"who after the 2008 RNC convention was worse than Ming the Merciless accroding to the same people who wrote the glowing articles about her not one month ago..."
"All we need is an idiot-proof box for the living room so that grandma can surf all these channels with her "clicker" and we'll forget there ever was such a thing as cable tv."
Right on. JM is a lame duck, though he probably doesn't yet know it.
He's taking to avoiding the true conservative constituents, however, which is a good plan. He may as well spend the next 3 years in peace and solitude. No point in getting all riled up.
The ads used to say "'system administrator", "desktop support", "server", "application", etc.
And then the nice to have skills: "html", "java", "CMS", "web".
Why did I not get hired? Even though I can wrangle a CMS, and figure out a lot of stuff hosed up on a site, I cannot re-write the offending jsp and get things running again unless it is a glaring syntax error. So though I know my way around the Microsoft office systems environment, can bring servers up reliably, and keep the joint running, what they wanted was 60% sysadmin and 40% web developer, with the emphasis on the web development despite the alleged share of time.
And they want to pay cheap sysadmin pay while they suck the web developer's time at the expense of really nailing down the network.
Of course employers want more for less. The lie is that you can't find people that can do it all, because you've grown accustomed to average sysadmin skills (and possibly average web dev skills also) but think you will get a bargain with two average skills sets in one salary.
Yeah, and the idea of my tax preparer moonlighting from their day job pretending to be a plumber is funny too. Not impossible, just improbable, and they weren't that good a plumber to start.
There isn't any fundamental difference between hardware and software engineering. It was never engineering, my friend.
And the robots will need what? Oh yeah. Software. Commodity hardware will make robots both affordable and worth the software for widespread use. Just like the personal computer made computing useful for widespread use.
I've done this for more than a decade. I first heard about this in database development, seeding the subscription table, for instance, with fake subscribers to both test that delivery was made ( I and my address was one of the fakes) and to catch thieves using the list. Virtually every mailing list I've handled has had trap users in it. Every mail server I've built has had traps in it both to verify spam and catch the thieves.
This is virtually BAU for me and my fellow admins on servers that we maintain. Trap users and such are very handy. I usually have a few users with no shell or anything on the server(s) just to catch this, and log analyzers that watch and report.
And I expect we'll get pwned again some day. It used to be script kiddies pretending to be ninjas haxrs, but nowadays it's mostly random attackers that hate me, or generic botnet and compromisers by the tens of thousands. Sometimes I would rather not run a mail server.
Fortunately, the last few times we've had trouble, I was able to trace back close to the offenders. The university network guys were marginally interested, but the ISP in the southeastern US took action. I don't expect them to do that again, so I just watch and wait.
But trap users, seeding honeywords, very good ideas.
Those were never problems introduced by us. Teaching programming with network libraries was asking for trouble. Not that Windows Server 2000 was safe from them either, but the three that re-wrote the GINA received my full measure of wrathful judgement. I nearly told the administration it was them or me. Didn't come to that, one of their parent was savvy enough to understand.
My first Algebra teacher was uninterested, and my work showed it. My second one was very interested, and my work showed that.
Not one single English teacher I had in high school was the least bit interesting, so I muddled through. But my Geometry teacher was fabulous, my American History teacher even more so, and my Drafting teacher par excellence. My Earth Science teacher similarly. My French teacher was also. these subjects I did well in.
World History was taught by an old teacher who was as engaging as a cowpie. Biology taught by an energetic but scatterbrained teacher that left me behind in the first quarter and I never caught up. Chemistry was taught to me at the level of repeating steps in the textbook, and other than our legendary team experiment that evacuated the entire school, I was bored and uninvolved. Making chlorine gas seems to be a dangerous proposition for some reason...
But I would have recommended only the first Algebra teacher be fired, and she was actually, though not on my account.
And trust me, you do NOT see the time teachers put in off-hours, away from school. My wife teaches choir and spends a lot of time during the summer, at night, weekends working on curriculum and activities. While tests and such for choir are mostly selfedge and other concepts long since worked out entirely, and some subjects need similarly less updating yearly than others, being in the IT business is very very different than being in education. I try to explain to my wife that if choir was like IT, every three years she would be learning new scales, tossing out 90% of her music and learning new constructs, and learning new instruments as the old ones were obsoleted. She doesn't understand that either, but the principles of good teaching persist. Or they should.
