Programmers (even good programmers) have gotten more and more replaceable.
Software has gotten much more encapsolated.. you no longer need to have 10 years of domain knowledge to maintain stuff (most software isn't even around that long). Policies and management methods have pushed for making people more inter-changable.. and always having multiple people who can do every job. And of course there is a huge pool of qualified workers out there.
There is a certain reasonable perception that complaining and continued gainful employment don't work well together.
As the bias in those sample questions may have implied.. I don't really care either. Not saying I'd want to live in a glass house.. but what I purchase and other mundane details.. I could care less about who sees that. Most of the scenarios where that data would hurt me require paranoia on a level that is beyond me.
And yes, I was generalizing on a massive level. I do think geeks are at least generally more aware of privacy and security concerns, because technology is becoming the new battleground for this stuff, and geeks naturally tend to understand technology better than non-geeks.
I definitely wouldn't say most geeks are obsessed with their data or privacy, but I would say that most geeks have at least thought about it and formed an opinion, which is more than can be said by a large portion of "meh" crowd.
But the non-geeks are the ones who most need to hear the message
and who care the least.
We are geeks.. we think and care about technological issues around privacy and freedom and security. They are a big deal to most of us. This seems to blind us to the fact that most people don't really care.
And it's not because they don't understand. Twitter and facebook are popular because most people outside of the geek community _like_ sharing every mundane detail about themselves with anyone who will listen. The answer to most "what they can do with the data" is "so what".
A conversation with a non-geek on the subject of data privacy tends to go like this:
They sell it to credit card companies, advertisers, marketters, and anyone else who wants to sell you some junk: a) So what? how does that hurt me. I get more targetted advertisments and possibly products that better suit me
They give it to the government: a) If the government wants to know what I did at that party last week.. I would have happily told them
When we revert into some paranoid disutopia the forces of opression will use your twitter comments to identify you as counter to their objectives and have you dragged from your homes and taken to the acid mines where you'll... a) oh get a life..
If we want to convince people that privacy is important, we need better scare statements!
Michael Moore style drama, sensationalism, and bias meets wikileaks style cold hard data. This should be interesting
I do agree that _all_ governments seem to have gotten a little too used to being able to work in secret.. and wikileaks might just curb some of the insanity by making the question “what if this gets out” a little more real. That said I do think they go a bit far.
“Hacktivism”. Never heard the word before today and now it’s on every second post.
I really hope it doesn’t catch on. I cringe every time I hear it. It’s not catchy or clever, just irritating. It’s right up there with “blogosphere” and “*gate”.
Probably brought to you by the guys who coined the word “cracker” in a desperate attempt to win back the word “hacker” (you lost guys.. give it up.. spouting off “don’t you mean cracker” every time someone uses the word is getting very old).
Back on topic: I fully support this war on snow. The weather here is _totally_ unacceptable. I’ve said for years that something needs to be done about it.. but my friends and co-workers just kind of laugh and continue to put up with it. Glad to see there are others who feel more direct action is necessary.
It's a nice pipe dream, but I don't see it happening... at least not for a _long_ time.
The whole Hollywood celebrity worship thing is huge.. both in money and in popularity. Personally I think it's completely insane.. but enough people are into it that the "virtual actor" thing is going to be a major uphill struggle.
Part of me thinks this is very creepy and even morally wrong.. but a bigger part actually wants to see it work. Pulling this off in a way that doesn’t look terrible would be pretty neat.
I could care less about seeing some dead actor brought back to life... I’m definitely interested in the work required to make it happen though.
The ethical/legal stuff is a little interesting. This falls somewhere between a family giving permission to use a dead loved one’s image for a product, and publishing something while claiming said loved one wrote it. Does anyone have the right to do the later (or even the former).. should they? Personally I don’t care what people do with me after I’m dead but I imagine some people do.
It’s probably BS anyway
Also lunch time is over. Gotta stay late enough as it is ya know. LOTS OF THINGS TO DO!
Also the task bar failed for me. I have multi-monitor setup with different sized monitors and absolute positioning, so I wasn't too surprised, but kde3's taskbar/multimonitor support is what I switched to kde3 for in the first place. In other words, this was on top of everything else a deal breaker for me.
xfce4-panel on the other hand handles my config just fine.
