In all my professional life, I've never once found work through an employment agency, which I think are disgusting parasitic, often offshore outsourced, rancid vermin. Every job I've had has come from word of mouth or direct ad by the employer. Intermediary agents are horribly stupid. I've never blown off an interview with a company that does show interest, but would happily do it with a recruiter given I have zero respect for them.
On the other hand I understand being ignored by employers who don't reply to job seekers. I think I've had only three negative replies to job inquiries in my life, the rest just leave you hanging. So I can understand the "bale if not better" mind set. If employers want to be taken seriously then they need to at least play nice with potential employees.
However in today's thrifty world, sending out N negative replies by post or even email is often too much a burden (hassle) for a business, so they leave applicants hanging; only fair turn around if an applicant does like wise.
IOCCC 1991 Best Utility was a vi like editor in 1536 bytes; Debian went on to use the unobfuscated version "ae" as a small editor for the rescue floppy for many many years.
I used to agree 100% with this sentiment; I would have happily have dumped history and chemistry in favour of more maths or even computer courses (if my school had had them at the time). However, my opinion (and understanding) changed when I finally asked one of my teachers when I was in 5th form about compulsory courses in junior and senior school. He said what you learn in any given course is not necessarily what is important at this level of schooling; what is important is "learning how to learn", so that you can learn and problem solve at higher education and throughout life in general.
So while I sucked at history and chemistry, looking back I finally managed to put them into perspective. I just wish someone had explained the concept about "learning how to learn" at the start of each school year, because then the sucky courses wouldn't have been such a trial then.
How can a 4yr girl of average height & weight (36 pounds = 16.3293253 Kg) could walk with 10 pounds of anything, a third of her weight, and be a threat before she fall over is sure proof that America's TSA are zealots without a clue. Reference/. earlier report today about groping a 4yr old; add McCarthy "witch hunts", and Spanish Inquisition (sans pillows). There are bad people in the world, even more zealots with good intentions, but without wisdom and temperance.
Imagine if France claimed copyright over Quebec or Spain claimed copyright over Mexico. When you create a language you expect it to spread over many regions in the name of trade and politics. Same applies to a computing language that spread because its popular, politically correct, and/or simply better.
Spoken languages evolve over time, likewise computing languages. The latter however aim to find consistency to avoid code portability issues after the initial adoption period. Still that does not entitle copyright; language has to be able to evolve to remain active, consider Cobol like Latin.
If you copyright a language spoken, written, or computing, no one would use it.
Doesn't track. If I don't leave my house, I can still be robbed. A home owner has to take proactive measures to protect their residence, good locks, alarm system, maybe bars on windows, and learning how to disable SSID broadcasting.
Most consumers would not know how to login nor modify their WiFi AP settings. Probably most wouldn't care nor understand. Only security concious power users would understand and would do what was necessary to opt-out or not broadcast their SSID. Frankly if you don't want to be mapped, don't broadcast SSID.
http://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#H Look at Anthony C Howe (me). 1991 (vi clone in 1526 bytes source, went on to become the floppy disk rescue editor "ae" in early Debian) and 1993 (egrep) are particularly interesting for their data structures. My favourite from someone else is http://www.ioccc.org//years.html#1992_buzzard.2 (forth clone); took me ages to understand this this gem way back then. And for those who think I'm bragging, shit ya, since the IOCCC has no real prize, they say bragging rights is all the winners get.
C is not about being cryptic, though it certainly can be when done badly. Its about clever data structures, being methodical, disciplined, where small is beautiful; instead of memory and CPU cycles being cheap.
Another great C example is the early "Empire" http://www.classicempire.com/ before there was fancy graphics and Sid Meyer's Civilisation.
I've lived in three different countries and have friends I've lost touch with in all of them and would welcome word from. Doesn't mean I want to jump on every social media service.
My distaste about Facebook is not lack of friends, but Facebook ethics, policy, terms of service or lack there of and the simple fact that I don't need to be connected 24 / 7 to some site gathering data on me to sell to a highest bidder. I have several domains, email, blog, web site, cell phone, land line, hosted server, file server, twitter, Skype, ICQ, Jabber, AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo, Hotmail. I have had an online presence since about 1986. If someone needs to find me online or real life, it "ain't" hard.
