I rewatched it, and it still doesn't sound like an intentional dig at the town's name. Watch his face, he doesn't crack a little smirk like McCain does whenever he's getting a meaningless dig in on Obama.
Maybe it was intentional. It would be out of character with how he's conducted his campaign to date if it was.
But let's assume that it was (which I am not at all convinced of), even in that case, here you have Obama making one very tiny dig, then going on to support his point with figures and discussion. McCain's campaign - and I have to compare McCain more than Palin since her presence has been so far so short-lived and the GOP is deciding to keep her sequestered away from the press to avoid any gaffes - has made silly and absurd dig after silly and absurd dig at Obama's campaign.
I don't think the fact that he's been briefed on Palin makes his statement a prepared one. I also don't suspect Anderson Cooper send the questions to Obama in advance. Heck, if it was a prepared statement as you suggest, why would he have had the um's and uh's in there (which of course every GOP die hard dutifully transcribes).
If you want to call Obama out on something like that, you have to call McCain out on the hundreds of petty, meaningless digs he gets in against Obama on a regular basis. Things which have nothing to do with issues, policy, or suitability to be president (such as every time they quote Obama, they transcribe the "uh" and such filler sounds). Things that are outright lies (such as repeatedly claiming that Obama's tax plan is to raise taxes for middle class Americans - which is not currently nor has it ever been true unless you include people who make over $250,000 as middle class).
McCain has been running a dirty, dirty campaign. Obama has been refusing to drop to that same level, which interestingly almost seems to make McCain get all the dirtier, perhaps out of desperation.
I agree with Obama that it's more challenging to run a campaign that has 50 times the number of staffers, and 36 times the budget. I can't say whether he addresses her gubernatorial experience since the video cuts off w/ no indication that he was done answering the question except that he was finishing a point. I even had to re-watch to have heard the "and as governer" in the question which was just kind of thrown in there.
Anyway all of this is again a meaningless distraction from the real issues. Maybe he didn't address a question during a live interview that well. Big freaking whoop. The media gives McCain a pass every time he completely changes his policy week to week. Let's get back to what matters.
Obama has concrete thought out and well defended plans for many major issues. He has run a respectable campaign in the face of repeated meaningless insults. He has a strong foreign policy. He has exhibited consistency and clarity of intention throughout. He rarely has had to change his stance, and when he has done so, he has explained in clear terms why he made that change.
McCain doesn't have cogent policy, he changes his stated policy depending on what will get the best response from the crowd he's currently talking to. He has flip flopped on dozens and dozens of major issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
ETags have problems only really in clustered environments, mostly because the way common web servers generate the ETag means different servers in the same cluster serving the same site are likely to have different values. They do this because it's a fast way to generate the ETag.
We serve a lot of images and static documents out of a database (this solves a replication issue for us). The ETags we generate for this are created as an md5 of the file's content at the time it was inserted into the database. So for us, even though we have a geographically disperse cluster, ETag is still consistent, and works great for us.
The "problem with ETags" is actually a server performance consideration, and is a design decision by Microsoft and Apache. My guess is there's ways to configure ETag to be more reliable when you're working in a cluster, but I have not had to do so.
It doesn't sound to me like his pronunciation is intended as some covert dig. In fact, it's not far from how many people pronounce it (though not technically correct). For example, on a guide on how to pronounce the name Wasilla, it mentions the Wasilly pronunciation specifically as a common mispronunciation.
Second, he's not ignoring her gubernatorial experience; the question was specifically about her mayoral experience compared to his senate experience. He directly addresses the question posed to him which did not talk about gubernatorial experience. He points out that her mayoral experience compared to his campaign experience leans in his favor. He's got a substantially larger staff, and he's got a substantially larger budget than she had while as mayor. That was the question, and I think he addressed it directly and adequately.
I'm not familiar with the "Wa-silly" comment, and it seems unlike Obama. Can you provide a link to back that up, preferably a video? Are you sure it wasn't misspeaking?
Anyway, from your own description, it sounds like Obama was responding to questions posed by reporters, and people sometimes make bad statements at times like this. Obama has by and large refrained from commenting at all on Palin and her experience and/or lack of it. Yet Palin mocked his community organization experience during a prepared speech at the RNC. It was intentional, calculated, premeditated, and a lot more directed.
Palin and McCain have repeatedly directed low blows to Obama and Biden attacking them on matters from which they purposely draw incorrect conclusions through the fallacies Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent.
If you ignored policy, it seems evident that McCain/Palin are running a campaign where they're more concerned with making others around them look bad through any means available, while Obama/Biden are running a campaign where they work to make themselves look good through cogent well defined, well thought out policy.
This speaks to character and the lack of character in the candidates. Certainly McCain doesn't have any solid policy that he's running on, he's only got his internal pendulum that swings back and forth until he gets the best response, where he keeps that policy. No regard for plans that make a good future, just let's see what makes people smile the most and boo the least. Without a solid thought-out policy, the only other thing to vote for him through would be
Maybe I read it wrong, but your post implies Obama has a cult of personality. If I didn't misread that, you're confusing charisma and perspicacity with what a true cult of personality is - where the government forces the media to unquestioningly and unhesitatingly extol virtues of a political leader - real and fake - in order to prevent citizens from ever hearing anything bad about their whitewashed leader.
