My biggest problem with this primordial soup idea is not that some some variation of a simple cell could form accidentally, it's that it would form accidentally and have all of the facilities necessary to reproduce itself. How did an essentially random mass of crap acquire the ability to replicate itself? Wouldn't that be a very early requirement, before the tumultuous environment split that thing apart again?
It's funny, I read these long "well it could have", and "then maybe with enough time" and "if the conditions were just right...", and to be honest, I see grasping at straws. While some of it explains how the first one might form accidentally, it doesn't explain how the random chemicals begin acting in concert to reproduce and carry out the metabolic functions of even the simplest cell.
Why does a cell metabolize anything? Why doesn't it just sit there and wait for its current supply of chemical reactions to finish, and then just go inert and dry up? You can say this behavior is happenstance, but it's a pretty fortunate one. Unlike evolution, it doesn't have the deus ex machina of millions of years to rely upon. This sort of thing has to happen exactly right or it doesn't work.
So once you've got a cell with the ability to metabolize outside chemicals and expel the resulting metabolic products, this thing has to be able to make more of itself or wind up a curiosity in the dark, blank history of the universe.
How do even these two complex events happen to coincide and form the simplest cells?
Until I see it done by random processes in an experiment designed to mimic early earth, I think random biogenesis takes as much faith as saying "God did it." It may appeal to scientifically-minded people more, but you must realize that it sounds no more likely to people you're trying to convince. It's still just a lot of hmm and uhhhh and wild-ass guessing.
I'm not saying that evolution doesn't exist, but how did it get started? I've asked this question before, and have never received a convincing reply that wasn't based on the assumption of unlikely events.
"Oh, well RNA formed..." Great! Then what? What is it about RNA versus water or dirt that makes the surrounding environment automatically want to transcode and replicate it? What sets it apart from the rest of the junk heap?
Oh! Then lipids formed around it... Thereby cutting it off from anything in its environment that would randomly transcode it?
Where did all of the other organelles of the simplest cell come from? How did it happen that these organelles can be replicated and pushed into a copy of the cell using nothing but an unguided process and random material from outside the cell?
The point is that you don't get to be all hand-wavy if you want the truth, and that's what I see. Lots of hand waving, which is exactly what you complain about with Creationists.
I'm obviously not a biologist, but I do work in IT. Necessarily, that means I'm especially sensitive to hand-waving, and that I've honed my ability to see when people are talking out of their asses. You don't want me to think God did it? Great, show me something:
Plausible
Doesn't rely on "millions of years" in places where "millions of years" would have meant the destruction of the key happenstance.
Doesn't sound like you're making it up on the spot when I ask a question you didn't think of before.
Is completely devoid of the requirement of intelligence. Your experiment isn't allowed to stack the deck.
Doesn't gloss over complex functions as if they would obviously and naturally occur
...and then tell me how spontaneous biogenesis proves that God doesn't exist, because as far as I can tell, it's a non sequitur.
So, until I see better, here's my model of the universe:
God creates "physics"
God creates universe to follow the laws of physics.
God works within those rules to guide everything else that happens.
In that scenario, science would study the "how", but could never study the guiding forces behind it. I have no doubt that biogenesis happened, and that at some point conditions were right for it. What I'm saying is that I don't think it was an accident.
Nice troll, and I normally wouldn't respond to it, but many of the "smart" people here tend to cling to anything that reinforces their prejudices.
The central point of Ecclesiastes is that what you achieve here doesn't matter in the grand scheme of eternity. Training and education are useful for a short time, but you're still going to die. What good is it to you then?
No, the author of this is generally held to be among the wisest people who ever lived, and his other writings stress that education and wisdom are indeed important to your Earthly life. However, he tries to put it into perspective with eternity and the idea of an eternal, all-knowing God.
So like I said, nice troll. I give it a +1 bigoted and +3 ignorant.
You don't seem to understand "wealth" verses "high salary". Wealthy people are those who don't think of money in terms of how much they make per year because it's irrelevant. They're the guys who track their "net worth", not their yearly income.
Bill Gates is "wealthy". Warren Buffett is "wealthy". The trader down the hall may have a nice house, car, and some money in the bank account, but he's not wealthy. If he was wealthy, his job would be optional, much like Gates' and Buffett's has been for years. They do that stuff cuz they like it and they chose to, not because they have to. That trader would be in dire straights after 6 months of unemployment. That's not wealthy.
