I've long argued that for as much as the pro-PHP group blames the coders, there is simply no excuse for some of the levels of vulnerability. So, while I'm loathe for the torrent of problems, I am glad to see someone finally calling PHP out in the open for some of the problems it created long before any kid touched a single line of code.
OK... any decent critical thinking process eventually requires that an individual claiming a degree of skill ought to have enough background to sort out the bullshit claims that every single thing ever marketed to us makes. That goes double for FOSS, because most FOSS stuff is being sold on personal involvement, not money, and therefore has a less brutal and more hopeful thinking process behind it. This discussion will be an ongoing discussion until the last programmer dies. This is just a redux of what is supposed to be wrong with (INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE). Therefore, it is the programmer's responsibility to sort out whether the programming language in question is suitable.
The greatest flaw to PHP is that it opens up more power than many of its users can handle. When you had to compile CGI binaries, it placed explicit limits on who could work on web apps. Now? The power that was once reserved for a handful of good programmers is opened up to all sorts of non-programmers and novice programmers.
What is needed is better education. An up-front warning to the non-programmers about what exactly it is they are getting themselves, their clients and their clients' customers into.
The whole blame PHP or blame the programmer argument ultimately falls onto the programmer. If you use too small of a bit and end up stripping out a screwhead, should you blame Black & Decker for it? Of course not. Likewise, if you use PHP the wrong way, should you blame PHP for it?
But it has been my experience that there is usually a good reason a candidate lacks the fundamentals. The #1 good reason is? Immaturity. Do you really feel like asking an immature person to confront their own flaws?
If you're really worried that if you die there will be a need for notices to be sent, then you are either full of vanity or you have not led much of a life. Especially if you're an IT person.
Christ, if I died 400 idiots would call on that day and be pissed that I was lacking the courtesy to hold off dying until their problem was fixed. Soon, people who never knew what post-it notes and pens are would be forced to get new email hosting. Order would break down for everything from dog groomers to realtors. Yeah... it would be bad.
But, there would be no need to issue a notice.
Obviously, the other use for a dead man's switch constitutes a crime in most countries. And, again, you may need to get a life if you feel you need it. After all, it is immature and unprofessional to leave a job and leave an automated piece of malware behind.
In summation, all forms of interest in a dead man's switch are strongly indicative of the need to grow up and/or get a life.
It's my experience that programming is about being good at studying new info and incorporating it quickly. You take your fundamentals, and use those to make sure you're not accidentally incorporating code you have no idea how to fix, and pull together what you need.
There aren't a hell of a lot of solutions out there that really require novelty. It is mostly being a quick study, settling on the solution that most resembles your approach to coding, and then breaking out your jigsaw to make the solution fit your problem. If you have time, you sand down the rough edges. You do that enough times and it becomes your standard response.
To the extent others recommend you look at OSS projects, I strongly agree. Not as much for the experience, but for the knowledge of where to start looking for code. The prime driving force behind OSS, contrary to other claims about liberty and sticking it to the man, is there is no good reason to reinvent the wheel every time you code.
And if that approach doesn't sound useful to you, then you probably picked the wrong profession.
For the purpose of knowing where I come from: I have two bachelor's and neither one is in a computer-related field.
1 Firefox Window with a website I'm working on (usually a few tabs for various parts I'm looking at).
1 Internet Explorer just to verify there aren't any CSS or JS issues.
1 Text Editor
1 Photoshop
1 FTP
1 Stock ticker during the day
I just don't buy the premise that RAC ever had any cred, besides letting cheap bastards line up to get crappy work from Bangalore.
What kills me is that even half-way decent coders can find stable work in the US. Very few decent coders need to be low-balling their skills, because there are companies lining up to hire them.
Unless you live in an awful part of the US, there is more demand than there is supply.
I mean, shit, the internet is crawling with child molesters. So, Foucault would just adore the internet.
Does any half-way intelligent person take Postmodernism seriously? Postmodernism is the String Theory of philosophy, one of those theories that nests itself in a safe defensive position where nothing can really be proven or disproven.
When you get into nuts and bolts stuff, there's no point even exploring PM.
PM can easily be summarized in the grand cliche "think outside the box".
Wow! Maybe we can have postmodern space flight. Better yet, let's have postmodern genetic engineering... at least that would yield results worth laughing at.
The Japanese have been slowly hedging toward remilitarization, and this is a shining excuse for the Abe government to do it.
The Japanese have done studies before about converting their civilian reactor program into a weapons program and believe it is feasible to turn around a few nukes in a couple months and a major arsenal within a few years.
Also, many conservatives in Japan think the time for the post-WWII pity party is over. They will see an assertive, anti-DPRK militarization as a return to Japan's proper place on the international stage. And, frankly, many Japanese believe that this is good cover to prepare for an inevitable conflict with China.
One of the best strategy games ever made. A genuine time burner, especially when you face a large computer opponent attacking along all front in a single season. You can lose a significant portion of your life playing MTW and make little progress.
