If you can make a good case for having the Bible age-restricted, I encourage you to write your congressman, but I think you're talking about apples and oranges here, I've never seen a Bible marketed toward children with pictures of homosexuals being abused, nor of any other glorification of things which are today considered morally wrong.
Your version of the Bible obviously differs from my version, because I don't recall mine saying, "Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless he's a homosexual, then hate him." Maybe it's a typo in mine.
Answer me some questions. Should the government not ever restrict access to children for some materials, no matter the content within those materials? Are movie ratings and age restrictions on those movies inappropriate for the government to enforce? Should children, no matter their age, be allowed in adult book stores and strip joints? Should to government not concern itself in any way with the content of material sent to the public?
What I'm getting at is this: Is it ever appropriate for the government to exercise control over distribution of material regardless of its content (I'm not talking about video games, but media in general)?
If you answer no to this latter question, then I can understand your frustration with the proposal of this law. I think you'd be out of your mind if you believe all material no matter its content should be completely uncontrolled, and that children are emotionally equipped to deal with any media content no matter how corse. What about videos of women being raped? What about videos of murder? Surely you can't believe it's healthy for children to be exposed to these things, particularly if these things glorified.
If you answer yes to this question, then you must see that if it's appropriate for some forms of media, similar restrictions are appropriate for all forms of media, which includes video games. In this case, there's got to be a line where it starts to become appropriate for the government to step in and restrict access, and I'd like to know where exactly you draw this line. Mature ratings on video games seem like a fair location to draw the line.
You don't have to be a Bible thumper just to think it's detrimental to children to have them engage in activities glorifying acts that would otherwise be criminal.
And if you really think you can actively control your children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, then you're either not a parent, or simply naieve.
Laws giving parents control to guide their children with out that parent having to resort to draconian measures are a good thing. That's why there's laws about purchasing spray paint (huffing), cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Despite the fact that you reassert this is about belief imposition, it's really and truly not. It's about the realization that parents can't, and *shouldn't* be omnipresent for their children's development, coupled with the realization that there's a lot more developmentally damaging material available to a kid today than there was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Tell me you never got away with things your parents didn't want you doing, no matter how hard you tried, and I'll believe you are the sort of parent who can accomplish the same with your kids. But since I am quite certain that's not the case, I can feel confident that you recognize a parent can't control every aspect of their children's lives. However, some aspects are better left controlled. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and yes, movies and video games. I'll admit these latter are less important than the former, but they're all still important.
And in the end, there is still nothing barring you from dredging up all the filth you can find and serving it to your 6-year-old. Your rights aren't being impaired in any way, your children's rights aren't being impaired in any way, you'll just have to coordinate with your kids to get them access to it. Since you're obviously such an involved parent, the extra time with your kid (being present for the sale) could only make you an even better parent.
First, thanks for not responding with a diatribe:-)
9 is the point that kids gain the fundamental ability to distinguish from fantasy and imagination? Happy birthday, here's your ability to distinguish? Some children are developmentally slowed. Some children are developmentally accelerated. What one child does at 9, another might not do until they are 13, or maybe they did it at 6. Unfortunately, a 6-year old in a city, with access to $15, can go down to the used video game store on the corner and pick up a copy of GTA:hooker-raping-edition.
Ok, so that was diatribe, but my point is this: you at least admit that there's a point in a child's life where they cannot distinguish from fantasy and reality, and during this time the child is particularly impressionable. Unless a parent has the luxury of being a super parent and parentally smothering their child well past the point that almost anyone would agree was healthy (You shall never be out of my presence Jimmy), little Jimmy has an opportunity to delve into filth. Maybe Jimmy is 9, but hasn't quite gotten the hang of this reality distinction thing yet.
At what point do they stop being influenced by portrayal of a life of crime as a glorious thing? The answer to that rhetoric is: "never." 50 years ago, a grown man would probably have punched someone if he saw that fellow playing some of today's video games. You can't say that this sort of material doesn't desensitize people, and given you're a psychology student, I'd wager you realize this is true.
Kids growing up in today's world have a severely reduced ability to construct a world-view that is healthy. It's filled with crime on TV, in the newspaper, and they even get to live out their life of crime in video games. Normal behavior isn't reinforced because it's not glorified in the same way. Some parents, whether or not you agree with them, believe this is the wrong way to raise a child, and it's their right to believe that, and it's their right to raise their child this way, no matter how developmentally stunting you believe it is to the child.
Laws like this only give the necessary tools to parents who choose to raise their children this way (as it is their right to), while allowing other more "open minded" parents to raise their children with access to such things.
You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of age restrictions on video games, at least for the reasons I believe it's a good thing.
The purpose isn't to restrict access to these games for kids whose parents who want their kids to have access to them. It's to restrict access to these games for kids whose parent don't want them to have access to them. You've said several times throughout the course of your diatribe that the solution is to "...don't let your kids play it," and that's all that's being proposed with these restrictions: a way for parents to at least raise the bar on the difficulty their kids have getting access to such material. Console games are tiny now, they fit in a pocket or between the pages of a book so easily that it's becoming very difficult for parents to track their kids usage of them.
I've said it in the original comment, I'll say it again. If you want your kids to have access to this stuff, this law does not prevent this. The only kids who are losing anything are those kids whose parents don't want them having it in the first place.
Whether you like it or not, kids don't have the same rights as an adult, and it is each parents right to dictate the sort of video games their kids play.
It does block kids rights to free speech.
No it doesn't, at best it blocks their ability to hear someone else's free speech, we're not talking about preventing kids from creating video games (which would be a blocking of free speech), we're talking about video games with content not appropriate for some or all kids from being self-purchasable by those kids.
The underlying question is why you want to impose your beliefs on everyone else...
If you want to see a straw man, this was one as we're talking about an act that affects only minors with respect to material that many parents don't want them having access to, which is hardly 'everyone else.' The point you accused me of using a straw man wasn't even close to one, it was an attempt to foresee the typical Slashhdot hubris and address it before it came up as a comment.
Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this (Andy -- Shawshank Redepmtion), this isn't about me imposing beliefs on you, this is about me imposing beliefs on my kids. Nothing here prevents you from raising your kids how you want.
I think I speak for a great number of people when I say I would prefer it if you stopped trying to parent my children as well.
I'm not trying to parent your kids. You can feel free to purchase any sort of video game you want for them.
You are promoting government regulation of speech.... Stop trying to throw away MY freedom of expression...
The government already controls speech to a significant extent. You can't drop the F-bomb on TV or radio. Janet Jackson can't show her breast on TV. You can't market cigarettes and alcohol to minors.
Either you believe that society should be fully unfettered, and at no point should the government step in and tell you what you can say, and who you can say it to, or you recognize that just like you have a right to free speech, others have a right to not have to be exposed to your free speech.
This latter thing is really what it's about: giving people the right to control what they or their children are exposed to.
This has nothing to do with subjective beliefs, it has everything to do with globally recognized belief systems. A game where part of the objective is to perform actions that would be illegal outside the game, and includes violence against other human beings (or even animals) is decidedly different from a game where a yellow pie eats white dots and blue & red ghosts.
You're free to express yourself to the fullest extent you wish, so long as your expression doesn't impair my right to raise my child the way I see fit.
I disagree. Do you know how large an XBox game disc is? Especially when their children are teenagers, and the parents lack the luxury of being able to be home before their kids (latch-key kids), the kid has plenty of opportunity to pop in a game they bought and play for a while. Hear the door unlatching, pop the disc out and slip it in the pocket.
I know as a kid, *I* was frequently able to find time to do things my parents didn't want me to.
Giving the parent more control is not a bad thing, it is a good thing.