Cult of personality notably has a negative connotation, and indeed it should, it's a form of repression. If you want to see what a true cult of personality is like, examine Eric Lafforgue's Flickr photo set from North Korea, where citizens are required by law to wear patriotic pins, and required by law to have photographs of their illustrious leaders in their home, tilted slightly downward so the eyes follow you everywhere. Where citizens are required by law to have a radio in their home which they cannot turn off that periodically spouts political propaganda. Where every hour, on the hour, from 6 am to midnight, loudspeakers blast out a patriotic song. Where reading material for children is war propaganda espouting the virtues of their leader and speaking in vague terms of the threat of the west.
Obama doesn't have a cult of personality. He has the clarity, insight, and speaking ability to make people feel good about the chance for change in the future, to feel good about themselves and who they are and can be. He inspires people. And even though you try to make that out to be a bad thing, it is in fact a very good thing.
And I may have missed what Obama was going to do make the USA a force for good in this world again. So please recite them or point me in the right place.
Perhaps you haven't looked. Here, Obama covers current foreign policy issues in detail, giving a good background on each, and detailing his plan for each: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/
I think Obama has far out-proven his qualifications for being president over McCain. Although I don't agree with all of his policies, his policies make sense and he has good and well-supported reasons for them. He has a good clear vision for the long-term and near-term future.
Way more significantly he has demonstrated decades more maturity than nearly anyone in the GOP. He has refused to reciprocate the meaningless character attacks and outright lies that the GOP and John McCain has leveraged against him. He has so far held true to his word. He has so far in his life proven that he's willing to put the needs of average citizens above his own greed.
The GOP has the audacity to MOCK his time as a public servant and community organizer in Chicago. Here's a guy who, with his Harvard law degree, and the ability to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, instead put aside his own greed and got his hands dirty on the streets.
This isn't a guy who's running for self gain. His pre-political career proves it unless you want to call those years merely a political tactic.
Here's a guy who sees something wrong with the system. Here's a guy who has the intelligence, charisma, and wherewithal to unite this country and make us feel good about ourselves again. He's got the necessary skills to make the world once again love the USA, or at least not despise us.
George Bush has spent the last 8 years using international good will toward the USA as form of currency to purchase the ability to misbehave in the world. International good will toward America has risen merely on the prospect that we'll be wise enough to elect this man president.
It's time the USA became a force for good in this world again. McCain won't lead us there, he's too busy slinging mud to even spend time forming a cogent policy on how to run this country. Obama can take us there.
They make so much in oil that each citizen is paid $3,200 annually.
The fact that they're getting any federal money when their state is positively rolling in oil money is substantially more outrageous than if you examine the per-capita federal money sent to that state.
My brother is an Alaskan citizen, people who are complete hermits can still get this money without contributing anything at all to either their state or federal government. This is more than most Alaskan citizens pay annually in federal taxes.
Sorry, it doesn't make sense to examine per-capita money when the Alaskan government makes so much more in alternate channels.
A lot of people maintain a mailing address in Alaska and maintain their Alaskan citizenship, then just have the check forwarded by a buddy to the lower 48 states. They shouldn't be receiving any federal money as long as there's this sort of absurd excess.
In fact, this amount of excess speaks significantly to the unsuitability of Palin for VP role. She hasn't had to balance a budget even for a small town. She hasn't had to deal with limited funds at all in fact. Their government doesn't even know how to spend all the money it does have.
Chrome does this. And it's built-in task manager can show you the CPU and memory usage for the Flash process separate from the CPU and memory usage for your page. If it starts getting wonky you can even kill the Flash plugin process, and those elements disappear from the page (replaced by an image of a puzzle piece with a frowny face).
Likewise if one tab is misbehaving, you can see its memory and cpu usage, and you can kill it. Their built-in task manager shows you what's what (not just "Chrome.exe, PID 1288398") so you can make intelligent decisions about what to kill.
Also, maybe I'm doing it wrong, but so far for me, Chrome has been using a lot less memory than IE 7 or Firefox, and the work I'm doing has me bouncing between each to test (so I'd say they're under pretty similar load).
Maybe it's that I'm opening and closing a lot of tabs, and Chrome can clear up tab memory much easier since it just lets the OS handle it when that tab's process is shut down, while IE and Firefox have to have their own built-in single-memory-space memory management.
If a Chrome tab were to start eating too much CPU or RAM, the Chrome task manager will show you which one. You can kill it, and the content of that tab is replaced with a picture of a folder with a frowny face. Click refresh, and you're rocking again, picking up where you left off (as much as you can with a refresh, which of course might not be the case with a heavily AJAX app).
