Answer: yes. Due to a lot of unfortunate incidents with employees coming out with their "own inventions" a month before the company does, and hey it's basically the same thing. Or people starting their own company, working all nighters and basically being zombies on company time. Or claiming to have invented something and then suing the company over the companies own code. Or all three at the same time. Cases a-plenty.
And it's not hard to get out of that clause if you're dealing in good faith. What I did was to include a list of all projects I was working on that did not relate to my job within the company. I then added that to the contract as an exclusion clause. And whenever I felt like doing another project that was looking like it would be making money, I went to my boss and asked him to okay another exclusion clause. Noone was bothered by it, I never had a problem getting them to sign, and everything was legal. It did help that they're not developing software, though, so I wasn't competing with them.
Analysis skills are actually a basic requirement for any math-heavy course. Actually, one of my maths courses was titled "Analysis":) But seriously, you can't complete a CS course and NOT have an analytical mindset. However, what they mean is can person A read a text and then extract the meaningful items from it? I've found a lot of CS students have a hard time with that. They need to read a bit more normal books.
Database skills is very vague, but I think you need at least a general understanding of what databases are, what they do, and what relational algebra is, and what a network database is, what normal forms are etc. However, this in no way replaces actually using SQL to get things done. Butall the concepts should be primed so actually learning it will only take a few days - getting proficient in it, now thats another story. Ofcourse, a lot of companies would like experienced Oracle DBA's to jump out of the course (or grow on trees) - and that won't happen either.
The rest of the requirements is indeed quite silly, especially when you consider CS students without problem solving or technical skills - how would they ever graduate? It's probably much as someone else wrote: business is looking for a quick fix for a problem and can't just take the cheapest option - a student fresh out of college. What a bummer.
Each company has 50 million different combinations of programs and programming languages. They should be looking for someone with a solid understanding of object oriented design, UML, database design, etc. Those are the things my school taught me in the limited time they had.
Congratulations! You know nothing but flavor-of-the-week "technologies" that are actually products and acts of windbaggery.
Your attitude towards database design (like, if it ain't IDMS it's not worth my time, like) is one of the reasons I make good money repairing software that doesn't perform, does not maintain its data-integrity and is impossible to use as basis for management reporting.
And UML is not a product. It's a modelling notation. And for heaven's sake, are you some weird assembly-code purist that looks down upon object-oriented design? While not the first thing I'd teach someone (actually, I'd start with Turing machines to weed out the folks looking for a quick buck in computing) it certainly helps to understand the concept of design patterns, inheritance, etc. because most current languages are in some way or another, object-oriented languages.
The sad thing is, if he had learnt only Visual Basic.Net, it would have probably qualified him *more*.
A lot of computer graphics, especially the field of Computational Geometry, deals with sorting points and lines, finding the closest convex shape around a set of points and stuff like that. All these things are used in algorithms to draw 3D-objects faster, or detect collisions between objects, etc.
You'd need a specialist to answer the question as to what actual use this will be put - but theorems like this form the underpinnings of all computer graphics beyond just putting a few pixels on a 2D-plane.
The main reason for building web-apps in the first place is that you have a central point where you roll out your applications and you don't need to touch the client. Using ActiveX client-components defeats that. It is lack of an enterprise software architecture that allows this thing to take place. I managed to get my CIO to back me up on this in our company around 2001 (we called it "webbased programming standards", nowadays I'd call it our "Enterprise architecture requirements for webbased software"), and they're still pretty happy with that decision. Happier each year, I might add.
Allowing ActiveX apps to be deployed is a failure in your Architecture department (or in the IT department at least). If your company doesn't understand why having and enforcing software architecture policies is a necessity and not a luxury, point them to the example of being locked into IE6.
Their security sounds eerily familiar to my security - Who forces me to sit with my laptop on an unsecured connection right on the internet, because I'm an "untrusted" contractor - but working on developing their systems, who are thus *also* untrusted. And therefore they can't allow internal access, so none of the internal customers are allowed to actually see what I'm developing, unless I mail them a screenshot.
Oh yeah - since I'm in the untrusted segment, they also don't allow debugging because that's against policy, since the server needs to connect to my development environment (the insecure one - the one I'm using to BUILD THEIR SOFTWARE for them that will then be promoted to the internal servers, no questions asked).
I've told my project lead that he could do two things: one was to change the policies, and the other one was to accept more billed hours. He chose the hours. Way easier.
You can get a hardback AND get a digital copy of not only that book, but most of the other books by the same author, if you buy from Baen. Not for all of their authors, and not for all of their books, but certainly for Weber, Ringo, Flint and Steve White - see http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ for a full listing of the CDs.