I don't need Facebook and don't want Facebook, the same way I don't want an iPhone or iPad, because I'm happy with my Nokia S40 based phone and Opera Mini. I'm happy with Twitter. It works for me. Some times simplicity and peace of mind is better than being constantly plugged in.
Bad enough that Windows exists on mobile phones and has infiltrated Nokia,
but to be allowed on mainframe kit would be horrible. I might tolerate my
laptop running an OS I consider flakey, but can restart in 120s to clear
the problem, yet mainframes promise an extremely high level of quality and
assurance. Microsoft in my mind has failed to demonstrate that level of
quality over the years.
No love for Facebook. I've never joined and won't join just because they're the only choice
for some web site of questionable use. Twitter is my social network choice, because they
are more open; my words, good or bad, aren't hidden from non-members.
I've always been passionate about my code and attempt to test as much of it as possible, but I've found what saves on testing / process is discipline in coding style, commenting, consistent use of language idioms, good function / variable names, checking all function returns, lots of debug logging... Lots of little things that a programmer can do to help them read and diagnose their code during development and testing.
It also helps to work with a "testing" partner (an element of Extreme Programming). I don't formally follow Extreme, but I do know from experience working in pairs or on occasion threes works really well: let the passionate go nuts with the support of a tester who should be equally passionate about that aspect of code (it is possible to find), and maybe the third is simply a mentor to overview and act as a sounding board for design ideas and problem solving. My partner and I will often discuss and compare ideas again and again; I'll code something, test it, then pass it to him to test it in depth. In many ways it becomes a game to write the code clean and for him to fault it. http://www.dailywav.com/0600/kaboom.wav
I tried the proposed better solution in Firefox 3.6.3 and it did not work for me; with Firefox in safe mode, it did work. I can only conclude that browser themes and/or add-ons breaks the "default invisible" page setting in the suggested solution.
IMO the Swiss plug design is the best I've seen, compared to North America, Australia, European (France & friends), and the British. The Brit plug has to be the worst bulky design; the European design is so but very difficult when you use transformers on power bars. The Aussie design is a little on the large side.
I too grew up with Defender, Scramble, Galaga, and a slew of others. There was social interaction with this games, at least two players "king of the hill scores". I remember at university a four player fantasy game called "Gauntlet" that was really hard and ate money faster than a street walker. Gauntlet was pretty social. However, personally I'm less interested in the social aspect of games; prefer excellent single player campaigns. I treat modern games much like a book: there is a beginning, middle, and end to the story. And I can replay sometime in the future to relive that experience, much like rereading a book. Of course there are those who like the idea of climbing a social ladder in a fictional online world, but personally I find they require too much investment in time (if playing Subspace/Continuum is a guide), and there will always be someone better who has the time to social climb. The same is true of text MUDs, they are social, and continue to draw in people. Truly social games will be those where you play with family or friends in the same room: be it PC, console, pool, darts, cards (bridge, poker, Eurkre, Magic The Gathering) , board games (Civilisation, Eurorails, Roborally,...) For me playing board games down at the pub on a Sunday with my mates from uni. was the best form of social.
If the games industry switches to a buy online / download model, I want to be able to burn that download to CD for backup. Nothing worse than paying for something and finding N+1 months later when you want to play again, that the download is no longer available and/or the seller has gone bust. For example NetStorm. Greatt game. Good single player campaign. Net play was good too, except the servers eventually died off. Still I do like to play single player from time to time. If I didn't have the CD, I'd be shit out of luck to replay later (yes I know there are online cracked versions now). The point is that if you buy something, people had better be able to burn to CD and install from CD.
If only an AV did all that as it should, but notice how there are different products for different classes of badness: one for root kits, key loggers; another for worms, virii, and trojans; another for adware/spyware; etc. A product like Symantec's AV should find all those, but seldom does, except for EICAR on a good day. At least many of the alternative free AV product find more things than Symantec's products do. And Malwarebytes is brill; at least I know IT works.
As for Boris, all my important files are backed up on a file server. I'm always prepared to reformat and reinstall if necessary, which more often than not is the only way to ultimately clean a Windows machine once infected.
Blame Windows for a default setup where the owner by default runs with administrator privileges, instead of a weaker user where you enable admin only as needed to install software. Microsoft could have been more responsible by encouraging good security practices. But that would require educating users, which of course Microsoft opted to punt on.