Or maybe it's just that people don't understand the difference between private and shared memory. Right now, IE 7 is using 97mb, Firefox 3 is using 205mb, and Chrome is using 48mb. But if I add up the memory usage in Task Manager, Chrome looks a lot higher than that. Chrome offers about:memory which lets you compare its memory usage to IE and Firefox, and breaks down what its internal memory usage is for you.
It's the best end-user photo management application. Lightroom does the same job but much much better (though it doesn't hold your hand like Picasa does - not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just a different audience).
Web fonts are going to end up supporting the minimal character set; fonts with a large character set get too sizy. Arial Unicode, for example, is 22.7 meg.
Also there really are a lot of great free fonts out there. Not all of them are good for text level formatting, but not all of them are intended for that. Check out http://creamundo.com/ (which unfortunately seems to be suffering some stability problems this morning)
Diffie-Hellman is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks if you don't have a way to verify the signing keys of either side (that's what I was talking about in my previous post).
It provides encryption, not endpoint authentication.
BGP poisoning enables a man-in-the-middle attack; encryption will only work with either a pre-shared key, pre-shared identities, or a trust infrastructure such as ssl.
Unfortunately most protocols don't have these as options; if they support encryption at all, it's with neither any explicit prior knowledge of the other party nor trusted certificate authority. This means that passive sniffing is blocked, but man-in-the-middle is just a little harder than it would have been, but still entirely feasible.
Excellent point, if you present yourself as the man with the solutions, and especially if they promote you as such, you're going to be taking the heat when things do not go perfectly.
The thing about rigid development and testing processes is that they delay releases. You can do featureful but buggy from-the-hip releases rapidly, or you can do rock solid heavily tested releases very slowly.
It's the old speed, quality, cost diumverate. Sounds like today they're choosing speed and cost, and quality is there only because your product isn't yet so mature that regression bugs aren't common.
Companies starting a development methodology need time to adjust to the reduced agility that these require. It's best to work your way into it.
Start with introducing source control and some formal testing, along with build releases. It's not very likely that they're going to reject you on these things as their benefits are fairly clear and they shouldn't have that much impact on your bottom line. Create a branch per release, and suggest that the software not be released to manufacturing until that release passes formal testing.
Later you can introduce things like regression testing and a proper software development lifecycle.
You have to be careful how you present it. Make sure they're aware that you're easing the company into a larger methodology, and until fully implemented there's still going to be gaps for bugs to fit through. Explain that during this process you'll be performing gap analysis on each bug that does appear, identifying how it got through testing, and adjusting the process as necessary to ensure that such a thing is less likely in the future.
You don't want to present it as a silver bullet out the gate, you want to be sure to explain that it's iterative and the objective isn't immediate perfection but continual quality increase. Even if you have 30 years of software development lifecycle managerial experience, you can't convert a company to a full-blown lifecycle overnight, and depending on how a company works and what its needs are, lifecycles will in fact differ a bit from company to company. Even if a perfect lifecycle existed, you still need to give people time to get accustomed to it, so you can't just throw the switch over night or everything comes to a halt.
If a site legitimately has their key compromised (or they just for some reason need or want to change their key), how do they change it to something new and secure without that appearing to be a mitm until it's been there long enough that Perspectives accepts it?
You seem to have correlation and causation confused.
Google offers Internet-based products, subtract the Internet, and their products don't work. It's not really surprising, and it doesn't mean that they do it this way solely for the purposes of tracking you (this is the mistaken causal relationship you've taken up). Even still they offer apps like Picasa and Google Desktop which work just fine without an Internet connection.
Many of Apple's products don't do much without Internet either; Safari, Mail.app, iPhone (yes, I know it's still a phone, but if you only wanted a phone, there's cheaper better alternatives for this purpose). That doesn't imply a nefarious intent.
Complaining about Google apps not working without Internet is like complaining about computers not working without electricity, and it's exactly as absurd to assume malice as a motivation.
The same person who's responsible for the bomb that leveled a civilian building. Namely the leader of the country that dropped the bomb, the commander who ordered the attack, the pilot of the plane, and the bombardier.
Likewise the whole chain of command bears responsibility in an attack perpetrated via a botnet.
The police are there as part of public safety and investigation into the possibility of suspicious circumstances behind the fire. They can't search your house without probable cause, but a fire qualifies as probable cause.
As I understand it, not being into watching other people play sports, there's a fixed number of season tickets, and if you own season tickets for the previous season you get priority on the next season. To the point that very few people ever manage to swing season tickets that didn't already have them for the previous season.
I'd say focus only as much on other things as they are relevant to your job. For example, if applying for a C developer position, and you have some Java experience, it's reasonably relevant. If you have GWBasic experience, not nearly as much so. If you worked as a construction laborer for a few years, its only real relevance is to explain what would otherwise be a gap in your resume (and helped teach you the value of hard work of course, which you can explain in your cover letter).
As an anecdote, when I was earning money for college, I spent about a year as a janitor. Let me tell you that was a character building year; I've never worked so hard as that, and been looked down upon by so many people. I think the character built during that year was incredibly valuable, but it doesn't really have a place on my resume. I have used it in a cover letter right after listing my virtues though; so I don't seem too hubris laden.
