My CompSci department at Uni has an online hand-in system - when I registered, it wouldn't let me log in with the details I had entered. I did the recover my password link, and it sent me my password, truncated to 12 characters, in plaintext. So not only did they not limit the text field or warn me about the over-length password, but then they stored it in plain text. A Computer Science department made this. Isn't that encouraging? (Disclaimer: They have changed the system now).
The way passwords are handled in general is appalling - a major supermarket here in the UK emails you your password in plaintext if you say you forgot it. The fact they have it in plaintext is disgusting.
I'm not surprised security isn't strong - given the Virgin Media (ISP) account puts a 10 character limit on your password. Seriously. 10 is woefully short as a maximum.
It's funny, when I used to buy graphics cards, I bought nVidia because the driver was that much better - TwinView meant good multi-monitor support, etc... Now all that has changed. I replaced two nVidia cards with an AMD card, because AMD support their Eyefinity tech even on low-end cards, and my triple monitor setup works perfectly with 3D acceleration on the open drivers, which means I get KMS and no binary blobs. By comparison, I had to use xinerama to get triple monitors with the nVidia driver, no KMS, no 3D acceleration.
It's obvious what we want, open source drivers. If they can't handle that, documentation, but we all know they'll spout the same stuff about NDAs and 3rd party stuff they are licensing and can't reveal, and tell us binary blobs are the only way - well, I don't buy it. Intel manage it well, and AMD are definitely getting there. Binary blobs just don't give the experience any more, that's the reality.
Get experience. Internships and jobs are not the only way. Open source software, personal projects (the two can overlap a lot), do whatever you want. Just write code if you want to get good at it. Get on StackOverflow and ask/answer questions (once you have the relevant knowledge).
If you can talk about programming well, show you truly understand it, then people will know you are capable. To be honest, you'll learn more doing that than doing your degree, if you do it right. The internet is a great resource.
I did this before I went to Uni, and - I don't want to brag, but to show I am not just saying it with nothing to back myself up - I am 2 years in, having gotten firsts both years, and have an internship at IBM for the summer. With no prior experience working for a company (not even non-relevant experience). If you can learn and show you are capable, it's not a barrier.
The Bartimaeus books are great, among my favourite reads to this day. The are refreshingly different, and extremely interesting. Definitely worth a read for anyone, kids or not (the later books mature a little).
Then deal with those breaches of the law. What about people like me who havn't discriminated against anyone? You don't raise a universal punishment (which is what affirmative action is, make no mistake - it punishes some people by rewarding others) for a crime some people commit, you deal with the people who break the law. If I run a company and I have to hire a sub-par candidate because of affirmative action, I've been punished. If I go for a job and don't get it because I'm a white male, I've been punished. That is not right. Yes, discrimination is wrong on every account, and it's disgusting it still exists (here in the UK I see and hear of a lot less of it than you appear to believe happens in America, which is something to be thankful for), but that's exactly why we shouldn't be encouraging discrimination in another form.
That's not a good analogy. It's relatively easy to tell who is a victim of Katrina. Affirmative action is roughly equivalent to finding you have a problem with knife crime in gangs, so you give rival gangs guns to try and kill them off. If you want to right the wrong, right the wrong, don't apply another vague layer of wrong on top and hope it roughly balences out.
The open drivers are pretty good for ATI cards these days, and all newish (past 5xxx series) cards with at least one DP port (or an internal adaptor) support on-the-card multi-monitor stuff, which is pretty nice.
Because the nVidia driver forces you to a trade off. If you want KMS, you can't use it, and KMS is a much better experience for the end-user, which nVidia should care about if they want me to buy their graphics cards (interestingly, I've got an ATI card on the way right now because they support my triple monitor setup under Linux in a much, much better way than nVidia do).
The difference is that affermative action is endorsed and allowed. You are *not* allowed to be favourable to white male candidates (rightfully so). However, because some people believe that two wrongs make a right, you are allowed to do the whole affirmative action rubbish. We should be capable of better than having a knee-jerk reaction to do the exact opposite of what we were doing before.
Maybe people should stop with the affirmative action stuff then. It's bad for everyone. People should get jobs based on their ability to do the job, nothing more, nothing less. Affirmative action ruins that by potentially employing someone who is worse for the job just because of their gender, race, etc... and making everyone second guess that person's appointment.
What you are describing is more akin to a pepper - a single value stored code-side that is appended to all data (the idea being if only the database is compromised (SQL injection, for example), your passwords are incredibly long and virtually impossible to brute-force in the foreseable future.
Salts, on the other hand, want to be an individual value for each password, stored in the database. This means that if someone is brute forcing your database, it becomes a magnitude harder. Not only does it stop rainbow tables, but it also stops the attacker using one attack against the entire database. A single salt stops rainbow tables, but you can brute force the entire database at once (generate a value with salt, check against every hash in database, repeat) - as opposed to having to brute force each record individually - making it a significantly larger effort.
