This is something i've been thinking about for years. I want to do a mass mailout to all employees at all our clients (with the managers permission of course) in almost exactly the same way as this virus does, except instead of actually installing malicious software it keeps track of how many people click the link, and of those, how many then proceed to download the software. Far easier to send each manager a report of "x of your employees would now be infected if this was a real virus" (i'd probably not put individual employees names on there) than to fix the damage caused by viruses.
The next patent will be on a method of doing plastic surgery to make you look like the movie star of your choice. Search Engine Optimisation for your face!
And if it proves that I was not drinking and just had low blood sugar or something. Then dose that mean i get to "rough you up a bit"?
Well... if you are driving a motor vehicle with low enough blood sugar that it's obvious you are not doing a good job then regardless of your blood alcohol content, we have a problem.
So either you know your blood sugar is low and you're driving anyway, in which case you're an idiot, or you are not aware in which case your state of consciousness has deteriorated to the point where you need medical attention, and the cop is doing you (and everyone else) a favour by getting your off the road.
"I just don't understand any legitimate concern to decline a breathalyzer test."
The same reason you should refuse to provide the police with any information. False positives.
Benjamin Franklin once said something along the lines of "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". I don't think he was talking about breathalyzer tests though. If you look like you've been drinking and you're driving on the same roads as me i'll hold you down myself while they draw blood from you. And if it turns out you've been drinking, i'll like the other way while they rough you up a bit too.
The only thing that makes my computer mine is my data (OS, apps, documents, etc). None of the places I work have the sort of connection that could be relied on for speed and availability to make a Thin Client a workable option, so I'd rather sneakernet my data with me and connect it to whatever computer happens to be around to make it 'mine'. Properly encrypted and backed up at any given location of course.
I'm not actually doing this of course, but it's something i'd like to try.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is awfully slow under RDP. Some of the other PDF viewers are better but not by that much. Unless they can fix that, RDP isn't going to be a solution for anyone I know.
I've often heard the availability/data safety argument against thin clients, but I can't imagine that it'd be that hard to implement proper data and application "caching" on the thin client to ensure a user can work for brief periods of time offline, and sync correctly when connection is reestablished. There's already a lot of theory on similar problems in distributed databases, it seems like it should be possible to transfer some of the knowledge to this new realm...
Maybe i'm setting myself up for a whoosh, but isn't that a fat client that you are describing?
The drop in crime with cameras is the exact same as the drop in crime everywhere. If the cameras themselves had anything to do with it, you'd see a larger drop in crime where they're used.
Or alternatively, the cameras are so effective that they reduce crime well outside the range of the camera itself!
I disagree, mistakes like this should not happen at all.
That's a given, but mistakes will happen, and did happen, and they did the right thing in response. Once the crisis is over i'm sure they'll look at what went wrong and how to stop it happening in the future, so stepping up onto a soapbox and saying "this should not happen" doesn't actually help. I think they already know that, and your attitude makes it _worse_ because potential hostility from people who don't understand this stuff might make companies think twice about reporting, and then we all lose.
The only thing worse than making a mistake is making a mistake and then making another mistake by not handling the crisis correctly. I'd rather know before the bad guys (or as soon as possible after) that my password was leaked in a relatively insecure form vs only finding out when the company is forced into admitting it. And in fact this leak appears to be relatively benign unless you use the same password in multiple places or are dumb enough to be under the illusion that your email address and full name isn't already in someone's inbox or address book somewhere for malware to find.
I've just been playing Command & Conquer (the Win95 release) again to re-live a waste of time from my youth, and i'm up to the Ion Cannon level. I haven't RTFA (who has time these days?:) but I assume that they are talking about a woodpecker sized Ion Cannon. If you go down to the woods today, be sure you don't look like a woodpecker when viewed from above.
I can't help but be struck by the seemingly limited amount of spatial and mathematical reasoning capabilities of many who have exceptional social intelligence. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the two traits. The evidence seems enough to even posit that there is a maximal beyond which it is impossible to expand new intelligence and thus the capacity must be split between various capabilities.
I've noticed that too. You've got 20 points, you can allocate those points between charisma (to give it a name most rpg players can relate to:) and intelligence.
Or perhaps training and choosing to shooting people messes with the social part of your brain, leading you to a lonely, isolated, fucked up life.
I'd never thought about it like that... in many conflicts the enemy is most likely there either because they think it's the right thing to do for their country, or because they were conscripted. After the conflict is over I can imagine it would be difficult trying to reconcile the fact that you have killed someones father/brother/son who maybe didn't even want to be fighting you in the first place. It might be hard to ever relate to another human being in the same way again. I wonder if it would be any easier if you were yourself conscripted and forced to fight instead of choosing to join...