You don't have to forsake less relevant experience if you're proud of it, just don't expend much space on it in your actual resume (it might be good to include these details only in your < 1 page cover letter).
I like resumes that are easy to parse quickly. Sometimes we get a lot of them for a given position, and many of them are barely relevant or not even relevant at all.
One of my favorite things is a table of skills, skill level, how recently you used it, and years of experience (you might have done some Classic ASP maintenance periodically for the last 8 years, but because you didn't do it often you're only moderate at it, which is why it's meaningful to put both years of experience and skill level).
Try to keep your resume relevant unless you're just getting started and need to avoid a resume which only lists education =)
Employers will glance over your resume first, looking for the skills they need, then if they find enough to be interested, they'll look closer at the resume, and read the cover letter.
Finally not many technical resumes are 1 page long any more; most are 2 pages, and it's uncommon to see 3 pages.
The longest I ever saw was 16 pages, and I'll tell you that it got noticed because we all had a good chuckle at that! Well, we did until we read it over; this guy was so far out of our league, he managed to have 16 pages of relevant resume experience. Real, meaty experience going back to the 70's, peppered with various degrees he acquired at different times in his career (he had two pages dedicated to education); this guy used basically every significant language that has existed since the 70's, and used each for at least several years. ASP,.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Objective C, Pascal, R, S, (those two are statistical languages), Fortran, Cobol, etc.
We weren't even close to being able to afford him, and he certainly wouldn't have been happy with the work we had in mind (in fact at the time we were looking for a junior developer).
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. I guess the moral is, try to keep your resume to 2 pages, and try to keep it as relevant and easy to parse as you can. Monster.com used to have a really good resume creator, I have no idea if they still do, but you might look for it. Less relevant experience can go in the cover letter, and there you can explain its tie-in if any with the work you're looking to do.
Remember that interviews go both ways. They're interviewing you to find out if you're a good match for what they need. You're interviewing them to find out if the job they have is a good match for what you do (or want to do).
Just make sure to double or triple the impact of any negatives they present. When you ask if they ever do death marches, and they say, "maybe once a year when we approach a new release, and we try to make it better by providing free pizza and coke," read that as "every month or two; someone goes for food but it's pitch-in, and the guys on the other team who aren't in on the death march will snipe some of the pizza you paid for."
It is very hard to get over the impression that you're not allowed to ask questions, or that asking questions will make them think less of you. Any place worth working for will appreciate your thoroughness with the questions you're asking, the only places that will hold something like that against you is places that expect you to keep your mouth shut and do as you're told. It's helpful to prepare the questions you intend to ask in advance. Bring a note pad, and have the questions written down on that pad so you don't miss any.
Plus if you keep in mind that you're also interviewing them, it'll help to keep you grounded, and will demonstrate a level of confidence and competence on your part which may actually increase your chances of being offered the job.
Some sample questions: 1) What is the average number of hours worked each week by members of the team, and do you expect that to change in the foreseeable future? 2) Describe your development cycle from requirements gathering to feature planning to architecture planning to release strategy to actual release. 3) What is your policy on internally discovered security vulnerabilities with your software? 4) Do you send your team members to conferences or training, and what are the typical arrangements for such (what's paid for by the company vs what's paid for by the employee) 5) How much development time is spent on new feature development vs bug fixing.
There's plenty more and of course your actual position and responsibilities tailor the applicability and value of each question.
Just don't lie... especially if we can find out about it on your personal site. Have had that a few times; someone claiming 6 years of experience with Technology X, when on the same website they included on their resume as example experience they have a blog talking about picking up the basics 6 months ago.
In case you come back: the amazing thing is that you can reveal secrets without ever giving up anything physical which would be missed or necessarily retraceable to an individual. A thumb drive, a CD, a hard copy.
Also it sounds like you're working for or in collusion with the government. In the case of corporate espionage, their powers of inconveniencing the offending party are substantially lower. Their repercussions are mostly limited to civil court especially if the rogue employee has plausible deniability.
They also have to be careful that they aren't perceived as persecuting someone, because they have to consider employee morale. Morale is one of their best defenses against espionage; employees sufficiently happy with the company would not want to jeopardize their job or harm the company unless it's for substantial reward (here you're raising the bar for your opponents). Damage morale to a certain point, and employees may start to use company secrets as bargaining chips to land a job with a competitor.
Especially in the private sector, any intelligent employee who is determined to sacrifice your company secrets is fully capable of doing so for any secrets they have access to in a way that fails to arouse suspicion; particularly if they limit the frequency of the exposure.
Preface: I think this whole thing is absurd, and Blizzard is acting very poorly in all of this.
If the sole purpose of the software is to facilitate the violation of contracts, then it can be considered that you're actively facilitating contract violation, and therefore bear at least some of the liability. Or so goes the reasoning.
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I rewatched it, and it still doesn't sound like an intentional dig at the town's name. Watch his face, he doesn't crack a little smirk like McCain does whenever he's getting a meaningless dig in on Obama.