I find it's a lot like memory leaks. If you run your program through a leak checker frequently, it is very easy to stay on top of the leaks. The same is true about warnings. You know what code you introduced, so chances are the new warning is somewhere in there. It's when you leave "fixing the warnings" or "plugging the leaks" till the end that you run into the mountain... and it tends to be a convenient chunk to skip when a project is behind on budget.
Oh, and KDE isn't a product. It's a community. A thought. A feeling.
A bad dream..
I know I'm gonna get modded troll for this one.. but the whole plasma desktop thing is a nightmare, and probably will kill KDE (the desktop, the community, etc..). Not for the reasons the article mentions, that's just silliness. For the reason that it has gone from something relatively stable, mature, and well liked.. to a barely usable mess... and has stayed that way. Stuff that should work.. basic stuff.. fails horribly. We arn't talking minor bugs and lack of polish.. we are talking key features like.. the menu.. and desktop wallpaper. Plasma _still_ feels like pre-alpha software.
I've recently switched to an interesting but very nice combination of openbox and xfce4-panel. It gives me most of what kde3 gave me, without the eye candy I generally disabled anyway. If anyone else is having the "omg how do I get kde3 back" feeling.. might give this off pair a try.
And I know you always lose users when you make drastic changes.. but hatred ot plasma desktop and a strong desire to get kde3 back seems almost universal in my circle(s).
And I suspect a lot of the people who have pirated copies of avast didn't know it. A friend/whoever set their computer up for them probably put it on there for them.
What are you talking about.. Farmville is brilliant.
I know people who have been _fired_ for playing it at work.. constantly.. AFTER BEING TOLD TO STOP!
Every aspect of that game is cored around getting people addicted and playing continuously.
Pre-emptive: No I don't play farmville.. I don't have a facebook/myspace/twitter account either.. but I can appreciate the pure brilliance behind these things. The pure number of people hooked on this stuff like crack is a testament to it.
What I meant was that the idea of having a language/tool be so intuitive that non-technical people could just write out what they wanted died when COBOL failed to deliver on that goal.
I know COBOL is still alive and well.. unfortunately:(
I find I like the noise when doing slog work.. i.e. just hacking out code/flushing out designs/reviewing stuff. I almost always have music playing playing through my noise canceling headphones.
That said, when I get stuck on something, the "noise canceling" part becomes quite relevant. Flip off the music.. nothing but that damn voice in my head...
I disagree. A terrible idea with a beautifully executed development goes no where. A great idea that is hacked together with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code can make someone a fortune and (lame as it sounds) change the world.
That said I think having solid developer(s) is a really good thing. It costs less, makes for a more reliable product, and enables you to say "yeah, we can add that" vs. "hah, you'd have to rewrite everything" when further great ideas come along.
But saying that the importance of programming is on par with the idea.. it's not. Much as us programmers like to think we are _the_ critical component.. I really don't think we are in a lot of cases. The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful. HR tends to think of programmers as production line workers.. and as much as I hate to admit it, there really is truth in that. We turn ideas into something tangible so they can be sold. If we produce better products or produce them more efficiently, we make the company more money.. but we arn't as important as the guy's who tell us what to make, or the guy's who get people to pay for it.
As for idea people learning to program.. I don't buy it. Might work for some people, but I think programming/working with technology is either something you enjoy or you don't. Most good programers I know don't care about the end product as much as the code. The end product is a necessary evil.. a reason to justify their code poetry. Learning programming as a way of achieving and end goal sounds like some bad code about to happen. And I thought the whole "managers can write code thing" died with COBOL.
Religion survives science because faith, being a major tenant of most organized religions, encourages a strong belief in something without empirical evidence, verifiability, or scientific method.. cause you know.. someone told you it was true.
It was how he _got_ the data.. and bragging about it probably didn't help much either.
Key word in my post was "necessarily". Obviously you can get hosed at any step in the process.. but before wikileaks I think most geeks assumed there really was no safe way to upload something to the internet.
It was possible, via myriad methods, to release the same information in a widely distributed, completely anonymous manner
On the other hand, most people were unaware of this. What wikileaks has really done is shown that you can leak something to the internet without necessarily destroying your life. Wikileaks has done more by being on TV constantly than by the service they offer imo.