I concur that Malwarebytes Antimalware is brill! It has found things that Norton, McAfee, and Avast missed. AND has been able to actually remove them instead of referring me to a "how to remove" web page that typically occurs (at least in the past) with Norton's product. I'm more inclined to pay for something that I've seen actually work in the field with customer machines than invest in something that supposedly is suppose to do the job and never reports anything. As an aside: when I first saw the film "The Net" it always made me think of companies like Microsoft, Symantec, and McAfee as likely candidates; now we have Microsoft AV to help protect Microsoft Windows. This combination sounds so wrong.
The fact that Windows needs AV to the extreme extent that it does just boggles the mind. And now that Microsoft are providing their own free AV solution as a cheaper solution to actually fixing Windows security sounds like Microsoft trying to pull a fast one while at the same time push into yet another software market. Why should I trust a Microsoft AV solution, when I find it so hard to trust Windows and any other Microsoft product in terms of security? They might get it right at the product launch, but I bet over time their AV will degrade like the rest of their stuff. The only reason I use Windows is because I still like to play games. Oh hum.
As a software author, I've found that free anti-virus, like Avira and Avast, pretty good, given my
understanding of computers, email, spam, and security threats. Symantec are just creating
FUD. I used to use Norton Security software, but found that it just slows down a Windows XP
machine far too much, guesstimate 15 to 20%. The UI would take ages to load. Symantec
might be good for the peons, but for experts the performance hit is too much. Expert users
can find better, cheaper, and faster working solutions.
While I use VLC a lot, the UI is still clumsy compared to other Windows and X-Windows players. You have to tell it the difference between a DVD and audio CD; the UI changes between audio and video; the gaziline advanced options can be problematic; klunky.
Also the region free ability has been broken for a while now. I have to use DVD43 and another player to watch Region 2 (France) DVDs. It used to work, but some where it just stopped.
Frankly, they still have a long way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
https://academic.oup.com/iwc/a...
In all my professional life, I've never once found work through an employment agency, which I think are disgusting parasitic, often offshore outsourced, rancid vermin. Every job I've had has come from word of mouth or direct ad by the employer. Intermediary agents are horribly stupid. I've never blown off an interview with a company that does show interest, but would happily do it with a recruiter given I have zero respect for them.
On the other hand I understand being ignored by employers who don't reply to job seekers. I think I've had only three negative replies to job inquiries in my life, the rest just leave you hanging. So I can understand the "bale if not better" mind set. If employers want to be taken seriously then they need to at least play nice with potential employees.
However in today's thrifty world, sending out N negative replies by post or even email is often too much a burden (hassle) for a business, so they leave applicants hanging; only fair turn around if an applicant does like wise.
Thought it died long ago.
Start with the CERT Secure Coding standards, especially for C programmers it covers many of the "gotchas" to watch out for.
SEI CERT C Coding Standard: Rules for Developing Safe, Reliable, and Secure Systems (2016 Edition)
https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/...
Apparently they them for other languages like C++, Java, Perl.
IOCCC 1991 Best Utility was a vi like editor in 1536 bytes; Debian went on to use the unobfuscated version "ae" as a small editor for the rescue floppy for many many years.
I used to agree 100% with this sentiment; I would have happily have dumped history and chemistry in favour of more maths or even computer courses (if my school had had them at the time). However, my opinion (and understanding) changed when I finally asked one of my teachers when I was in 5th form about compulsory courses in junior and senior school. He said what you learn in any given course is not necessarily what is important at this level of schooling; what is important is "learning how to learn", so that you can learn and problem solve at higher education and throughout life in general.
So while I sucked at history and chemistry, looking back I finally managed to put them into perspective. I just wish someone had explained the concept about "learning how to learn" at the start of each school year, because then the sucky courses wouldn't have been such a trial then.
How can a 4yr girl of average height & weight (36 pounds = 16.3293253 Kg) /. earlier report today about groping a 4yr old; add McCarthy
could walk with 10 pounds of anything, a third of her weight, and be a threat
before she fall over is sure proof that America's TSA are zealots without a
clue. Reference
"witch hunts", and Spanish Inquisition (sans pillows). There are bad people
in the world, even more zealots with good intentions, but without wisdom
and temperance.
