There's an interesting third approach, used by Sysinternals's (now part of MS) RootkitRevealer for Windows.
Basically, enumerate all the files on the system using the usual OS APIs. Then, scan the entire raw disk, and enumerate all the files on the system by manually interpreting the directory structures stored on-disk. Any files whose directory entries exist on-disk, but don't show up in the OS's API (with a few standard system exceptions) are being hidden from the OS API layer by a rootkit.
It's certainly theoretically possible to fool, by having your rootkit hook the APIs used to read the raw disk, and returning innocuous values, but that's a good bit harder to do than the other stuff rootkits usually do. Some rootkits fooled it by not hiding their files if the process trying to look them up was named RootkitRevealer.exe, so the tool took to making a randomly-named copy of itself and executing that.
The U.S. does manufacture things to sell for profit and export - music and movies.
That's why the Powers That Be are so big on DRM and trying to stamp out IP piracy - it's not just about getting big campaign contributions from the "content industry", it's about protecting the only industry the U.S. has left.
Heck, most contracts-of-adhesion of any kind have them these days.
That's where the usual advice of "vote with your feet (or dollars)" falls short - if a practice is money-saving enough, basic economics forces all the players in the market to adopt it, regardless of its evilness. Then there is no place for your feet / dollars to go.
Arbitration clauses can be used by corporations to duck bad karma.
An example: Imagine you've gotten screwed by a cellphone company, and wish to sue for damages (and maybe injunctive relief to stop them from screwing other customers in the same way). In the regular court system, imagine trying to find 12 people for the jury who have not been screwed by a cellphone company in the past. Lots of people would be tempted to award the plaintiff 10 million dollars, just because the defendant is a cellphone company.
Maybe companies would think twice about engendering such ill will amongst their consumers if that ill will might taint juries against them.
The first time I played "Rust Never Sleeps" in the CD player, the last track ("Hey Hey, My My") came on, and my wife thought there was something wrong with the stereo. I explained that we were getting perfect digital reproduction of something that was intended to sound kind of like a broken stereo.
You can sidestep that whole problem, by skipping the DB data directory with the ordinary backup tools, and backing up the DB data from MSSQL. If you can connect remotely to their SQL servers and issue queries, have it backup to a file on a network share.
I dunno. The usual wisdom is that, by the time you could hear material news about a company, fire up your broker website and take action, everyone else has also done so, and so the stock's price already reflects that news.
A threat to the entire human race might provide an excellent catalyst for us to stop fighting one another. It would be interesting to see if we really could work together in the face of such a threat, though a failure of that experiment would mean it can't be repeated:-)
classical music is for winners and rap music is for losers
Interesting rap anecdote: I used to have a deaf officemate at a previous job. She would listen to rap, enjoying the rhythms (which she could feel easily). Since I found that out, now I think of rap, jokingly, as "music for deaf people".
That ties in to the grandparent post's point: An alien, because of sensory differences, might percieve our art quite differently than we do.
I know. One of the many many things that bothers me these days is how companies just shrug off obscene executive compensation: "B-b-but it's the only way we can retain quality executives!". However, when you get the same problem with working-shmoe developers: "We have trouble retaining quality developers. Increasing compensation is not an option, let's try to convince the government there's a 'shortage'".
Positive (for the business, and ultimately for consumers): Greatly reduces the cost of defending against frivolous lawsuits.
Negative (for some consumers): If you have a real complaint, there's less chance of it getting resolved in your favor, or of getting big damages levied against the company, which might incent it to change its policies. Likewise, getting your case heard by a jury might help you get a judgement based in part on what's "right" or "reasonable", rather than the legalese buried in some EULA-type agreement.
Negative (for society): Corporations don't need to pay as much attention to their karma. Think cellular providers here as an example - finding a jury of twelve where most hadn't been screwed over by a cellphone company in the past would be very difficult; as a result, actual lawsuits against cellphone companies would have a good chance of succeeding, just because of who the defendant is. This force would act to help those companies not be so adversarial to customer interests.
People somehow have developed the hubris that any sufficiently talented generalist can master a new field in short order and lead it to success.