Having data on 5.25" disks might be no big deal, but we got a call from a guy just recently wanting us to make some copies of an application activation disk that was 5.25". It's a copy protected disk and obviously the media is subject to bitrot. Apparently we (the company I work for) made some copies many years ago (5.25" disks were old even then!) but they were down to their last few and wanted some more copies made. They weren't interested in any offer to assist in migrating to something newer.
I've got some old Amstrad CPC 464 tapes around that may still be readable... I wrote something to read the data off them through the soundcard about 10 years ago.
Interesting that without mentioning anything about a culture (China presumably), you immediately picked up the intent and labeled it racist. That's why it's funny.
If you're spending most of your time as a programmer typing, or even dealing directly with source code, then there's a lot more wrong with this picture than typing speed. Keying in code should be one of the most trivial parts of the job.
Wow. Old School. There is a lot to be said for getting the essence of the design laid out before you write the first piece of code, but a lot of what you said goes back to the days of punch cards and batch jobs with long wait times where the 'measure twice, cut once' approach to programming really paid off.
And even writing the requirements, specification and design documents involves a lot of time at the keyboard, unless you really are old school and doing it on pen and paper. When doing this I normally sit down at a computer and write down everything I know about the problem, and if I can't get my ideas out as fast as I think of them then i'm going to miss something.
It's not really about raw speed. Typing should be an unconscious reflex... you want words and symbols to appear on the screen, and they should do so, without you having to think about it. That way you can think about the problem at hand, and not about the act of entering the code to solve the problem.
That's more or less what I was going to post so I'll just agree with you. As long as you can get your ideas down fast enough that you don't forget them by the time the next idea comes along, then you can type as well as you need to. Also, once you have the basics in place - hands on the home row, hitting the right keys with the right fingers, etc - an increase in speed will come naturally as you do it more.
One thing I wish I could learn is how to type well with someone looking over my shoulder. I can type as fast or faster than most programmers, but as soon as someone is standing behind me watching my accuracy goes to crap.
That works both ways though. I kind of agree that crashes shouldn't be pretty - you don't want to make a serious error something you can just click through. If the nightly backup job failed I don't want a benign little error message presented to the user, I want something that will get their attention. And if that means blowing the application up so that Windows lets them know then so be it.
Crashing with a stack trace because you can't open the database, instead of MessageBox.Show("Could not connect to database\n%s", useful_error_message) seems kind of dumb though.
Program: *crash for no apparent reason* Sysadmin: Why did you crash? Program: I didn't crash. Sysadmin: What went wrong? Program: Nothing went wrong. Sysadmin: But there's an error message right there! Program: No there isn't. Sysadmin: Yes there is. Look. Right there in the logs where it says Error. Program: And what does it say after the word Error? Sysadmin:... "the operation completed successfuly"...
"Error: The operation completed succesfully" is my all time favourite error message!
I think the OP might have been referring to user behavior wrt security in general, not just passwords (or their physical counterparts). When they aren't using weak passwords and aren't giving them away to social engineers, they are 'working from home', clicking on links they shouldn't, and following the instructions of scammers who cold call and tell them their computer has a virus.
Passwords are certainly one factor of online security but there are plenty of ways someone can get you without ever knowing your password.
By "classic" I assume you just mean "a film that is more than one year old"?
I'm sure there is a specific definition somewhere, but a film would need to have been rammed down the throats of at least one generation of school kids to be considered a classic so yes, more than a year old.
a] drivers watching for pedestrians, like they're supposed to be doing [but who actually follows the laws these days?]. b] pedestrians checking for traffic before they walk into areas that might be occupied by cars; as it would actually be smart [this may be too much to ask]. c] lawmakers passing laws that actually benefit a majority of people, not just a small minority.
It's a tricky one. Should we be making cars noisy just for the one or two blind people who might walk the streets? I can't really think of another way of doing it. You can say that drivers should watch for pedestrians but someone can walk out from behind a large vehicle in a car park giving you very little time to react so they really do need a few hints to know that something is coming.
I know that blind people do make a very small minority, but this is the society we live in. If you don't like it go elsewhere.
If this does go into effect, though, my car is totally going to have the TIE Fighter sound.
I was actually saying pretty much the same thing. I enjoyed most of his movies immensely, but not because they were or weren't believable.
I think it you put him into gone with the wind or bridges of maddison county or some such classic he might not be quite so much fun though (or if he was, it would be for different reasons:)
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This is something i've been thinking about for years. I want to do a mass mailout to all employees at all our clients (with the managers permission of course) in almost exactly the same way as this virus does, except instead of actually installing malicious software it keeps track of how many people click the link, and of those, how many then proceed to download the software. Far easier to send each manager a report of "x of your employees would now be infected if this was a real virus" (i'd probably not put individual employees names on there) than to fix the damage caused by viruses.