Crap. This is a classic argument that falls down. Let me spell it out for you.
Your argument: The customer can:
1. Pay $x and get the product.
2. Pay $0 and get the product illegally.
The reality: The customer can:
1. Pay $x and get the product, in a medium they don't want, with adverts, in some areas a long time after it's come out, etc...
2. Pay $0 and get the product easily and instantly, illegally.
Yes. There are some people who will pirate something regardless of what you do. The reality is that most people, given the opportunity to get something good in a form they want for a reasonable price will jump on it (Steam, Good old Games, Louis C.K., etc... have proved this). Most of those that do end up pirating are kids who probably couldn't afford it anyway (who later become paying fans), or people who wouldn't pay for it whatever. I'm not saying there are not sales lost to piracy, but there are far, far more lost to giving us content in a rubbish way for too much. Inconvinience us and of course we'll take it for free without the inconvinience. Not only that, but you are giving people a way to justify it to themselves morally.
You might want to check out RubyMine. I've never used it myself (not a Ruby person), but I'm a big fan of PyCharm, JetBrain's Python offering, which is excellent, so I imagine it would also be very good.
YouTube is not run by the government - they are free to pick and choose what they want to display as they see fit. If you don't like it, feel free to set up same-sex-marriage-bashing-tube.
Ha ha ha oh wow, you still go to the cinema? Because what I really want is to pay loads of money to pay insane money for food and drink, then get crammed into uncomfortable seats for the cinema experience (some kid behind you asking 'who that is' every time anyone who isn't the main character comes on-screen). Piracy isn't killing cinema, cinemas are.
Just because there is the vague potential of something being true doesn't mean you believe it to be true. I can't prove a god didn't create everything, that doesn't prove he did. As to the big bang theory, no, we don't know why a big bang would happen in the first place. What does support it is background radiation, the expansion of space, etc... We can observe these things, which fit in with a big bang.
Yes, it is a theory, because we don't know. It's better to admit that than make up a god and say that he did it. Proove that a god did. The big bang theory fits the evidence and makes sense, that's far better than 'god'.
The fact that I exist doesn't prove the existance of a god. That's like saying a polished stone on the beach proves the existance of a guy polishing stones. The reality is it could easily just be a stone smoothed by natural proceses in the sea.
Slashdot Mirror
My CompSci department at Uni has an online hand-in system - when I registered, it wouldn't let me log in with the details I had entered. I did the recover my password link, and it sent me my password, truncated to 12 characters, in plaintext. So not only did they not limit the text field or warn me about the over-length password, but then they stored it in plain text. A Computer Science department made this. Isn't that encouraging? (Disclaimer: They have changed the system now).
The way passwords are handled in general is appalling - a major supermarket here in the UK emails you your password in plaintext if you say you forgot it. The fact they have it in plaintext is disgusting.
I'm not surprised security isn't strong - given the Virgin Media (ISP) account puts a 10 character limit on your password. Seriously. 10 is woefully short as a maximum.
Did you consider not saying anything then?
It's funny, when I used to buy graphics cards, I bought nVidia because the driver was that much better - TwinView meant good multi-monitor support, etc... Now all that has changed. I replaced two nVidia cards with an AMD card, because AMD support their Eyefinity tech even on low-end cards, and my triple monitor setup works perfectly with 3D acceleration on the open drivers, which means I get KMS and no binary blobs. By comparison, I had to use xinerama to get triple monitors with the nVidia driver, no KMS, no 3D acceleration.
It's obvious what we want, open source drivers. If they can't handle that, documentation, but we all know they'll spout the same stuff about NDAs and 3rd party stuff they are licensing and can't reveal, and tell us binary blobs are the only way - well, I don't buy it. Intel manage it well, and AMD are definitely getting there. Binary blobs just don't give the experience any more, that's the reality.
Get experience. Internships and jobs are not the only way. Open source software, personal projects (the two can overlap a lot), do whatever you want. Just write code if you want to get good at it. Get on StackOverflow and ask/answer questions (once you have the relevant knowledge).
If you can talk about programming well, show you truly understand it, then people will know you are capable. To be honest, you'll learn more doing that than doing your degree, if you do it right. The internet is a great resource.
I did this before I went to Uni, and - I don't want to brag, but to show I am not just saying it with nothing to back myself up - I am 2 years in, having gotten firsts both years, and have an internship at IBM for the summer. With no prior experience working for a company (not even non-relevant experience). If you can learn and show you are capable, it's not a barrier.
The Bartimaeus books are great, among my favourite reads to this day. The are refreshingly different, and extremely interesting. Definitely worth a read for anyone, kids or not (the later books mature a little).