Interestingly enough, this doesn't seem to apply when looking for software jobs. It doesn't matter how long you've been a Linux kernel programmer or that you have a master's in computer architecture, if you don't have 7 years' experience with Visual C# 3.1, you're obviously not qualified.
That might not be a bad thing (I can't believe I just said that...)
There's two basic bad effects from the current system: big companies squashing competition, and patent trolls submarining obvious patents then popping up demanding license fees.
Big corps are the ones hurt most by the patent trolls, so they and we (the public) are on the same side in that fight.
As far as squashing upstart competition goes, I'm sure they'll lobby to keep that ability.
They had a search warrant for the instance the article reports about. So this particular story isn't about an abuse of power (for once!). There's nothing (yet, sigh) to indicate they're going on warrantless fishing expeditions with their spyware, or trying to get it pervasively installed so they can data-mine "in the interest of national security". I agree that either of those cases would be cause for outrage.
Heck, if the FBI wasn't allowed to use spyware, with a warrant, they could just install a hidden camera recording the computer's monitor (see the movie "Antitrust" for a neat example of that kind of spying.)
This doesn't jibe with economic theory as I understand it.
The 200 zorkmids that go to the retailer don't just get stuck in a vault or buried under a mattress. They get invested in the business, or paid back to shareholders. The vendors the company buys stuff from, or the shareholders, then spend that money, etc. Eventually this trickes down to everybody. (Perhaps the CEO hires the consumer to clean his private jet, for a direct example).
Don't believe me? Make a post sometime complaining about concentration of wealth. Someone will come out of the woodwork and say the exact same thing I said above, only with "rich people" substituted for "the retailer".
shop based on the quality of products and services
This is problematic because for a lot of things, quality is difficult or impossible to discern. If it's impossible to discern, see the paper "The Market For Lemons"; only low-quality products can survive in that market.
There's also network effects to overcome; if 99% of people are shopping on price alone then there's not enough market for higher-quality higher-priced products, even if you can tell the difference.
Plus, corporations today are managed so that their profit growth rate keeps increasing (which is the only way to keep stock price rising). Many slashdotters claim this is not actually legally required of corporations, as was previously widely believed. I think it's just a basic conflict of interest in making the people who make the decisions mostly compensated in stock.
Spotting a failing IT project: If it's a project, and it involves IT, then it's failing. (The summary's cited statistics bear this out).
Fixing a failing IT project: Rewrite the laws of economics. (My experience bears this out). This may involve fiat, chemical means, or founding a new religion.
I got that feeling once, on the first viewing of a movie.
My wife and I were watching "The Sixth Sense" with some friends.
Very soon into the movie, my wife successfully (though none of us knew that at the time) guessed and blurted out the Big Twist.
We all spent the movie looking for little clues that confirmed this (e.g. who talks to Bruce Willis). It was pretty interesting. Had she not inadvertently spoiled the twist, we'd have had to watch the movie a second time to pick up on all those little details.
This is what I generally do. However, there's two type of jobs where that doesn't work:
Temp agencies (temp jobs or jobs where the company outsourced the hiring to the agency). They tend to expect 1 resume they can send for everything.
Big companies. Suppose you want to put in an app at Cisco, IBM, etc. Those big companies want to hire specialists, so you'd have to give them a "networking developer" resume for one job, and an "Asterisk consultant" resume for another. Most of the time their systems are built on a one-resume-per-person model.
It may be best to just avoid those two types of employers, now that I think of it, or, for each one of those, pick one area and act like a specialist in it.
Antidepressants don't make you artificially happy. The best evidence for this is that they have no street value - if they got you high, there would be a black market.
not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for.
I was probly seeing about 1 candidate for about ever 150 resumes submitted
That might be your problem - your HR droid is screening out the wrong ones.
Ours used to pass anything along to the hiring managers that wasn't very blatantly unqualified (e.g. no mention of programming experience) (you do have to weed out resume-spam these days, after all). More work for the hiring managers, but we've got a lot of good people. I think that was the right way to go.
I totally agree about training shortsightedness. Once I stopped seeing entry-level positions, I knew we'd be in trouble after a few years; if nobody hires any entry level people for 5 years, then, guess what - there's now nobody with 5 years' experience. Unfortunately the laws of economics don't seem to allow companies to train people (it's never in that particular corporation's short-term best interest).