You're defining people with nice salaries as wealthy, but I'm telling you that if they're living on their salary, they're not wealthy. The people who are wealthy you probably know by name.
The word "wealthy" carries with it the idea of overabundance, "not merely rich, but loaded", to quote the dictionary.com page.
The people you are talking about might be considered "rich", but you'd be surprised how fast they can tumble because they're still dependent on their jobs for income. The "wealthy" have money coming in through no action of their own, many times old money. Think Paris Hilton and the other trust fund types.
Do you see the distinction I'm trying to make? You're saying you want to tax the wealthy, but then take away from someone's salary. The two statements don't jive.
The one constant in the human condition is greed. There's no such thing as an idealized system, and if a market for waste gases is created, it *will* be manipulated to suit the needs of the investors.
That's why some people are pushing for it so hard. Don't be fooled, the basis of this CO2 credit market idea is about making money at the expense of industry, and ultimately, the public at large. It is NOT a legitimate solution to the problem, if such a problem exists at all.
This is one of those ideas where the AGW crowd shows their true colors and reveals what's really behind the hype and hysteria. It's all about socialism, power consolidation, and money.
Think about this economically. You are trading a commodity, but this isn't a standard commodity where scarcity of resources limits the supply. This is an artificially created commodity where nothing more substantial than words determine the supply. If the person in charge decides that he can make money by creating more credits to sell, what's to stop him? His honesty, integrity, and desire to save the planet? Forgive me if I'm skeptical, but you're essentially giving yet another person a license to print money and impose additional taxes on industry and the public at large.
Don't you guys listen to yourselves? On one hand you talk about how corrupt and evil corporations are, and how all the ills of the world are caused by lobbyists, and on the other hand you want to create YET ANOTHER multi-trillion dollar market and have YET ANOTHER lobbyist in DC lobbying for Big Oxygen or Big CO2?
What if, in the future after you've created your trillion-dollar market selling artificial commodities you find that shit, we made a mistake, and we need to stop doing whatever it is we're doing -- increasing O2, decreasing CO2, etc. Do you think that this trillion dollar market will just give up and self-terminate at the first utterance of your intellectual brilliance?
Wasn't there an incident last year where NASA was corrected by an independent climatologist because they'd made some basic error in normalizing their data?
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody has motives.
To the guy who says not to assume climate scientists are idiots: I don't think they're idiots, but I allow for the possibility (probability?) that they're missing something. In addition, I make no assumptions about their motives, given the politically charged issue at hand.
Exactly. The same people who complain that the gap between the lower and upper classes is widening are frequently the same people advocating the destruction of the middle class through taxation. There was a time I would have said "Democrats" or "Liberals" here, but nowadays it seems to be everyone except the Libertarians.
Next time a politician says "tax the wealthy", take a look at who the "wealthy" are. Most of the time they're people who are doing okay, but not by any means secure in that position and can easily be brought down. There are very few people in this country who can lose 5% of what they earn and not have their lives thrown into chaos.
But then, that's the dirty little secret of socialism, isn't it? Everyone is equal (equally poor) in socialist states, except the rich people in government who will have some sort of good excuse. In the meantime, all those middle or upper middle class people who could have started and grown small businesses are in poverty themselves. Bye bye job market, hello squalor. And if you think all of this will somehow end the tyranny of the wealthy, you're wrong. Socialism only increases the power of those who remain wealthy -- typically through means most would consider "unethical".
Is there a "666" in there somewhere" Maybe if you add up the letters just right.... What's the significance of the missing "nLa"? Is there a Nostradamus connection?
That's funny. Even more funny are the several comments that follow telling why Biden would be an idiotic choice for VP. I wonder if those same people suddenly changed their minds today? Gotta show your solidarity!
The sticking point is of course the fact that the major problem these beaten-down countries have is the corrupt government that runs them. Invasion and colonization at least gets them out of their own way.
I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that these countries probably won't improve much on their own. They're too much their own worst enemy. The citizens not only don't think they can personally improve it, they many times don't know that it can be improved to begin with.
Would you want electricity if you didn't know it exists? Or if you'd always done without it? Or even if you'd heard of it but never used it, would that be enough to make you risk your life to get it?
I'm not sure when computer programming became a "macho" activity, but whatever.
I've worked with shiny pointy clicky before this experience. I worked for a telecom a while back where I worked on their VRU. The programming interface was drag and drop icons that you'd fit together on a grid and fill in a properties sheet. Rows in the grid were a set of instructions, and branches with conditionals or gotos would take you to a different row on the grid.