I don't mean this as a troll (really), but I never understood the fuss over preventing sales of violent video games to minors.
All it does is provide a tool to parents enabling them to throttle the sort of world their child is exposed to. Whether or not you agree that a parent should do this, it's not your decision on the matter. It's the right of that parent to control what their kid has access to.
If a parent wants their kid to have access to that stuff, they just need to be present when the sale happens.
This isn't the government saying what a kid can or can't do, it's only the government helping parents have better control over what their kids can and can't do. It's fundamentally like parental controls on your TV. You want your kid watching the PlayBoy channel, don't lock it. You want your kid playing San Andreas, buy it for him/her.
Enter typical diatribe about "but Billy will just go to Jimmy's house to play it" or "but Susie will just get Janie (/Janie's parents) to buy it for her." Guess what, Billy and Susie aren't allowed over to Jimmy and Janie's house once I (overprotective parent) find out about it.
Another diatribe I hear on this matter is, "It's fantasy, kids are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality." First, not all kids are capable of making this distinction. Frankly, not all adults are capable of making this distinction. If my kid can't, I don't want him or her having access to this stuff. Second, even if my kid is capable of making this distinction, it still presents certain things as acceptable, things like beating hookers, shooting random people on the street, or even just stealing cars. Ok, so as a rational adult you can recognize that these are things which are not valid courses of action. You have a fundamental upbringing that tells you as much though.
Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative. It's environmental. There's no absolute goods, no absolute bads. Please understand what the inevitable conclusion from this is: a child's environment shapes what that child's perception of acceptable behavior is.
Video games like San Andreas glorify a lifestyle that's not one I want my kids growing up believing is an acceptable life path. Whether or not you believe it, psychologists (folks with degrees on this stuff) understand that a growing child is impressionable. Things that are presented as acceptable to them are accepted as acceptable or perhaps even appropriate to them.
Maybe some kids would still turn into serial killers when they grow up, even having grown up in a totally sterile environment. Maybe some kids can consume all of the corruption society can throw at them, and still turn into a nun/priest when they grow up. These children are the exception. I, as a parent, have the right to observe my child's reactions to his or her environment, and tailor the environment my child is exposed to in order that he or she grows up to be a productive member of society, and not the kind of kid who smokes / does drugs / carjacks people. This only enables me to do that to a higher degree. I'm not telling you how to raise your child, buy your child all the corruption you can if that's the decision you make, just let me have control over what sort of corruption my kid gets.
In the end, the only people here who lose any freedom are the under-18 crowd whose parents don't want them having access to this sort of content. This isn't like alcohol where it's illegal to give it to a minor even after purchase, it's just illegal to sell it to a minor.
This doesn't block anyone's right to free speech. It just filters people's (lack of a) right to direct their free speech at minors through those minors' parents.
The range on this transmitter is fairly limited, particularly if you live in or near a major city. I play tunes from my iPod to my stereo, but if I walk it into the next room (25 feet away), it starts getting very staticy.
Also, the quality of FM is pretty lousy, presumably he'd like to have some decent sound quality. But then I'm a very minor audiophile.
Since he lives in Alaska and I live in the lower 48, I tried to walk him through WindowsUpdate on the phone. He couldn't get even the WindowsUpdate ActiveX installed, let alone patch his box. Fortunately for him the store he bought it at had a network connection with a firewall, once they got him de-virused, they patched him, and even made an extra sale of a firewall that day. In a strange round about way, he ended up more secure over all for running Windows, only by relying on technologies outside of Windows, which were fundamentally required to RUN windows.
I think you misunderstood the parent post, or I misunderstand your post.
have an online mean life expectancy of 3 months before being successfully compromised.
The increase from 72 hours to 3 months is a good thing here. It's how long it takes an unpatched box to be successfully compromised. Meaning, the steps necessary to compromised a machine running Linux are becoming more complex on average.
Your post seems to indicate you believe that the average vulnerability is going from 72 hours to be fixed to 3 months to be fixed, which is not the case. Time to patch release isn't examined in the parent statement.
I remember my brother (computer illiterate) getting a new Windows computer a couple of months back. His first real computer since his 386 (not kidding). He was very excited, went home, and got on the net with his roommate's cable modem -- sans firewall. Quickly, he got very angry, because his brand new computer just kept crashing. Took it back to the store, it booted fine, but he's got a virus already. He never even launched his web browser after first boot, and he was compromised.
This story has been anectdotal, but it's also not uncommon. Average time to compromise on a Windows box is much less than that 72 hour lowpoint from Linux security.
I know this is an oldish comment, but I go back and re-read my posts sometimes to see if I was a jerk, egotistical, or highly insightful:-).
Something in your response stuck out at me this time: "Why work your ass off when there is no possible hope of promotion or higher pay?"
Promotions are pretty meaningless in the grander scheme of things. What they represent is either more 'significant' work, or higher pay. It's this latter that's the real reason most people want promotions, so promotions and higher pay are pretty interchangeable in this respect.
That said, I've known a few contractors who are under this bizarre impression that because they are a contractor, they are not able to raise their rates. This is common in self employed contractors (versus ones working through a contracting firm). Usually you'll have a contract period as a contractor (hence the term). Your pay rate is pretty non-negotiable during a contract, but when it comes time to renew, that's when you have an opportunity to revisit pay raises.
Realize that the longer you've worked with a company, the more valuable you are. You're more efficient in that environment than an equivalently or even higher skilled new contractor: you know how things work, and who to contact for a variety of common situations that might arise in your job.
That gives you some leverage to ask for a higher rate time to time. There's also cost of living increases, inflation, and things like that. There'll be a certain expectation that your rate goes up over time, just don't go in demanding a 15% increase unless you feel you're absolutely invaluable to them (and thus worth it).
Further, there's nothing that stops you from seeking out higher level contracting positions within the same company. Not all contractors are created equal. Some contractors are architecture or strategy advisors. Some contractors are team leads (yes, it's true!). Sometimes they need someone with a lot of experience to lead a team of fairly green programmers. If you can go to management and make a good case for something like that, you might well find yourself in the contracting equivalent of a promotion.
If you're valuable, you'll find the bill payers to be pretty amicable to higher responsibility and higher pay.
While (no pun intended) what you recommend works in some circumstances, it does first presume you're working with an IDE that recognizes the language you're coding in.
There's quite a number of IDE's that do an excellent job of helping you save a few keystrokes if they recognize your language, and at least the GUI IDE's do it not by guessing which tag you want, and making you hit Tab to switch between the possible completions, but rather by popping up a submenu immediately above or below where you're typing with the possibilities, and allowing you to use the arrow keys to choose the one you want. One problem I have with these popups is that they frequently obscure nearby code that you may want to reference, such as that complex regex you just wrote and want to backreference (was it the 7th or 8th parenthesis set?).
Also, most tags take arguments, and aren't just straight <tag> </tag>. Although a few such tags exist, they're the exception rather than the rule. So you end up with <while list.next()> or <while x gt 7> At what point should it automatically provide your closing tag? I guess you could say it should be <while|></while> with the pipe there being the cursor position, and that makes a lot of sense, though when you are done, you have to relocate your cursor, and if you already have the inner guts of the <while> loop or <if> block or whatever written, you have to relocate the closing tag since of course the IDE has no way of knowing where you want the closing tag. And if you're talking about an XML based language, what if you want to do nothing inside the block (such as a for loop that does all of its work within the arguments of the loop, you want to count how many times foo.bar() returned true before its first false [such as an iterator function on an object that fails to provide a count() method], you can do for (x=0; foo.bar(); x++){}). Although it's syntactically valid to write <foo></foo> it's prefferable to write <foo/>.
