Huge areas of northern Canada are covered by muskeg. Roads are winter use only. This is the reason why there is Canadian interest especially in alternative transport. I'm simply explaining this to you.
There are also many archipelagos in the world, the Philippines for example, where a similar transportation challenge emerges at a different granularity. In the absence of better alternatives, intermodal freight is the prevailing answer, but it involves a materials handling component which is slow, effortful, and requires significant infrastructure. It doesn't work well for scattered populations or perishable goods.
Here, too, there's Canadian interest, and the reason is historical. We were early in developing a strong telecommunications capability for challenging terrain. We were then able to export this expertise to other parts of the world such as the Philippines, and we have longstanding business relationships as a result. The implications are not lost on Canadian investors.
All this assumes that rail track can be laid economically over the terrain in question. That eliminates huge areas of the world, including most of Canada, for example.
In marine transport, ships returning "in ballast" have been common for centuries. Of course this isn't optimal, but it's proved to be entirely feasible.
To clarify, you disagree with my opinion because yours differs from it. That's perfectly fine. However, that does not make it wrong. Moreover, nobody is doing anything. We're talking about what we might do. Your analysis seems flawed on several other points as well:
Indeed there are many approaches to taching younger kids. However, we're not talking about younger kids but high school students. Do you have any teaching experience with either age group? If so, you're welcome to share it.
Indeed it may not be necessary to start with formal number theory. Nobody remotely suggested that it was (though, come to think of it, that is where computer science historically had its beginnings.) What I said was that I personally would like to approach it in this way, implying that I believe such an approach ought to be sufficient. It would also provide a realistic look into what computer science is like as a discipline. If you're not a computer scientist yourself, you may not understand the distinction.
You learned English informally. Fine. I learned French and Swedish formally, and German informally. In other words, a personal experience on your part does not invalidate the experiences that others may have.
Indeed there's nothing impure about learning Python. What a bizarre premise! I don't see anyone claiming that. But Python is not an introduction to computer science, any more than driving a car is an introduction to engine design.
And of course, being science, it's based in truth, not fashion. When technology is rapidly changing, it helps a lot to be able to see past the technology and into what is actually going on. You're correct to say that what you know as a technologist has become history in two years. What you know as a scientist has far more enduring value. If nothing else, that makes it easy to see past the hype and know which new technology has real potential and which is ultimately doomed.
The other learning aspect of this young field is that we get exposure and practice in all of it, or at least, as much as we're willing to take on. Other fields such as medicine are rigidly specialized. In the academic discipline of computer science, of course there are areas of specialization such as numerical computation and distributed systems. In the industry, it's more typical to bring a broad synthesis of these to the job, but for the application of that knowledge to take many different forms.
Best of all, you're not just analyzing data. You get to build stuff! And, if you do your work well, you can go back after twenty years and see that what you've contributed is still vitally alive in the DNA of that organization. An idea rooted in science transcends its implementation. I've seen it many times. I'm sure you have too.
Hard to put that up against a generation who has a lot of instant gratification when it comes to their experience with anything technology related.
Man, you have a true gift for words.
When I was a CS undergrad, it was a small and somewhat exotic discipline. Exactly one course was offered at the first year level. Anyone wanting to get into the program had to first pass through the course. It began with a lecture that basically warned us to expect several times the effort in this course compared to the other sciences. That was no exaggeration. It meant that not too many people went into the program who didn't love it for its own sake. We were happy to put in the time. This was the spirit of folks like Dennis Ritchie.
The dot com boom felt horrid. The industry was massively invaded by greed and competitiveness and impatience and fascination with all things shiny, more the spirit of Steve Jobs. But you can't get around the fact that science is a discipline. It entails a lot of work. If I were trying to expose kids to computer science today, I'd talk to them about this reality. I wouldn't mind scaring a lot of them away, frankly. But I'd also present some simple examples of why I find it so beautiful and appealing. Binary numbers and simple operations. I'd say, "This might seem boring, but this is where it all starts. All we have to work with at first is O and 1. They're our Legos. And we're building an entire universe with them." I'd let my enthusiasm speak for itself. A few in the class would sort of get it. That's all that matters.