Apart from the annoyance of having "code" that required constant horizontal scrolling, this system was also a constant source of problems. You couldn't tell what the thing was really doing under the hood, because all you had was essentially a spreadsheet with a bunch of pictures on it.
That's surprisingly difficult to debug. It looks like a kindergarten kid should be able to do it, but the trouble is that the lanugage hid too much from you. All "If" icons looked the same, and you had to double-click them to see what they were testing. All "Dial" icons looked the same, and you had to click on it to see what number it was calling. So debugging was a real bitch.
The real problems came in when there were system problems. For all of its abstraction and pointy clicky, this thing was or course, a Windows system. So now you're working on an operating system whose claim to fame is that it hides the complexity from the user. That's all well and good, but as a developer who's having hangs and reboots twice a day, I friggin want to see that complexity so I know where things are going wrong.
That particular problem, by the way, was caused by PC Anywhere causing the machine to bluescreen and reboot. Because it was a remote machine, we weren't able to see the blue screens, and only found out about them when our client had driven out to the remote site to reboot the box and was still standing there when it happened again. The guy only spoke spanish with broken English, but all it took was "It just turn blue".
Once we knew that, I turned on memory dumps, and found that the fault was caused by pcaw32.dll (or something along those lines). Replaced it with VNC, and all was well in the world.
It has nothing to do with macho. It has everything to do with the ability to get the job done and to fix it quickly when it breaks. Trying to figure out what the hell is happening underneath when I see a picture isn't conducive to making that happen. Even worse when the problem could be with the underlying system *or* with the program.
I did telecommuting for about 6 months. I loved it, no doubt, and wish I could do it again.
Some notes from the experience:
* wife/kids initially respect the boundaries, but it very soon becomes real effort to maintain them.
* wife realized what I actualy do for a living. Got this gem several times: "why can't you go do XYZ? You're just sitting in front of the computer anyway.". WTF? Yes dear, I'm a computer programmer. Apparently she didn't realize it involved the computers.
* people can't figure out why daddy doesn't want to talk/play/whatever every 15 minutes. This turns into "you're ignoring me/us", to which the only answer is "well, I"m certainly trying, but you're making it pretty difficult."
Now, you may see those and think "Hah! See? There are too many distractions at home!"... And you'd be totally ignoring what goes on in the office.
Office has bench-style desks where everyone sits side-by-side. The level of noise and commotion sometimes reaches the level of the absurd - especially around lunch time (between 12 and 2, as not everyone eats at the same time). The air conditioning vent is right over my head and makes an unholy racket. Every time I have to pee, it's a 5 minute walk.
Add into that 3 to 4 hours of travel every day, and the office just doesn't seem to have many advantages over working from home.
There are significant distractions in both places, but at least at home the distraction is my daughter giving me a hug or my son showing me what he did at school. Lots better than the inane chatter and insanity around the office.
That's not to mention the fact that my home office has a door that, while easily opened by the random interloper, does a much better job than the open layout office where there's never a moment's peace.
Which one's better? Truth is, they both suck, but working from home sucks a lot less.
By the way, I'm writing this at 10pm on the train on my way home. I got to the office 13 hours ago, left my house 15 hours ago, and won't be home for another hour. When I get home, there's another hour of work to do. If I worked from home, I could have done all that work, and still had a much shorter day. The office? No redeeming qualities as far as I can see.
I saw this in several of the people involved, where they overuse the word "just." Oh, why write loader scripts when we can just use business works? They get the impression that some tool suddenly makes the job into a no-brainer, non-event that can be done in fifteen minutes.
There are two big problems:
1. There is very seldom a "just" involved in data processing in large environments. Why? Because you have yourself a large, mature system that was not designed around the feed you're bringing in. You now need to adapt the vendor/client view of what this data is and convert into what your system's idea of it is.
Sometimes, yes, it's a simple bcp into a table, run a stock stored procedure, and you're done. In my experience, that doesn't happen very often. The load processes of the banks where I've worked are frequently complex and disjointed, and you're always going to wind up with custom code above and beyond what comes in the box with these ETL tools. Do they save a few steps? Potentially, but they're the simple steps that you could have done easily and with better performance.
2 When managers think something is going to be easy, they make promises that their people have a hard time keeping. In my professional career, I am always careful not to use the word "just", because it usually means I'm glossing over something. As we all know, the devil's in the details, and that's where your stress levels go up, and your projects go over time and over budget. This tends to make people think I'm overcomplicating things, but the problem is really that they are oversimplifying.
