And if Congress had to participate in Social Security, ObamaCare, or any one of a thousand indignities and injustices inflicted upon the American people, they wouldn't have lasted 15 minutes in debate, let alone get passed. Maybe we need to take a cue from Libya, Egypt, and Dhubai and get rid of the privileged overlords.
They are paid by the patent denied - patents are generally rejected the first time through, if nothing else to generate more revenue. But it's much easier to just let it slide than to keep searching for good prior art that stops a patent. It's not enough to know it's been done before, you have to cite the prior art, which may be buried in some obscure journal on a different topic. Patents tend to get worded by lawyers, who try hard to obfuscate and make the examiner's job difficult, so they'll give up and allow the patent.
Multics via a DecWriter Dot-matrix terminal and 300-baud modem. Still think it was a fantastic system. It was the general-purpose "utility" for everyone at MIT when I was a freshman. Email, "Arpanet" access, shell scripts, 40 years ago they solved the spyware problem. Just no one else thought security was important enough to bother. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Let Big Brother spend his money on this
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
I think this man should get all the research money he can stand. It's clear his "research" will yield poor results, but if he can suck down more of Big Brother's big bucks and keep them from spending money on something that will really invade our privacy, good for him. Better this waste of money than a more effective domestic Echelon system.
If your employment is "at will", they can lay you off at anytime, for no reason. This is certainly true for the companies I've worked for in the last 10 years or so. You can get unemployment benefits, which you wouldn't get if you were fired "for cause", but you're out of work. They don't have to give notice, they can just say "You're out". You can quit at anytime too, so of course you have an implicit choice every time they ask (or tell) you to work overtime. You don't have to be there.
I have been through this grinder before. If they are asking for 15 hour days, the project is totally, and I mean totally screwed up. Bail right now. Run, don't walk, to the exit. It doesn't matter if you think you're productive, you're not. Good, creative code comes from getting regular sleep. Sleep deprivation generates only crap, which has to be recoded, fixed, redesigned, the whole kit and kaboodle. If they have this mindset they have probably f**ked everything else up too, so even by some chance you actually are productive and produce something, they will nullify your efforts. I have seen THIS more times than I can count. If they can't plan well, they won't do anything else well, and it's a wasted effort. They WILL screw up the marketing, get the requirements wrong, piss off the client, promise what can't possibly be supplied or whatever. Consistently good software comes from developing software using good processes and techniques, not beating the programmers until they're productive. Did anyone learn ANYTHING from the CMM?
I work for a company that does a number of web projects for the US government, and the big buzzword here is Section 508 compliance. This is federally mandated support for web users with disabilities that use readers and other assistive tools. It is a requirement for all government websites, although enforcement appears to be highly variable. From what I have gleaned, the rule of thumb is make the site Lynx-compliant and you're not too far off. By time you have true 508-compliance, you're not using very many of the cute IE tags, you're not using Flash (I know it's theoretically possible, but Flash & 508 absolutely do not mix), and you've eliminated a lot of the useless JPEG/GIF/Javascript menu junk. Unfortunately, some of our (government) clients are just thumbing their collective noses at the regulations right now, but 508-compliant sites do render just fine in just about anything.
I am involved in a project to do distance learning for a branch of the military - guess what, it's all flash. No flash, no training. The powers that be have specified IE-only - they're a Micro$oft-only shop. I've tried to explain that there are other browsers out there, but to no avail. The only hope is that Section 508 (the requirement to provide web access to the disabled) will force them away from their IE monomania.
(As an aside, when's the last time anyone used a.mil address? They're still valid TLDs, right?)
They're in very heavy use. A fair amount is publicly visible, a much larger amount is not externally visible. If you are a defense contractor so your IP is allowed through the firewalls, etc. there's a very big set of websites for most DOD branches, agencies, etc. For example, most DOD acquisitions are handled via the web now, to at least some degree (public announcements via web site, email protocol submissions, etc.).
I think it's just that.MIL addresses were a big part of ARPANET, but their growth has been eclipsed by the rest of the 'net. (duh!)
A couple of years back, I worked on a project where we had a very similar problem, (actually,
we went from PDP-11 Pascal to Sun Pascal to HP Pascal). It was much too big a program to rewrite by hand, but it turned out that converting it with awk and sed wasn't. I'd recommend using perl now, it is probably better than any other language for this kind of problem.