Imagine if France claimed copyright over Quebec or Spain claimed copyright over
Mexico. When you create a language you expect it to spread over many regions
in the name of trade and politics. Same applies to a computing language that
spread because its popular, politically correct, and/or simply better.
Spoken languages evolve over time, likewise computing languages. The latter
however aim to find consistency to avoid code portability issues after the initial
adoption period. Still that does not entitle copyright; language has to be able
to evolve to remain active, consider Cobol like Latin.
If you copyright a language spoken, written, or computing, no one would use it.
Doesn't track. If I don't leave my house, I can still be robbed.
A home owner has to take proactive measures to protect their
residence, good locks, alarm system, maybe bars on windows,
and learning how to disable SSID broadcasting.
Most consumers would not know how to login nor modify their WiFi AP settings.
Probably most wouldn't care nor understand. Only security concious power users
would understand and would do what was necessary to opt-out or not broadcast
their SSID. Frankly if you don't want to be mapped, don't broadcast SSID.
http://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#H Look at Anthony C Howe (me). 1991 (vi clone in 1526 bytes source, went on to become the floppy disk rescue editor "ae" in early Debian) and 1993 (egrep) are particularly interesting for their data structures. My favourite from someone else is http://www.ioccc.org/ /years.html#1992_buzzard.2 (forth clone); took me ages to understand this this gem way back then. And for those who think I'm bragging, shit ya, since the IOCCC has no real prize, they say bragging rights is all the winners get.
C is not about being cryptic, though it certainly can be when done badly. Its about clever data structures, being methodical, disciplined, where small is beautiful; instead of memory and CPU cycles being cheap.
Another great C example is the early "Empire" http://www.classicempire.com/ before there was fancy graphics and Sid Meyer's Civilisation.
I've lived in three different countries and have friends I've lost touch with
in all of them and would welcome word from. Doesn't mean I want to jump
on every social media service.
My distaste about Facebook is not lack of friends, but Facebook ethics,
policy, terms of service or lack there of and the simple fact that I don't
need to be connected 24 / 7 to some site gathering data on me to sell
to a highest bidder. I have several domains, email, blog, web site, cell
phone, land line, hosted server, file server, twitter, Skype, ICQ, Jabber,
AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo, Hotmail. I have had an online presence since about
1986. If someone needs to find me online or real life, it "ain't" hard.
I don't need Facebook and don't want Facebook, the same way I don't
want an iPhone or iPad, because I'm happy with my Nokia S40 based
phone and Opera Mini. I'm happy with Twitter. It works for me. Some
times simplicity and peace of mind is better than being constantly
plugged in.
Bad enough that Windows exists on mobile phones and has infiltrated Nokia, but to be allowed on mainframe kit would be horrible. I might tolerate my laptop running an OS I consider flakey, but can restart in 120s to clear the problem, yet mainframes promise an extremely high level of quality and assurance. Microsoft in my mind has failed to demonstrate that level of quality over the years.
No love for Facebook. I've never joined and won't join just because they're the only choice for some web site of questionable use. Twitter is my social network choice, because they are more open; my words, good or bad, aren't hidden from non-members.
I've always been passionate about my code and attempt to test as much of it as possible, but I've found what saves on testing / process is discipline in coding style, commenting, consistent use of language idioms, good function / variable names, checking all function returns, lots of debug logging... Lots of little things that a programmer can do to help them read and diagnose their code during development and testing. It also helps to work with a "testing" partner (an element of Extreme Programming). I don't formally follow Extreme, but I do know from experience working in pairs or on occasion threes works really well: let the passionate go nuts with the support of a tester who should be equally passionate about that aspect of code (it is possible to find), and maybe the third is simply a mentor to overview and act as a sounding board for design ideas and problem solving. My partner and I will often discuss and compare ideas again and again; I'll code something, test it, then pass it to him to test it in depth. In many ways it becomes a game to write the code clean and for him to fault it. http://www.dailywav.com/0600/kaboom.wav
I tried the proposed better solution in Firefox 3.6.3 and it did not work for me; with Firefox in safe mode, it did work. I can only conclude that browser themes and/or add-ons breaks the "default invisible" page setting in the suggested solution.
IMO the Swiss plug design is the best I've seen, compared to North America, Australia, European (France & friends), and the British. The Brit plug has to be the worst bulky design; the European design is so but very difficult when you use transformers on power bars. The Aussie design is a little on the large side.