It's true, this may be a little easier on the carpals, but I'd wager that it's harder to achieve deep code mode when you're babysitting the IDE instead of working on logic. Personally I can't stand the IDE ever doing anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. I have my IDE set up so that when I want tag insight, I hit Ctrl-Space, and the surrounding-code-blocking popup appears.
I think people who rely heavily on their IDE's tend to be weaker coders too. Again, this is personal supposition, based on a too-small sample of watching developers around me who are heavily invested in a particular IDE. Periodically something happens that wipes out their IDE settings, and it's weeks before they're able to produce usable code. They tend to be the same guys who are frequently being called in the evening or on a Saturday when their code fails. And when they are, it takes them hours to fix the problem because they're VPNing in from home to fix it, where they don't have their IDE set up to do the speed coding they're accustomed to.
There's a decided split in my group of the folks who are IDE heads (dependant on their IDE rather than using it as a tool) and those who are not. Those of us who are not have a lower average repair time on critical error fixes, and a lower incidence of critical errors, based on our helpdesk ticketing system. If you look at these figures, there's a double bell curve, where the guys on the left of the curve (good) are those who are not IDE devoted, and on the right (bad) are those who aren't. It's certainly possible that this is coincidental, I'll admit, but it's definatly a trend I've observed first hand at least within my group of 30 +/- developers.
You made me think of another reason I don't like tag based languages. The < and > signs can't be used in boolean tests. You can't test <if x > 7> because what you've written is invalid XML, and as a code parser, which > sign is the end of the tag? Maybe it can make a good guess, but I g
Agreed, and I speak to this as someone who's had some exposure to XML based languages. For example, there's the open source Laszlo, which is actually a pretty slick way to render dynamic Flash, and does a lot of the gruntwork of providing a ton of complex standard elements (accordion boxes, tab bars, checkboxes, buttons, and many more) in a simple to use format, while also allowing you to build in the sort of simple interface animation that has tested so well in usability studies (such as clicking a calendar item expanding it to the screen rather than just blinking it up in a new window).
Macromedia Flex serves the same purposes, but is proprietary (and expensive). It's also an XML based language.
What a pain in the butt it is to write in these languages. They're even worse than ColdFusion. The biggest problem I have with my experience with XML based languages (or tag based languages such as ColdFusion) is the sheer amount of time it takes to code in them, measured in the number of keystrokes. I've never had a problem with carpal tunnel programming in languages such as C++, Java, or PHP, not even ASP/VBscript. One day of Laszlo syntax got my wrists a-hurtin'.
Turns out I spent a much larger portion of my time actually writing the syntax instead of problem solving in my head. Characters such as < and > are found in great abundance, and these are actually characters that require two keystrokes. Compared to curly brackets { and }, you're guaranteed to see these at least half as often. Also, since < is almost half the time followed by/, realize that the combination of </ is harder to type than } and whatever comes immediately after it (usually a return, or space for things like "} else {"). It's harder because / doesn't require the shift, while < does, while failing to release the shift in time for a space or return has no negative impact on your code.
To boot, it's harder to write out the full closing tag than a simple } mark just because it's quite a few more characters. I agree that a full closing tag is easier to debug, and easier to read, but it's hell on the wrists. </while> vs }.
I realize these things seem trivial, but they really add up. A verbose language syntax such as is required in an XML language takes more time to code in than an equivalent syntax in a less verbose form.
I think that this is probably targeted at roaming corporate users. I split my time up between three corporate offices, a day here, a day there. Since I only have a cubicle in one of the three, I'm always having to use someone else's computer who's out for the day (it's a big company, there's always someone out). Each of the other guys in my group are in the same scenario.
Our roaming profiles give us access to our documents when signed on to someone else's computer, but they don't give us access to our developer tools. We've thought about external USB / Firewire drives, but not all of the tools we use can work running right off a detachible device.
This sounds like it might offer a better solution.
While most consultants just specilize in a job and leave when they are done.
No offense, but you're clearly speaking of consultants in companies I've never heard of. While it's true that what you describe is what consultants are *supposed* to be, in reality the vast majority of the consultants I know are long-term workers with no specified end date. Many of them have worked in a single consulting position (same desk, same type of work) for 3-4 years.
This is birthed from the myth held by many upper management that cutting "head count" will reduce overall costs. While this may be true in some individual departments here and there, what usually happens is that when the policy is originally initiated, some people lose their jobs, and their former coworkers start busting butt to get all the work done. This manifests itself in the form of exhausted, disgruntled workers who produce lower quality but higher quantity. Eventually, despite having no additional head count, the individual departments decide they need more bodies to get the work done, and so hire consultants to help out with some particularly large project.
Once this large project nears an end, other tasks are offloaded to the consultant, and the consultant finds themselves a standard part of the rest of the team. With only one exception: as a consultant, all the employees tend to look down on you a little bit. They don't necessarily think you're a lesser worker, they just feel you don't have the same entitlements. The consultants don't get invited to the company Christmas party even though they might have worked more hours than anyone else on the team, or having been with the company for more years. They don't get access to company discounts, they are not elligible for company training, they may not be permitted to perform certain security actions (such as VPN), and finally, their opinion really isn't given quite as much weight in the decision making processes.
Anyhow, I've digressed. I've spent time both as a consultant and as an employee, and I have a unique insight in that the company for which I'm currently consulting, I am a former laid-off employee of. Now they pay me more (compared to industry standards) than they did when I was an employee. I spent 4 years as an employee, and have now consulted with them for 4 years. It's distinctly interesting how some people who've been with the company for six months to a year look down on me some times, despite the fact that I'm clearly the veteran here. I don't think I behaved that way when I was an employee; I sure hope I didn't.
These guys have no intention of letting it end: they need someone to do the work I'm doing, and they don't have time to do it. Work only promises to get more intense, not less, and they may hire another consultant to help me with the work I have on my plate already. Of my developer buddies, from college, and from 'net acquaintences (a web of friends as it were), I know at least 14 people, myself included (having just now counted in my head, myself included) who are in long term consulting positions with no end in sight. I can think of only 2 that really are in short term consulting positions. Maybe my web of friends is nonrepresentative of current market conditions, but I find it unlikely.
The specific article in question here is about the technology involved. Although your point is well taken in the grander scheme, I don't think that's what most people are so excited by. From the article linked to by this story:
# How fast this is... I type pretty fast, and it updates with every single keypress... # The cool web interface... I used to be pro-server side web updates, and avoiding javascript, but I'm really turning around on this with the impressive interfaces I've seen with gmail, and now google suggest (among others...)
and
# That the suggestion list lines up perfectly with the query input field... # The high-lighting of the additionally suggested text (I type "fa", it suggests "fast bugtrack" and highlights the "st bugtrack" so that the next character I type wipes out it's suggestion... beautiful...) # The great handling of keypresses (cursors up and down...) And After going through googles code: # How the javascript cache's the dynamic results so that if you backspace, it doesn't have to go back to google... # How the code dynamically adjusts it's main (time/alarm) driven loop based on how quickly you're getting results back from google...
None of these are discussing intelligent forethough on the part of this tool, but rather technical aspects behind it.
Re:And for those who would like to see it...
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Google Suggest Dissected
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The thing that's interesting to me is that this is not really much different than the GMail compose address area, but suddenly it's brilliant in this respect.
Annoyingly, I'd written almost identical functionality for my own personal use maybe a year before I ever saw it in GMail (though it was already in place when I got GMail so I have no idea when they put it in there) because I really wanted standard combo boxes with pre-populated choices that also let you key in another choice. You could even use the arrow keys or the mouse just like Google's interfaces, with result caching (just like Google!) on the client side. Suddenly no one can stop talking about it.
