There is also the motivation of the contestant. I would expect a lot of Indian to enlist just with the hope to increase their creds or make their resume stand out, that would mean a bigger proportion of lower skill applicant.
This. What Google and Facebook are doing is what people in the real life would call "stalking". You can actually sue somebody for that and get restraining orders, so that is indeed a social contract.
Basically the same thing could be said between discussing this on slashdot and doing it at the pub with your technically minded friends. See you there:-)
That is not so clear-cut - the US traded their safety net for freedom. Moving from the bottom of the social ladder to the top was possible. In Europe, maybe you cannot fall as low, but traditionally it was harder to get a job/position outside of your station. (Being able to raise to a position by doing well at your job was called US-Style management when I was a kid. That was not the norm.)
Society is not static however. The US social ladder has become more slippery (nowadays you are either broke or billionaire) while mentalities have changed in EU making climbing the ladder easier than ever before (thanks in part to the US influence on the mentalities, btw). So that is indeed a win for Europe right now. However, that is not really that intuitive. Europe turned out better than it could have, and the US is turning worse than it should.
And you cannot believe how cheap they are. I order tools from india from time to time. Any type of marking is done by hand. For the majority of the markings, the machinery to do that can of work cost only a few thousands and would run literally forever with little maintenance. Yet, people (and mistake made by those people) are cheaper than that.
Well that is also misleading. The number of muslim is far greater with a far greater proportion of them living in poor condition generally under some sort of dictatorship.
Extremist, even in minority, in first world nation are a lot more scary than extremist in third world nation. Yes, people in third world nation have outrageous behaviour, but we have been there before, not even a long time ago: there are still a lot of people alive that remember that the first world nuked civilian cities, mass murdered, and did not give a shit about human rights for women or blacks.
But in 2012, we should know better. Israel should know better.
If the developer lied about the error range of his application, they would be right to be upset. Otherwise, business as usual, as far as engineering is concerned: until we can build stuff atom by atom, calculation will always be an approximation.
You assume that the client of customer service will not rate the user based on the resolution he received : ask for a refund and the agent cannot give it - 1 star. Already in lot of customer services deps dealing with the general public, agents learn to recognize the stinkers: the one you cannot do anything about but will still be blamed by the client. In those places, the system you propose would be anything but fun.
I guess there is nothing that works in every situation. The most fun metric to measure IMHO is the one you change them from time to time. Keeping the same one for too long is either boring or encourage cheaters.
London ? Most people you work with in London are foreigners: entrepreneurs and employees, winners and losers. Also, that is IT you are talking about, that segment of the market in London is literally flooded by foreigners. When you look at small investment firms and hedge funds, layers practices,... the proportion of UK born entrepreneurs increase dramatically.
(PS: you really sound like a jerk describing your "friend" as you do )
I doubt you or the author of TFA would want to live in a society so tightly monitored that it was impossible to commit ID theft or internet crime (he seems to equate the two).
There must be a middle ground between no law enforcement and a totalitarian regime. You made the point earlier: you can steal, but it is very difficult to make a decent living out of it, that is the target for software/internet scams.
Well there is a solution: curated platforms like Apple IOS Store. If you use only apps from store, you have a lot more chance to be safe than on a "free" platform like a computer. If a decent solution is not found, there will be some day a company like Apple selling a curated internet for a profit and people will flock to it. (we had that before in the time of Compuserve and cie)
They would probably try to settle, and normally the amount should not be too miserable. As much as big companies can be evil, at the end of the day, they run a business - what they can buy for 1M they won't sue for 2M.
That works in the other direction aswell. Except for patent troll, there is very little to make buy shutting down a small business when it is cheaper to buy it. Again, that does not work with patent troll.
That is not good of course, that is a travesti of the original goal of patents in the first place, at best, the patent fail to protect the inventor, at worse they scare them off. Patents have jumped the shark - the cheapest way would be to ditch them for 50/100 years and see if trade secrets are really still a problem.
I guess the good news is that if Google puts their weight behind Python or some other language then it will actually tag along with the success that Android has already become.
Too optimistic. There would be too much risk investing in somebody else language, so that would mean a custom Google language. There are companies today that are afraid to use opensource because somebody somewhere (in the US) could sue them, cannot imagine that would improve the feeling. (I worked in one of those - developing for anything that could be sold to the US was a real pain, we spent years re-inventing what could pass for a wheel. Competitor on the asian market were just so much faster to develop than us that it was not even funny)
Come on now, nobody simply hash the password: you timestamp it and salt it first then hash it. That is how it is done, and you know it. So yes the parent is incorrect, but saying that hashing is useless is misinformation. If you properly hash, a sniffer will be able to use the hash as a password only once. So that is a man in the middle, that sucks but it is not a complete pwnage as you suggest it is.