At my last job, I wrote a perfectly good perl loader for a large data file we'd bring in every night. They decided to kill it off and go with BusinessWorks instead. BW took 45 times longer (I shit you not -- 45 minutes instead of 1 minute) and broke every week. We finally got sick of the support issues and went back to perl.
Fact is that shiny pointy clicky just introduces complexity and additional points of failure into the infrastructure. If you want the latest buzzwords, then by all means, go with shiny pointy clicky. If you want your system to work, keep it with tried and true.
This has been said ad nauseum: There's nothing inherent about perl that makes its programs unmaintainable or broken. It's all about getting programmers who know how to write maintainable, well-designed code. A bad programmer can make an abortion of any programming language or fancy pointy clicky system.
Consumer boxes don't have to support ipv6. The home router boxes everyone has and the isps give out nowadays can do the ipv6 on the internet and still dole out ipv4 addresses internally.
For those who want all the benefits of ip6, click a radio button that tells the router to assign ip6 addresses from the isp and disable nat. You can still use the router as a firewall, so it's not like it's useless at that point.
Want a financial incentive for the isp's? Here you go: you know all those router boxes you're giving out? You can replace them with switches or just tell the customer to buy a switch. They only need a router if they're using an old OS. That's quite a lot of savings, I'd think.
That's not to mention the helpdesk support costs caused by people fighting with nat to make their games or voip apps work. It also simplifies the setup for isps who want to offer voip as a service as well.
So there you go. Cost savings and easier to offer new products without nat-related headaches.
Lack of incentive in this case is very much a failure to "think outside the box" and realize the potential.
This just bit me in the ass a couple weeks ago. Debian/Ubuntu don't symlink to bash, which is what I'd assumed. They symlink to "dash" -- a stripped-down shell where stuff you expect to work doesn't.
For the life of me I couldn't figure out why my perfectly valid bash one-liner in my crontab wouldn't work. Some Googling and cursing Debian later, and/bin/sh ->/bin/bash, and my cron jobs are working as expected.
Now, someone can disagree with me here, and I know you will. The stated purpose of this change is performance gains. Really? Performance gains on shell scripts that rarely go over a couple hundred lines and do all the grunt work in other utilities?
I'm sure someone came up with a benchmark showing how dash is 100x faster than bash, but in real-world examples, I have to doubt there's any noticeable difference. That said, all the time saved by dash running faster was lost completely when I had to waste my time figuring out what in the hell was wrong with cron.
It's an interesting idea, but what happens when you lose the file? Basically you are up the proverbial creek with no way back.
I don't think that's necessarily a show stopper. All systems have ways of resetting the password. For companies, the corporate helpdesk can set it to a known value and have the user change it at next login. For your linux desktop, just boot up with the S kernel option.
People lose/forget passwords all the time. Helpdesks have dedicated call queues just for that occasion.
I have a fingerprint scanner on my computer which uses libpam-thinkfinger (IIRC) to log me into my desktop session. You'd think the complexity was all the possible permutations of the lines and ridges on my finger, but really, it's just 1 in 10.
Well, it used to be 1 in 11, but I had that fixed.:-)
I don't understand this very well, so someone who does please chime in.
Switches use your ethernet card's MAC address (not IP) to know how to route ethernet frames on across the switch. It knows that MAC AB:CD:EF:etc is on port 1, and 12:34:56:etc is on port 2. Because you can daisy chain switches, it actually has to remember a many MACs to 1 port sort of mapping.
Switches can only remember a finite number of MAC addresses, so if you overflow the memory of the switch with bogus MAC addresses, it fails over to hub mode and just broadcasts all the packets to all the ports. It's not pretty, and would cause the network to get slower, but at least it would continue to work.
As I can't see hubs being used at a Black Hat conference, I'd guess this is the sort of thing the reporters did. I'm sure there's a name for it... probably "ARP Cache Smashing" or something, but I don't know it.
Anyway, if someone can give a better explanation, I'd be grateful.
Because they're a monopoly, they didn't care to fix it until a newspaper came along with a bag of bad publicity in tow. If there were other options, the customer could have gone with a competitor with more willingness to resolve the problem.
Monopoly status didn't cause the problem, but it did cause a delay in the resolution. They suggested he change his name rather than fix the problem with the computer. Does that sound like the suggestion of someone who's worried about losing customers?