Then deal with those breaches of the law. What about people like me who havn't discriminated against anyone? You don't raise a universal punishment (which is what affirmative action is, make no mistake - it punishes some people by rewarding others) for a crime some people commit, you deal with the people who break the law. If I run a company and I have to hire a sub-par candidate because of affirmative action, I've been punished. If I go for a job and don't get it because I'm a white male, I've been punished. That is not right. Yes, discrimination is wrong on every account, and it's disgusting it still exists (here in the UK I see and hear of a lot less of it than you appear to believe happens in America, which is something to be thankful for), but that's exactly why we shouldn't be encouraging discrimination in another form.
That's not a good analogy. It's relatively easy to tell who is a victim of Katrina. Affirmative action is roughly equivalent to finding you have a problem with knife crime in gangs, so you give rival gangs guns to try and kill them off. If you want to right the wrong, right the wrong, don't apply another vague layer of wrong on top and hope it roughly balences out.
The open drivers are pretty good for ATI cards these days, and all newish (past 5xxx series) cards with at least one DP port (or an internal adaptor) support on-the-card multi-monitor stuff, which is pretty nice.
Because the nVidia driver forces you to a trade off. If you want KMS, you can't use it, and KMS is a much better experience for the end-user, which nVidia should care about if they want me to buy their graphics cards (interestingly, I've got an ATI card on the way right now because they support my triple monitor setup under Linux in a much, much better way than nVidia do).
The difference is that affermative action is endorsed and allowed. You are *not* allowed to be favourable to white male candidates (rightfully so). However, because some people believe that two wrongs make a right, you are allowed to do the whole affirmative action rubbish. We should be capable of better than having a knee-jerk reaction to do the exact opposite of what we were doing before.
Maybe people should stop with the affirmative action stuff then. It's bad for everyone. People should get jobs based on their ability to do the job, nothing more, nothing less. Affirmative action ruins that by potentially employing someone who is worse for the job just because of their gender, race, etc... and making everyone second guess that person's appointment.
What you are describing is more akin to a pepper - a single value stored code-side that is appended to all data (the idea being if only the database is compromised (SQL injection, for example), your passwords are incredibly long and virtually impossible to brute-force in the foreseable future.
Salts, on the other hand, want to be an individual value for each password, stored in the database. This means that if someone is brute forcing your database, it becomes a magnitude harder. Not only does it stop rainbow tables, but it also stops the attacker using one attack against the entire database. A single salt stops rainbow tables, but you can brute force the entire database at once (generate a value with salt, check against every hash in database, repeat) - as opposed to having to brute force each record individually - making it a significantly larger effort.
Crap. This is a classic argument that falls down. Let me spell it out for you.
Your argument: The customer can:
The reality: The customer can:
Yes. There are some people who will pirate something regardless of what you do. The reality is that most people, given the opportunity to get something good in a form they want for a reasonable price will jump on it (Steam, Good old Games, Louis C.K., etc... have proved this). Most of those that do end up pirating are kids who probably couldn't afford it anyway (who later become paying fans), or people who wouldn't pay for it whatever. I'm not saying there are not sales lost to piracy, but there are far, far more lost to giving us content in a rubbish way for too much. Inconvinience us and of course we'll take it for free without the inconvinience. Not only that, but you are giving people a way to justify it to themselves morally.
You might want to check out RubyMine. I've never used it myself (not a Ruby person), but I'm a big fan of PyCharm, JetBrain's Python offering, which is excellent, so I imagine it would also be very good.
YouTube is not run by the government - they are free to pick and choose what they want to display as they see fit. If you don't like it, feel free to set up same-sex-marriage-bashing-tube.
The Pirate Party UK is hosting a mirror (or acting as a proxy, not sure which): http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
Ha ha ha oh wow, you still go to the cinema? Because what I really want is to pay loads of money to pay insane money for food and drink, then get crammed into uncomfortable seats for the cinema experience (some kid behind you asking 'who that is' every time anyone who isn't the main character comes on-screen). Piracy isn't killing cinema, cinemas are.
Just everyone do it, and in a few months, everyone will have forgotten this insane thing and be used to it.
Just because there is the vague potential of something being true doesn't mean you believe it to be true. I can't prove a god didn't create everything, that doesn't prove he did. As to the big bang theory, no, we don't know why a big bang would happen in the first place. What does support it is background radiation, the expansion of space, etc... We can observe these things, which fit in with a big bang.
Yes, it is a theory, because we don't know. It's better to admit that than make up a god and say that he did it. Proove that a god did. The big bang theory fits the evidence and makes sense, that's far better than 'god'.
OK, so say we follow this all the way back to the big bang, what do you say? That God then did that? Why. Why believe a god did it?
The fact that I exist doesn't prove the existance of a god. That's like saying a polished stone on the beach proves the existance of a guy polishing stones. The reality is it could easily just be a stone smoothed by natural proceses in the sea.
I don't know why I exist (beyond the obvious, my parents had me stuff).