I agree with you that there is a element of life choice involved here, especially for the young (and by young, I mean less than 60) There is the same concern for giving unemployment benefit to people that live in region/town where there is no work and where there has been no work for generations.
There is however the other side of the coin, at least from the government perspective:
1. High concentration of people have their costly problems too: traffic, sanitation, power and water distribution. And then the government also need to help people to deal with higher cost of living (or if you don't people to help people living in cities, you need to deal with people not finding work, catch 22)
2. There is a cost associated to letting the country side die or fall behind: tourism (visitor and local product), business opportunities (country side outsourcing), equal opportunities (you don't know where the next Steve Jobs will be born)
Wiring the whole country is certainly a waste of money (that being said, we did it with water, sanitation, road, electricity, phonelines before), however there is certainly a balance to reach for the good of the country. (note that all those costs are externalities - there is no other way but for the government to pay)
If every app maker that had to face ridiculous draconian Apple policies would stand up to Apple, they would change their stupid policies. But as long as everybody keeps bending over and taking it, why should Apple change anything? They have a sweet deal going.
Actually you nailed it right there. Those developers would not lift their finger to create something on Mac or Linux that were wide opened for years. Come IOS and they won't stop coding even with Apple being a dick. So it seems that Apple managed to find the right balance despite all.
As a developer, there is always a reason to complain on a blog, whining is a key development skill - if you have a developer that does not whine, fire him.
Also, the real pain are the users, by the time you have a moderate userbase, suicide has become a valid career plan and Apple start to look like your best friend.
I'm confused where blowing up men is more moral than blowing up women.
Sec discrimination has always been funny that way. Women were seen as both important and weak. Depending the circumstance or what quality you stress you have a range of possible behaviour against them: weak physically - you need to help them - or mentally aswell - they should shut up and obbey ? Important or Precious ?
In any case, here they were pushing the guy for a reaction. They IMHO are very close to putting him in a completely artificial situation that would never have happened in real life. Take an example, imagine that I'm an undercover cop and I sell you this wonderful remote. If you use it, I promise it will kill some random high ranking Democrat/Republican (chose your side) with no way to track you back. Oh, and to sweeten the pot if you hesitate, I pay you 100K to use it. Should you really be arrested for murder if you press the button ?
As long as teachers are paid with tax and/or fake inflation money, the people who pay these taxes should be against them.
"us" vs "them" ? Like it is a war, against them, the teachers, nurses, firemen, policemen, soldier, politician ?
Wait, Microsoft, IBM, Boeing,... and all the big and not so big companies get boatload of money from the government either directly through contract or indirectly through customised regulation. It also us vs them, the employee of the top-500 companies including their CEO.
And the bailout ? Add all the bankers and all their support people (it, pa, cleaner,...) to them.
It starts to be pretty crowded on the "them" side.
People want shiny and slick, and really couldn't care less freedom, code, control, or innovation.
People never cared, only programmer and hacker ever did. OpenSource never delivered anything to the masses before they were packaged "for the masses" (Android, OSX).
The next generation of programmers have been raised to live and program in flashy iDink walled gardens and have neither the interest or the inclination in releasing or collaborating on code.
OpenSource is not a choice you make nowadays. You must use OpenSource or you don't deliver as fast as your competitor. If you create a framework, you must open source or you will never reach critical masses. You must participate in open source project, because that is too costly to maintain your own private fork and nobody care about your references if they are not commit id on github. And all of that is not counting the problem you have recruiting developers to develop your proprietary applications.
OpenSource has won in the development world. Unlike the previous generation, the current generation are not paid to develop closed source software, so forget them not too feel like rebels.
Because everything exist on the iPhone and everything that does not exist get cloned as soon as your app reaches the store. It used to be that you could have an original idea and develop it (fun), now even before you start you see 10 implementations already in the store, that kills the fun right there.
It is still good to develop for the iPhone because of the incredible amount of resources you have. However, that is a harsh and very competitive environment. If you are not coding to become rich or create a software empire, you may want a more "open" (as in you have a chance of being seen on merit without a dedicating half your time marketing) environment.
For existing developer (Android, IOS), all boils down to market opportunity: less competition to grab the market shares early on.