The only difference in this from the GMail address bar is that in GMail the complete address book is pre-populated, while here they use the browser's DOM object to pass a request for the data (that's how mine did it, since I was working on thousands of distinct combinations and didn't want to have to have page load times get unmanagable). Populating the data is as simple as (if it were php):
echo "<data-result>"; $sql = "SELECT search_text, result_count FROM common_user_searches WHERE search_text LIKE '$user_input%' ORDER BY search_frequency DESC LIMIT 10"; $result = (mysql|odbc|etc)_query($sql); while ($row = *_fetch_assoc($result)){
echo "<result text=\"".htmlentities($row['search_text'])."\" count=\"{$row['result_count']}\"/>"; } echo "</data-result>";
I'll definately agree, it's incredibly clever, but it's not so bleeding clever that it demands as much attention as they're getting for it.
That's a good point, but a little different from directly associating your face with a given transaction (though any time you pay with credit card, there's enough data there to do a matchup like this).
I personally don't have a problem with any sort of automated machine taking my photo so long as: 1) It is clearly indicated that the machine will do so, and what the storage and use policies are for the photo. 2) It will only take my photo if I am performing a transaction with the machine (or in the background as someone else performs a transaction, and am not the subject of the photo, of course) 3) The photo cannot by law be retained outside of 30 days, barring some sort of associated investigation related to a potential crime. 4) The photo cannot by law be distributed or used in any way except as directly associated with criminal proceedings (Tonight on the 10 o'clock news: Have you seen this criminal who stole $500 worth of stamps earlier today).
This will give me the ability to avoid having my picture taken if I so desire by not interacting with machines that will do so, and it will protect my rights if I do choose to interact with the machine, while still bringing the anti-criminal security needed for any sort of automated transactional machine dealing with valuable goods.
They can still use it as a current email address verification scheme, throw their millions of old addresses at it and figure out which are still good, thus increasing the quality of their lists, and the density which they can successfully delivery spam.
Even if each IP was limited per some interval, with the spam bot nets that are the source of most spam anyhow, it's trivial to abuse. Presuming a reasonable figure of 10 per hour (legitimately I have looked up more than this), *small* botnets could generate millions of address verifications per day.
Won't a database of verified emails be, y'know, abusable? What about spammers who want to harvest from this? If they can't directly harvest, they could certainly validate email addresses they know about, and know they were getting people on email addresses that they care about.
Anyone who is not currently the market leader *has* to play catchup on all existing features in the market leader's softare for the simple reason that they'll lose many customers who don't find the one obscure feature they need.
It has to do with that proprietary software market ability to focus on individual features rather than broad features, and it lends a catch-22 to free software: the way to make good free software is to attract enough developers to cover the spread, and the way to attract those developers is to make good free software.
Proprietary software can usually throw more resources at a project earlier on because they have capital behind them. They can build a broad shallow feature set which looks very impressive, then they can worry about making the money later by deepening those features that turn out to be popular. Free software has a tough time competing against that broad-but-shallow approach, because when they do get developers, those developers know what features they personally are interested in, and so build narrow-but-deep on said features.
It's not as competetive an approach, and this is why free software hasn't already dominated the market. Broad-but-shallow is sexier because superficial examination makes it appear better. Whether free or proprietary, broad-and-deep software only comes around when it is popularly accepted, as both models need intillectual capital that are both the indirect result of their popularity.
The reason the free software model is a better one (aside from the cost savings, speaking purely on an architectural level) is that software that starts deep and expands to broad is going to be better constructed than software that started broad and expanded to deep. The reason for this is that deep software makes good architectural decisions early on, in order to support its depth, and these good architectural decisions provide for more laterality when it comes to broadening the software.
It's just like constructing a building. If you design a three acre building that is one story tall, then start adding stories on top of it, you'll encounter problems. If you build a building that is 200 stories tall but only 2500 square feet per story, you've got a very solid model, and you can build up around this without compromising the existing integrity, even when you're 3 or 6 acres in breadth.
Re:Outsourcing made simple
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Offshoring IT
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· Score: 1
Sorry to sound like some political chowderhead, but this ignores a fundamental principle: capitalism is not perfect.
The people who make decisions on off-shoring are the top 1%, who personally stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for deciding to off-shore some of their work. They are not interested in whether the decision is actually good for either recipients of the off-shoring, nor for those whose jobs were lost to it, nor for that matter, the company itself. In fact, the former two of these are unlikely questions to even cross the minds of the decision maker, and the latter is only true for the current quarter or current fiscal year.
Executives in a company stand to make money when the company makes money, this is a fundamental principle in capitalism. Unfortunately there is no effective way to quantitatively measure the long-term money making potential of most real world executive level decisions. All you can do is sample short-term metrics such as dollars spent this quarter on your support center, and hope they are an accurate forecast of the long term fiscal goals.
Because of this, it is very much in an executive's personal best interests to make a decision that saves millions this year, even if it costs billions in the long run.
You're right, as far as the decision makers go, if it's not a good idea, they're not going to do it, however, this neglects to examine whether the decision makers' best interests are the same as those of the greater good, which I assert is in fact not the case.
To provide a ludicrously exaggerated example, simply to illustrate my point, let's say Joe Executive decides to out source his support call center to NothingButRudePeople.com (NoBRuP.com). NoBRuP.com will supply call support with a minimum of 100 personnel 24 hours a day, and no wait times ever longer than 15 seconds, for $100/hour total. Previously Joe Executive had been spending about $1000/hour for the same coverage since his American employees were each making about $20,000 per year.
Holy smokes, Joe Executive just saved his company aabout $7.9 million per year! He gets a huge bonus, maybe his company (like some real companies) rewards their execs with 15% of the savings from any money-making decision. Joe E here just made almost 1.2 million dollars personally.
A year later though, they notice overall sales are down 10%. Turns out NoBRuP.com employs only, surprisingly, rude people, who repeatedly hang up on customers and call them nasty names. Annual sales are about 8 billion dollars, and just in the customers that have already been lost, the company has lost money on this decision. Joe Executive says, "Well, it sounded like a good idea," and is not forced to pay back his cushy $1.2 million bonus, just maybe he doesn't get a bonus this quarter.
NoBRuP.com, centered in Uzkranistan, loses the contract, but not before a lot of money is sent their way, and off American soil. Customers are not better served by this decision, thus Americans who own some of Joe E.'s products are not better off, because the expensive Widjamagadget they bought doesn't work, and they don't know why. Americans who own stock in Joe E's company are not better off because their stock has become worthless. Further, Americans are forced to either buy a competitor's inferior product, or go with Joe E's more expensive (to recoup their losses) product. The former employees of Joe E's company are not better off, because they're out of a job. Joe E's company itself is not better off. It turns out that the Uzkranistan economy is now in the middle of a dot-com style bubble bursting, since the average cost of living is up to $2/day (from $0.02/day), and no one makes more than $0.50/day.
Only one person is better off in this scenario, and it's Joe Executive. He's sapped out $1.2 million from the company, sent a bunch more to another country whose economy wasn't suited to handle it, and taken that money from American hands.
Almost always someone's going to be better off, but it's probably not the "greater good."
If it's a copy of your official credit report, then it's the same information that a potential creditor would get, and if there is other information, it wouldn't matter since those potential new creditors wouldn't see it either.
Your privacy benefits because previously there was no actual free way to get a copy of your credit report. Sure there were things like freecreditreport.com, but there are little strings attached all over that if you're not careful to read the fine print. EG, you're automatically subscribed to a "credit monitoring service" at an absurd monthly rate, and you can only unsubscribe from it by calling their number and jumping through a lot of hooops (I have experience with this first hand). Most (or a lot of) people don't realize they've agreed to a monthly fee, and sure maybe they notice it on next month's credit card bill, but in the mean time, they've been "legitimately" charged for a service they didn't want.