On the other hand, how fair is it to withhold life saving/extending treatment from someone willing and able to pay for it? (Assuming that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us)
Ah, but it does. That's exactly the problem. Compare Canada and the United States. The healthcare system is vast, in both instances, constituting a massive component not only of the economy but also of all research effort, laboratory infrastructure, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries to mention just two, and so on. And I wouldn't claim that this is a bad thing, indeed it seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of our natural human priorities. A multiplicity of forces influence this vast sector, and a lot of layers have accreted over a very long time. That, too, seems inevitable and is probably beneficial in the sense that there's no single point of failure, though it comes at the price of inefficiency. Such a broad description really applies to every industrialized country. The comparative question, then, is what forces are primarily at play in each instance, which layers are truly essential and which may prove to be superfluous.
I observe that, in Canada, the primary forces arise out of public policy. The form that the healthcare system has taken here, top to bottom, deeply reflects this. It also reflects other essential factors such as our population size and overall level of wealth. Various efforts are sometimes attempted to privatize parts of the system, in some cases accepted without a murmur and in other cases stirring much public debate. But in any case such developments take place at the periphery of the system. The status quo of striving to deliver accessible healthcare for everyone is not easily diverted. Lucky us. I expect that you have roughly the same situation in the Netherlands, plus or minus some interesting factors, no doubt. But the attitude that the community is stronger when it takes care of its members seems to be very strong there, admirably so.
I don't know the American system from more than a few years of firsthand experience, but it seems clearly to have evolved under a different set of forces. People can get marvellous care in the US, if they or their insurers are prepared to pay sufficient sums of money. Related to this, there is a very large and seemingly very convoluted insurance sector. Some research, and some clinical practice, is fabulously well resourced, but at the same time a shockingly high percentage of the population is uninsured. Some advanced research simply can't happen without abundant funding, and some of the benefits do eventually trickle down to the point that treatment becomes universally available. Some do not. I'm not prepared to comment on whether this is good or bad in a broad sense, but it does seem to be very distinctive of this particular healthcare regime. And it, too, doesn't change easily.
To get back to your question of fairness of access, under the assumption that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us, I'd have to conclude from the foregoing examples that such an assumption doesn't hold in practice. If you build a healthcare system primarily to serve the rich, then the quality of care for the rest of us suffers, not just occasionally but systemically. On the other hand, an accessible public healthcare system can't always afford to deliver highly specialized and expensive treatment, even if such treatment is theoretically possible.
So, the assumption that you can have the best of both is not one that can bear much weight. And even the concept of "fairness" then has to be seen in context. Each of these systems strives to be fair, but each means something quite distinctive. I'm not trying to come down in favor of one or the other, just pointing out, as an exercise in analysis, what you have to trade off.
First, to address your premise, we are in no position to criticize any protocol merely because some particular implementation of it has been installed with a predefined set of root certs that you don't like. Second, to address your conclusion, it does not logically follow from the premise. QED.
That's not to say that there can be no possible flaws in SSL, though this is a point that you don't address. Both design and implementation vulnerabilities have indeed been identified in SSL, and they have all been successfully fixed. In other words, none have proven so fundamental that SSL can't possibly be fixed, which is what it means to declare that SSL is broken. You can, for example - at the risk of overstating your case - say that SSL 2.0 is broken, but that's no big surprise to anyone. Even so, it would be more accurate to say that it's deprecated.
Browsers have supported SSL 3.0 for years. If you have an application that today relies on behavior specific to SSL 2.0 then it would be correct to say that your application is broken.
I'm happy that we were able to clear up these misunderstandings so easily.
This is true. Commonly, the development environment evolves in ad hoc fashion with various elements and approaches being tried along the way. The result after a few year can be pretty messy, especially if developers have been sidelined to do the system administration. If you're a developer, it's important during the interview to find out about this, but the exact details are probably less important than the attitude toward maintaining and improving that environment. There's always room for improvement, after all. It's exactly the sort of question that you can very reasonably ask during an interview. I'd look for clear, candid answers from each of your interviewers, according to the perspective they have within the organization.