Maybe it was intentional. It would be out of character with how he's conducted his campaign to date if it was.
But let's assume that it was (which I am not at all convinced of), even in that case, here you have Obama making one very tiny dig, then going on to support his point with figures and discussion. McCain's campaign - and I have to compare McCain more than Palin since her presence has been so far so short-lived and the GOP is deciding to keep her sequestered away from the press to avoid any gaffes - has made silly and absurd dig after silly and absurd dig at Obama's campaign.
I don't think the fact that he's been briefed on Palin makes his statement a prepared one. I also don't suspect Anderson Cooper send the questions to Obama in advance. Heck, if it was a prepared statement as you suggest, why would he have had the um's and uh's in there (which of course every GOP die hard dutifully transcribes).
If you want to call Obama out on something like that, you have to call McCain out on the hundreds of petty, meaningless digs he gets in against Obama on a regular basis. Things which have nothing to do with issues, policy, or suitability to be president (such as every time they quote Obama, they transcribe the "uh" and such filler sounds). Things that are outright lies (such as repeatedly claiming that Obama's tax plan is to raise taxes for middle class Americans - which is not currently nor has it ever been true unless you include people who make over $250,000 as middle class).
McCain has been running a dirty, dirty campaign. Obama has been refusing to drop to that same level, which interestingly almost seems to make McCain get all the dirtier, perhaps out of desperation.
I agree with Obama that it's more challenging to run a campaign that has 50 times the number of staffers, and 36 times the budget. I can't say whether he addresses her gubernatorial experience since the video cuts off w/ no indication that he was done answering the question except that he was finishing a point. I even had to re-watch to have heard the "and as governer" in the question which was just kind of thrown in there.
Anyway all of this is again a meaningless distraction from the real issues. Maybe he didn't address a question during a live interview that well. Big freaking whoop. The media gives McCain a pass every time he completely changes his policy week to week. Let's get back to what matters.
Obama has concrete thought out and well defended plans for many major issues. He has run a respectable campaign in the face of repeated meaningless insults. He has a strong foreign policy. He has exhibited consistency and clarity of intention throughout. He rarely has had to change his stance, and when he has done so, he has explained in clear terms why he made that change.
McCain doesn't have cogent policy, he changes his stated policy depending on what will get the best response from the crowd he's currently talking to. He has flip flopped on dozens and dozens of major issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
ETags have problems only really in clustered environments, mostly because the way common web servers generate the ETag means different servers in the same cluster serving the same site are likely to have different values. They do this because it's a fast way to generate the ETag.
We serve a lot of images and static documents out of a database (this solves a replication issue for us). The ETags we generate for this are created as an md5 of the file's content at the time it was inserted into the database. So for us, even though we have a geographically disperse cluster, ETag is still consistent, and works great for us.
The "problem with ETags" is actually a server performance consideration, and is a design decision by Microsoft and Apache. My guess is there's ways to configure ETag to be more reliable when you're working in a cluster, but I have not had to do so.
It doesn't sound to me like his pronunciation is intended as some covert dig. In fact, it's not far from how many people pronounce it (though not technically correct). For example, on a guide on how to pronounce the name Wasilla, it mentions the Wasilly pronunciation specifically as a common mispronunciation.
Second, he's not ignoring her gubernatorial experience; the question was specifically about her mayoral experience compared to his senate experience. He directly addresses the question posed to him which did not talk about gubernatorial experience. He points out that her mayoral experience compared to his campaign experience leans in his favor. He's got a substantially larger staff, and he's got a substantially larger budget than she had while as mayor. That was the question, and I think he addressed it directly and adequately.
I'm not familiar with the "Wa-silly" comment, and it seems unlike Obama. Can you provide a link to back that up, preferably a video? Are you sure it wasn't misspeaking?
Anyway, from your own description, it sounds like Obama was responding to questions posed by reporters, and people sometimes make bad statements at times like this. Obama has by and large refrained from commenting at all on Palin and her experience and/or lack of it. Yet Palin mocked his community organization experience during a prepared speech at the RNC. It was intentional, calculated, premeditated, and a lot more directed.
Palin and McCain have repeatedly directed low blows to Obama and Biden attacking them on matters from which they purposely draw incorrect conclusions through the fallacies Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent.
If you ignored policy, it seems evident that McCain/Palin are running a campaign where they're more concerned with making others around them look bad through any means available, while Obama/Biden are running a campaign where they work to make themselves look good through cogent well defined, well thought out policy.
This speaks to character and the lack of character in the candidates. Certainly McCain doesn't have any solid policy that he's running on, he's only got his internal pendulum that swings back and forth until he gets the best response, where he keeps that policy. No regard for plans that make a good future, just let's see what makes people smile the most and boo the least. Without a solid thought-out policy, the only other thing to vote for him through would be
Maybe I read it wrong, but your post implies Obama has a cult of personality. If I didn't misread that, you're confusing charisma and perspicacity with what a true cult of personality is - where the government forces the media to unquestioningly and unhesitatingly extol virtues of a political leader - real and fake - in order to prevent citizens from ever hearing anything bad about their whitewashed leader.