My opinion as to whether this is a good thing or not is still un-decided.
This is up in lala land.. but you really can’t cure stupid.
What we need to do is make phishing attacks useless. Obviously a lot harder to do than say.
The best I could come up with is some kind of challenge response system, possibly with the aid of a key token, with the user’s IP address factored in. That is:
You are at the login screen.. and presented with a challenge. On the server the challenge is tied to the IP that requested the login screen. You punch the challenge into some device, it gives you a response. You then plug the response into the login dialog (possibly with some other traditional password). The server validates that the IP logging in matches the IP associated with the challenge, and if so (and if the response is correct of course), lets the user log in.
Obviously this is way too cumbersome to work.. and the users who fall for phishing attacks tend to be the same ones who have PINs of 1234 and resent having to enter _that_ in. But I think something like this where it is impossible to “tell” someone your credentials is the solution.
I would bet good money that IPv6 NAT is going to emerge, because people are used to thinking in the NAT way. Even though this is what a large part of IPv6 is meant to avoid.
Hardware is easy at the large company level. "Hey, we need to spend $xxxxxx to stay in business". Getting people to use something when they don't absolutely have to isn't.
People are used to the way IPv4 works.. and specifically the way NAT works.
IPv6 requires people to figure out how to have what they used to have with something different. Some people love this, some people don't.
I understand that now seemed like a good time to "fix everything". The internet really is the definitive legacy problem.. you can't just roll out a new patch every month.. and this is probably the only chance they'll ever have to make sweeping changes.
But the other side is that we are hitting the reset switch on maturity. As buggy as stuff is, I don't think it's gonna compare to the years of exploits that IPv6 is going to bring. IPv4 grew with the hackers.. IPv6 is going to be transplanted..
Slashdot Mirror
Programmers (even good programmers) have gotten more and more replaceable.
Software has gotten much more encapsolated.. you no longer need to have 10 years of domain knowledge to maintain stuff (most software isn't even around that long). Policies and management methods have pushed for making people more inter-changable.. and always having multiple people who can do every job. And of course there is a huge pool of qualified workers out there.
There is a certain reasonable perception that complaining and continued gainful employment don't work well together.
As the bias in those sample questions may have implied.. I don't really care either. Not saying I'd want to live in a glass house.. but what I purchase and other mundane details.. I could care less about who sees that. Most of the scenarios where that data would hurt me require paranoia on a level that is beyond me.
And yes, I was generalizing on a massive level. I do think geeks are at least generally more aware of privacy and security concerns, because technology is becoming the new battleground for this stuff, and geeks naturally tend to understand technology better than non-geeks.
I definitely wouldn't say most geeks are obsessed with their data or privacy, but I would say that most geeks have at least thought about it and formed an opinion, which is more than can be said by a large portion of "meh" crowd.
But the non-geeks are the ones who most need to hear the message
and who care the least.
We are geeks.. we think and care about technological issues around privacy and freedom and security. They are a big deal to most of us. This seems to blind us to the fact that most people don't really care.
And it's not because they don't understand. Twitter and facebook are popular because most people outside of the geek community _like_ sharing every mundane detail about themselves with anyone who will listen. The answer to most "what they can do with the data" is "so what".
A conversation with a non-geek on the subject of data privacy tends to go like this:
They sell it to credit card companies, advertisers, marketters, and anyone else who wants to sell you some junk:
a) So what? how does that hurt me. I get more targetted advertisments and possibly products that better suit me
They give it to the government:
a) If the government wants to know what I did at that party last week.. I would have happily told them
When we revert into some paranoid disutopia the forces of opression will use your twitter comments to identify you as counter to their objectives and have you dragged from your homes and taken to the acid mines where you'll ...
a) oh get a life..
If we want to convince people that privacy is important, we need better scare statements!
Michael Moore style drama, sensationalism, and bias meets wikileaks style cold hard data. This should be interesting
I do agree that _all_ governments seem to have gotten a little too used to being able to work in secret.. and wikileaks might just curb some of the insanity by making the question “what if this gets out” a little more real. That said I do think they go a bit far.
“Hacktivism”. Never heard the word before today and now it’s on every second post.