The last high school I supported, they had the brilliant (BRILLIANT!) idea of teaching programming using Turbo Pascal. And they included the network libraries in it.
Using Novell, the school suffered an escalating fight with the kids. First they faked a login screen. then they hacked the GINA and got it installed on all the machines in the lab. Then they ran a password sniffer at boot.
Then I convinced the administration to let me use the same techniques. Installed some boot time code to catch these nasties, searched and found the source code, and identified the miscreants. We applauded their efforts, hired one on as a part-time assistant, and warned the others that future incidents would result in escalating punishments. One did get back into school, but the others were banned from the lab for their junior year.
Next semester we deployed ZenWorks, images, and a lot of policies. No matter how they tried, if a station was logged in with a staff ID, the screen bakcground was red. Easy to spot.
Pretty talented kids. Their escapades getting browser access kept me busy for a few weeks. Fun times.
IIRC, in Vegas gaming machine makers are required to write code that doesn't overtly cheat the gambler. As in, if the jackpot reaches astronomical size, the machine doesn't change the odds UNLESS that is the game, and everyone knows it. Which for video slots is not the game. the odds are supposed to stay the same.
Haven't there been some court cases over whether software bugs could be used to recover unexpected winnings, after the gaming commission certified that the software was fair?
Oh. This, and an example of the casino, saying 'sorry, mistake, no jackpot for you'. the comments for this story include references to some classic 'outs', like disclaimers etc.
EVERY 'professional' poker player I know (ok, both, but they are family) claim poker is not a game of chance or luck, but one of skill. They don't play against the house, or a machine, or even on the outcome of a chance event, but rather they pay against other individuals, across the table from them. And they match skill against skill, they say.
That's their story. Poker can reward luck, apparently, but they don't claim to be lucky. Even when they draw an inside straight, they claim they used skill to get into a position to win.
If you disagree, I can't give you their numbers. They will scoff at you and hang up. And you will be angry. Pass.
Actually, when someone got impressed with the OP article and the $125k transaction. I wanted to point out that even $30M is not unheard of. I've processed larger. For an individual account, transactions over $5M would be notable.
Some banks charge fees for deposits. Some of their clients insist on payment by Corporate Card for various reasons, some of their clients may say terms are net 30-90 or by corp card 1-3 days.
There are no 'one off' agreements like that at Amex. Period.
However, terms and conditions are permitted for merchant charges, and the one noted above are not uncommon. It brecomes a tug of war between the implicit contract between merchant and cardholder, and performance.
Somewhere between 2% and 4%. Probably 2.8-3.1% And they got a promise of payment better than a paper check. In this case, better than the willingness of the cardholder to pay.
In case you're wondering, this seems like a case where Amex is doing what it would ordinarily do - cardholder agreed to to terms of the Salesforce contract. But, I wonder if he really did, in which case he may prevail eventually. His employer may yet be on the hook directly to Salesforce. Certainly Mr. Furlong has a case against his employer.
Your Amex card, if not blue, has a limit that is dependent on may factors, but is not a pre-set, fixed limit. You may find that if you call in and ask, you're able to charge against it beyind what you expect. Any 'limit' is based on history, your creditworthiness, and other factors. You may NOT have to call in to process a charge against it that would seem to exceed any apparent limits. Amex explains this fairly well.
Blue cards (and you know if you have one) are more limited, but the available credit you may see on your statement may well not be a fixed limit.
I'm betting Mr.Furlong has a non-blue card, and his limit was not hard and fast. And while I see the details of the case as common, it is unfortunate. Mr. Furlong's error was in not getting payment from his employer immediately, and was an easy one to make. He's in the middle.
" Considering how focused you have been on the red herring of getting a phone for practically nothing, yeah, you really do look that stupid." Your words, not mine.
Slashdot Mirror
"who after the 2008 RNC convention was worse than Ming the Merciless accroding to the same people who wrote the glowing articles about her not one month ago..."
Oh yeah, the RINOs. Yeah, we got that. Bigtime.
"Whats TV?"
It's this moving picture stuff your getting on your phone. You know, instead of actual content, and smaller than your older brother remembers.
"All we need is an idiot-proof box for the living room so that grandma can surf all these channels with her "clicker" and we'll forget there ever was such a thing as cable tv."
Oh, something we don't have now. Concept.