These are great questions (and there are many others that could be asked as well, concerning a multitude of important aspects of the work environment.)
Asking them tends to reflect well on you, showing your alertness and discernment. Nothing wrong with that. But the way job interviews work, it's you the applicant being interviewed. For the most part, you have to take the cues you're given, starting with you making a trip to the employer, not the other way around. In other words, you're the supplicant. There are often several people in the interview room, and you have the singular burden of responding to all of them. Finally, the interview schedule may, but frequently does not, permit adequate time for you to ask evaluative questions.
I've often found myself in interviews where there is a token "any questions?" moment right at the very end, with all the body language in the room telegraphing, "well, we're done here." Okay, let's agree that this is really dumb. After all, the fit has to work both ways or your placement will turn into failure. But we live in a culture where the employee is expected to adapt to the workplace, not the converse. There's very little acknowledgement that the workplace may be imperfect, or at any rate not easy for just anyone to fit into. If there are flaws, you'll rarely hear them spontaneously presented at interview time. You have to draw them out somehow.
Over the course of several decades in the industry, I've gotten a lot of practice with interviews, on both sides of the desk. Practice makes perfect. I've come to find them quite fun, actually, and that's a great attitude to bring with you. When you're relaxed and enjoying the experience, you can not only participate more effectively in being interviewed, but you can also spare some cognitive focus for picking up clues from the environment. Those clues will help to guide and inform your questions later, to the extent that you get the chance to ask questions. I guess the attitude is that you're bringing your best self to the task, but you're not too concerned about the outcome.
Here's two examples, just for fun. In one case, I was met in the lobby by some anonymous functionary who led me in silence to an interview room in which one school chair (the kind with the wide arm for writing on) had been placed under a recessed ceiling light, in effect a spotlight, in front of a long table with several office chairs behind it. The table was in shadow. This somewhat undersized school chair was exactly square to this long table. A few minutes later, the interviewers filed in, introduced themselves briefly, and began asking questions in turn. Meanwhile, I'm laughing inside. Sure, I'd made a long drive for nothing. There's no way I would want to work in a place like that. All that was missing was the whips and handcuffs. But on the other hand, might as well have some fun now that I'm here. So I moved my chair out of the spotlight, placed it at a casual angle where I could also see everybody's face, got nice and comfortable while making a couple of introductory comments on my own, and then said, well, let's get started. In retrospect, it was a very empowering experience. I totally outclassed these guys. Of course I wasn't offered the position, but then I wouldn't have taken it anyway.
Another interview ran well overtime, we were so interested in talking with each other. It was led by two scientists, the principal investigators in a research lab. They were wearing suits. I didn't know how to interpret that, at the time. I ended up working there for 12 years, one of the best times in my entire career. Turns out that these guys almost never wear suits, only on quite formal occasions. Why then did they wear them to the interview? As best I can tell, because they were treating the prospective employee as an honored guest. Wow. And that's the kind of people they proved to be.
Getting back to the kind of questions one might ask during an interview,
The problem with bad security is that it looks just like good security.
In this respect, the problem comes down to incompetence at some point in the chain of command, and (by transitive closure) lack of effective oversight at all points above that one. But that's not an excuse, just a description of the pathology.
Of course, this is merely a symptom of an emerging mindset in which problems can be automatically solved by adding more technology to the mix rather than slowing down to contemplace a given problem and think critically about it. Most people don't come to this sort of discipline on their own; it has to be taught and practiced in a way that allows students to discover the joy of it. Critical thinking is the motive force, discipline the lever. Technology is, sometimes, the pivot.
I also endorse your comment about technology being primarily an aid for the instructor. Office automation tools are great for organizing test results and student's submissions, and that's great for the teacher. For the student, there is nothing which entirely substitutes for participation in the classroom. Technology finds a very useful niche in distance learning, but distance learning only works for certain kinds of students. In my experience, these are the kind who already have the necessary discipline and would also do well with a good textbook and no instruction at all.