They also have a very extensive free library with eBooks. Their eBooks are published free of DRM and in different formats. Seriously, I can't recommend them enough, in the face of what the larger publishers are doing. If you buy from anywhere - make it from them. Oh, did you know they also have a CD published with a selection from the Gutenberg site (as a coproduction with the site)? Really, great publishers in that respect.
1. Download Metasploit/OllyDbg 2. Get Top Secret clearance 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
Sounds like a good plan, actually.
Over the last decade I've seen some really dumb people with some really stupid ideas become insanely rich. Just because I *knew* as an expert it couldn't work or wouldn't do what you would want it to do - and the idiots didn't have a clue about it but managed to sell the idea to people with even less knowledge but a great deal of money.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm not the one being utterly stupid for having ethics and being a professional. Or if everyone that I consider to be an immoral idiot is just extremely smart and only trying to look silly to get away with stuff that'd otherwise get you arrested and convicted.
Sometimes, I just get very depressed about the state of humanity.
Apparently, they didn't update their risk assessment after going live in the news about "how they are attacking anonymous" (who?). And that is a fatal flaw with a lot of security theater in companies: it only gets done once, when what you need is constant maintenance. Shees, even ITIL standard procedures recommend this for business continuity and that includes security.
Its like this: normally, you have a nice wooden house and open windows and a normal door. And suddenly a class IV hurricane approaches. You are warned in advance. So... you just pretend nothing changes, or do you board up all the windows and prepare the shelter? These folks just ignored the entire hurricane and are now turning into security laughingstocks.
This is nicely undoing their bold plan of first getting a lot of attention in the media (score on that) and capitalizing by showing what a professional and loyal security firm they are. I see nothing that could have hurt them worse than this, right now. Except when the files captured had included kiddy porn. And had been posted on wikileaks. But apart from that, their reputation just took a hit and reputation is all you have in business.
Whether or not the site infringes on copyright is still under discussion, and so far they've won two legal victories. But the main issue is not that someone is enforcing the closure of a website through the courts. It is that apparently, all those over-broad powers given to the Department of Homeland Security are not used for Homeland Security, but enforcing copyright rules even when the judge rules otherwise.
Even worse, they didn't even receive a warning. Nor did the registrar. So they couldn't even argue this in court. If you don't consider that a problem, please do the unspeakable and actually try to read the article. It helps to understand the issue.
What is religion? As far as I'm concerned it is just ONE expression of a political ideology. So all we have is that people born into families that are active in politics, are themselves more likely to be active in politics. Jay, big deal.
If your assertions were true, then how has it ever been possible that Western Europe became secularized? We went from a situation with large families, all of them religious, with only a choice on which brand of religion you liked (unless you were a godless socialist) to a situation where 1.8 children are the norm and most of the population is no longer religious. You will have a hard time explaining the history of the last century in Western Europe on this point, if you just take this article as gospel (couldn't resist that one:)).
Many of the implied implications aren't even scientifically correct. The political incorrectness is actually a minor issue.
Matter of fact: In the Netherlands we now have a situation where more and more families discover that two brilliant individuals do not combine and make even smarter kids automatically. It's actually being considered as a social issue because the parents keep trying to force the kids into things they just can't do - causing unhappy children and more suicides.
The main problem preventing such a scenario in other countries is that access to education is still restricted by asking large amounts of money for the best education, ensuring only the kids from the ones already on top will get a good education and jobs at universities. Once those restrictions are removed, a huge amount of people from families with no background in higher education will suddenly do quite well.
Simulation is by itself a valuable technique, but if we don't know the assumptions being fed into the simulated model, the simulation is worthless. A statement that a theory is being supported by a simulation is not enough to validate the theory.
Religion *is* a political ideology. That people tend to see listening to an orator on sunday and listening to one on the TV every day as different things, is not surprising but still incorrect.
Especially in times before radio and TV, how would any political idea spread, if not in the form of religion? And why does religion reflect the attitudes of the social class that was the biggest supporter of that religion so much, if it was just Divine inspiration and not a form of political ideology?
I mean, look at Islam: everything in it reflects the attitude of nomadic traders living in a very inhospitable climate. And look at the protestant version of religion: comes up at the same time as the cities start to grow in importance, with the new bourgeois desiring equal representation in relation to their new worldly power and having an urgent need for free people to work in their workshops (and not being banned from hiring anyone because everyone's a serf). What a surprise that it stresses the value of the new upcoming "burgers" as opposed to those ruling the world at the time. No surprise that it took a few revolutions and a lot of heads to change the system - it *was* a revolution, a political one. Just look at Cromwells New Model Army.