When I really want to pussy out and just win I play anything Madden.
Or else moderation is pointless. If you can't recruit serious members of the community to do the job, there's no way to keep a good web forum going anyhow.
Although, I cool the hell out of my systems. So much apparently that I've never even had trouble with WD, which had a stretch of some pretty notorious drives.
It is barely, if at all, testable. Half its assumptions are based on assumptions that require assumptions in order to assume something we should probably assume.
While some of the math might be right, the same theory applies to friggin role playing games, too. So, are those real just because their math ads up?
Where are the good string theory experiments? Nowhere.
Long time fan of curves. Big shout out to all the fat bottom girls!
Anyhoo... Solving problems is our natural predator instinct as a man. Either that mammoth dies or we're all screwed. This happens to adapt fairly well to civil society, except for the part where we flake out and beat the shit out of things (even then, more than a few cars have been fixed by this method).
In fairness, shaken baby syndrome would be a lot more common if women approached frustration the way men do.
Being called useless without a problem to solve isn't an insult to me!
In truth, aren't you kind of useless if you DON'T have a problem to solve? Isn't a person who has no problems they are currently involved in solving... useless? I mean, what the hell else are they doing? Are they independently wealthy? Lazy? Dumb? Manic?
Is that sexist? Perhaps. It would certainly explain the old phrase "tits on a bull" as an analogy for uselessness.
I don't know. I was raised by a mom who drove truck and later was a mechanic. She can't stand most other women. Maybe women wouldn't be so marginalized if they learned to break a tire off a rim (my mom's a friggin pro).
Of course, this is probably why I always have really shitty relationships.
Which, brings us back to those elegant mathematical curves you mentioned.
Because, um, ya know... er... your comments about men and such...
You scare me!!! Go away!
Mom!!! Mom? hey!'s pickin' on me!!
More serious, the marketing metaphor is an advisement that you stick to your plan or else you wait until a more appropriate time to end the relationship. Same thing as going to a dance.
Wikipedia is making a mistake. The wiki model brought Wikipedia to the dance, and Wikipedia is now running off with another guy. This usually ends in gun play.
I took a job once where they didn't even bother to send me a techie for the interview. While I could do the work, the work environment was awful. If they can't be bothered, you can't be bothered.
Maybe the underpinning problems with Wikipedia stem from the fact that it is not valued enough to provide the necessary incentives to improve it.
If we put the entire patent process into a wiki (hell, even official approval) then there would be a very strong incentive to counter the flaws of the wiki.
Just talking out my ass. No real proof this work. Like everything else, it would probably just cause more spam and Nigeria scams.
Slashdot Mirror
I've long argued that for as much as the pro-PHP group blames the coders, there is simply no excuse for some of the levels of vulnerability. So, while I'm loathe for the torrent of problems, I am glad to see someone finally calling PHP out in the open for some of the problems it created long before any kid touched a single line of code.
Give people a day or two to respond to each exploit before he hands us another to go racing after.
Seriously. Watch CNBC. Someone will say something like that very soon.
OK... any decent critical thinking process eventually requires that an individual claiming a degree of skill ought to have enough background to sort out the bullshit claims that every single thing ever marketed to us makes. That goes double for FOSS, because most FOSS stuff is being sold on personal involvement, not money, and therefore has a less brutal and more hopeful thinking process behind it. This discussion will be an ongoing discussion until the last programmer dies. This is just a redux of what is supposed to be wrong with (INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE). Therefore, it is the programmer's responsibility to sort out whether the programming language in question is suitable.
I've seen fat women missing teeth and wearing shorts with the word "Juicy" over their dimpled ass cheeks who were toating six kids with them.
The greatest flaw to PHP is that it opens up more power than many of its users can handle. When you had to compile CGI binaries, it placed explicit limits on who could work on web apps. Now? The power that was once reserved for a handful of good programmers is opened up to all sorts of non-programmers and novice programmers.
What is needed is better education. An up-front warning to the non-programmers about what exactly it is they are getting themselves, their clients and their clients' customers into.
The whole blame PHP or blame the programmer argument ultimately falls onto the programmer. If you use too small of a bit and end up stripping out a screwhead, should you blame Black & Decker for it? Of course not. Likewise, if you use PHP the wrong way, should you blame PHP for it?
But it has been my experience that there is usually a good reason a candidate lacks the fundamentals. The #1 good reason is? Immaturity. Do you really feel like asking an immature person to confront their own flaws?
If you're really worried that if you die there will be a need for notices to be sent, then you are either full of vanity or you have not led much of a life. Especially if you're an IT person.