Cult of personality notably has a negative connotation, and indeed it should, it's a form of repression. If you want to see what a true cult of personality is like, examine Eric Lafforgue's Flickr photo set from North Korea, where citizens are required by law to wear patriotic pins, and required by law to have photographs of their illustrious leaders in their home, tilted slightly downward so the eyes follow you everywhere. Where citizens are required by law to have a radio in their home which they cannot turn off that periodically spouts political propaganda. Where every hour, on the hour, from 6 am to midnight, loudspeakers blast out a patriotic song. Where reading material for children is war propaganda espouting the virtues of their leader and speaking in vague terms of the threat of the west.
Obama doesn't have a cult of personality. He has the clarity, insight, and speaking ability to make people feel good about the chance for change in the future, to feel good about themselves and who they are and can be. He inspires people. And even though you try to make that out to be a bad thing, it is in fact a very good thing.
Perhaps you haven't looked. Here, Obama covers current foreign policy issues in detail, giving a good background on each, and detailing his plan for each: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/
I think Obama has far out-proven his qualifications for being president over McCain. Although I don't agree with all of his policies, his policies make sense and he has good and well-supported reasons for them. He has a good clear vision for the long-term and near-term future.
Way more significantly he has demonstrated decades more maturity than nearly anyone in the GOP. He has refused to reciprocate the meaningless character attacks and outright lies that the GOP and John McCain has leveraged against him. He has so far held true to his word. He has so far in his life proven that he's willing to put the needs of average citizens above his own greed.
The GOP has the audacity to MOCK his time as a public servant and community organizer in Chicago. Here's a guy who, with his Harvard law degree, and the ability to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, instead put aside his own greed and got his hands dirty on the streets.
This isn't a guy who's running for self gain. His pre-political career proves it unless you want to call those years merely a political tactic.
Here's a guy who sees something wrong with the system. Here's a guy who has the intelligence, charisma, and wherewithal to unite this country and make us feel good about ourselves again. He's got the necessary skills to make the world once again love the USA, or at least not despise us.
George Bush has spent the last 8 years using international good will toward the USA as form of currency to purchase the ability to misbehave in the world. International good will toward America has risen merely on the prospect that we'll be wise enough to elect this man president.
It's time the USA became a force for good in this world again. McCain won't lead us there, he's too busy slinging mud to even spend time forming a cogent policy on how to run this country. Obama can take us there.
They make so much in oil that each citizen is paid $3,200 annually.
The fact that they're getting any federal money when their state is positively rolling in oil money is substantially more outrageous than if you examine the per-capita federal money sent to that state.
My brother is an Alaskan citizen, people who are complete hermits can still get this money without contributing anything at all to either their state or federal government. This is more than most Alaskan citizens pay annually in federal taxes.
Sorry, it doesn't make sense to examine per-capita money when the Alaskan government makes so much more in alternate channels.
A lot of people maintain a mailing address in Alaska and maintain their Alaskan citizenship, then just have the check forwarded by a buddy to the lower 48 states. They shouldn't be receiving any federal money as long as there's this sort of absurd excess.
In fact, this amount of excess speaks significantly to the unsuitability of Palin for VP role. She hasn't had to balance a budget even for a small town. She hasn't had to deal with limited funds at all in fact. Their government doesn't even know how to spend all the money it does have.
Chrome does this. And it's built-in task manager can show you the CPU and memory usage for the Flash process separate from the CPU and memory usage for your page. If it starts getting wonky you can even kill the Flash plugin process, and those elements disappear from the page (replaced by an image of a puzzle piece with a frowny face).
Likewise if one tab is misbehaving, you can see its memory and cpu usage, and you can kill it. Their built-in task manager shows you what's what (not just "Chrome.exe, PID 1288398") so you can make intelligent decisions about what to kill.
Also, maybe I'm doing it wrong, but so far for me, Chrome has been using a lot less memory than IE 7 or Firefox, and the work I'm doing has me bouncing between each to test (so I'd say they're under pretty similar load).
Maybe it's that I'm opening and closing a lot of tabs, and Chrome can clear up tab memory much easier since it just lets the OS handle it when that tab's process is shut down, while IE and Firefox have to have their own built-in single-memory-space memory management.
If a Chrome tab were to start eating too much CPU or RAM, the Chrome task manager will show you which one. You can kill it, and the content of that tab is replaced with a picture of a folder with a frowny face. Click refresh, and you're rocking again, picking up where you left off (as much as you can with a refresh, which of course might not be the case with a heavily AJAX app).
Or maybe it's just that people don't understand the difference between private and shared memory. Right now, IE 7 is using 97mb, Firefox 3 is using 205mb, and Chrome is using 48mb. But if I add up the memory usage in Task Manager, Chrome looks a lot higher than that. Chrome offers about:memory which lets you compare its memory usage to IE and Firefox, and breaks down what its internal memory usage is for you.