Your privacy is protected because you could have been the victim of identity theft and not realise it. Or maybe there's an incorrect mark on your report, which you now have the chance to address before it becomes a problem. Now you can check each year and make sure everything is kosher.
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That, my friend, was pure diatribe.
If you can make a good case for having the Bible age-restricted, I encourage you to write your congressman, but I think you're talking about apples and oranges here, I've never seen a Bible marketed toward children with pictures of homosexuals being abused, nor of any other glorification of things which are today considered morally wrong.
Your version of the Bible obviously differs from my version, because I don't recall mine saying, "Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless he's a homosexual, then hate him." Maybe it's a typo in mine.
Answer me some questions. Should the government not ever restrict access to children for some materials, no matter the content within those materials? Are movie ratings and age restrictions on those movies inappropriate for the government to enforce? Should children, no matter their age, be allowed in adult book stores and strip joints? Should to government not concern itself in any way with the content of material sent to the public?
What I'm getting at is this: Is it ever appropriate for the government to exercise control over distribution of material regardless of its content (I'm not talking about video games, but media in general)?
If you answer no to this latter question, then I can understand your frustration with the proposal of this law. I think you'd be out of your mind if you believe all material no matter its content should be completely uncontrolled, and that children are emotionally equipped to deal with any media content no matter how corse. What about videos of women being raped? What about videos of murder? Surely you can't believe it's healthy for children to be exposed to these things, particularly if these things glorified.
If you answer yes to this question, then you must see that if it's appropriate for some forms of media, similar restrictions are appropriate for all forms of media, which includes video games. In this case, there's got to be a line where it starts to become appropriate for the government to step in and restrict access, and I'd like to know where exactly you draw this line. Mature ratings on video games seem like a fair location to draw the line.
You don't have to be a Bible thumper just to think it's detrimental to children to have them engage in activities glorifying acts that would otherwise be criminal.
And if you really think you can actively control your children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, then you're either not a parent, or simply naieve.
Laws giving parents control to guide their children with out that parent having to resort to draconian measures are a good thing. That's why there's laws about purchasing spray paint (huffing), cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Despite the fact that you reassert this is about belief imposition, it's really and truly not. It's about the realization that parents can't, and *shouldn't* be omnipresent for their children's development, coupled with the realization that there's a lot more developmentally damaging material available to a kid today than there was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Tell me you never got away with things your parents didn't want you doing, no matter how hard you tried, and I'll believe you are the sort of parent who can accomplish the same with your kids. But since I am quite certain that's not the case, I can feel confident that you recognize a parent can't control every aspect of their children's lives. However, some aspects are better left controlled. Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and yes, movies and video games. I'll admit these latter are less important than the former, but they're all still important.
And in the end, there is still nothing barring you from dredging up all the filth you can find and serving it to your 6-year-old. Your rights aren't being impaired in any way, your children's rights aren't being impaired in any way, you'll just have to coordinate with your kids to get them access to it. Since you're obviously such an involved parent, the extra time with your kid (being present for the sale) could only make you an even better parent.
First, thanks for not responding with a diatribe :-)
9 is the point that kids gain the fundamental ability to distinguish from fantasy and imagination? Happy birthday, here's your ability to distinguish? Some children are developmentally slowed. Some children are developmentally accelerated. What one child does at 9, another might not do until they are 13, or maybe they did it at 6. Unfortunately, a 6-year old in a city, with access to $15, can go down to the used video game store on the corner and pick up a copy of GTA:hooker-raping-edition.
Ok, so that was diatribe, but my point is this: you at least admit that there's a point in a child's life where they cannot distinguish from fantasy and reality, and during this time the child is particularly impressionable. Unless a parent has the luxury of being a super parent and parentally smothering their child well past the point that almost anyone would agree was healthy (You shall never be out of my presence Jimmy), little Jimmy has an opportunity to delve into filth. Maybe Jimmy is 9, but hasn't quite gotten the hang of this reality distinction thing yet.
At what point do they stop being influenced by portrayal of a life of crime as a glorious thing? The answer to that rhetoric is: "never." 50 years ago, a grown man would probably have punched someone if he saw that fellow playing some of today's video games. You can't say that this sort of material doesn't desensitize people, and given you're a psychology student, I'd wager you realize this is true.
Kids growing up in today's world have a severely reduced ability to construct a world-view that is healthy. It's filled with crime on TV, in the newspaper, and they even get to live out their life of crime in video games. Normal behavior isn't reinforced because it's not glorified in the same way. Some parents, whether or not you agree with them, believe this is the wrong way to raise a child, and it's their right to believe that, and it's their right to raise their child this way, no matter how developmentally stunting you believe it is to the child.
Laws like this only give the necessary tools to parents who choose to raise their children this way (as it is their right to), while allowing other more "open minded" parents to raise their children with access to such things.
You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of age restrictions on video games, at least for the reasons I believe it's a good thing.
The purpose isn't to restrict access to these games for kids whose parents who want their kids to have access to them. It's to restrict access to these games for kids whose parent don't want them to have access to them. You've said several times throughout the course of your diatribe that the solution is to "...don't let your kids play it," and that's all that's being proposed with these restrictions: a way for parents to at least raise the bar on the difficulty their kids have getting access to such material. Console games are tiny now, they fit in a pocket or between the pages of a book so easily that it's becoming very difficult for parents to track their kids usage of them.
I've said it in the original comment, I'll say it again. If you want your kids to have access to this stuff, this law does not prevent this. The only kids who are losing anything are those kids whose parents don't want them having it in the first place.
Whether you like it or not, kids don't have the same rights as an adult, and it is each parents right to dictate the sort of video games their kids play.
It does block kids rights to free speech.
No it doesn't, at best it blocks their ability to hear someone else's free speech, we're not talking about preventing kids from creating video games (which would be a blocking of free speech), we're talking about video games with content not appropriate for some or all kids from being self-purchasable by those kids.
The underlying question is why you want to impose your beliefs on everyone else...
If you want to see a straw man, this was one as we're talking about an act that affects only minors with respect to material that many parents don't want them having access to, which is hardly 'everyone else.' The point you accused me of using a straw man wasn't even close to one, it was an attempt to foresee the typical Slashhdot hubris and address it before it came up as a comment.
Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this (Andy -- Shawshank Redepmtion), this isn't about me imposing beliefs on you, this is about me imposing beliefs on my kids. Nothing here prevents you from raising your kids how you want.
I think I speak for a great number of people when I say I would prefer it if you stopped trying to parent my children as well.
... Stop trying to throw away MY freedom of expression ...
I'm not trying to parent your kids. You can feel free to purchase any sort of video game you want for them.
You are promoting government regulation of speech.
The government already controls speech to a significant extent. You can't drop the F-bomb on TV or radio. Janet Jackson can't show her breast on TV. You can't market cigarettes and alcohol to minors.
Either you believe that society should be fully unfettered, and at no point should the government step in and tell you what you can say, and who you can say it to, or you recognize that just like you have a right to free speech, others have a right to not have to be exposed to your free speech.
This latter thing is really what it's about: giving people the right to control what they or their children are exposed to.
This has nothing to do with subjective beliefs, it has everything to do with globally recognized belief systems. A game where part of the objective is to perform actions that would be illegal outside the game, and includes violence against other human beings (or even animals) is decidedly different from a game where a yellow pie eats white dots and blue & red ghosts.
You're free to express yourself to the fullest extent you wish, so long as your expression doesn't impair my right to raise my child the way I see fit.
Because not everything has the potential to be psychologically damaging.