Slashdot Mirror
There's an interesting third approach, used by Sysinternals's (now part of MS) RootkitRevealer for Windows.
Basically, enumerate all the files on the system using the usual OS APIs. Then, scan the entire raw disk, and enumerate all the files on the system by manually interpreting the directory structures stored on-disk. Any files whose directory entries exist on-disk, but don't show up in the OS's API (with a few standard system exceptions) are being hidden from the OS API layer by a rootkit.
It's certainly theoretically possible to fool, by having your rootkit hook the APIs used to read the raw disk, and returning innocuous values, but that's a good bit harder to do than the other stuff rootkits usually do. Some rootkits fooled it by not hiding their files if the process trying to look them up was named RootkitRevealer.exe, so the tool took to making a randomly-named copy of itself and executing that.
The U.S. does manufacture things to sell for profit and export - music and movies.
That's why the Powers That Be are so big on DRM and trying to stamp out IP piracy - it's not just about getting big campaign contributions from the "content industry", it's about protecting the only industry the U.S. has left.
Heck, most contracts-of-adhesion of any kind have them these days.
That's where the usual advice of "vote with your feet (or dollars)" falls short - if a practice is money-saving enough, basic economics forces all the players in the market to adopt it, regardless of its evilness. Then there is no place for your feet / dollars to go.
Arbitration clauses can be used by corporations to duck bad karma.
An example: Imagine you've gotten screwed by a cellphone company, and wish to sue for damages (and maybe injunctive relief to stop them from screwing other customers in the same way). In the regular court system, imagine trying to find 12 people for the jury who have not been screwed by a cellphone company in the past. Lots of people would be tempted to award the plaintiff 10 million dollars, just because the defendant is a cellphone company.
Maybe companies would think twice about engendering such ill will amongst their consumers if that ill will might taint juries against them.
The first time I played "Rust Never Sleeps" in the CD player, the last track ("Hey Hey, My My") came on, and my wife thought there was something wrong with the stereo. I explained that we were getting perfect digital reproduction of something that was intended to sound kind of like a broken stereo.
You can sidestep that whole problem, by skipping the DB data directory with the ordinary backup tools, and backing up the DB data from MSSQL. If you can connect remotely to their SQL servers and issue queries, have it backup to a file on a network share.
I dunno. The usual wisdom is that, by the time you could hear material news about a company, fire up your broker website and take action, everyone else has also done so, and so the stock's price already reflects that news.
A threat to the entire human race might provide an excellent catalyst for us to stop fighting one another. It would be interesting to see if we really could work together in the face of such a threat, though a failure of that experiment would mean it can't be repeated :-)
You were debunking the perception of
classical music is for winners and rap music is for losersInteresting rap anecdote: I used to have a deaf officemate at a previous job. She would listen to rap, enjoying the rhythms (which she could feel easily). Since I found that out, now I think of rap, jokingly, as "music for deaf people".
That ties in to the grandparent post's point: An alien, because of sensory differences, might percieve our art quite differently than we do.
Simple. The U.S. will be able to compete after its economy collapses, and its standard of living drops to Indian / Chinese levels.
What other way can a global economy with free trade turn out, other than everyone having the same standard of living?
Gotta go hide under a table now until I can forget this.
I know. One of the many many things that bothers me these days is how companies just shrug off obscene executive compensation: "B-b-but it's the only way we can retain quality executives!". However, when you get the same problem with working-shmoe developers: "We have trouble retaining quality developers. Increasing compensation is not an option, let's try to convince the government there's a 'shortage'".
Mandatory arbitration cuts both ways.
Positive (for the business, and ultimately for consumers): Greatly reduces the cost of defending against frivolous lawsuits.
Negative (for some consumers): If you have a real complaint, there's less chance of it getting resolved in your favor, or of getting big damages levied against the company, which might incent it to change its policies. Likewise, getting your case heard by a jury might help you get a judgement based in part on what's "right" or "reasonable", rather than the legalese buried in some EULA-type agreement.
Negative (for society): Corporations don't need to pay as much attention to their karma. Think cellular providers here as an example - finding a jury of twelve where most hadn't been screwed over by a cellphone company in the past would be very difficult; as a result, actual lawsuits against cellphone companies would have a good chance of succeeding, just because of who the defendant is. This force would act to help those companies not be so adversarial to customer interests.