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest problem with this primordial soup idea is not that some some variation of a simple cell could form accidentally, it's that it would form accidentally and have all of the facilities necessary to reproduce itself. How did an essentially random mass of crap acquire the ability to replicate itself? Wouldn't that be a very early requirement, before the tumultuous environment split that thing apart again?
It's funny, I read these long "well it could have", and "then maybe with enough time" and "if the conditions were just right...", and to be honest, I see grasping at straws. While some of it explains how the first one might form accidentally, it doesn't explain how the random chemicals begin acting in concert to reproduce and carry out the metabolic functions of even the simplest cell.
Why does a cell metabolize anything? Why doesn't it just sit there and wait for its current supply of chemical reactions to finish, and then just go inert and dry up? You can say this behavior is happenstance, but it's a pretty fortunate one. Unlike evolution, it doesn't have the deus ex machina of millions of years to rely upon. This sort of thing has to happen exactly right or it doesn't work.
So once you've got a cell with the ability to metabolize outside chemicals and expel the resulting metabolic products, this thing has to be able to make more of itself or wind up a curiosity in the dark, blank history of the universe.
How do even these two complex events happen to coincide and form the simplest cells?
Until I see it done by random processes in an experiment designed to mimic early earth, I think random biogenesis takes as much faith as saying "God did it." It may appeal to scientifically-minded people more, but you must realize that it sounds no more likely to people you're trying to convince. It's still just a lot of hmm and uhhhh and wild-ass guessing.
I'm not saying that evolution doesn't exist, but how did it get started? I've asked this question before, and have never received a convincing reply that wasn't based on the assumption of unlikely events.
"Oh, well RNA formed..." Great! Then what? What is it about RNA versus water or dirt that makes the surrounding environment automatically want to transcode and replicate it? What sets it apart from the rest of the junk heap?
Oh! Then lipids formed around it... Thereby cutting it off from anything in its environment that would randomly transcode it?
Where did all of the other organelles of the simplest cell come from? How did it happen that these organelles can be replicated and pushed into a copy of the cell using nothing but an unguided process and random material from outside the cell?
The point is that you don't get to be all hand-wavy if you want the truth, and that's what I see. Lots of hand waving, which is exactly what you complain about with Creationists.
I'm obviously not a biologist, but I do work in IT. Necessarily, that means I'm especially sensitive to hand-waving, and that I've honed my ability to see when people are talking out of their asses. You don't want me to think God did it? Great, show me something:
So, until I see better, here's my model of the universe:
In that scenario, science would study the "how", but could never study the guiding forces behind it. I have no doubt that biogenesis happened, and that at some point conditions were right for it. What I'm saying is that I don't think it was an accident.
Then what *do* they have in that thing? A Cuisinart?!
Nice troll, and I normally wouldn't respond to it, but many of the "smart" people here tend to cling to anything that reinforces their prejudices.
The central point of Ecclesiastes is that what you achieve here doesn't matter in the grand scheme of eternity. Training and education are useful for a short time, but you're still going to die. What good is it to you then?
No, the author of this is generally held to be among the wisest people who ever lived, and his other writings stress that education and wisdom are indeed important to your Earthly life. However, he tries to put it into perspective with eternity and the idea of an eternal, all-knowing God.
So like I said, nice troll. I give it a +1 bigoted and +3 ignorant.
You don't seem to understand "wealth" verses "high salary". Wealthy people are those who don't think of money in terms of how much they make per year because it's irrelevant. They're the guys who track their "net worth", not their yearly income.
Bill Gates is "wealthy". Warren Buffett is "wealthy". The trader down the hall may have a nice house, car, and some money in the bank account, but he's not wealthy. If he was wealthy, his job would be optional, much like Gates' and Buffett's has been for years. They do that stuff cuz they like it and they chose to, not because they have to. That trader would be in dire straights after 6 months of unemployment. That's not wealthy.
You're defining people with nice salaries as wealthy, but I'm telling you that if they're living on their salary, they're not wealthy. The people who are wealthy you probably know by name.
Take a look here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=wealthy&x=0&y=0
The word "wealthy" carries with it the idea of overabundance, "not merely rich, but loaded", to quote the dictionary.com page.
The people you are talking about might be considered "rich", but you'd be surprised how fast they can tumble because they're still dependent on their jobs for income. The "wealthy" have money coming in through no action of their own, many times old money. Think Paris Hilton and the other trust fund types.
Do you see the distinction I'm trying to make? You're saying you want to tax the wealthy, but then take away from someone's salary. The two statements don't jive.