Time to get coding I guess...
Funny isn't it... no amount of security updates in the world will make people stop for a minute and think about what they are doing.
HARD LABOR, not some wimpy country club prison.
On slashdot we refer to such prisons as "federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" and "white collar resort prison" respectively.
The next patent will be on a method of doing plastic surgery to make you look like the movie star of your choice. Search Engine Optimisation for your face!
And if it proves that I was not drinking and just had low blood sugar or something. Then dose that mean i get to "rough you up a bit"?
Well... if you are driving a motor vehicle with low enough blood sugar that it's obvious you are not doing a good job then regardless of your blood alcohol content, we have a problem.
So either you know your blood sugar is low and you're driving anyway, in which case you're an idiot, or you are not aware in which case your state of consciousness has deteriorated to the point where you need medical attention, and the cop is doing you (and everyone else) a favour by getting your off the road.
So what was your point?
"I just don't understand any legitimate concern to decline a breathalyzer test."
The same reason you should refuse to provide the police with any information. False positives.
Benjamin Franklin once said something along the lines of "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". I don't think he was talking about breathalyzer tests though. If you look like you've been drinking and you're driving on the same roads as me i'll hold you down myself while they draw blood from you. And if it turns out you've been drinking, i'll like the other way while they rough you up a bit too.
The only thing that makes my computer mine is my data (OS, apps, documents, etc). None of the places I work have the sort of connection that could be relied on for speed and availability to make a Thin Client a workable option, so I'd rather sneakernet my data with me and connect it to whatever computer happens to be around to make it 'mine'. Properly encrypted and backed up at any given location of course.
I'm not actually doing this of course, but it's something i'd like to try.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is awfully slow under RDP. Some of the other PDF viewers are better but not by that much. Unless they can fix that, RDP isn't going to be a solution for anyone I know.
I've often heard the availability/data safety argument against thin clients, but I can't imagine that it'd be that hard to implement proper data and application "caching" on the thin client to ensure a user can work for brief periods of time offline, and sync correctly when connection is reestablished. There's already a lot of theory on similar problems in distributed databases, it seems like it should be possible to transfer some of the knowledge to this new realm...
Maybe i'm setting myself up for a whoosh, but isn't that a fat client that you are describing?
Sure you can: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/GlasgowCCTV.html
The drop in crime with cameras is the exact same as the drop in crime everywhere. If the cameras themselves had anything to do with it, you'd see a larger drop in crime where they're used.
Or alternatively, the cameras are so effective that they reduce crime well outside the range of the camera itself!
I disagree, mistakes like this should not happen at all.
That's a given, but mistakes will happen, and did happen, and they did the right thing in response. Once the crisis is over i'm sure they'll look at what went wrong and how to stop it happening in the future, so stepping up onto a soapbox and saying "this should not happen" doesn't actually help. I think they already know that, and your attitude makes it _worse_ because potential hostility from people who don't understand this stuff might make companies think twice about reporting, and then we all lose.
The only thing worse than making a mistake is making a mistake and then making another mistake by not handling the crisis correctly. I'd rather know before the bad guys (or as soon as possible after) that my password was leaked in a relatively insecure form vs only finding out when the company is forced into admitting it. And in fact this leak appears to be relatively benign unless you use the same password in multiple places or are dumb enough to be under the illusion that your email address and full name isn't already in someone's inbox or address book somewhere for malware to find.
The rest is damage limitation.
Or, as the OP said, crisis communication.
I've just been playing Command & Conquer (the Win95 release) again to re-live a waste of time from my youth, and i'm up to the Ion Cannon level. I haven't RTFA (who has time these days? :) but I assume that they are talking about a woodpecker sized Ion Cannon. If you go down to the woods today, be sure you don't look like a woodpecker when viewed from above.
I can't help but be struck by the seemingly limited amount of spatial and mathematical reasoning capabilities of many who have exceptional social intelligence. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the two traits. The evidence seems enough to even posit that there is a maximal beyond which it is impossible to expand new intelligence and thus the capacity must be split between various capabilities.
I've noticed that too. You've got 20 points, you can allocate those points between charisma (to give it a name most rpg players can relate to :) and intelligence.
Or perhaps training and choosing to shooting people messes with the social part of your brain, leading you to a lonely, isolated, fucked up life.
I'd never thought about it like that... in many conflicts the enemy is most likely there either because they think it's the right thing to do for their country, or because they were conscripted. After the conflict is over I can imagine it would be difficult trying to reconcile the fact that you have killed someones father/brother/son who maybe didn't even want to be fighting you in the first place. It might be hard to ever relate to another human being in the same way again. I wonder if it would be any easier if you were yourself conscripted and forced to fight instead of choosing to join...