It's not that specifications and standards aren't important. Of course they are. But Microsoft is more than a bit disingenuous in pretending to advocate them when it has been so egregiously, perennially active in undermining them. This hypocrisy is all too familiar.
Thanks, Microsoft, for reminding me why I loathe you.
The only real need for sandboxing is for executable content. The data itself is harmless. Rendering it is not an issue. But you're absolutely right, sandboxing is necessary whenever an application might treat stray content as instructions ordering the application to perform some potentially unsafe action. Java bytecode is a good example, and consequently the Java Virtual Machine is sandboxed. But JavaScript, PDF, and Flash are other good examples, and they're not sandboxed.
It's ironic therefore that the article is talking about a considerably more trivial exploit.
This kind of malware has been typically found inside an executable within an attached ZIP file disguised as a PDF file, and is pretty darn good at getting around traditional anti-virus products.
To me, this explanation seems outrageous. Exploits of this kind can only be successful on systems that are so badly designed that they will indiscriminately treat everything as executable content, even content posing as something else. That's a big problem, but it's easy to solve with a bit of care in system design. Most operating systems don't have this problem, and so they're not vulnerable. As far as I know, Microsoft Windows is the only exception.
There is no Linux namespace issue here. Linux inherits a hierarchical filesystem and strong conventions for environment variables such as PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If tens of thousands of complex applications can coexist under this discipline, session managers have no excuse for breakage.
It seems to be simply egregiously arrogant design for two session managers to insist on appropriating exactly the same part of this environment for themselves. That's like the C compiler insisting on using JAVA_HOME for some special purpose of its own.
Am I missing something fundamental here? Because I have found both Gnome and KDE to be a step backwards in terms of true ease of use and configurability compared to much simpler predecessors like twm. I can't even change the root cursor color. Pathetic.
On the other hand, most people despise Oracle support. I've had plenty of experience with it myself, and I'd far rather look to the community than be obliged to deal with vendor support from Oracle.
Indeed. CALEA, as applied to digital communications, came into force in May 2007. At that point, all US network providers were required to file a report of comprehensive intercept capability or face a $10,000/day fine from the FCC. For this to be achievable, network devices with this capability had to be widely available well ahead of the deadline, and indeed they were. That in itself looks like prior art to me.
You'll notice that RFC 3924 has a section dedicated to VOIP. It was published in October 2004. You'll also notice that while this RFC discusses decryption of intercepted traffic, there is not even a mention in the Microsoft patent.
"Why should a university be trying to teach you, what you should have already learnt?"
This sort of reasoning is based on an exaggerated premise. Most people who begin an undergraduate degree are still legally - and developmentally - children. Their brains have only been capable of abstract reasoning for a few years at best. Even under ideal circumstances they will have been exposed to only a bare introduction to the enormous breadth of critical thought that is recognized and valued in a university education. No high school in the world can compress this additional depth of exposure into its existing curriculum, certainly not while meeting the requirement to provide a general and essentially pragmatic education to everyone regardless of ability.
A university can set arbitrarily high admissions requirements, but those which receive public funding for their undergraduate programs have corresponding obligations imposed upon them. So, as a practical matter, the undergrad intake stream must remain inclusive. In my experience, most universities expect to lose somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of their undergraduate population during the first two years of a degree program. A good proportion of these don't make it past the first midterm. These were students who, on paper, appeared fully qualified for the program, but who proved unable to keep up.
In other words, students entering a degree program are a mixed lot in terms of cognitive development, innate talent, educational background, emotional maturity, motivation, and discipline. Trade schools face exactly the same issues, of course, but their teaching mandate is much narrower and more concrete. Its subject matter is well defined, not controversial, and of immediate practical value.