The one constant in the human condition is greed. There's no such thing as an idealized system, and if a market for waste gases is created, it *will* be manipulated to suit the needs of the investors.
That's why some people are pushing for it so hard. Don't be fooled, the basis of this CO2 credit market idea is about making money at the expense of industry, and ultimately, the public at large. It is NOT a legitimate solution to the problem, if such a problem exists at all.
This is one of those ideas where the AGW crowd shows their true colors and reveals what's really behind the hype and hysteria. It's all about socialism, power consolidation, and money.
Think about this economically. You are trading a commodity, but this isn't a standard commodity where scarcity of resources limits the supply. This is an artificially created commodity where nothing more substantial than words determine the supply. If the person in charge decides that he can make money by creating more credits to sell, what's to stop him? His honesty, integrity, and desire to save the planet? Forgive me if I'm skeptical, but you're essentially giving yet another person a license to print money and impose additional taxes on industry and the public at large.
Selling CO2, selling O2...
Don't you guys listen to yourselves? On one hand you talk about how corrupt and evil corporations are, and how all the ills of the world are caused by lobbyists, and on the other hand you want to create YET ANOTHER multi-trillion dollar market and have YET ANOTHER lobbyist in DC lobbying for Big Oxygen or Big CO2?
What if, in the future after you've created your trillion-dollar market selling artificial commodities you find that shit, we made a mistake, and we need to stop doing whatever it is we're doing -- increasing O2, decreasing CO2, etc. Do you think that this trillion dollar market will just give up and self-terminate at the first utterance of your intellectual brilliance?
Do you even think past the first step?
** Election season, so modded troll in 3..2..1...
Wasn't there an incident last year where NASA was corrected by an independent climatologist because they'd made some basic error in normalizing their data?
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody has motives.
To the guy who says not to assume climate scientists are idiots: I don't think they're idiots, but I allow for the possibility (probability?) that they're missing something. In addition, I make no assumptions about their motives, given the politically charged issue at hand.
Exactly. The same people who complain that the gap between the lower and upper classes is widening are frequently the same people advocating the destruction of the middle class through taxation. There was a time I would have said "Democrats" or "Liberals" here, but nowadays it seems to be everyone except the Libertarians.
Next time a politician says "tax the wealthy", take a look at who the "wealthy" are. Most of the time they're people who are doing okay, but not by any means secure in that position and can easily be brought down. There are very few people in this country who can lose 5% of what they earn and not have their lives thrown into chaos.
But then, that's the dirty little secret of socialism, isn't it? Everyone is equal (equally poor) in socialist states, except the rich people in government who will have some sort of good excuse. In the meantime, all those middle or upper middle class people who could have started and grown small businesses are in poverty themselves. Bye bye job market, hello squalor. And if you think all of this will somehow end the tyranny of the wealthy, you're wrong. Socialism only increases the power of those who remain wealthy -- typically through means most would consider "unethical".
"He"? Dude, I'm never drinking 2% milk again. *shudder*
Is there a "666" in there somewhere" Maybe if you add up the letters just right.... What's the significance of the missing "nLa"? Is there a Nostradamus connection?
That's funny. Even more funny are the several comments that follow telling why Biden would be an idiotic choice for VP. I wonder if those same people suddenly changed their minds today? Gotta show your solidarity!
The sticking point is of course the fact that the major problem these beaten-down countries have is the corrupt government that runs them. Invasion and colonization at least gets them out of their own way.
I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that these countries probably won't improve much on their own. They're too much their own worst enemy. The citizens not only don't think they can personally improve it, they many times don't know that it can be improved to begin with.
Would you want electricity if you didn't know it exists? Or if you'd always done without it? Or even if you'd heard of it but never used it, would that be enough to make you risk your life to get it?
I'm not sure when computer programming became a "macho" activity, but whatever.
I've worked with shiny pointy clicky before this experience. I worked for a telecom a while back where I worked on their VRU. The programming interface was drag and drop icons that you'd fit together on a grid and fill in a properties sheet. Rows in the grid were a set of instructions, and branches with conditionals or gotos would take you to a different row on the grid.
Apart from the annoyance of having "code" that required constant horizontal scrolling, this system was also a constant source of problems. You couldn't tell what the thing was really doing under the hood, because all you had was essentially a spreadsheet with a bunch of pictures on it.