And the Catholic faith just happens (by Divine will ofcourse) to stress the importance of peons listening to feudal lords, everyone in their place. What a surprise, that the changeover in early Christianity from "kick the rich out of the temple!" to "well, listen to the good King because he knows best and that is the will of the Lord" comes around the time that Kings start to convert into Christians.
I'm not even going into Confucianism here. That is such a blatant justification for the way the world was ordered under the emperor. And don't say it's not a religion - about a gazillion Chinese will disagree with you.
And religion wasn't just a "minor component" of this, and of the Crusades: without priests giving absolution, without priests calling for volunteers, without the Church pressing rulers into adventures into strange lands, there would have been no crusades at all. If you think Luther and Calvijn were just political, I'm pretty sure a lot of protestants will disagree. But if you say they were a-political, that's just silly.
And I'm not even going into the succession wars, the three popes, the fact that the Church at one time controlled more than half the areable land in Europe, or the things Machiavelli wrote about religion (and that book was banned by the church with reason - it's both very well written, a great read even now, and an absolute brilliant expose of the way in which rulers should use religion to control their subjects. Hot stuff for the 16th century)
Religion has been the main political ideology for thousands of years! Only recently do we get new ideologies, because the facilities have started to exist with the start of mass bookprints. Luther and Calvijn didn't just open the door for their OWN ideology with that, they opened the door for OTHER ideologies as well. The ones we call "political". But all that means is that they don't claim to derive from Divine inspiration. Apart from that, I see no difference.
The cutting up garlic thing is great - I bet those students realize that handling lethal stuff unprotected gets it into their bloodstream REAL QUICK and will be a bit more cautious as of then.
Normally I operate on a "no toolbars!" principle, but I tried it to see what it did. I wasn't impressed when Chrome began crashing irregularly. I recommend people uninstall it pronto, if you are suffering from Chrome crashes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never seen a European say that their country is "a republic, not a democracy".
I assume you haven't been spending time in Italy, lately? :)
Khadaffi, is that you?
Answer: yes. Due to a lot of unfortunate incidents with employees coming out with their "own inventions" a month before the company does, and hey it's basically the same thing. Or people starting their own company, working all nighters and basically being zombies on company time. Or claiming to have invented something and then suing the company over the companies own code. Or all three at the same time. Cases a-plenty.
And it's not hard to get out of that clause if you're dealing in good faith. What I did was to include a list of all projects I was working on that did not relate to my job within the company. I then added that to the contract as an exclusion clause. And whenever I felt like doing another project that was looking like it would be making money, I went to my boss and asked him to okay another exclusion clause. Noone was bothered by it, I never had a problem getting them to sign, and everything was legal. It did help that they're not developing software, though, so I wasn't competing with them.
Why, you Communist! :)
Analysis skills are actually a basic requirement for any math-heavy course. Actually, one of my maths courses was titled "Analysis" :) But seriously, you can't complete a CS course and NOT have an analytical mindset. However, what they mean is can person A read a text and then extract the meaningful items from it? I've found a lot of CS students have a hard time with that. They need to read a bit more normal books.
Database skills is very vague, but I think you need at least a general understanding of what databases are, what they do, and what relational algebra is, and what a network database is, what normal forms are etc. However, this in no way replaces actually using SQL to get things done. Butall the concepts should be primed so actually learning it will only take a few days - getting proficient in it, now thats another story. Ofcourse, a lot of companies would like experienced Oracle DBA's to jump out of the course (or grow on trees) - and that won't happen either.
The rest of the requirements is indeed quite silly, especially when you consider CS students without problem solving or technical skills - how would they ever graduate? It's probably much as someone else wrote: business is looking for a quick fix for a problem and can't just take the cheapest option - a student fresh out of college. What a bummer.
Each company has 50 million different combinations of programs and programming languages. They should be looking for someone with a solid understanding of object oriented design, UML, database design, etc. Those are the things my school taught me in the limited time they had.
Congratulations! You know nothing but flavor-of-the-week "technologies" that are actually products and acts of windbaggery.
Your attitude towards database design (like, if it ain't IDMS it's not worth my time, like) is one of the reasons I make good money repairing software that doesn't perform, does not maintain its data-integrity and is impossible to use as basis for management reporting.
And UML is not a product. It's a modelling notation. And for heaven's sake, are you some weird assembly-code purist that looks down upon object-oriented design? While not the first thing I'd teach someone (actually, I'd start with Turing machines to weed out the folks looking for a quick buck in computing) it certainly helps to understand the concept of design patterns, inheritance, etc. because most current languages are in some way or another, object-oriented languages.