I disagree. Do you know how large an XBox game disc is? Especially when their children are teenagers, and the parents lack the luxury of being able to be home before their kids (latch-key kids), the kid has plenty of opportunity to pop in a game they bought and play for a while. Hear the door unlatching, pop the disc out and slip it in the pocket.
I know as a kid, *I* was frequently able to find time to do things my parents didn't want me to.
Giving the parent more control is not a bad thing, it is a good thing.
I don't mean this as a troll (really), but I never understood the fuss over preventing sales of violent video games to minors.
All it does is provide a tool to parents enabling them to throttle the sort of world their child is exposed to. Whether or not you agree that a parent should do this, it's not your decision on the matter. It's the right of that parent to control what their kid has access to.
If a parent wants their kid to have access to that stuff, they just need to be present when the sale happens.
This isn't the government saying what a kid can or can't do, it's only the government helping parents have better control over what their kids can and can't do. It's fundamentally like parental controls on your TV. You want your kid watching the PlayBoy channel, don't lock it. You want your kid playing San Andreas, buy it for him/her.
Enter typical diatribe about "but Billy will just go to Jimmy's house to play it" or "but Susie will just get Janie (/Janie's parents) to buy it for her." Guess what, Billy and Susie aren't allowed over to Jimmy and Janie's house once I (overprotective parent) find out about it.
Another diatribe I hear on this matter is, "It's fantasy, kids are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality." First, not all kids are capable of making this distinction. Frankly, not all adults are capable of making this distinction. If my kid can't, I don't want him or her having access to this stuff. Second, even if my kid is capable of making this distinction, it still presents certain things as acceptable, things like beating hookers, shooting random people on the street, or even just stealing cars. Ok, so as a rational adult you can recognize that these are things which are not valid courses of action. You have a fundamental upbringing that tells you as much though.
Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative. It's environmental. There's no absolute goods, no absolute bads. Please understand what the inevitable conclusion from this is: a child's environment shapes what that child's perception of acceptable behavior is.
Video games like San Andreas glorify a lifestyle that's not one I want my kids growing up believing is an acceptable life path. Whether or not you believe it, psychologists (folks with degrees on this stuff) understand that a growing child is impressionable. Things that are presented as acceptable to them are accepted as acceptable or perhaps even appropriate to them.
Maybe some kids would still turn into serial killers when they grow up, even having grown up in a totally sterile environment. Maybe some kids can consume all of the corruption society can throw at them, and still turn into a nun/priest when they grow up. These children are the exception. I, as a parent, have the right to observe my child's reactions to his or her environment, and tailor the environment my child is exposed to in order that he or she grows up to be a productive member of society, and not the kind of kid who smokes / does drugs / carjacks people. This only enables me to do that to a higher degree. I'm not telling you how to raise your child, buy your child all the corruption you can if that's the decision you make, just let me have control over what sort of corruption my kid gets.
In the end, the only people here who lose any freedom are the under-18 crowd whose parents don't want them having access to this sort of content. This isn't like alcohol where it's illegal to give it to a minor even after purchase, it's just illegal to sell it to a minor.
This doesn't block anyone's right to free speech. It just filters people's (lack of a) right to direct their free speech at minors through those minors' parents.
The range on this transmitter is fairly limited, particularly if you live in or near a major city. I play tunes from my iPod to my stereo, but if I walk it into the next room (25 feet away), it starts getting very staticy.
Also, the quality of FM is pretty lousy, presumably he'd like to have some decent sound quality. But then I'm a very minor audiophile.
Since he lives in Alaska and I live in the lower 48, I tried to walk him through WindowsUpdate on the phone. He couldn't get even the WindowsUpdate ActiveX installed, let alone patch his box. Fortunately for him the store he bought it at had a network connection with a firewall, once they got him de-virused, they patched him, and even made an extra sale of a firewall that day. In a strange round about way, he ended up more secure over all for running Windows, only by relying on technologies outside of Windows, which were fundamentally required to RUN windows.
I think you misunderstood the parent post, or I misunderstand your post.
have an online mean life expectancy of 3 months before being successfully compromised.
The increase from 72 hours to 3 months is a good thing here. It's how long it takes an unpatched box to be successfully compromised. Meaning, the steps necessary to compromised a machine running Linux are becoming more complex on average.
Your post seems to indicate you believe that the average vulnerability is going from 72 hours to be fixed to 3 months to be fixed, which is not the case. Time to patch release isn't examined in the parent statement.
I remember my brother (computer illiterate) getting a new Windows computer a couple of months back. His first real computer since his 386 (not kidding). He was very excited, went home, and got on the net with his roommate's cable modem -- sans firewall. Quickly, he got very angry, because his brand new computer just kept crashing. Took it back to the store, it booted fine, but he's got a virus already. He never even launched his web browser after first boot, and he was compromised.
This story has been anectdotal, but it's also not uncommon. Average time to compromise on a Windows box is much less than that 72 hour lowpoint from Linux security.
And further, reacts instantly. The computer is capable of more powerful maneuvers simply because it can command more than 1 group of troops at once.
I know this is an oldish comment, but I go back and re-read my posts sometimes to see if I was a jerk, egotistical, or highly insightful :-).
Something in your response stuck out at me this time: "Why work your ass off when there is no possible hope of promotion or higher pay?"
Promotions are pretty meaningless in the grander scheme of things. What they represent is either more 'significant' work, or higher pay. It's this latter that's the real reason most people want promotions, so promotions and higher pay are pretty interchangeable in this respect.
That said, I've known a few contractors who are under this bizarre impression that because they are a contractor, they are not able to raise their rates. This is common in self employed contractors (versus ones working through a contracting firm). Usually you'll have a contract period as a contractor (hence the term). Your pay rate is pretty non-negotiable during a contract, but when it comes time to renew, that's when you have an opportunity to revisit pay raises.
Realize that the longer you've worked with a company, the more valuable you are. You're more efficient in that environment than an equivalently or even higher skilled new contractor: you know how things work, and who to contact for a variety of common situations that might arise in your job.
That gives you some leverage to ask for a higher rate time to time. There's also cost of living increases, inflation, and things like that. There'll be a certain expectation that your rate goes up over time, just don't go in demanding a 15% increase unless you feel you're absolutely invaluable to them (and thus worth it).
Further, there's nothing that stops you from seeking out higher level contracting positions within the same company. Not all contractors are created equal. Some contractors are architecture or strategy advisors. Some contractors are team leads (yes, it's true!). Sometimes they need someone with a lot of experience to lead a team of fairly green programmers. If you can go to management and make a good case for something like that, you might well find yourself in the contracting equivalent of a promotion.
If you're valuable, you'll find the bill payers to be pretty amicable to higher responsibility and higher pay.
While (no pun intended) what you recommend works in some circumstances, it does first presume you're working with an IDE that recognizes the language you're coding in.
There's quite a number of IDE's that do an excellent job of helping you save a few keystrokes if they recognize your language, and at least the GUI IDE's do it not by guessing which tag you want, and making you hit Tab to switch between the possible completions, but rather by popping up a submenu immediately above or below where you're typing with the possibilities, and allowing you to use the arrow keys to choose the one you want. One problem I have with these popups is that they frequently obscure nearby code that you may want to reference, such as that complex regex you just wrote and want to backreference (was it the 7th or 8th parenthesis set?).