It's the best end-user photo management application. Lightroom does the same job but much much better (though it doesn't hold your hand like Picasa does - not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just a different audience).
Web fonts are going to end up supporting the minimal character set; fonts with a large character set get too sizy. Arial Unicode, for example, is 22.7 meg.
Also there really are a lot of great free fonts out there. Not all of them are good for text level formatting, but not all of them are intended for that. Check out http://creamundo.com/ (which unfortunately seems to be suffering some stability problems this morning)
Diffie-Hellman is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks if you don't have a way to verify the signing keys of either side (that's what I was talking about in my previous post).
It provides encryption, not endpoint authentication.
BGP poisoning enables a man-in-the-middle attack; encryption will only work with either a pre-shared key, pre-shared identities, or a trust infrastructure such as ssl.
Unfortunately most protocols don't have these as options; if they support encryption at all, it's with neither any explicit prior knowledge of the other party nor trusted certificate authority. This means that passive sniffing is blocked, but man-in-the-middle is just a little harder than it would have been, but still entirely feasible.
It's a bastardized word intended to invoke the meaning of a triumvirate while indicating that you only get to choose two.
I may have spelled it poorly, but I'm by no means the only person to try this word.
Thanks for skipping all the meat of the post and instead nitpicking a word you didn't grok though; that was a meaningful contribution.
Excellent point, if you present yourself as the man with the solutions, and especially if they promote you as such, you're going to be taking the heat when things do not go perfectly.
The thing about rigid development and testing processes is that they delay releases. You can do featureful but buggy from-the-hip releases rapidly, or you can do rock solid heavily tested releases very slowly.
It's the old speed, quality, cost diumverate. Sounds like today they're choosing speed and cost, and quality is there only because your product isn't yet so mature that regression bugs aren't common.
Companies starting a development methodology need time to adjust to the reduced agility that these require. It's best to work your way into it.
Start with introducing source control and some formal testing, along with build releases. It's not very likely that they're going to reject you on these things as their benefits are fairly clear and they shouldn't have that much impact on your bottom line. Create a branch per release, and suggest that the software not be released to manufacturing until that release passes formal testing.
Later you can introduce things like regression testing and a proper software development lifecycle.
You have to be careful how you present it. Make sure they're aware that you're easing the company into a larger methodology, and until fully implemented there's still going to be gaps for bugs to fit through. Explain that during this process you'll be performing gap analysis on each bug that does appear, identifying how it got through testing, and adjusting the process as necessary to ensure that such a thing is less likely in the future.
You don't want to present it as a silver bullet out the gate, you want to be sure to explain that it's iterative and the objective isn't immediate perfection but continual quality increase. Even if you have 30 years of software development lifecycle managerial experience, you can't convert a company to a full-blown lifecycle overnight, and depending on how a company works and what its needs are, lifecycles will in fact differ a bit from company to company. Even if a perfect lifecycle existed, you still need to give people time to get accustomed to it, so you can't just throw the switch over night or everything comes to a halt.
If a site legitimately has their key compromised (or they just for some reason need or want to change their key), how do they change it to something new and secure without that appearing to be a mitm until it's been there long enough that Perspectives accepts it?
You seem to have correlation and causation confused.
Google offers Internet-based products, subtract the Internet, and their products don't work. It's not really surprising, and it doesn't mean that they do it this way solely for the purposes of tracking you (this is the mistaken causal relationship you've taken up). Even still they offer apps like Picasa and Google Desktop which work just fine without an Internet connection.
Many of Apple's products don't do much without Internet either; Safari, Mail.app, iPhone (yes, I know it's still a phone, but if you only wanted a phone, there's cheaper better alternatives for this purpose). That doesn't imply a nefarious intent.
Complaining about Google apps not working without Internet is like complaining about computers not working without electricity, and it's exactly as absurd to assume malice as a motivation.
The same person who's responsible for the bomb that leveled a civilian building. Namely the leader of the country that dropped the bomb, the commander who ordered the attack, the pilot of the plane, and the bombardier.
Likewise the whole chain of command bears responsibility in an attack perpetrated via a botnet.
The police are there as part of public safety and investigation into the possibility of suspicious circumstances behind the fire. They can't search your house without probable cause, but a fire qualifies as probable cause.
As I understand it, not being into watching other people play sports, there's a fixed number of season tickets, and if you own season tickets for the previous season you get priority on the next season. To the point that very few people ever manage to swing season tickets that didn't already have them for the previous season.
I'd say focus only as much on other things as they are relevant to your job. For example, if applying for a C developer position, and you have some Java experience, it's reasonably relevant. If you have GWBasic experience, not nearly as much so. If you worked as a construction laborer for a few years, its only real relevance is to explain what would otherwise be a gap in your resume (and helped teach you the value of hard work of course, which you can explain in your cover letter).