The sad thing is, if he had learnt only Visual Basic.Net, it would have probably qualified him *more*.
A lot of computer graphics, especially the field of Computational Geometry, deals with sorting points and lines, finding the closest convex shape around a set of points and stuff like that. All these things are used in algorithms to draw 3D-objects faster, or detect collisions between objects, etc.
You'd need a specialist to answer the question as to what actual use this will be put - but theorems like this form the underpinnings of all computer graphics beyond just putting a few pixels on a 2D-plane.
The main reason for building web-apps in the first place is that you have a central point where you roll out your applications and you don't need to touch the client. Using ActiveX client-components defeats that. It is lack of an enterprise software architecture that allows this thing to take place. I managed to get my CIO to back me up on this in our company around 2001 (we called it "webbased programming standards", nowadays I'd call it our "Enterprise architecture requirements for webbased software"), and they're still pretty happy with that decision. Happier each year, I might add.
Allowing ActiveX apps to be deployed is a failure in your Architecture department (or in the IT department at least). If your company doesn't understand why having and enforcing software architecture policies is a necessity and not a luxury, point them to the example of being locked into IE6.
I'm pretty sure he has.
Their security sounds eerily familiar to my security - Who forces me to sit with my laptop on an unsecured connection right on the internet, because I'm an "untrusted" contractor - but working on developing their systems, who are thus *also* untrusted. And therefore they can't allow internal access, so none of the internal customers are allowed to actually see what I'm developing, unless I mail them a screenshot.
Oh yeah - since I'm in the untrusted segment, they also don't allow debugging because that's against policy, since the server needs to connect to my development environment (the insecure one - the one I'm using to BUILD THEIR SOFTWARE for them that will then be promoted to the internal servers, no questions asked).
I've told my project lead that he could do two things: one was to change the policies, and the other one was to accept more billed hours. He chose the hours. Way easier.
You can get a hardback AND get a digital copy of not only that book, but most of the other books by the same author, if you buy from Baen. Not for all of their authors, and not for all of their books, but certainly for Weber, Ringo, Flint and Steve White - see http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ for a full listing of the CDs.
They also have a very extensive free library with eBooks. Their eBooks are published free of DRM and in different formats. Seriously, I can't recommend them enough, in the face of what the larger publishers are doing. If you buy from anywhere - make it from them. Oh, did you know they also have a CD published with a selection from the Gutenberg site (as a coproduction with the site)? Really, great publishers in that respect.
1. Download Metasploit/OllyDbg
2. Get Top Secret clearance
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Sounds like a good plan, actually.
Over the last decade I've seen some really dumb people with some really stupid ideas become insanely rich. Just because I *knew* as an expert it couldn't work or wouldn't do what you would want it to do - and the idiots didn't have a clue about it but managed to sell the idea to people with even less knowledge but a great deal of money.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm not the one being utterly stupid for having ethics and being a professional. Or if everyone that I consider to be an immoral idiot is just extremely smart and only trying to look silly to get away with stuff that'd otherwise get you arrested and convicted.
Sometimes, I just get very depressed about the state of humanity.
Apparently, they didn't update their risk assessment after going live in the news about "how they are attacking anonymous" (who?). And that is a fatal flaw with a lot of security theater in companies: it only gets done once, when what you need is constant maintenance. Shees, even ITIL standard procedures recommend this for business continuity and that includes security.
Its like this: normally, you have a nice wooden house and open windows and a normal door. And suddenly a class IV hurricane approaches. You are warned in advance. So... you just pretend nothing changes, or do you board up all the windows and prepare the shelter? These folks just ignored the entire hurricane and are now turning into security laughingstocks.
This is nicely undoing their bold plan of first getting a lot of attention in the media (score on that) and capitalizing by showing what a professional and loyal security firm they are. I see nothing that could have hurt them worse than this, right now. Except when the files captured had included kiddy porn. And had been posted on wikileaks. But apart from that, their reputation just took a hit and reputation is all you have in business.
Whether or not the site infringes on copyright is still under discussion, and so far they've won two legal victories. But the main issue is not that someone is enforcing the closure of a website through the courts. It is that apparently, all those over-broad powers given to the Department of Homeland Security are not used for Homeland Security, but enforcing copyright rules even when the judge rules otherwise.
Even worse, they didn't even receive a warning. Nor did the registrar. So they couldn't even argue this in court. If you don't consider that a problem, please do the unspeakable and actually try to read the article. It helps to understand the issue.
Ofcourse... because Lord_of_the_Nerf is your real name, right?