Also, most tags take arguments, and aren't just straight <tag> </tag>. Although a few such tags exist, they're the exception rather than the rule. So you end up with <while list.next()> or <while x gt 7> At what point should it automatically provide your closing tag? I guess you could say it should be <while|></while> with the pipe there being the cursor position, and that makes a lot of sense, though when you are done, you have to relocate your cursor, and if you already have the inner guts of the <while> loop or <if> block or whatever written, you have to relocate the closing tag since of course the IDE has no way of knowing where you want the closing tag. And if you're talking about an XML based language, what if you want to do nothing inside the block (such as a for loop that does all of its work within the arguments of the loop, you want to count how many times foo.bar() returned true before its first false [such as an iterator function on an object that fails to provide a count() method], you can do for (x=0; foo.bar(); x++){}). Although it's syntactically valid to write <foo></foo> it's prefferable to write <foo/>.
It's true, this may be a little easier on the carpals, but I'd wager that it's harder to achieve deep code mode when you're babysitting the IDE instead of working on logic. Personally I can't stand the IDE ever doing anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. I have my IDE set up so that when I want tag insight, I hit Ctrl-Space, and the surrounding-code-blocking popup appears.
I think people who rely heavily on their IDE's tend to be weaker coders too. Again, this is personal supposition, based on a too-small sample of watching developers around me who are heavily invested in a particular IDE. Periodically something happens that wipes out their IDE settings, and it's weeks before they're able to produce usable code. They tend to be the same guys who are frequently being called in the evening or on a Saturday when their code fails. And when they are, it takes them hours to fix the problem because they're VPNing in from home to fix it, where they don't have their IDE set up to do the speed coding they're accustomed to.
There's a decided split in my group of the folks who are IDE heads (dependant on their IDE rather than using it as a tool) and those who are not. Those of us who are not have a lower average repair time on critical error fixes, and a lower incidence of critical errors, based on our helpdesk ticketing system. If you look at these figures, there's a double bell curve, where the guys on the left of the curve (good) are those who are not IDE devoted, and on the right (bad) are those who aren't. It's certainly possible that this is coincidental, I'll admit, but it's definatly a trend I've observed first hand at least within my group of 30 +/- developers.
You made me think of another reason I don't like tag based languages. The < and > signs can't be used in boolean tests. You can't test <if x > 7> because what you've written is invalid XML, and as a code parser, which > sign is the end of the tag? Maybe it can make a good guess, but I g
Agreed, and I speak to this as someone who's had some exposure to XML based languages. For example, there's the open source Laszlo, which is actually a pretty slick way to render dynamic Flash, and does a lot of the gruntwork of providing a ton of complex standard elements (accordion boxes, tab bars, checkboxes, buttons, and many more) in a simple to use format, while also allowing you to build in the sort of simple interface animation that has tested so well in usability studies (such as clicking a calendar item expanding it to the screen rather than just blinking it up in a new window).
/, realize that the combination of </ is harder to type than } and whatever comes immediately after it (usually a return, or space for things like "} else {"). It's harder because / doesn't require the shift, while < does, while failing to release the shift in time for a space or return has no negative impact on your code.
Macromedia Flex serves the same purposes, but is proprietary (and expensive). It's also an XML based language.
What a pain in the butt it is to write in these languages. They're even worse than ColdFusion. The biggest problem I have with my experience with XML based languages (or tag based languages such as ColdFusion) is the sheer amount of time it takes to code in them, measured in the number of keystrokes. I've never had a problem with carpal tunnel programming in languages such as C++, Java, or PHP, not even ASP/VBscript. One day of Laszlo syntax got my wrists a-hurtin'.
Turns out I spent a much larger portion of my time actually writing the syntax instead of problem solving in my head. Characters such as < and > are found in great abundance, and these are actually characters that require two keystrokes. Compared to curly brackets { and }, you're guaranteed to see these at least half as often. Also, since < is almost half the time followed by
To boot, it's harder to write out the full closing tag than a simple } mark just because it's quite a few more characters. I agree that a full closing tag is easier to debug, and easier to read, but it's hell on the wrists. </while> vs }.
I realize these things seem trivial, but they really add up. A verbose language syntax such as is required in an XML language takes more time to code in than an equivalent syntax in a less verbose form.
I think that this is probably targeted at roaming corporate users. I split my time up between three corporate offices, a day here, a day there. Since I only have a cubicle in one of the three, I'm always having to use someone else's computer who's out for the day (it's a big company, there's always someone out). Each of the other guys in my group are in the same scenario.
Our roaming profiles give us access to our documents when signed on to someone else's computer, but they don't give us access to our developer tools. We've thought about external USB / Firewire drives, but not all of the tools we use can work running right off a detachible device.
This sounds like it might offer a better solution.
While most consultants just specilize in a job and leave when they are done.
No offense, but you're clearly speaking of consultants in companies I've never heard of. While it's true that what you describe is what consultants are *supposed* to be, in reality the vast majority of the consultants I know are long-term workers with no specified end date. Many of them have worked in a single consulting position (same desk, same type of work) for 3-4 years.
This is birthed from the myth held by many upper management that cutting "head count" will reduce overall costs. While this may be true in some individual departments here and there, what usually happens is that when the policy is originally initiated, some people lose their jobs, and their former coworkers start busting butt to get all the work done. This manifests itself in the form of exhausted, disgruntled workers who produce lower quality but higher quantity. Eventually, despite having no additional head count, the individual departments decide they need more bodies to get the work done, and so hire consultants to help out with some particularly large project.
Once this large project nears an end, other tasks are offloaded to the consultant, and the consultant finds themselves a standard part of the rest of the team. With only one exception: as a consultant, all the employees tend to look down on you a little bit. They don't necessarily think you're a lesser worker, they just feel you don't have the same entitlements. The consultants don't get invited to the company Christmas party even though they might have worked more hours than anyone else on the team, or having been with the company for more years. They don't get access to company discounts, they are not elligible for company training, they may not be permitted to perform certain security actions (such as VPN), and finally, their opinion really isn't given quite as much weight in the decision making processes.
Anyhow, I've digressed. I've spent time both as a consultant and as an employee, and I have a unique insight in that the company for which I'm currently consulting, I am a former laid-off employee of. Now they pay me more (compared to industry standards) than they did when I was an employee. I spent 4 years as an employee, and have now consulted with them for 4 years. It's distinctly interesting how some people who've been with the company for six months to a year look down on me some times, despite the fact that I'm clearly the veteran here. I don't think I behaved that way when I was an employee; I sure hope I didn't.
These guys have no intention of letting it end: they need someone to do the work I'm doing, and they don't have time to do it. Work only promises to get more intense, not less, and they may hire another consultant to help me with the work I have on my plate already. Of my developer buddies, from college, and from 'net acquaintences (a web of friends as it were), I know at least 14 people, myself included (having just now counted in my head, myself included) who are in long term consulting positions with no end in sight. I can think of only 2 that really are in short term consulting positions. Maybe my web of friends is nonrepresentative of current market conditions, but I find it unlikely.
"The end of the PC as we know it" has been proclaimed so many times I care not to count.
Google knows though.
and
None of these are discussing intelligent forethough on the part of this tool, but rather technical aspects behind it.
The thing that's interesting to me is that this is not really much different than the GMail compose address area, but suddenly it's brilliant in this respect.
Annoyingly, I'd written almost identical functionality for my own personal use maybe a year before I ever saw it in GMail (though it was already in place when I got GMail so I have no idea when they put it in there) because I really wanted standard combo boxes with pre-populated choices that also let you key in another choice. You could even use the arrow keys or the mouse just like Google's interfaces, with result caching (just like Google!) on the client side. Suddenly no one can stop talking about it.