That's surprisingly difficult to debug. It looks like a kindergarten kid should be able to do it, but the trouble is that the lanugage hid too much from you. All "If" icons looked the same, and you had to double-click them to see what they were testing. All "Dial" icons looked the same, and you had to click on it to see what number it was calling. So debugging was a real bitch.
The real problems came in when there were system problems. For all of its abstraction and pointy clicky, this thing was or course, a Windows system. So now you're working on an operating system whose claim to fame is that it hides the complexity from the user. That's all well and good, but as a developer who's having hangs and reboots twice a day, I friggin want to see that complexity so I know where things are going wrong.
That particular problem, by the way, was caused by PC Anywhere causing the machine to bluescreen and reboot. Because it was a remote machine, we weren't able to see the blue screens, and only found out about them when our client had driven out to the remote site to reboot the box and was still standing there when it happened again. The guy only spoke spanish with broken English, but all it took was "It just turn blue".
Once we knew that, I turned on memory dumps, and found that the fault was caused by pcaw32.dll (or something along those lines). Replaced it with VNC, and all was well in the world.
It has nothing to do with macho. It has everything to do with the ability to get the job done and to fix it quickly when it breaks. Trying to figure out what the hell is happening underneath when I see a picture isn't conducive to making that happen. Even worse when the problem could be with the underlying system *or* with the program.
So do incompetence and consequences of bad decisions.
I did telecommuting for about 6 months. I loved it, no doubt, and wish I could do it again.
Some notes from the experience:
* wife/kids initially respect the boundaries, but it very soon becomes real effort to maintain them.
* wife realized what I actualy do for a living. Got this gem several times: "why can't you go do XYZ? You're just sitting in front of the computer anyway.". WTF? Yes dear, I'm a computer programmer. Apparently she didn't realize it involved the computers.
* people can't figure out why daddy doesn't want to talk/play/whatever every 15 minutes. This turns into "you're ignoring me/us", to which the only answer is "well, I"m certainly trying, but you're making it pretty difficult."
Now, you may see those and think "Hah! See? There are too many distractions at home!" ... And you'd be totally ignoring what goes on in the office.
Office has bench-style desks where everyone sits side-by-side. The level of noise and commotion sometimes reaches the level of the absurd - especially around lunch time (between 12 and 2, as not everyone eats at the same time). The air conditioning vent is right over my head and makes an unholy racket. Every time I have to pee, it's a 5 minute walk.
Add into that 3 to 4 hours of travel every day, and the office just doesn't seem to have many advantages over working from home.
There are significant distractions in both places, but at least at home the distraction is my daughter giving me a hug or my son showing me what he did at school. Lots better than the inane chatter and insanity around the office.
That's not to mention the fact that my home office has a door that, while easily opened by the random interloper, does a much better job than the open layout office where there's never a moment's peace.
Which one's better? Truth is, they both suck, but working from home sucks a lot less.
By the way, I'm writing this at 10pm on the train on my way home. I got to the office 13 hours ago, left my house 15 hours ago, and won't be home for another hour. When I get home, there's another hour of work to do. If I worked from home, I could have done all that work, and still had a much shorter day. The office? No redeeming qualities as far as I can see.
I saw this in several of the people involved, where they overuse the word "just." Oh, why write loader scripts when we can just use business works? They get the impression that some tool suddenly makes the job into a no-brainer, non-event that can be done in fifteen minutes.
There are two big problems:
1. There is very seldom a "just" involved in data processing in large environments. Why? Because you have yourself a large, mature system that was not designed around the feed you're bringing in. You now need to adapt the vendor/client view of what this data is and convert into what your system's idea of it is.
Sometimes, yes, it's a simple bcp into a table, run a stock stored procedure, and you're done. In my experience, that doesn't happen very often. The load processes of the banks where I've worked are frequently complex and disjointed, and you're always going to wind up with custom code above and beyond what comes in the box with these ETL tools. Do they save a few steps? Potentially, but they're the simple steps that you could have done easily and with better performance.
2 When managers think something is going to be easy, they make promises that their people have a hard time keeping. In my professional career, I am always careful not to use the word "just", because it usually means I'm glossing over something. As we all know, the devil's in the details, and that's where your stress levels go up, and your projects go over time and over budget. This tends to make people think I'm overcomplicating things, but the problem is really that they are oversimplifying.
So really, the problem becomes cultural as well.
At my last job, I wrote a perfectly good perl loader for a large data file we'd bring in every night. They decided to kill it off and go with BusinessWorks instead. BW took 45 times longer (I shit you not -- 45 minutes instead of 1 minute) and broke every week. We finally got sick of the support issues and went back to perl.