I too grew up with Defender, Scramble, Galaga, and a slew of others. There was social interaction with this games, at least two players "king of the hill scores". I remember at university a four player fantasy game called "Gauntlet" that was really hard and ate money faster than a street walker. Gauntlet was pretty social. However, personally I'm less interested in the social aspect of games; prefer excellent single player campaigns. I treat modern games much like a book: there is a beginning, middle, and end to the story. And I can replay sometime in the future to relive that experience, much like rereading a book. Of course there are those who like the idea of climbing a social ladder in a fictional online world, but personally I find they require too much investment in time (if playing Subspace/Continuum is a guide), and there will always be someone better who has the time to social climb. The same is true of text MUDs, they are social, and continue to draw in people. Truly social games will be those where you play with family or friends in the same room: be it PC, console, pool, darts, cards (bridge, poker, Eurkre, Magic The Gathering) , board games (Civilisation, Eurorails, Roborally, ...) For me playing board games down at the pub on a Sunday with my mates from uni. was the best form of social.
If the games industry switches to a buy online / download model, I want to be able to burn that download to CD for backup. Nothing worse than paying for something and finding N+1 months later when you want to play again, that the download is no longer available and/or the seller has gone bust. For example NetStorm. Greatt game. Good single player campaign. Net play was good too, except the servers eventually died off. Still I do like to play single player from time to time. If I didn't have the CD, I'd be shit out of luck to replay later (yes I know there are online cracked versions now). The point is that if you buy something, people had better be able to burn to CD and install from CD.
If only an AV did all that as it should, but notice how there are different products for different classes of badness: one for root kits, key loggers; another for worms, virii, and trojans; another for adware/spyware; etc. A product like Symantec's AV should find all those, but seldom does, except for EICAR on a good day. At least many of the alternative free AV product find more things than Symantec's products do. And Malwarebytes is brill; at least I know IT works.
As for Boris, all my important files are backed up on a file server. I'm always prepared to reformat and reinstall if necessary, which more often than not is the only way to ultimately clean a Windows machine once infected.
Blame Windows for a default setup where the owner by default runs with administrator privileges, instead of a weaker user where you enable admin only as needed to install software. Microsoft could have been more responsible by encouraging good security practices. But that would require educating users, which of course Microsoft opted to punt on.
I concur that Malwarebytes Antimalware is brill! It has found things that Norton, McAfee, and Avast missed. AND has been able to actually remove them instead of referring me to a "how to remove" web page that typically occurs (at least in the past) with Norton's product. I'm more inclined to pay for something that I've seen actually work in the field with customer machines than invest in something that supposedly is suppose to do the job and never reports anything. As an aside: when I first saw the film "The Net" it always made me think of companies like Microsoft, Symantec, and McAfee as likely candidates; now we have Microsoft AV to help protect Microsoft Windows. This combination sounds so wrong.
Simply put Norton has become the "Microsoft" of AV products, slow, bloated, and works most of the time if you're patient.
The fact that Windows needs AV to the extreme extent that it does just boggles the mind. And now that Microsoft are providing their own free AV solution as a cheaper solution to actually fixing Windows security sounds like Microsoft trying to pull a fast one while at the same time push into yet another software market. Why should I trust a Microsoft AV solution, when I find it so hard to trust Windows and any other Microsoft product in terms of security? They might get it right at the product launch, but I bet over time their AV will degrade like the rest of their stuff. The only reason I use Windows is because I still like to play games. Oh hum.
As a software author, I've found that free anti-virus, like Avira and Avast, pretty good, given my understanding of computers, email, spam, and security threats. Symantec are just creating FUD. I used to use Norton Security software, but found that it just slows down a Windows XP machine far too much, guesstimate 15 to 20%. The UI would take ages to load. Symantec might be good for the peons, but for experts the performance hit is too much. Expert users can find better, cheaper, and faster working solutions.
While I use VLC a lot, the UI is still clumsy compared to other Windows and X-Windows players. You have to tell it the difference between a DVD and audio CD; the UI changes between audio and video; the gaziline advanced options can be problematic; klunky. Also the region free ability has been broken for a while now. I have to use DVD43 and another player to watch Region 2 (France) DVDs. It used to work, but some where it just stopped. Frankly, they still have a long way to go.