Right on. JM is a lame duck, though he probably doesn't yet know it.
He's taking to avoiding the true conservative constituents, however, which is a good plan. He may as well spend the next 3 years in peace and solitude. No point in getting all riled up.
"Some fatass executive will figure out a way to get rich off of it.. THEN it won't matter if it passed."
There, fixed that for ya.
As opposed to my consumer-grade-piece-of-shit environment called x86/linux, a lot like what powers /.
Right. Someone else built that.
No.
The ads used to say "'system administrator", "desktop support", "server", "application", etc.
And then the nice to have skills: "html", "java", "CMS", "web".
Why did I not get hired? Even though I can wrangle a CMS, and figure out a lot of stuff hosed up on a site, I cannot re-write the offending jsp and get things running again unless it is a glaring syntax error. So though I know my way around the Microsoft office systems environment, can bring servers up reliably, and keep the joint running, what they wanted was 60% sysadmin and 40% web developer, with the emphasis on the web development despite the alleged share of time.
And they want to pay cheap sysadmin pay while they suck the web developer's time at the expense of really nailing down the network.
Of course employers want more for less. The lie is that you can't find people that can do it all, because you've grown accustomed to average sysadmin skills (and possibly average web dev skills also) but think you will get a bargain with two average skills sets in one salary.
Yeah, and the idea of my tax preparer moonlighting from their day job pretending to be a plumber is funny too. Not impossible, just improbable, and they weren't that good a plumber to start.
There isn't any fundamental difference between hardware and software engineering. It was never engineering, my friend.
And the robots will need what? Oh yeah. Software. Commodity hardware will make robots both affordable and worth the software for widespread use. Just like the personal computer made computing useful for widespread use.
I've done this for more than a decade. I first heard about this in database development, seeding the subscription table, for instance, with fake subscribers to both test that delivery was made ( I and my address was one of the fakes) and to catch thieves using the list. Virtually every mailing list I've handled has had trap users in it. Every mail server I've built has had traps in it both to verify spam and catch the thieves.
This is virtually BAU for me and my fellow admins on servers that we maintain. Trap users and such are very handy. I usually have a few users with no shell or anything on the server(s) just to catch this, and log analyzers that watch and report.
And I expect we'll get pwned again some day. It used to be script kiddies pretending to be ninjas haxrs, but nowadays it's mostly random attackers that hate me, or generic botnet and compromisers by the tens of thousands. Sometimes I would rather not run a mail server.
Fortunately, the last few times we've had trouble, I was able to trace back close to the offenders. The university network guys were marginally interested, but the ISP in the southeastern US took action. I don't expect them to do that again, so I just watch and wait.
But trap users, seeding honeywords, very good ideas.
Those were never problems introduced by us. Teaching programming with network libraries was asking for trouble. Not that Windows Server 2000 was safe from them either, but the three that re-wrote the GINA received my full measure of wrathful judgement. I nearly told the administration it was them or me. Didn't come to that, one of their parent was savvy enough to understand.
My first Algebra teacher was uninterested, and my work showed it. My second one was very interested, and my work showed that.
Not one single English teacher I had in high school was the least bit interesting, so I muddled through. But my Geometry teacher was fabulous, my American History teacher even more so, and my Drafting teacher par excellence. My Earth Science teacher similarly. My French teacher was also. these subjects I did well in.
World History was taught by an old teacher who was as engaging as a cowpie. Biology taught by an energetic but scatterbrained teacher that left me behind in the first quarter and I never caught up. Chemistry was taught to me at the level of repeating steps in the textbook, and other than our legendary team experiment that evacuated the entire school, I was bored and uninvolved. Making chlorine gas seems to be a dangerous proposition for some reason...
But I would have recommended only the first Algebra teacher be fired, and she was actually, though not on my account.
And trust me, you do NOT see the time teachers put in off-hours, away from school. My wife teaches choir and spends a lot of time during the summer, at night, weekends working on curriculum and activities. While tests and such for choir are mostly selfedge and other concepts long since worked out entirely, and some subjects need similarly less updating yearly than others, being in the IT business is very very different than being in education. I try to explain to my wife that if choir was like IT, every three years she would be learning new scales, tossing out 90% of her music and learning new constructs, and learning new instruments as the old ones were obsoleted. She doesn't understand that either, but the principles of good teaching persist. Or they should.