By contrast, a university education is an exposure, in breadth, to scholarly thought, so that the student can deal with material which is not well defined and may even be controversial. Undergrad mathematics, for example, is not taught so that students can go out into the world and solve differential equations. But they will be able to recognize problems whose solutions require mathematical rigor, should the need arise. Likewise they're not reading Rousseau in order to master a repetoire of political philosophy but in order to understand the roots of philosophy in general, in order to recognize when a philosophical approach is required. Even the most zealous computer science student is not expected to use this sort of education directly. That's not its purpose. It's been my observation that very few people emerge from high school already knowing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Huge areas of northern Canada are covered by muskeg. Roads are winter use only. This is the reason why there is Canadian interest especially in alternative transport. I'm simply explaining this to you.
There are also many archipelagos in the world, the Philippines for example, where a similar transportation challenge emerges at a different granularity. In the absence of better alternatives, intermodal freight is the prevailing answer, but it involves a materials handling component which is slow, effortful, and requires significant infrastructure. It doesn't work well for scattered populations or perishable goods.
Here, too, there's Canadian interest, and the reason is historical. We were early in developing a strong telecommunications capability for challenging terrain. We were then able to export this expertise to other parts of the world such as the Philippines, and we have longstanding business relationships as a result. The implications are not lost on Canadian investors.
All this assumes that rail track can be laid economically over the terrain in question. That eliminates huge areas of the world, including most of Canada, for example.
In marine transport, ships returning "in ballast" have been common for centuries. Of course this isn't optimal, but it's proved to be entirely feasible.
To clarify, you disagree with my opinion because yours differs from it. That's perfectly fine. However, that does not make it wrong. Moreover, nobody is doing anything. We're talking about what we might do. Your analysis seems flawed on several other points as well:
And of course, being science, it's based in truth, not fashion. When technology is rapidly changing, it helps a lot to be able to see past the technology and into what is actually going on. You're correct to say that what you know as a technologist has become history in two years. What you know as a scientist has far more enduring value. If nothing else, that makes it easy to see past the hype and know which new technology has real potential and which is ultimately doomed.
The other learning aspect of this young field is that we get exposure and practice in all of it, or at least, as much as we're willing to take on. Other fields such as medicine are rigidly specialized. In the academic discipline of computer science, of course there are areas of specialization such as numerical computation and distributed systems. In the industry, it's more typical to bring a broad synthesis of these to the job, but for the application of that knowledge to take many different forms.
Best of all, you're not just analyzing data. You get to build stuff! And, if you do your work well, you can go back after twenty years and see that what you've contributed is still vitally alive in the DNA of that organization. An idea rooted in science transcends its implementation. I've seen it many times. I'm sure you have too.
Like.
Hard to put that up against a generation who has a lot of instant gratification when it comes to their experience with anything technology related.
Man, you have a true gift for words.
When I was a CS undergrad, it was a small and somewhat exotic discipline. Exactly one course was offered at the first year level. Anyone wanting to get into the program had to first pass through the course. It began with a lecture that basically warned us to expect several times the effort in this course compared to the other sciences. That was no exaggeration. It meant that not too many people went into the program who didn't love it for its own sake. We were happy to put in the time. This was the spirit of folks like Dennis Ritchie.
The dot com boom felt horrid. The industry was massively invaded by greed and competitiveness and impatience and fascination with all things shiny, more the spirit of Steve Jobs. But you can't get around the fact that science is a discipline. It entails a lot of work. If I were trying to expose kids to computer science today, I'd talk to them about this reality. I wouldn't mind scaring a lot of them away, frankly. But I'd also present some simple examples of why I find it so beautiful and appealing. Binary numbers and simple operations. I'd say, "This might seem boring, but this is where it all starts. All we have to work with at first is O and 1. They're our Legos. And we're building an entire universe with them." I'd let my enthusiasm speak for itself. A few in the class would sort of get it. That's all that matters.
See, Steve, the fact is that I am a computer scientist. So I can tell the difference in product quality, without finding out the hard way.
But don't feel too bad about it. If I were an aircraft engineer, I probably wouldn't fly on a Microsoft plane, either.