Fact is that shiny pointy clicky just introduces complexity and additional points of failure into the infrastructure. If you want the latest buzzwords, then by all means, go with shiny pointy clicky. If you want your system to work, keep it with tried and true.
This has been said ad nauseum: There's nothing inherent about perl that makes its programs unmaintainable or broken. It's all about getting programmers who know how to write maintainable, well-designed code. A bad programmer can make an abortion of any programming language or fancy pointy clicky system.
Consumer boxes don't have to support ipv6. The home router boxes everyone has and the isps give out nowadays can do the ipv6 on the internet and still dole out ipv4 addresses internally.
For those who want all the benefits of ip6, click a radio button that tells the router to assign ip6 addresses from the isp and disable nat. You can still use the router as a firewall, so it's not like it's useless at that point.
Want a financial incentive for the isp's? Here you go: you know all those router boxes you're giving out? You can replace them with switches or just tell the customer to buy a switch. They only need a router if they're using an old OS. That's quite a lot of savings, I'd think.
That's not to mention the helpdesk support costs caused by people fighting with nat to make their games or voip apps work. It also simplifies the setup for isps who want to offer voip as a service as well.
So there you go. Cost savings and easier to offer new products without nat-related headaches.
Lack of incentive in this case is very much a failure to "think outside the box" and realize the potential.
This just bit me in the ass a couple weeks ago. Debian/Ubuntu don't symlink to bash, which is what I'd assumed. They symlink to "dash" -- a stripped-down shell where stuff you expect to work doesn't.
For the life of me I couldn't figure out why my perfectly valid bash one-liner in my crontab wouldn't work. Some Googling and cursing Debian later, and /bin/sh -> /bin/bash, and my cron jobs are working as expected.
Now, someone can disagree with me here, and I know you will. The stated purpose of this change is performance gains. Really? Performance gains on shell scripts that rarely go over a couple hundred lines and do all the grunt work in other utilities?
I'm sure someone came up with a benchmark showing how dash is 100x faster than bash, but in real-world examples, I have to doubt there's any noticeable difference. That said, all the time saved by dash running faster was lost completely when I had to waste my time figuring out what in the hell was wrong with cron.
Grr.
</rant>
It's okay. They're still more secure than the passwords on the Post-It note taped to the back.
/ I kid, I kid...
It's an interesting idea, but what happens when you lose the file? Basically you are up the proverbial creek with no way back.
I don't think that's necessarily a show stopper. All systems have ways of resetting the password. For companies, the corporate helpdesk can set it to a known value and have the user change it at next login. For your linux desktop, just boot up with the S kernel option.
People lose/forget passwords all the time. Helpdesks have dedicated call queues just for that occasion.
I have a fingerprint scanner on my computer which uses libpam-thinkfinger (IIRC) to log me into my desktop session. You'd think the complexity was all the possible permutations of the lines and ridges on my finger, but really, it's just 1 in 10.
Well, it used to be 1 in 11, but I had that fixed. :-)
I don't understand this very well, so someone who does please chime in.
Switches use your ethernet card's MAC address (not IP) to know how to route ethernet frames on across the switch. It knows that MAC AB:CD:EF:etc is on port 1, and 12:34:56:etc is on port 2. Because you can daisy chain switches, it actually has to remember a many MACs to 1 port sort of mapping.
Switches can only remember a finite number of MAC addresses, so if you overflow the memory of the switch with bogus MAC addresses, it fails over to hub mode and just broadcasts all the packets to all the ports. It's not pretty, and would cause the network to get slower, but at least it would continue to work.
As I can't see hubs being used at a Black Hat conference, I'd guess this is the sort of thing the reporters did. I'm sure there's a name for it... probably "ARP Cache Smashing" or something, but I don't know it.
Anyway, if someone can give a better explanation, I'd be grateful.
Because they're a monopoly, they didn't care to fix it until a newspaper came along with a bag of bad publicity in tow. If there were other options, the customer could have gone with a competitor with more willingness to resolve the problem.
Monopoly status didn't cause the problem, but it did cause a delay in the resolution. They suggested he change his name rather than fix the problem with the computer. Does that sound like the suggestion of someone who's worried about losing customers?
I'm more than willing to go Godwin on you. Don't make me go Godwin.
I think you just meta-Godwinned the thread. Nice twist. :-)