If I see that you are hungry and I sell you food for a profit, you call that empathy ? Or is it only when my business failed because I didn't calculate my margin properly, that you blame empathy ?
Bankers thought they could make money off people with no money using their clever formula. They were wrong. Some of them maybe thought they were making the world a better place (empathy), but at the end of the day they were in it to make a profit.
I trust scientists because I can go over their data and validate their conclusions.
The community is the difference between trust and faith. Like for opensource, if a project does not have a community and you do not validate every line yourself, you can only believes what the developer tell you ( because well, you cannot even tell if the source build the same program ). However you trust projects supported by a large and open community like Firefox.
You do not trust science because some illusionary feeling that you could somehow validate what they say. You trust science because it is backed by a scientific community that has proven times and times again that it can be trusted : it actually does check the results; it evolves changing with the theories; it is huge and open to lot of people ( and reading slashdot you are probably part of it and have done your bit to validate the little corner of science your skills cover ) and you can actually validate the result of those theories in the many technologies they helped create.
You may have had a point 5 years ago. But the world has changed. There are device like smartphone and tablets that are basically risk free from a technical point of view (no need for firewall, antivirus, no need to think about not installing that dodgy app,...). With the new devices, phishing is hardly more technical than all other form of phising using traditional means. You cannot sue the bank if you give your credit card and pin to some stranger in the street. Same on the internet.
For expert attack (like somebody installing a trojan on your computer, somebody cloning your secured token or stealing your credentials from the bank), same thing, you are of course expected to take reasonable measure like using safe device (tablet) instead of expert device like a plain computer and follow the guideline of the bank, but your responsibility stop there. That is about the same level of expertise that we expect you to have in plumbery, electricity, fire fighting, first aid, car maintenance,... ( try to sue the housing company because "only an electrical engineer would know that sticking your finger in a plug is a bad idea" )
Indeed if you don't follow basic safety instruction you should pay for it.
As you do if you accept to bring the "package of flu medicine" for that "nice gentleman's mum" across border control.
As you do if you don't lock you car and it gets stolen or if you "optimise" the wiring of your house and it burns down.
We have now in a time and age where computers are basically ubiquitous so we must require from people a token level of responsibility.
why would people create textual content if all ad revenue is circumvented by Siri.
Back in 2000, when the default business model was to create content and package it either in a box (like for encyclopedia,...) or stick it behind a paywall. People would have asked the question: "why would people create content if you can find for free on the internet".
Today we know, and tomorrow there will be other business models that work with Siri...
Slashdot Mirror
There is also the motivation of the contestant. I would expect a lot of Indian to enlist just with the hope to increase their creds or make their resume stand out, that would mean a bigger proportion of lower skill applicant.
This. What Google and Facebook are doing is what people in the real life would call "stalking". You can actually sue somebody for that and get restraining orders, so that is indeed a social contract.
Basically the same thing could be said between discussing this on slashdot and doing it at the pub with your technically minded friends. See you there :-)
Society is not static however. The US social ladder has become more slippery (nowadays you are either broke or billionaire) while mentalities have changed in EU making climbing the ladder easier than ever before (thanks in part to the US influence on the mentalities, btw). So that is indeed a win for Europe right now. However, that is not really that intuitive. Europe turned out better than it could have, and the US is turning worse than it should.
And you cannot believe how cheap they are. I order tools from india from time to time. Any type of marking is done by hand. For the majority of the markings, the machinery to do that can of work cost only a few thousands and would run literally forever with little maintenance. Yet, people (and mistake made by those people) are cheaper than that.
Well that is also misleading. The number of muslim is far greater with a far greater proportion of them living in poor condition generally under some sort of dictatorship.
Extremist, even in minority, in first world nation are a lot more scary than extremist in third world nation. Yes, people in third world nation have outrageous behaviour, but we have been there before, not even a long time ago: there are still a lot of people alive that remember that the first world nuked civilian cities, mass murdered, and did not give a shit about human rights for women or blacks.
But in 2012, we should know better. Israel should know better.
If the developer lied about the error range of his application, they would be right to be upset. Otherwise, business as usual, as far as engineering is concerned: until we can build stuff atom by atom, calculation will always be an approximation.
You assume that the client of customer service will not rate the user based on the resolution he received : ask for a refund and the agent cannot give it - 1 star. Already in lot of customer services deps dealing with the general public, agents learn to recognize the stinkers: the one you cannot do anything about but will still be blamed by the client. In those places, the system you propose would be anything but fun.