As an anecdote, when I was earning money for college, I spent about a year as a janitor. Let me tell you that was a character building year; I've never worked so hard as that, and been looked down upon by so many people. I think the character built during that year was incredibly valuable, but it doesn't really have a place on my resume. I have used it in a cover letter right after listing my virtues though; so I don't seem too hubris laden.
You don't have to forsake less relevant experience if you're proud of it, just don't expend much space on it in your actual resume (it might be good to include these details only in your < 1 page cover letter).
I like resumes that are easy to parse quickly. Sometimes we get a lot of them for a given position, and many of them are barely relevant or not even relevant at all.
One of my favorite things is a table of skills, skill level, how recently you used it, and years of experience (you might have done some Classic ASP maintenance periodically for the last 8 years, but because you didn't do it often you're only moderate at it, which is why it's meaningful to put both years of experience and skill level).
Try to keep your resume relevant unless you're just getting started and need to avoid a resume which only lists education =)
Employers will glance over your resume first, looking for the skills they need, then if they find enough to be interested, they'll look closer at the resume, and read the cover letter.
Finally not many technical resumes are 1 page long any more; most are 2 pages, and it's uncommon to see 3 pages.
The longest I ever saw was 16 pages, and I'll tell you that it got noticed because we all had a good chuckle at that! Well, we did until we read it over; this guy was so far out of our league, he managed to have 16 pages of relevant resume experience. Real, meaty experience going back to the 70's, peppered with various degrees he acquired at different times in his career (he had two pages dedicated to education); this guy used basically every significant language that has existed since the 70's, and used each for at least several years. ASP, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Objective C, Pascal, R, S, (those two are statistical languages), Fortran, Cobol, etc.
We weren't even close to being able to afford him, and he certainly wouldn't have been happy with the work we had in mind (in fact at the time we were looking for a junior developer).
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. I guess the moral is, try to keep your resume to 2 pages, and try to keep it as relevant and easy to parse as you can. Monster.com used to have a really good resume creator, I have no idea if they still do, but you might look for it. Less relevant experience can go in the cover letter, and there you can explain its tie-in if any with the work you're looking to do.
Remember that interviews go both ways. They're interviewing you to find out if you're a good match for what they need. You're interviewing them to find out if the job they have is a good match for what you do (or want to do).
Just make sure to double or triple the impact of any negatives they present. When you ask if they ever do death marches, and they say, "maybe once a year when we approach a new release, and we try to make it better by providing free pizza and coke," read that as "every month or two; someone goes for food but it's pitch-in, and the guys on the other team who aren't in on the death march will snipe some of the pizza you paid for."
It is very hard to get over the impression that you're not allowed to ask questions, or that asking questions will make them think less of you. Any place worth working for will appreciate your thoroughness with the questions you're asking, the only places that will hold something like that against you is places that expect you to keep your mouth shut and do as you're told. It's helpful to prepare the questions you intend to ask in advance. Bring a note pad, and have the questions written down on that pad so you don't miss any.
Plus if you keep in mind that you're also interviewing them, it'll help to keep you grounded, and will demonstrate a level of confidence and competence on your part which may actually increase your chances of being offered the job.
Some sample questions:
1) What is the average number of hours worked each week by members of the team, and do you expect that to change in the foreseeable future?
2) Describe your development cycle from requirements gathering to feature planning to architecture planning to release strategy to actual release.
3) What is your policy on internally discovered security vulnerabilities with your software?
4) Do you send your team members to conferences or training, and what are the typical arrangements for such (what's paid for by the company vs what's paid for by the employee)
5) How much development time is spent on new feature development vs bug fixing.
There's plenty more and of course your actual position and responsibilities tailor the applicability and value of each question.
Just don't lie... especially if we can find out about it on your personal site. Have had that a few times; someone claiming 6 years of experience with Technology X, when on the same website they included on their resume as example experience they have a blog talking about picking up the basics 6 months ago.
Never accept a counter offer.
In case you come back: the amazing thing is that you can reveal secrets without ever giving up anything physical which would be missed or necessarily retraceable to an individual. A thumb drive, a CD, a hard copy.
Also it sounds like you're working for or in collusion with the government. In the case of corporate espionage, their powers of inconveniencing the offending party are substantially lower. Their repercussions are mostly limited to civil court especially if the rogue employee has plausible deniability.
They also have to be careful that they aren't perceived as persecuting someone, because they have to consider employee morale. Morale is one of their best defenses against espionage; employees sufficiently happy with the company would not want to jeopardize their job or harm the company unless it's for substantial reward (here you're raising the bar for your opponents). Damage morale to a certain point, and employees may start to use company secrets as bargaining chips to land a job with a competitor.
Especially in the private sector, any intelligent employee who is determined to sacrifice your company secrets is fully capable of doing so for any secrets they have access to in a way that fails to arouse suspicion; particularly if they limit the frequency of the exposure.
Preface: I think this whole thing is absurd, and Blizzard is acting very poorly in all of this.
If the sole purpose of the software is to facilitate the violation of contracts, then it can be considered that you're actively facilitating contract violation, and therefore bear at least some of the liability. Or so goes the reasoning.