The only difference in this from the GMail address bar is that in GMail the complete address book is pre-populated, while here they use the browser's DOM object to pass a request for the data (that's how mine did it, since I was working on thousands of distinct combinations and didn't want to have to have page load times get unmanagable). Populating the data is as simple as (if it were php):
echo "<data-result>";
$sql = "SELECT search_text, result_count FROM common_user_searches WHERE search_text LIKE '$user_input%' ORDER BY search_frequency DESC LIMIT 10";
$result = (mysql|odbc|etc)_query($sql);
while ($row = *_fetch_assoc($result)){
echo "<result text=\"".htmlentities($row['search_text'])."\" count=\"{$row['result_count']}\"/>";
}
echo "</data-result>";
I'll definately agree, it's incredibly clever, but it's not so bleeding clever that it demands as much attention as they're getting for it.
That's a good point, but a little different from directly associating your face with a given transaction (though any time you pay with credit card, there's enough data there to do a matchup like this).
I personally don't have a problem with any sort of automated machine taking my photo so long as:
1) It is clearly indicated that the machine will do so, and what the storage and use policies are for the photo.
2) It will only take my photo if I am performing a transaction with the machine (or in the background as someone else performs a transaction, and am not the subject of the photo, of course)
3) The photo cannot by law be retained outside of 30 days, barring some sort of associated investigation related to a potential crime.
4) The photo cannot by law be distributed or used in any way except as directly associated with criminal proceedings (Tonight on the 10 o'clock news: Have you seen this criminal who stole $500 worth of stamps earlier today).
This will give me the ability to avoid having my picture taken if I so desire by not interacting with machines that will do so, and it will protect my rights if I do choose to interact with the machine, while still bringing the anti-criminal security needed for any sort of automated transactional machine dealing with valuable goods.
They can still use it as a current email address verification scheme, throw their millions of old addresses at it and figure out which are still good, thus increasing the quality of their lists, and the density which they can successfully delivery spam.
Even if each IP was limited per some interval, with the spam bot nets that are the source of most spam anyhow, it's trivial to abuse. Presuming a reasonable figure of 10 per hour (legitimately I have looked up more than this), *small* botnets could generate millions of address verifications per day.
FPCP (First Privacy Complaint Post):
Won't a database of verified emails be, y'know, abusable? What about spammers who want to harvest from this? If they can't directly harvest, they could certainly validate email addresses they know about, and know they were getting people on email addresses that they care about.
Anyone who is not currently the market leader *has* to play catchup on all existing features in the market leader's softare for the simple reason that they'll lose many customers who don't find the one obscure feature they need.
It has to do with that proprietary software market ability to focus on individual features rather than broad features, and it lends a catch-22 to free software: the way to make good free software is to attract enough developers to cover the spread, and the way to attract those developers is to make good free software.
Proprietary software can usually throw more resources at a project earlier on because they have capital behind them. They can build a broad shallow feature set which looks very impressive, then they can worry about making the money later by deepening those features that turn out to be popular. Free software has a tough time competing against that broad-but-shallow approach, because when they do get developers, those developers know what features they personally are interested in, and so build narrow-but-deep on said features.
It's not as competetive an approach, and this is why free software hasn't already dominated the market. Broad-but-shallow is sexier because superficial examination makes it appear better. Whether free or proprietary, broad-and-deep software only comes around when it is popularly accepted, as both models need intillectual capital that are both the indirect result of their popularity.
The reason the free software model is a better one (aside from the cost savings, speaking purely on an architectural level) is that software that starts deep and expands to broad is going to be better constructed than software that started broad and expanded to deep. The reason for this is that deep software makes good architectural decisions early on, in order to support its depth, and these good architectural decisions provide for more laterality when it comes to broadening the software.
It's just like constructing a building. If you design a three acre building that is one story tall, then start adding stories on top of it, you'll encounter problems. If you build a building that is 200 stories tall but only 2500 square feet per story, you've got a very solid model, and you can build up around this without compromising the existing integrity, even when you're 3 or 6 acres in breadth.
Sorry to sound like some political chowderhead, but this ignores a fundamental principle: capitalism is not perfect.
The people who make decisions on off-shoring are the top 1%, who personally stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for deciding to off-shore some of their work. They are not interested in whether the decision is actually good for either recipients of the off-shoring, nor for those whose jobs were lost to it, nor for that matter, the company itself. In fact, the former two of these are unlikely questions to even cross the minds of the decision maker, and the latter is only true for the current quarter or current fiscal year.
Executives in a company stand to make money when the company makes money, this is a fundamental principle in capitalism. Unfortunately there is no effective way to quantitatively measure the long-term money making potential of most real world executive level decisions. All you can do is sample short-term metrics such as dollars spent this quarter on your support center, and hope they are an accurate forecast of the long term fiscal goals.
Because of this, it is very much in an executive's personal best interests to make a decision that saves millions this year, even if it costs billions in the long run.
You're right, as far as the decision makers go, if it's not a good idea, they're not going to do it, however, this neglects to examine whether the decision makers' best interests are the same as those of the greater good, which I assert is in fact not the case.
To provide a ludicrously exaggerated example, simply to illustrate my point, let's say Joe Executive decides to out source his support call center to NothingButRudePeople.com (NoBRuP.com). NoBRuP.com will supply call support with a minimum of 100 personnel 24 hours a day, and no wait times ever longer than 15 seconds, for $100/hour total. Previously Joe Executive had been spending about $1000/hour for the same coverage since his American employees were each making about $20,000 per year.
Holy smokes, Joe Executive just saved his company aabout $7.9 million per year! He gets a huge bonus, maybe his company (like some real companies) rewards their execs with 15% of the savings from any money-making decision. Joe E here just made almost 1.2 million dollars personally.
A year later though, they notice overall sales are down 10%. Turns out NoBRuP.com employs only, surprisingly, rude people, who repeatedly hang up on customers and call them nasty names. Annual sales are about 8 billion dollars, and just in the customers that have already been lost, the company has lost money on this decision. Joe Executive says, "Well, it sounded like a good idea," and is not forced to pay back his cushy $1.2 million bonus, just maybe he doesn't get a bonus this quarter.
NoBRuP.com, centered in Uzkranistan, loses the contract, but not before a lot of money is sent their way, and off American soil. Customers are not better served by this decision, thus Americans who own some of Joe E.'s products are not better off, because the expensive Widjamagadget they bought doesn't work, and they don't know why. Americans who own stock in Joe E's company are not better off because their stock has become worthless. Further, Americans are forced to either buy a competitor's inferior product, or go with Joe E's more expensive (to recoup their losses) product. The former employees of Joe E's company are not better off, because they're out of a job. Joe E's company itself is not better off. It turns out that the Uzkranistan economy is now in the middle of a dot-com style bubble bursting, since the average cost of living is up to $2/day (from $0.02/day), and no one makes more than $0.50/day.
Only one person is better off in this scenario, and it's Joe Executive. He's sapped out $1.2 million from the company, sent a bunch more to another country whose economy wasn't suited to handle it, and taken that money from American hands.
Almost always someone's going to be better off, but it's probably not the "greater good."
If it's a copy of your official credit report, then it's the same information that a potential creditor would get, and if there is other information, it wouldn't matter since those potential new creditors wouldn't see it either.
Your privacy benefits because previously there was no actual free way to get a copy of your credit report. Sure there were things like freecreditreport.com, but there are little strings attached all over that if you're not careful to read the fine print. EG, you're automatically subscribed to a "credit monitoring service" at an absurd monthly rate, and you can only unsubscribe from it by calling their number and jumping through a lot of hooops (I have experience with this first hand). Most (or a lot of) people don't realize they've agreed to a monthly fee, and sure maybe they notice it on next month's credit card bill, but in the mean time, they've been "legitimately" charged for a service they didn't want.
Your privacy is protected because you could have been the victim of identity theft and not realise it. Or maybe there's an incorrect mark on your report, which you now have the chance to address before it becomes a problem. Now you can check each year and make sure everything is kosher.