On the other hand, how fair is it to withhold life saving/extending treatment from someone willing and able to pay for it? (Assuming that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us)
Ah, but it does. That's exactly the problem. Compare Canada and the United States. The healthcare system is vast, in both instances, constituting a massive component not only of the economy but also of all research effort, laboratory infrastructure, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries to mention just two, and so on. And I wouldn't claim that this is a bad thing, indeed it seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of our natural human priorities. A multiplicity of forces influence this vast sector, and a lot of layers have accreted over a very long time. That, too, seems inevitable and is probably beneficial in the sense that there's no single point of failure, though it comes at the price of inefficiency. Such a broad description really applies to every industrialized country. The comparative question, then, is what forces are primarily at play in each instance, which layers are truly essential and which may prove to be superfluous.
I observe that, in Canada, the primary forces arise out of public policy. The form that the healthcare system has taken here, top to bottom, deeply reflects this. It also reflects other essential factors such as our population size and overall level of wealth. Various efforts are sometimes attempted to privatize parts of the system, in some cases accepted without a murmur and in other cases stirring much public debate. But in any case such developments take place at the periphery of the system. The status quo of striving to deliver accessible healthcare for everyone is not easily diverted. Lucky us. I expect that you have roughly the same situation in the Netherlands, plus or minus some interesting factors, no doubt. But the attitude that the community is stronger when it takes care of its members seems to be very strong there, admirably so.
I don't know the American system from more than a few years of firsthand experience, but it seems clearly to have evolved under a different set of forces. People can get marvellous care in the US, if they or their insurers are prepared to pay sufficient sums of money. Related to this, there is a very large and seemingly very convoluted insurance sector. Some research, and some clinical practice, is fabulously well resourced, but at the same time a shockingly high percentage of the population is uninsured. Some advanced research simply can't happen without abundant funding, and some of the benefits do eventually trickle down to the point that treatment becomes universally available. Some do not. I'm not prepared to comment on whether this is good or bad in a broad sense, but it does seem to be very distinctive of this particular healthcare regime. And it, too, doesn't change easily.
To get back to your question of fairness of access, under the assumption that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us, I'd have to conclude from the foregoing examples that such an assumption doesn't hold in practice. If you build a healthcare system primarily to serve the rich, then the quality of care for the rest of us suffers, not just occasionally but systemically. On the other hand, an accessible public healthcare system can't always afford to deliver highly specialized and expensive treatment, even if such treatment is theoretically possible.
So, the assumption that you can have the best of both is not one that can bear much weight. And even the concept of "fairness" then has to be seen in context. Each of these systems strives to be fair, but each means something quite distinctive. I'm not trying to come down in favor of one or the other, just pointing out, as an exercise in analysis, what you have to trade off.
No, SSL is not broken.
First, to address your premise, we are in no position to criticize any protocol merely because some particular implementation of it has been installed with a predefined set of root certs that you don't like. Second, to address your conclusion, it does not logically follow from the premise. QED.
That's not to say that there can be no possible flaws in SSL, though this is a point that you don't address. Both design and implementation vulnerabilities have indeed been identified in SSL, and they have all been successfully fixed. In other words, none have proven so fundamental that SSL can't possibly be fixed, which is what it means to declare that SSL is broken. You can, for example - at the risk of overstating your case - say that SSL 2.0 is broken, but that's no big surprise to anyone. Even so, it would be more accurate to say that it's deprecated.
Browsers have supported SSL 3.0 for years. If you have an application that today relies on behavior specific to SSL 2.0 then it would be correct to say that your application is broken.
I'm happy that we were able to clear up these misunderstandings so easily.
This is true. Commonly, the development environment evolves in ad hoc fashion with various elements and approaches being tried along the way. The result after a few year can be pretty messy, especially if developers have been sidelined to do the system administration. If you're a developer, it's important during the interview to find out about this, but the exact details are probably less important than the attitude toward maintaining and improving that environment. There's always room for improvement, after all. It's exactly the sort of question that you can very reasonably ask during an interview. I'd look for clear, candid answers from each of your interviewers, according to the perspective they have within the organization.
These are great questions (and there are many others that could be asked as well, concerning a multitude of important aspects of the work environment.)