Christ, if I died 400 idiots would call on that day and be pissed that I was lacking the courtesy to hold off dying until their problem was fixed. Soon, people who never knew what post-it notes and pens are would be forced to get new email hosting. Order would break down for everything from dog groomers to realtors. Yeah... it would be bad. But, there would be no need to issue a notice. Obviously, the other use for a dead man's switch constitutes a crime in most countries. And, again, you may need to get a life if you feel you need it. After all, it is immature and unprofessional to leave a job and leave an automated piece of malware behind. In summation, all forms of interest in a dead man's switch are strongly indicative of the need to grow up and/or get a life.It's my experience that programming is about being good at studying new info and incorporating it quickly. You take your fundamentals, and use those to make sure you're not accidentally incorporating code you have no idea how to fix, and pull together what you need.
There aren't a hell of a lot of solutions out there that really require novelty. It is mostly being a quick study, settling on the solution that most resembles your approach to coding, and then breaking out your jigsaw to make the solution fit your problem. If you have time, you sand down the rough edges. You do that enough times and it becomes your standard response.
To the extent others recommend you look at OSS projects, I strongly agree. Not as much for the experience, but for the knowledge of where to start looking for code. The prime driving force behind OSS, contrary to other claims about liberty and sticking it to the man, is there is no good reason to reinvent the wheel every time you code.
And if that approach doesn't sound useful to you, then you probably picked the wrong profession.
For the purpose of knowing where I come from: I have two bachelor's and neither one is in a computer-related field.
1 Firefox Window with a website I'm working on (usually a few tabs for various parts I'm looking at). 1 Internet Explorer just to verify there aren't any CSS or JS issues. 1 Text Editor 1 Photoshop 1 FTP 1 Stock ticker during the day
When did RAC have street cred?
I just don't buy the premise that RAC ever had any cred, besides letting cheap bastards line up to get crappy work from Bangalore.
What kills me is that even half-way decent coders can find stable work in the US. Very few decent coders need to be low-balling their skills, because there are companies lining up to hire them.
Unless you live in an awful part of the US, there is more demand than there is supply.
One could get into a hell of a postmodernist argument using that as the premise.
Does any half-way intelligent person take Postmodernism seriously? Postmodernism is the String Theory of philosophy, one of those theories that nests itself in a safe defensive position where nothing can really be proven or disproven.
When you get into nuts and bolts stuff, there's no point even exploring PM.
PM can easily be summarized in the grand cliche "think outside the box".
Wow! Maybe we can have postmodern space flight. Better yet, let's have postmodern genetic engineering... at least that would yield results worth laughing at.
The Japanese have done studies before about converting their civilian reactor program into a weapons program and believe it is feasible to turn around a few nukes in a couple months and a major arsenal within a few years.
Also, many conservatives in Japan think the time for the post-WWII pity party is over. They will see an assertive, anti-DPRK militarization as a return to Japan's proper place on the international stage. And, frankly, many Japanese believe that this is good cover to prepare for an inevitable conflict with China.
When I really want to pussy out and just win I play anything Madden.
Or else moderation is pointless. If you can't recruit serious members of the community to do the job, there's no way to keep a good web forum going anyhow.
Although, I cool the hell out of my systems. So much apparently that I've never even had trouble with WD, which had a stretch of some pretty notorious drives.
While some of the math might be right, the same theory applies to friggin role playing games, too. So, are those real just because their math ads up?
Where are the good string theory experiments? Nowhere.
Anyhoo ... Solving problems is our natural predator instinct as a man. Either that mammoth dies or we're all screwed. This happens to adapt fairly well to civil society, except for the part where we flake out and beat the shit out of things (even then, more than a few cars have been fixed by this method).
In fairness, shaken baby syndrome would be a lot more common if women approached frustration the way men do.
Being called useless without a problem to solve isn't an insult to me!
In truth, aren't you kind of useless if you DON'T have a problem to solve? Isn't a person who has no problems they are currently involved in solving ... useless? I mean, what the hell else are they doing? Are they independently wealthy? Lazy? Dumb? Manic?
Is that sexist? Perhaps. It would certainly explain the old phrase "tits on a bull" as an analogy for uselessness.
I don't know. I was raised by a mom who drove truck and later was a mechanic. She can't stand most other women. Maybe women wouldn't be so marginalized if they learned to break a tire off a rim (my mom's a friggin pro).
Of course, this is probably why I always have really shitty relationships.
Which, brings us back to those elegant mathematical curves you mentioned.
You scare me!!! Go away!
Mom!!! Mom? hey!'s pickin' on me!!
More serious, the marketing metaphor is an advisement that you stick to your plan or else you wait until a more appropriate time to end the relationship. Same thing as going to a dance.
Wikipedia is making a mistake. The wiki model brought Wikipedia to the dance, and Wikipedia is now running off with another guy. This usually ends in gun play.
Let someone else innovate, avert the risk and then evaluate the best of their efforts and offer a more refined product.
I took a job once where they didn't even bother to send me a techie for the interview. While I could do the work, the work environment was awful. If they can't be bothered, you can't be bothered.
If we put the entire patent process into a wiki (hell, even official approval) then there would be a very strong incentive to counter the flaws of the wiki.
Just talking out my ass. No real proof this work. Like everything else, it would probably just cause more spam and Nigeria scams.