What is religion? As far as I'm concerned it is just ONE expression of a political ideology. So all we have is that people born into families that are active in politics, are themselves more likely to be active in politics. Jay, big deal.
If your assertions were true, then how has it ever been possible that Western Europe became secularized? We went from a situation with large families, all of them religious, with only a choice on which brand of religion you liked (unless you were a godless socialist) to a situation where 1.8 children are the norm and most of the population is no longer religious. You will have a hard time explaining the history of the last century in Western Europe on this point, if you just take this article as gospel (couldn't resist that one :)).
Many of the implied implications aren't even scientifically correct. The political incorrectness is actually a minor issue.
Matter of fact: In the Netherlands we now have a situation where more and more families discover that two brilliant individuals do not combine and make even smarter kids automatically. It's actually being considered as a social issue because the parents keep trying to force the kids into things they just can't do - causing unhappy children and more suicides.
The main problem preventing such a scenario in other countries is that access to education is still restricted by asking large amounts of money for the best education, ensuring only the kids from the ones already on top will get a good education and jobs at universities. Once those restrictions are removed, a huge amount of people from families with no background in higher education will suddenly do quite well.
Simulation is by itself a valuable technique, but if we don't know the assumptions being fed into the simulated model, the simulation is worthless. A statement that a theory is being supported by a simulation is not enough to validate the theory.
Religion *is* a political ideology. That people tend to see listening to an orator on sunday and listening to one on the TV every day as different things, is not surprising but still incorrect.
Especially in times before radio and TV, how would any political idea spread, if not in the form of religion? And why does religion reflect the attitudes of the social class that was the biggest supporter of that religion so much, if it was just Divine inspiration and not a form of political ideology?
I mean, look at Islam: everything in it reflects the attitude of nomadic traders living in a very inhospitable climate. And look at the protestant version of religion: comes up at the same time as the cities start to grow in importance, with the new bourgeois desiring equal representation in relation to their new worldly power and having an urgent need for free people to work in their workshops (and not being banned from hiring anyone because everyone's a serf). What a surprise that it stresses the value of the new upcoming "burgers" as opposed to those ruling the world at the time. No surprise that it took a few revolutions and a lot of heads to change the system - it *was* a revolution, a political one. Just look at Cromwells New Model Army.
And the Catholic faith just happens (by Divine will ofcourse) to stress the importance of peons listening to feudal lords, everyone in their place. What a surprise, that the changeover in early Christianity from "kick the rich out of the temple!" to "well, listen to the good King because he knows best and that is the will of the Lord" comes around the time that Kings start to convert into Christians.
I'm not even going into Confucianism here. That is such a blatant justification for the way the world was ordered under the emperor. And don't say it's not a religion - about a gazillion Chinese will disagree with you.
And religion wasn't just a "minor component" of this, and of the Crusades: without priests giving absolution, without priests calling for volunteers, without the Church pressing rulers into adventures into strange lands, there would have been no crusades at all. If you think Luther and Calvijn were just political, I'm pretty sure a lot of protestants will disagree. But if you say they were a-political, that's just silly.
And I'm not even going into the succession wars, the three popes, the fact that the Church at one time controlled more than half the areable land in Europe, or the things Machiavelli wrote about religion (and that book was banned by the church with reason - it's both very well written, a great read even now, and an absolute brilliant expose of the way in which rulers should use religion to control their subjects. Hot stuff for the 16th century)
Religion has been the main political ideology for thousands of years! Only recently do we get new ideologies, because the facilities have started to exist with the start of mass bookprints. Luther and Calvijn didn't just open the door for their OWN ideology with that, they opened the door for OTHER ideologies as well. The ones we call "political". But all that means is that they don't claim to derive from Divine inspiration. Apart from that, I see no difference.
Actually, the top 2 results for "three inch frange demodulator" are... on slashdot :)
Keeping the influx of new competitors low?
I agree completely. It's one of the reasons I'm using Chrome as my main browser, despite occasional issues.
"Giant monolithic backdoor", eh? This is the first time that I think a picture of Goatse might actually be on-topic :)
The cutting up garlic thing is great - I bet those students realize that handling lethal stuff unprotected gets it into their bloodstream REAL QUICK and will be a bit more cautious as of then.
Normally I operate on a "no toolbars!" principle, but I tried it to see what it did. I wasn't impressed when Chrome began crashing irregularly. I recommend people uninstall it pronto, if you are suffering from Chrome crashes.
How does removing the version number help the people who need to implement and work with the standard?
It's not mean to help the implementers. It's meant to help out the marketeers...