The last high school I supported, they had the brilliant (BRILLIANT!) idea of teaching programming using Turbo Pascal. And they included the network libraries in it.
Using Novell, the school suffered an escalating fight with the kids. First they faked a login screen. then they hacked the GINA and got it installed on all the machines in the lab. Then they ran a password sniffer at boot.
Then I convinced the administration to let me use the same techniques. Installed some boot time code to catch these nasties, searched and found the source code, and identified the miscreants. We applauded their efforts, hired one on as a part-time assistant, and warned the others that future incidents would result in escalating punishments. One did get back into school, but the others were banned from the lab for their junior year.
Next semester we deployed ZenWorks, images, and a lot of policies. No matter how they tried, if a station was logged in with a staff ID, the screen bakcground was red. Easy to spot.
Pretty talented kids. Their escapades getting browser access kept me busy for a few weeks. Fun times.
IIRC, in Vegas gaming machine makers are required to write code that doesn't overtly cheat the gambler. As in, if the jackpot reaches astronomical size, the machine doesn't change the odds UNLESS that is the game, and everyone knows it. Which for video slots is not the game. the odds are supposed to stay the
same.
Haven't there been some court cases over whether software bugs could be used to recover unexpected winnings, after the gaming commission certified that the software was fair?
Oh. This, and an example of the casino, saying 'sorry, mistake, no jackpot for you'. the comments for this story include references to some classic 'outs', like disclaimers etc.
Try tricking the person cross the table from you into giving you more chips than are in the pot.
If you can, that's a skill. If not, well, that's your problem.
EVERY 'professional' poker player I know (ok, both, but they are family) claim poker is not a game of chance or luck, but one of skill. They don't play against the house, or a machine, or even on the outcome of a chance event, but rather they pay against other individuals, across the table from them. And they match skill against skill, they say.
That's their story. Poker can reward luck, apparently, but they don't claim to be lucky. Even when they draw an inside straight, they claim they used skill to get into a position to win.
If you disagree, I can't give you their numbers. They will scoff at you and hang up. And you will be angry. Pass.
Cute. Not even my card, corp.card.
Actually, when someone got impressed with the OP article and the $125k transaction. I wanted to point out that even $30M is not unheard of. I've processed larger. For an individual account, transactions over $5M would be notable.
Some banks charge fees for deposits. Some of their clients insist on payment by Corporate Card for various reasons, some of their clients may say terms are net 30-90 or by corp card 1-3 days.
It is not that simple.
There are no 'one off' agreements like that at Amex. Period.
However, terms and conditions are permitted for merchant charges, and the one noted above are not uncommon. It brecomes a tug of war between the implicit contract between merchant and cardholder, and performance.
"no cancellations or refunds would be allowed"
No performance required here.
Mr. Furlong's action is against his employer. My Pillow has less of a case against Salesforce. "no cancellations or refunds would be allowed".
Somewhere between 2% and 4%. Probably 2.8-3.1% And they got a promise of payment better than a paper check. In this case, better than the willingness of the cardholder to pay.
In case you're wondering, this seems like a case where Amex is doing what it would ordinarily do - cardholder agreed to to terms of the Salesforce contract. But, I wonder if he really did, in which case he may prevail eventually. His employer may yet be on the hook directly to Salesforce. Certainly Mr. Furlong has a case against his employer.
Your Amex card, if not blue, has a limit that is dependent on may factors, but is not a pre-set, fixed limit. You may find that if you call in and ask, you're able to charge against it beyind what you expect. Any 'limit' is based on history, your creditworthiness, and other factors. You may NOT have to call in to process a charge against it that would seem to exceed any apparent limits. Amex explains this fairly well.
Blue cards (and you know if you have one) are more limited, but the available credit you may see on your statement may well not be a fixed limit.
I'm betting Mr.Furlong has a non-blue card, and his limit was not hard and fast. And while I see the details of the case as common, it is unfortunate. Mr. Furlong's error was in not getting payment from his employer immediately, and was an easy one to make. He's in the middle.
" Considering how focused you have been on the red herring of getting a phone for practically nothing, yeah, you really do look that stupid."
Your words, not mine.
Homeland security is not baseball.
Except you and me.
Only one of hundreds. Processing payments isn't as glamourous as it might seem.
$31.205M, on a green card. Several in the $12M range.