The process in short was 1) define or find the Pascal compiler and Linux box environment you want to use (the target). 2) Attempt to compile & run the code. 3) When it fails, rather than fix it by hand, analyze a little further and write (awk/sed/perl) code to translate the source program into something that does compile/work. 4) Repeat until it compiles & runs.
You'll find that although it is very hard at a theoretical level, at a practical level, it is very doable - you don't have to solve for the general case, just for the limited case of your one program. It helps a lot if the original program had some disciplined coding conventions, but this is not a hard requirement. I think we had 50,000 lines of Pascal that translated with a couple of hundred lines of awk & sed. We also did this with a 100,000 line Fortran program as well. It's not instantaneous, but it's much, much faster than rewriting, and it does not require that you know the code at the same level of detail that writing a significant extension would require, for example. In some cases, may will have to write some extra functions to handle either library mismatches or language features the new compiler doesn't handle. In our case, the maintenance of the program was done on the original code, and it was translated at build time (mainly because another organization maintained the original program, and we maintained the rehosted derivative).
I volunteer for a local organization, SMARTCO that recycles government and business computers into local non-profit organizations. Our biggest source of machines is the local Naval Station. Guess what -we're drive-limited. The biggest problem we have is finding hard drives because they've been stripped out of the machines we get. No classified stuff, mind you, just plain old everyday desktops stripped because everyone errs on the side of caution. This policy might change that, exceptdd takes time. On these old machines, the biggest (government) cost is the labor to strip it. Spending the hours it would take to dd the drive isn't going to happen, even if all but 3 minutes is interaction-free. So much quicker to run the drive through a degausser or a sledgehammer. The volunteers can't do it, because they aren't "cleared personnel". So unless we can get a civil servant to spend his or her precious free time to wipe the drive themselves, we'll still get driveless boxen.
<sigh>
Some time back, I was sysadmin for a project that generated a number of SECRET classified hard drives. They were perfectly good, large, and totally unusable. The difficulty in preserving the physical integrity was that although disk wipe software existed, it didn't overwrite every block. Remember, for a standard SCSI disk (and IDE too, I believe) there are "hidden" spare blocks (not visible to standard operations) - they are used to replace bad blocks by the drive controller. Any real disk overwrite utility had to overwrite all of those blocks too, which are generally accessible only through manufacturer-specific operations and damaged, so writes didn't work correctly. Then you had to demonstrate to a technically unsophisticated, very skeptical security officer that you really did erase everything. Couple that with the many passes (hours and hours worth) required by overwrite utilities and it translated to more hassle (read labor hours) than the government wanted to spend, just to recover the use of a hard drive - cheaper to physically destroy it. Nothing particularly exotic, just a sledgehammer (but it was so satisfying...). Pachooka-san
Hackers are statistically brighter than normal and prone to long periods of introspection. Anyone who has debugged code for more than 4 hours straight can claim that easily. So they'll think about philosophical issues, including religion and actually have an opinion. Most people I've encountered don't care enough about any of this stuff to have one - the response to "What religion are you?" is "I dunno".
Why neopaganism, buddhism, and other alternative religious beliefs? That's easy - you get to pick the rules you like, or better yet, make up your own rules as you go along. Atheists have it best of all - no rules at all. The traditional "mainstream" (OK, Judeo-Christian) religious beliefs mostly talk about rules, self-sacrifice, and morality, which are so inconvenient. They have hard standards to live up to (you try really loving your enemies). They get a lot of bad press because nothing gets people pissed off faster than someone else telling them they shouldn't do what they want to do. I haven't see anything that makes hackers any different than anyone else in that respect.
BTW, I was heavily into RPGs, Zen Buddhism, and magic at different times, too. Now I'm into the the scary stuff - I'm a Jesus Freak. Pachooka-san
If HP is using GPL'ed source in their product, where are the sources? They would answer the question of whether it really supports Linux as a client. I suspect it's more than just not giving back, it's violating the terms of the GPL. Pachooka-san
I couldn't let this one slide. I have used the shuttle software for years as an example of a failed software project. It was declared a "success" because they can occasionally get it into orbit. BUT
It costs $1000/line.
Remember the very first launch? Main engine shutdown due to a software snafu.
It takes 8 months of training on the shuttle software to avoid killing yourself (this is a direct quote from a former shuttle commander). The originally-designed interlocks you would expect in software were thrown out because it wouldn't fit.
If the predicted launch winds vary by more than +-5 knots or +-20degrees, they have to scrub the launch - why? The shuttle software can only take a limited number of wind parameters and it takes 12 (or 24, I forget) hours to rebuild the configuration if it changes.