Having data on 5.25" disks might be no big deal, but we got a call from a guy just recently wanting us to make some copies of an application activation disk that was 5.25". It's a copy protected disk and obviously the media is subject to bitrot. Apparently we (the company I work for) made some copies many years ago (5.25" disks were old even then!) but they were down to their last few and wanted some more copies made. They weren't interested in any offer to assist in migrating to something newer.
I've got some old Amstrad CPC 464 tapes around that may still be readable... I wrote something to read the data off them through the soundcard about 10 years ago.
Interesting that without mentioning anything about a culture (China presumably), you immediately picked up the intent and labeled it racist. That's why it's funny.
If you're spending most of your time as a programmer typing, or even dealing directly with source code, then there's a lot more wrong with this picture than typing speed. Keying in code should be one of the most trivial parts of the job.
Wow. Old School. There is a lot to be said for getting the essence of the design laid out before you write the first piece of code, but a lot of what you said goes back to the days of punch cards and batch jobs with long wait times where the 'measure twice, cut once' approach to programming really paid off.
And even writing the requirements, specification and design documents involves a lot of time at the keyboard, unless you really are old school and doing it on pen and paper. When doing this I normally sit down at a computer and write down everything I know about the problem, and if I can't get my ideas out as fast as I think of them then i'm going to miss something.
It's not really about raw speed. Typing should be an unconscious reflex... you want words and symbols to appear on the screen, and they should do so, without you having to think about it. That way you can think about the problem at hand, and not about the act of entering the code to solve the problem.
That's more or less what I was going to post so I'll just agree with you. As long as you can get your ideas down fast enough that you don't forget them by the time the next idea comes along, then you can type as well as you need to. Also, once you have the basics in place - hands on the home row, hitting the right keys with the right fingers, etc - an increase in speed will come naturally as you do it more.
One thing I wish I could learn is how to type well with someone looking over my shoulder. I can type as fast or faster than most programmers, but as soon as someone is standing behind me watching my accuracy goes to crap.
That works both ways though. I kind of agree that crashes shouldn't be pretty - you don't want to make a serious error something you can just click through. If the nightly backup job failed I don't want a benign little error message presented to the user, I want something that will get their attention. And if that means blowing the application up so that Windows lets them know then so be it.
Crashing with a stack trace because you can't open the database, instead of MessageBox.Show("Could not connect to database\n%s", useful_error_message) seems kind of dumb though.
Or even worse:
Program: *crash for no apparent reason* ... "the operation completed successfuly"...
Sysadmin: Why did you crash?
Program: I didn't crash.
Sysadmin: What went wrong?
Program: Nothing went wrong.
Sysadmin: But there's an error message right there!
Program: No there isn't.
Sysadmin: Yes there is. Look. Right there in the logs where it says Error.
Program: And what does it say after the word Error?
Sysadmin:
"Error: The operation completed succesfully" is my all time favourite error message!
I think the OP might have been referring to user behavior wrt security in general, not just passwords (or their physical counterparts). When they aren't using weak passwords and aren't giving them away to social engineers, they are 'working from home', clicking on links they shouldn't, and following the instructions of scammers who cold call and tell them their computer has a virus.
Passwords are certainly one factor of online security but there are plenty of ways someone can get you without ever knowing your password.
By "classic" I assume you just mean "a film that is more than one year old"?
I'm sure there is a specific definition somewhere, but a film would need to have been rammed down the throats of at least one generation of school kids to be considered a classic so yes, more than a year old.
This whole thing could be solved by:
a] drivers watching for pedestrians, like they're supposed to be doing [but who actually follows the laws these days?].
b] pedestrians checking for traffic before they walk into areas that might be occupied by cars; as it would actually be smart [this may be too much to ask].
c] lawmakers passing laws that actually benefit a majority of people, not just a small minority.
It's a tricky one. Should we be making cars noisy just for the one or two blind people who might walk the streets? I can't really think of another way of doing it. You can say that drivers should watch for pedestrians but someone can walk out from behind a large vehicle in a car park giving you very little time to react so they really do need a few hints to know that something is coming.
I know that blind people do make a very small minority, but this is the society we live in. If you don't like it go elsewhere.
If this does go into effect, though, my car is totally going to have the TIE Fighter sound.
That should be mandatory.
I was actually saying pretty much the same thing. I enjoyed most of his movies immensely, but not because they were or weren't believable.
I think it you put him into gone with the wind or bridges of maddison county or some such classic he might not be quite so much fun though (or if he was, it would be for different reasons :)