I really hope it doesn’t catch on. I cringe every time I hear it. It’s not catchy or clever, just irritating. It’s right up there with “blogosphere” and “*gate”.
Probably brought to you by the guys who coined the word “cracker” in a desperate attempt to win back the word “hacker” (you lost guys.. give it up.. spouting off “don’t you mean cracker” every time someone uses the word is getting very old).
Back on topic: I fully support this war on snow. The weather here is _totally_ unacceptable. I’ve said for years that something needs to be done about it.. but my friends and co-workers just kind of laugh and continue to put up with it. Glad to see there are others who feel more direct action is necessary.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/10/1651236
It's a nice pipe dream, but I don't see it happening... at least not for a _long_ time.
The whole Hollywood celebrity worship thing is huge.. both in money and in popularity. Personally I think it's completely insane.. but enough people are into it that the "virtual actor" thing is going to be a major uphill struggle.
Part of me thinks this is very creepy and even morally wrong.. but a bigger part actually wants to see it work. Pulling this off in a way that doesn’t look terrible would be pretty neat.
I could care less about seeing some dead actor brought back to life... I’m definitely interested in the work required to make it happen though.
The ethical/legal stuff is a little interesting. This falls somewhere between a family giving permission to use a dead loved one’s image for a product, and publishing something while claiming said loved one wrote it. Does anyone have the right to do the later (or even the former).. should they? Personally I don’t care what people do with me after I’m dead but I imagine some people do.
It’s probably BS anyway
Also lunch time is over. Gotta stay late enough as it is ya know. LOTS OF THINGS TO DO!
I'd say Java was pretty valuable. Love or hate Java, it's used all over the place.
They just never figured out a way to turn that mass user base into serious profit without losing their users.
Sure, but then why bother using kde.
Also the task bar failed for me. I have multi-monitor setup with different sized monitors and absolute positioning, so I wasn't too surprised, but kde3's taskbar/multimonitor support is what I switched to kde3 for in the first place. In other words, this was on top of everything else a deal breaker for me.
xfce4-panel on the other hand handles my config just fine.
they're easy to get rid of
Except in bulk.
I find it's a lot like memory leaks. If you run your program through a leak checker frequently, it is very easy to stay on top of the leaks. The same is true about warnings. You know what code you introduced, so chances are the new warning is somewhere in there. It's when you leave "fixing the warnings" or "plugging the leaks" till the end that you run into the mountain... and it tends to be a convenient chunk to skip when a project is behind on budget.
Oh, and KDE isn't a product. It's a community. A thought. A feeling.
A bad dream..
I know I'm gonna get modded troll for this one.. but the whole plasma desktop thing is a nightmare, and probably will kill KDE (the desktop, the community, etc..). Not for the reasons the article mentions, that's just silliness. For the reason that it has gone from something relatively stable, mature, and well liked.. to a barely usable mess... and has stayed that way. Stuff that should work.. basic stuff.. fails horribly. We arn't talking minor bugs and lack of polish.. we are talking key features like.. the menu.. and desktop wallpaper. Plasma _still_ feels like pre-alpha software.
I've recently switched to an interesting but very nice combination of openbox and xfce4-panel. It gives me most of what kde3 gave me, without the eye candy I generally disabled anyway. If anyone else is having the "omg how do I get kde3 back" feeling.. might give this off pair a try.
And I know you always lose users when you make drastic changes.. but hatred ot plasma desktop and a strong desire to get kde3 back seems almost universal in my circle(s).
Probably using words like "genuine".
And I suspect a lot of the people who have pirated copies of avast didn't know it. A friend/whoever set their computer up for them probably put it on there for them.
What are you talking about.. Farmville is brilliant.
I know people who have been _fired_ for playing it at work.. constantly.. AFTER BEING TOLD TO STOP!
Every aspect of that game is cored around getting people addicted and playing continuously.
Pre-emptive: No I don't play farmville.. I don't have a facebook/myspace/twitter account either.. but I can appreciate the pure brilliance behind these things. The pure number of people hooked on this stuff like crack is a testament to it.
LOL. You think the COBOL died?
What I meant was that the idea of having a language/tool be so intuitive that non-technical people could just write out what they wanted died when COBOL failed to deliver on that goal.