It requires the largest standing army of programmers to maintain of any 400K line program ever written. The only reason it works at all is they test, and retest, and retest the living daylights out of it, NOT because they designed it well.
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And if Congress had to participate in Social Security, ObamaCare, or any one of a thousand indignities and injustices inflicted upon the American people, they wouldn't have lasted 15 minutes in debate, let alone get passed. Maybe we need to take a cue from Libya, Egypt, and Dhubai and get rid of the privileged overlords.
They are paid by the patent denied - patents are generally rejected the first time through, if nothing else to generate more revenue. But it's much easier to just let it slide than to keep searching for good prior art that stops a patent. It's not enough to know it's been done before, you have to cite the prior art, which may be buried in some obscure journal on a different topic. Patents tend to get worded by lawyers, who try hard to obfuscate and make the examiner's job difficult, so they'll give up and allow the patent.
Multics via a DecWriter Dot-matrix terminal and 300-baud modem. Still think it was a fantastic system. It was the general-purpose "utility" for everyone at MIT when I was a freshman. Email, "Arpanet" access, shell scripts, 40 years ago they solved the spyware problem. Just no one else thought security was important enough to bother.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
I think this man should get all the research money he can stand. It's clear his "research" will yield poor results, but if he can suck down more of Big Brother's big bucks and keep them from spending money on something that will really invade our privacy, good for him. Better this waste of money than a more effective domestic Echelon system.
If your employment is "at will", they can lay you off at anytime, for no reason. This is certainly true for the companies I've worked for in the last 10 years or so. You can get unemployment benefits, which you wouldn't get if you were fired "for cause", but you're out of work. They don't have to give notice, they can just say "You're out". You can quit at anytime too, so of course you have an implicit choice every time they ask (or tell) you to work overtime. You don't have to be there.
I have been through this grinder before. If they are asking for 15 hour days, the project is totally, and I mean totally screwed up. Bail right now. Run, don't walk, to the exit. It doesn't matter if you think you're productive, you're not. Good, creative code comes from getting regular sleep. Sleep deprivation generates only crap, which has to be recoded, fixed, redesigned, the whole kit and kaboodle. If they have this mindset they have probably f**ked everything else up too, so even by some chance you actually are productive and produce something, they will nullify your efforts. I have seen THIS more times than I can count. If they can't plan well, they won't do anything else well, and it's a wasted effort. They WILL screw up the marketing, get the requirements wrong, piss off the client, promise what can't possibly be supplied or whatever. Consistently good software comes from developing software using good processes and techniques, not beating the programmers until they're productive. Did anyone learn ANYTHING from the CMM?
I work for a company that does a number of web projects for the US government, and the big buzzword here is Section 508 compliance. This is federally mandated support for web users with disabilities that use readers and other assistive tools. It is a requirement for all government websites, although enforcement appears to be highly variable. From what I have gleaned, the rule of thumb is make the site Lynx-compliant and you're not too far off. By time you have true 508-compliance, you're not using very many of the cute IE tags, you're not using Flash (I know it's theoretically possible, but Flash & 508 absolutely do not mix), and you've eliminated a lot of the useless JPEG/GIF/Javascript menu junk. Unfortunately, some of our (government) clients are just thumbing their collective noses at the regulations right now, but 508-compliant sites do render just fine in just about anything.
If you check Stuart Madnick's homepage, he's not a CS professor. He's a professor of management. Need I say more?
I am involved in a project to do distance learning for a branch of the military - guess what, it's all flash. No flash, no training. The powers that be have specified IE-only - they're a Micro$oft-only shop. I've tried to explain that there are other browsers out there, but to no avail. The only hope is that Section 508 (the requirement to provide web access to the disabled) will force them away from their IE monomania.
(As an aside, when's the last time anyone used a .mil address? They're still valid TLDs, right?)
.MIL addresses were a big part of ARPANET, but their growth has been eclipsed by the rest of the 'net. (duh!)
They're in very heavy use. A fair amount is publicly visible, a much larger amount is not externally visible. If you are a defense contractor so your IP is allowed through the firewalls, etc. there's a very big set of websites for most DOD branches, agencies, etc. For example, most DOD acquisitions are handled via the web now, to at least some degree (public announcements via web site, email protocol submissions, etc.).
I think it's just that
The process in short was 1) define or find the Pascal compiler and Linux box environment you want to use (the target). 2) Attempt to compile & run the code. 3) When it fails, rather than fix it by hand, analyze a little further and write (awk/sed/perl) code to translate the source program into something that does compile/work. 4) Repeat until it compiles & runs.