I guess there is nothing that works in every situation. The most fun metric to measure IMHO is the one you change them from time to time. Keeping the same one for too long is either boring or encourage cheaters.
(PS: you really sound like a jerk describing your "friend" as you do )
I doubt you or the author of TFA would want to live in a society so tightly monitored that it was impossible to commit ID theft or internet crime (he seems to equate the two).
There must be a middle ground between no law enforcement and a totalitarian regime. You made the point earlier: you can steal, but it is very difficult to make a decent living out of it, that is the target for software/internet scams.
Well there is a solution: curated platforms like Apple IOS Store. If you use only apps from store, you have a lot more chance to be safe than on a "free" platform like a computer. If a decent solution is not found, there will be some day a company like Apple selling a curated internet for a profit and people will flock to it. (we had that before in the time of Compuserve and cie)
They would probably try to settle, and normally the amount should not be too miserable. As much as big companies can be evil, at the end of the day, they run a business - what they can buy for 1M they won't sue for 2M.
That works in the other direction aswell. Except for patent troll, there is very little to make buy shutting down a small business when it is cheaper to buy it. Again, that does not work with patent troll.
That is not good of course, that is a travesti of the original goal of patents in the first place, at best, the patent fail to protect the inventor, at worse they scare them off. Patents have jumped the shark - the cheapest way would be to ditch them for 50/100 years and see if trade secrets are really still a problem.
I guess the good news is that if Google puts their weight behind Python or some other language then it will actually tag along with the success that Android has already become.
Too optimistic. There would be too much risk investing in somebody else language, so that would mean a custom Google language. There are companies today that are afraid to use opensource because somebody somewhere (in the US) could sue them, cannot imagine that would improve the feeling. (I worked in one of those - developing for anything that could be sold to the US was a real pain, we spent years re-inventing what could pass for a wheel. Competitor on the asian market were just so much faster to develop than us that it was not even funny)
The hash effectively becomes the password.
Come on now, nobody simply hash the password: you timestamp it and salt it first then hash it. That is how it is done, and you know it. So yes the parent is incorrect, but saying that hashing is useless is misinformation. If you properly hash, a sniffer will be able to use the hash as a password only once. So that is a man in the middle, that sucks but it is not a complete pwnage as you suggest it is.
I agree with you that there is a element of life choice involved here, especially for the young (and by young, I mean less than 60) There is the same concern for giving unemployment benefit to people that live in region/town where there is no work and where there has been no work for generations.
There is however the other side of the coin, at least from the government perspective:
1. High concentration of people have their costly problems too: traffic, sanitation, power and water distribution. And then the government also need to help people to deal with higher cost of living (or if you don't people to help people living in cities, you need to deal with people not finding work, catch 22)
2. There is a cost associated to letting the country side die or fall behind: tourism (visitor and local product), business opportunities (country side outsourcing), equal opportunities (you don't know where the next Steve Jobs will be born)
Wiring the whole country is certainly a waste of money (that being said, we did it with water, sanitation, road, electricity, phonelines before), however there is certainly a balance to reach for the good of the country. (note that all those costs are externalities - there is no other way but for the government to pay)
If every app maker that had to face ridiculous draconian Apple policies would stand up to Apple, they would change their stupid policies. But as long as everybody keeps bending over and taking it, why should Apple change anything? They have a sweet deal going.
Actually you nailed it right there. Those developers would not lift their finger to create something on Mac or Linux that were wide opened for years. Come IOS and they won't stop coding even with Apple being a dick. So it seems that Apple managed to find the right balance despite all.
As a developer, there is always a reason to complain on a blog, whining is a key development skill - if you have a developer that does not whine, fire him. Also, the real pain are the users, by the time you have a moderate userbase, suicide has become a valid career plan and Apple start to look like your best friend.
I'm confused where blowing up men is more moral than blowing up women.
Sec discrimination has always been funny that way. Women were seen as both important and weak. Depending the circumstance or what quality you stress you have a range of possible behaviour against them: weak physically - you need to help them - or mentally aswell - they should shut up and obbey ? Important or Precious ?
In any case, here they were pushing the guy for a reaction. They IMHO are very close to putting him in a completely artificial situation that would never have happened in real life. Take an example, imagine that I'm an undercover cop and I sell you this wonderful remote. If you use it, I promise it will kill some random high ranking Democrat/Republican (chose your side) with no way to track you back. Oh, and to sweeten the pot if you hesitate, I pay you 100K to use it. Should you really be arrested for murder if you press the button ?
As long as teachers are paid with tax and/or fake inflation money, the people who pay these taxes should be against them.