Asking them tends to reflect well on you, showing your alertness and discernment. Nothing wrong with that. But the way job interviews work, it's you the applicant being interviewed. For the most part, you have to take the cues you're given, starting with you making a trip to the employer, not the other way around. In other words, you're the supplicant. There are often several people in the interview room, and you have the singular burden of responding to all of them. Finally, the interview schedule may, but frequently does not, permit adequate time for you to ask evaluative questions.
I've often found myself in interviews where there is a token "any questions?" moment right at the very end, with all the body language in the room telegraphing, "well, we're done here." Okay, let's agree that this is really dumb. After all, the fit has to work both ways or your placement will turn into failure. But we live in a culture where the employee is expected to adapt to the workplace, not the converse. There's very little acknowledgement that the workplace may be imperfect, or at any rate not easy for just anyone to fit into. If there are flaws, you'll rarely hear them spontaneously presented at interview time. You have to draw them out somehow.
Over the course of several decades in the industry, I've gotten a lot of practice with interviews, on both sides of the desk. Practice makes perfect. I've come to find them quite fun, actually, and that's a great attitude to bring with you. When you're relaxed and enjoying the experience, you can not only participate more effectively in being interviewed, but you can also spare some cognitive focus for picking up clues from the environment. Those clues will help to guide and inform your questions later, to the extent that you get the chance to ask questions. I guess the attitude is that you're bringing your best self to the task, but you're not too concerned about the outcome.
Here's two examples, just for fun. In one case, I was met in the lobby by some anonymous functionary who led me in silence to an interview room in which one school chair (the kind with the wide arm for writing on) had been placed under a recessed ceiling light, in effect a spotlight, in front of a long table with several office chairs behind it. The table was in shadow. This somewhat undersized school chair was exactly square to this long table. A few minutes later, the interviewers filed in, introduced themselves briefly, and began asking questions in turn. Meanwhile, I'm laughing inside. Sure, I'd made a long drive for nothing. There's no way I would want to work in a place like that. All that was missing was the whips and handcuffs. But on the other hand, might as well have some fun now that I'm here. So I moved my chair out of the spotlight, placed it at a casual angle where I could also see everybody's face, got nice and comfortable while making a couple of introductory comments on my own, and then said, well, let's get started. In retrospect, it was a very empowering experience. I totally outclassed these guys. Of course I wasn't offered the position, but then I wouldn't have taken it anyway.
Another interview ran well overtime, we were so interested in talking with each other. It was led by two scientists, the principal investigators in a research lab. They were wearing suits. I didn't know how to interpret that, at the time. I ended up working there for 12 years, one of the best times in my entire career. Turns out that these guys almost never wear suits, only on quite formal occasions. Why then did they wear them to the interview? As best I can tell, because they were treating the prospective employee as an honored guest. Wow. And that's the kind of people they proved to be.
Getting back to the kind of questions one might ask during an interview,
In this respect, the problem comes down to incompetence at some point in the chain of command, and (by transitive closure) lack of effective oversight at all points above that one. But that's not an excuse, just a description of the pathology.
"The express version of visual studio is free. You do not have to pay anything."
Still closed. Still proprietary. Still encumbered by patents. Stil useless for the basis of operating system development.
Absolutely.
Of course, this is merely a symptom of an emerging mindset in which problems can be automatically solved by adding more technology to the mix rather than slowing down to contemplace a given problem and think critically about it. Most people don't come to this sort of discipline on their own; it has to be taught and practiced in a way that allows students to discover the joy of it. Critical thinking is the motive force, discipline the lever. Technology is, sometimes, the pivot.
I also endorse your comment about technology being primarily an aid for the instructor. Office automation tools are great for organizing test results and student's submissions, and that's great for the teacher. For the student, there is nothing which entirely substitutes for participation in the classroom. Technology finds a very useful niche in distance learning, but distance learning only works for certain kinds of students. In my experience, these are the kind who already have the necessary discipline and would also do well with a good textbook and no instruction at all.
Indeed. I'm glad you got first posting for this.
