think in most cases this is just wrong. But in this particular case it does sense: Once an employee plugs in an access point, they'll detect that additional MAC address. Spoofing the address on your wireless card won't help, as only one MAC address is allowed, but two are detected (wireless card + Access Point).
:).
If you have to install new PCs, this is quite annoying. I'm happy if the old PC has a network card that I can take out and put into the new PC, so the address doesn't change (I know spoofing is possible, but I don't think they like it
At home I'm using WEP, but unlike the article recommends not for security. I'm just being friendly to my neighbours, so their windows systems won't autoconnect and get an IP address, which they couldn't use for anything: Without a connection to my VPN, there's no internet.
Electo-shock is an exaggeration I think. Electric stimulation maybe is more adequate. Basically a hole is drilled into your had and an electrode is inserted. Using MRI it is navigated to an exact location in your head (chosen depending on your mental disorder). The electrode is connected to an electrical "pacemaker" that sends specific electric pulses into your brain.
Deep Brain stimulation can also be used to treat OCD. It's still being researched, but there are first tests on human patients. It seems to work quite good. It can also be used to treat Parkinson in late stages.
Avoid paypal if you can. They are not a bank and so are not regulated in a way banks are. When signing up you basically agree that they can do with your money what they want, like freezing your account, fining you or whatever. Of course, they decide what surpicious activity is. I think a judge should decide if this is to be done, not some employee of paypal.
For example they held back a lot of donated money for Katrina victims:
Click
grokster.com ?
MAybe someone wrote it already, but I haven't yet found it. There's quite an easy solution, unfortunately I'm missing a word as I'm not a native speaker. I'm talking about those multisocket things that have a plug on one end of the wire and multiple sockets on the other end of the wire (sorry, can anyone tell me the right word ?). They are available with switches too, at least where I live (germany that is). That switch will turn all sockets on and off at the same time.
For example my PC, monitor, speaker system and some more PC-periphals are hooked to one of these things. So I can switch them off all at once without having to use some master-slave socket or other complicated stuff. Just one switch and all devices are - really - off. The same should be possible for TV, VCR, DVD-Players and so on. Often the VCR is the problem as it looses it's time setting when powered off too long.
I'm not an expert, but I read that sitting in front of a monitor for a long time has (at least) two effects on your eyes:
- you blink less often which dries your eyes. This in turn allows bacterias and things like that to enter your eyes, causing deseases.
- you fixiate a near point (your monitor) for a long time, so your eye muscles have to work very long. A muscle contracted for an extended period of time changes from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism that produces acid in the muscle.
You should avoid both of this by
- training yourself to blink often (wasn't there a slashdot story about a program that generates stimuli that after some training make you blink automatically ?).
- Relax your eye muscles from time to time by looking away from your monitor and fixiating a far point (for example the sky if possible).
A program like workrave might help, not only your eyes but also your hands/arms to avoid RSI.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, as I said I'm not an expert.
What a sophisticated answer. I did not say it's the ultimate truth. Keep it easy. I'm not sure if you understood what I tried to say.
I don't have numbers, so I can't say how many security holes are found in IE compared to other browsers (take into account that IE is much longer there than for example Firefox).
On the other hand, ask Diebold how many security problems there are in their voting machines: None. We know there are severe problems, yet they claim there are none. Do you still trust software which doesn't have security problems ? Maybe I didn't express it clear enough: Those indicators don't show how good the security itself is, but how good the process of improving security works. In the end, a software which gets faster and better improved will be more secure.