That's just because of reality's well-known liberal bias.
Interestingly enough, this doesn't seem to apply when looking for software jobs. It doesn't matter how long you've been a Linux kernel programmer or that you have a master's in computer architecture, if you don't have 7 years' experience with Visual C# 3.1, you're obviously not qualified.
That might not be a bad thing (I can't believe I just said that...)
There's two basic bad effects from the current system: big companies squashing competition, and patent trolls submarining obvious patents then popping up demanding license fees.
Big corps are the ones hurt most by the patent trolls, so they and we (the public) are on the same side in that fight.
As far as squashing upstart competition goes, I'm sure they'll lobby to keep that ability.
They had a search warrant for the instance the article reports about. So this particular story isn't about an abuse of power (for once!). There's nothing (yet, sigh) to indicate they're going on warrantless fishing expeditions with their spyware, or trying to get it pervasively installed so they can data-mine "in the interest of national security". I agree that either of those cases would be cause for outrage.
Heck, if the FBI wasn't allowed to use spyware, with a warrant, they could just install a hidden camera recording the computer's monitor (see the movie "Antitrust" for a neat example of that kind of spying.)
This doesn't jibe with economic theory as I understand it.
The 200 zorkmids that go to the retailer don't just get stuck in a vault or buried under a mattress. They get invested in the business, or paid back to shareholders. The vendors the company buys stuff from, or the shareholders, then spend that money, etc. Eventually this trickes down to everybody. (Perhaps the CEO hires the consumer to clean his private jet, for a direct example).
Don't believe me? Make a post sometime complaining about concentration of wealth. Someone will come out of the woodwork and say the exact same thing I said above, only with "rich people" substituted for "the retailer".
This is problematic because for a lot of things, quality is difficult or impossible to discern. If it's impossible to discern, see the paper "The Market For Lemons"; only low-quality products can survive in that market.
There's also network effects to overcome; if 99% of people are shopping on price alone then there's not enough market for higher-quality higher-priced products, even if you can tell the difference.
Plus, corporations today are managed so that their profit growth rate keeps increasing (which is the only way to keep stock price rising). Many slashdotters claim this is not actually legally required of corporations, as was previously widely believed. I think it's just a basic conflict of interest in making the people who make the decisions mostly compensated in stock.
Spotting a failing IT project: If it's a project, and it involves IT, then it's failing. (The summary's cited statistics bear this out).
Fixing a failing IT project: Rewrite the laws of economics. (My experience bears this out). This may involve fiat, chemical means, or founding a new religion.
I got that feeling once, on the first viewing of a movie.
My wife and I were watching "The Sixth Sense" with some friends.
Very soon into the movie, my wife successfully (though none of us knew that at the time) guessed and blurted out the Big Twist.
We all spent the movie looking for little clues that confirmed this (e.g. who talks to Bruce Willis). It was pretty interesting. Had she not inadvertently spoiled the twist, we'd have had to watch the movie a second time to pick up on all those little details.
Heh. Watch the ads on daytime or late-night TV sometime.
You can advertise get-rich-quick scams, payday loans, prepaid phone services, psychic hotlines, bankruptcy lawyers, ...
This is what I generally do. However, there's two type of jobs where that doesn't work:
It may be best to just avoid those two types of employers, now that I think of it, or, for each one of those, pick one area and act like a specialist in it.
Antidepressants don't make you artificially happy. The best evidence for this is that they have no street value - if they got you high, there would be a black market.
Two words... rampant Catholicism.
That might be your problem - your HR droid is screening out the wrong ones.
Ours used to pass anything along to the hiring managers that wasn't very blatantly unqualified (e.g. no mention of programming experience) (you do have to weed out resume-spam these days, after all). More work for the hiring managers, but we've got a lot of good people. I think that was the right way to go.
I totally agree about training shortsightedness. Once I stopped seeing entry-level positions, I knew we'd be in trouble after a few years; if nobody hires any entry level people for 5 years, then, guess what - there's now nobody with 5 years' experience. Unfortunately the laws of economics don't seem to allow companies to train people (it's never in that particular corporation's short-term best interest).