It's not that specifications and standards aren't important. Of course they are. But Microsoft is more than a bit disingenuous in pretending to advocate them when it has been so egregiously, perennially active in undermining them. This hypocrisy is all too familiar.
Thanks, Microsoft, for reminding me why I loathe you.
I guess they're not the best of pals any more.
It's ironic therefore that the article is talking about a considerably more trivial exploit.
To me, this explanation seems outrageous. Exploits of this kind can only be successful on systems that are so badly designed that they will indiscriminately treat everything as executable content, even content posing as something else. That's a big problem, but it's easy to solve with a bit of care in system design. Most operating systems don't have this problem, and so they're not vulnerable. As far as I know, Microsoft Windows is the only exception.
(Psst, don't tell anyone else, but it's a spoof. Fooled me too when I first saw it.)
There is no Linux namespace issue here. Linux inherits a hierarchical filesystem and strong conventions for environment variables such as PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If tens of thousands of complex applications can coexist under this discipline, session managers have no excuse for breakage.
It seems to be simply egregiously arrogant design for two session managers to insist on appropriating exactly the same part of this environment for themselves. That's like the C compiler insisting on using JAVA_HOME for some special purpose of its own.
Am I missing something fundamental here? Because I have found both Gnome and KDE to be a step backwards in terms of true ease of use and configurability compared to much simpler predecessors like twm. I can't even change the root cursor color. Pathetic.
On the other hand, most people despise Oracle support. I've had plenty of experience with it myself, and I'd far rather look to the community than be obliged to deal with vendor support from Oracle.
Sure, it's exactly the problem. The people in question happen to be working for Microsoft.
It's already been done. It's called CALEA and its present form, covering digital communications and VOIP, came into force on May 14, 2007.
Indeed. CALEA, as applied to digital communications, came into force in May 2007. At that point, all US network providers were required to file a report of comprehensive intercept capability or face a $10,000/day fine from the FCC. For this to be achievable, network devices with this capability had to be widely available well ahead of the deadline, and indeed they were. That in itself looks like prior art to me.
You'll notice that RFC 3924 has a section dedicated to VOIP. It was published in October 2004. You'll also notice that while this RFC discusses decryption of intercepted traffic, there is not even a mention in the Microsoft patent.
"Why should a university be trying to teach you, what you should have already learnt?"
This sort of reasoning is based on an exaggerated premise. Most people who begin an undergraduate degree are still legally - and developmentally - children. Their brains have only been capable of abstract reasoning for a few years at best. Even under ideal circumstances they will have been exposed to only a bare introduction to the enormous breadth of critical thought that is recognized and valued in a university education. No high school in the world can compress this additional depth of exposure into its existing curriculum, certainly not while meeting the requirement to provide a general and essentially pragmatic education to everyone regardless of ability.
A university can set arbitrarily high admissions requirements, but those which receive public funding for their undergraduate programs have corresponding obligations imposed upon them. So, as a practical matter, the undergrad intake stream must remain inclusive. In my experience, most universities expect to lose somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of their undergraduate population during the first two years of a degree program. A good proportion of these don't make it past the first midterm. These were students who, on paper, appeared fully qualified for the program, but who proved unable to keep up.
In other words, students entering a degree program are a mixed lot in terms of cognitive development, innate talent, educational background, emotional maturity, motivation, and discipline. Trade schools face exactly the same issues, of course, but their teaching mandate is much narrower and more concrete. Its subject matter is well defined, not controversial, and of immediate practical value.
By contrast, a university education is an exposure, in breadth, to scholarly thought, so that the student can deal with material which is not well defined and may even be controversial. Undergrad mathematics, for example, is not taught so that students can go out into the world and solve differential equations. But they will be able to recognize problems whose solutions require mathematical rigor, should the need arise. Likewise they're not reading Rousseau in order to master a repetoire of political philosophy but in order to understand the roots of philosophy in general, in order to recognize when a philosophical approach is required. Even the most zealous computer science student is not expected to use this sort of education directly. That's not its purpose. It's been my observation that very few people emerge from high school already knowing this.