I know COBOL is still alive and well.. unfortunately :(
I find I like the noise when doing slog work.. i.e. just hacking out code/flushing out designs/reviewing stuff. I almost always have music playing playing through my noise canceling headphones.
That said, when I get stuck on something, the "noise canceling" part becomes quite relevant. Flip off the music.. nothing but that damn voice in my head...
I disagree. A terrible idea with a beautifully executed development goes no where. A great idea that is hacked together with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code can make someone a fortune and (lame as it sounds) change the world.
That said I think having solid developer(s) is a really good thing. It costs less, makes for a more reliable product, and enables you to say "yeah, we can add that" vs. "hah, you'd have to rewrite everything" when further great ideas come along.
But saying that the importance of programming is on par with the idea.. it's not. Much as us programmers like to think we are _the_ critical component.. I really don't think we are in a lot of cases. The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful. HR tends to think of programmers as production line workers.. and as much as I hate to admit it, there really is truth in that. We turn ideas into something tangible so they can be sold. If we produce better products or produce them more efficiently, we make the company more money.. but we arn't as important as the guy's who tell us what to make, or the guy's who get people to pay for it.
As for idea people learning to program.. I don't buy it. Might work for some people, but I think programming/working with technology is either something you enjoy or you don't. Most good programers I know don't care about the end product as much as the code. The end product is a necessary evil.. a reason to justify their code poetry. Learning programming as a way of achieving and end goal sounds like some bad code about to happen. And I thought the whole "managers can write code thing" died with COBOL.
Will not do any good..
Religion survives science because faith, being a major tenant of most organized religions, encourages a strong belief in something without empirical evidence, verifiability, or scientific method.. cause you know.. someone told you it was true.
It's a nice little package.
That was a typo (I corrected in reply) .. I meant _non_ geeks.
* most non geeks .. sigh
That wasn't the method he used to leak the data..
It was how he _got_ the data.. and bragging about it probably didn't help much either.
Key word in my post was "necessarily". Obviously you can get hosed at any step in the process.. but before wikileaks I think most geeks assumed there really was no safe way to upload something to the internet.
It was possible, via myriad methods, to release the same information in a widely distributed, completely anonymous manner
On the other hand, most people were unaware of this. What wikileaks has really done is shown that you can leak something to the internet without necessarily destroying your life. Wikileaks has done more by being on TV constantly than by the service they offer imo.
My opinion as to whether this is a good thing or not is still un-decided.
This is up in lala land.. but you really can’t cure stupid.
What we need to do is make phishing attacks useless. Obviously a lot harder to do than say.
The best I could come up with is some kind of challenge response system, possibly with the aid of a key token, with the user’s IP address factored in. That is:
You are at the login screen.. and presented with a challenge. On the server the challenge is tied to the IP that requested the login screen. You punch the challenge into some device, it gives you a response. You then plug the response into the login dialog (possibly with some other traditional password). The server validates that the IP logging in matches the IP associated with the challenge, and if so (and if the response is correct of course), lets the user log in.
Obviously this is way too cumbersome to work.. and the users who fall for phishing attacks tend to be the same ones who have PINs of 1234 and resent having to enter _that_ in. But I think something like this where it is impossible to “tell” someone your credentials is the solution.
Nitpic: what's this got to do with my rights?
Less "new shit" to learn.
I would bet good money that IPv6 NAT is going to emerge, because people are used to thinking in the NAT way. Even though this is what a large part of IPv6 is meant to avoid.
Hardware is easy at the large company level. "Hey, we need to spend $xxxxxx to stay in business". Getting people to use something when they don't absolutely have to isn't.
People are used to the way IPv4 works.. and specifically the way NAT works.
IPv6 requires people to figure out how to have what they used to have with something different. Some people love this, some people don't.
I understand that now seemed like a good time to "fix everything". The internet really is the definitive legacy problem.. you can't just roll out a new patch every month.. and this is probably the only chance they'll ever have to make sweeping changes.
But the other side is that we are hitting the reset switch on maturity. As buggy as stuff is, I don't think it's gonna compare to the years of exploits that IPv6 is going to bring. IPv4 grew with the hackers.. IPv6 is going to be transplanted..