"us" vs "them" ? Like it is a war, against them, the teachers, nurses, firemen, policemen, soldier, politician ? ... and all the big and not so big companies get boatload of money from the government either directly through contract or indirectly through customised regulation. It also us vs them, the employee of the top-500 companies including their CEO.
...) to them.
Wait, Microsoft, IBM, Boeing,
And the bailout ? Add all the bankers and all their support people (it, pa, cleaner,
It starts to be pretty crowded on the "them" side.
People want shiny and slick, and really couldn't care less freedom, code, control, or innovation.
People never cared, only programmer and hacker ever did. OpenSource never delivered anything to the masses before they were packaged "for the masses" (Android, OSX).
The next generation of programmers have been raised to live and program in flashy iDink walled gardens and have neither the interest or the inclination in releasing or collaborating on code.
OpenSource is not a choice you make nowadays. You must use OpenSource or you don't deliver as fast as your competitor. If you create a framework, you must open source or you will never reach critical masses. You must participate in open source project, because that is too costly to maintain your own private fork and nobody care about your references if they are not commit id on github. And all of that is not counting the problem you have recruiting developers to develop your proprietary applications.
OpenSource has won in the development world. Unlike the previous generation, the current generation are not paid to develop closed source software, so forget them not too feel like rebels.
Because everything exist on the iPhone and everything that does not exist get cloned as soon as your app reaches the store. It used to be that you could have an original idea and develop it (fun), now even before you start you see 10 implementations already in the store, that kills the fun right there.
It is still good to develop for the iPhone because of the incredible amount of resources you have. However, that is a harsh and very competitive environment. If you are not coding to become rich or create a software empire, you may want a more "open" (as in you have a chance of being seen on merit without a dedicating half your time marketing) environment.
For existing developer (Android, IOS), all boils down to market opportunity: less competition to grab the market shares early on.
If I see that you are hungry and I sell you food for a profit, you call that empathy ? Or is it only when my business failed because I didn't calculate my margin properly, that you blame empathy ?
Bankers thought they could make money off people with no money using their clever formula. They were wrong. Some of them maybe thought they were making the world a better place (empathy), but at the end of the day they were in it to make a profit.
I trust scientists because I can go over their data and validate their conclusions.
The community is the difference between trust and faith. Like for opensource, if a project does not have a community and you do not validate every line yourself, you can only believes what the developer tell you ( because well, you cannot even tell if the source build the same program ). However you trust projects supported by a large and open community like Firefox.
You do not trust science because some illusionary feeling that you could somehow validate what they say. You trust science because it is backed by a scientific community that has proven times and times again that it can be trusted : it actually does check the results; it evolves changing with the theories; it is huge and open to lot of people ( and reading slashdot you are probably part of it and have done your bit to validate the little corner of science your skills cover ) and you can actually validate the result of those theories in the many technologies they helped create.
Microsoft is trying to sell its "perpetual money-losing" product to potential client. Unbelievable, Microsoft has a sales team !
You may have had a point 5 years ago. But the world has changed. There are device like smartphone and tablets that are basically risk free from a technical point of view (no need for firewall, antivirus, no need to think about not installing that dodgy app, ...). With the new devices, phishing is hardly more technical than all other form of phising using traditional means. You cannot sue the bank if you give your credit card and pin to some stranger in the street. Same on the internet.
For expert attack (like somebody installing a trojan on your computer, somebody cloning your secured token or stealing your credentials from the bank), same thing, you are of course expected to take reasonable measure like using safe device (tablet) instead of expert device like a plain computer and follow the guideline of the bank, but your responsibility stop there. That is about the same level of expertise that we expect you to have in plumbery, electricity, fire fighting, first aid, car maintenance, ... ( try to sue the housing company because "only an electrical engineer would know that sticking your finger in a plug is a bad idea" )
Indeed if you don't follow basic safety instruction you should pay for it.
As you do if you accept to bring the "package of flu medicine" for that "nice gentleman's mum" across border control.
As you do if you don't lock you car and it gets stolen or if you "optimise" the wiring of your house and it burns down.
We have now in a time and age where computers are basically ubiquitous so we must require from people a token level of responsibility.
why would people create textual content if all ad revenue is circumvented by Siri.
Back in 2000, when the default business model was to create content and package it either in a box (like for encyclopedia, ...) or stick it behind a paywall. People would have asked the question: "why would people create content if you can find for free on the internet".
Today we know, and tomorrow there will be other business models that work with Siri ...