You'll find that although it is very hard at a theoretical level, at a practical level, it is very doable - you don't have to solve for the general case, just for the limited case of your one program. It helps a lot if the original program had some disciplined coding conventions, but this is not a hard requirement. I think we had 50,000 lines of Pascal that translated with a couple of hundred lines of awk & sed. We also did this with a 100,000 line Fortran program as well. It's not instantaneous, but it's much, much faster than rewriting, and it does not require that you know the code at the same level of detail that writing a significant extension would require, for example. In some cases, may will have to write some extra functions to handle either library mismatches or language features the new compiler doesn't handle. In our case, the maintenance of the program was done on the original code, and it was translated at build time (mainly because another organization maintained the original program, and we maintained the rehosted derivative).
I volunteer for a local organization, SMARTCO that recycles government and business computers into local non-profit organizations. Our biggest source of machines is the local Naval Station. Guess what -we're drive-limited. The biggest problem we have is finding hard drives because they've been stripped out of the machines we get. No classified stuff, mind you, just plain old everyday desktops stripped because everyone errs on the side of caution. This policy might change that, except dd takes time. On these old machines, the biggest (government) cost is the labor to strip it. Spending the hours it would take to dd the drive isn't going to happen, even if all but 3 minutes is interaction-free. So much quicker to run the drive through a degausser or a sledgehammer. The volunteers can't do it, because they aren't "cleared personnel". So unless we can get a civil servant to spend his or her precious free time to wipe the drive themselves, we'll still get driveless boxen.
<sigh>
Pachooka-san
Some time back, I was sysadmin for a project that generated a number of SECRET classified hard drives. They were perfectly good, large, and totally unusable. The difficulty in preserving the physical integrity was that although disk wipe software existed, it didn't overwrite every block. Remember, for a standard SCSI disk (and IDE too, I believe) there are "hidden" spare blocks (not visible to standard operations) - they are used to replace bad blocks by the drive controller. Any real disk overwrite utility had to overwrite all of those blocks too, which are generally accessible only through manufacturer-specific operations and damaged, so writes didn't work correctly. Then you had to demonstrate to a technically unsophisticated, very skeptical security officer that you really did erase everything. Couple that with the many passes (hours and hours worth) required by overwrite utilities and it translated to more hassle (read labor hours) than the government wanted to spend, just to recover the use of a hard drive - cheaper to physically destroy it. Nothing particularly exotic, just a sledgehammer (but it was so satisfying...).
Pachooka-san
Hackers are statistically brighter than normal and prone to long periods of introspection. Anyone who has debugged code for more than 4 hours straight can claim that easily. So they'll think about philosophical issues, including religion and actually have an opinion. Most people I've encountered don't care enough about any of this stuff to have one - the response to "What religion are you?" is "I dunno".
Why neopaganism, buddhism, and other alternative religious beliefs? That's easy - you get to pick the rules you like, or better yet, make up your own rules as you go along. Atheists have it best of all - no rules at all. The traditional "mainstream" (OK, Judeo-Christian) religious beliefs mostly talk about rules, self-sacrifice, and morality, which are so inconvenient. They have hard standards to live up to (you try really loving your enemies). They get a lot of bad press because nothing gets people pissed off faster than someone else telling them they shouldn't do what they want to do. I haven't see anything that makes hackers any different than anyone else in that respect.
BTW, I was heavily into RPGs, Zen Buddhism, and magic at different times, too. Now I'm into the the scary stuff - I'm a Jesus Freak.
Pachooka-san
If HP is using GPL'ed source in their product, where are the sources? They would answer the question of whether it really supports Linux as a client. I suspect it's more than just not giving back, it's violating the terms of the GPL.
Pachooka-san
It costs $1000/line.
Remember the very first launch? Main engine shutdown due to a software snafu.
It takes 8 months of training on the shuttle software to avoid killing yourself (this is a direct quote from a former shuttle commander). The originally-designed interlocks you would expect in software were thrown out because it wouldn't fit.
If the predicted launch winds vary by more than +-5 knots or +-20degrees, they have to scrub the launch - why? The shuttle software can only take a limited number of wind parameters and it takes 12 (or 24, I forget) hours to rebuild the configuration if it changes.
It requires the largest standing army of programmers to maintain of any 400K line program ever written. The only reason it works at all is they test, and retest, and retest the living daylights out of it, NOT because they designed it well.