Another thing to consider is, what will you do with the time saved when you are not squashing bugs. It could be that the employer has factored the OPs salary into the cost of maintaining the application and it is less expensive to have the OP squashing bugs than it is to invest in a testing process.
I don't think that Microsoft knows how to fix their own code. I work with new Microsoft software all the time. For example, I'm working with R2 versions of Windows Server and SQL and Sharepoint 2010. Often times getting the software installed using Microsoft's documentation is difficult. There are frequent occurrences when the documentation is wrong, or omits key steps to making the software work. Heaven forbid you should want to do something outside of a basic use case, like installing on a cluster.
I have come to the conclusion (completely talking out of my ass here mind you) that at Microsoft, there is ONE way of doing things. Their developers delicately balance this house of code. They QA it through a set process through which they know it will work under exact conditions. Then they ship it with semi-complete documentation.
When issues like this one with the fuzzer come along, they are at a complete loss. They barely got the software working in the first place. They do not have the programming talent or processes in place to handle these situations. If there are more than a dozen people at Microsoft who truly understand x86 assembly, I would be surprised.
Microsoft wants their customers to live in a sandbox. When their applications are setup right, some of the functionality that they bring to the table is pretty damn cool. The problem is that they are fragile. They fall apart in the real world. They fall apart when people start poking at them. Microsoft as a company can't deal with it. It seems to be the antithesis of their corporate culture. They try to get around it by forcing their customers into "certified" solutions. The reality seems to be that they're a company in a slow death spiral. They seem like that inbred family that was once very powerful, but they have polluted their gene pool. They can try to maintain what they once had, but they lack the talent to build anything new.
Maybe a simple mathematical algorithm? Each developer gets the equivalent of a "developer key" that is then combined with the UDID and a special third key that only Apple knows.
What does this mean for hacks and other programs that modify program code or execute and stay resident alongside game code? Does the cracking of the keys allow custom boot loaders that will open the doors for hacking?
If so, this is a sad day. The primary reason I bought a PS3 was to play in a hack free environment.
Thanks for the post. It was completely intelligible. Once you get everything sorted out there, you might consider putting your resume out there. Your skills are right where they need to be and the economy is picking up.
Any legit company who is pushing VDI and thin clients will tell you that the ROI on the hardware does not materialize until the first hardware refresh. Instead of doing a full refresh every three to five years and having to buy mid-range to high end workstations, you can buy the least expensive hardware available, and then buy extended warranties for it.
The only thing that made any sense to me was the support aspect of it. Instead of having to touch every single desktop every time there is an application update, you just update the main image. If the update goes haywire, you just roll back to the previous image.
Instead of having to have multiple images for different application configurations (accounting, general office, etc.), you can have one image for the actual client itself and then everything else is controlled via policies. The application profiles determine which user has access to which applications.
VDI is a good way for medium to large sized organizations to save on IT costs. That is bad news for the workstation jockeys but good news for the accountants and every else who can spend less on IT. Of course the savings aren't huge. Realistically you might be able to reduce a couple of head counts, or put off having to hire more entry level IT folks.
VDI won't revolutionize the corporate IT landscape, but for organizations who can leverage it, it will make certain things easier and more efficient. I would have killed for it at my last company. They had a near zero budget for workstations, and an application that was used by 50% of the organization and updated a half dozen times a year. Every update required visiting about 50 PCs, and spending 15-30 minutes running the patch. They didn't have SCCM / MOM / SMS and even if they did, the app updater would bork 15-20% of the time. It would have been great to have a Citrix style published app.
How do you use the terms "free market" and "force competition" in the same thought? Are you sure that YOU understand "free market"? A free market is a market free from regulation, of any sort. In a FREE market, companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
They do not need to improve. They need to do one thing and do that one thing well. I want my water company and my power company to have a regulated environment in which they can plan on having a fixed rate structure. With that structure they can then develop long term plans to keep the lights on and the water running. They do not need to be inventing new ways to deliver water.
The growth of society forces them to improve. Water is a finite resource. Power is finite as well. Population growth seems to be expanding despite any efforts to curb it. They have to improve, or society will falter and stumble. Do you want one agency planning your highways, or would you prefer dozens, each with their own way of doing things and own ideas about building codes. Maybe we should just dump the building codes. After all, those come from an evil government monopoly too.
Despite what the article seems to be getting at, the Wii thrives due to its multi-player gaming. Go figure. I'm not a big fan of the Wii, but my girlfriend and her friends seem to have a great with it. To each their own.
Split screen is okay for FPS type games, but for driving games the person on the top always seems to be at a disadvantage. It could just be that the people that I game with are all mentally wired in a similar way. With that caveat, we all seem to have problems with the "ground" moving beneath us when we're trying to drive. It is way more distracting to have the bottom of the screen out of sync (when you're on top), than it is to have the top of the screen out of sync. Then again, it's probably just old age catching up with me. I played split screen Gran Tourismo and never had a problem.
And this is why our legal system is screwed up and corrupt. The defendant is supposed to be subjected to a trial by their peers. What they end up with is a trial by a bunch of strangers who are only allowed to consider what the judge tells them to consider. The concept of jurisprudence is completely dead in this country. It is the hidden travesty of our legal system, and yet another example of how Americans are coerced into giving up our rights.
I like the way that Chase is setup. If I have not accessed their website from a particular computer, they require a second form of authentication that they send out via SMS or phone.
But why should Twitter build the data center? There are companies out there that just build data centers. I almost went to work for one two years ago. They own the One Wilshire building in Los Angeles. They were planning on building something stupid amount (15?) of data centers over the next couple of years. It would be interesting to see the ROI figures on Twitter's data center build out.
Why do they need to be in the data center business? What benefit do they gain from having to deal with HVAC and power and all the other nonsense that comes from running a data center? They could just co-locate in a current data center and probably negotiate one hell of a good deal if they really are big enough that they were able to build their own center. How much space do they REALLY need? All they are doing is tossing around 160 (?) character text bursts. It isn't like they have persistent connections for those hundreds of millions of users.
I would love to see a study funded by X that does not then show X as being the best product. Given that it seems $ > Truth, I doubt such a thing will ever happen.
Read the related articles. I believe that the one I submitted a month or so ago has the details. In brief, the programmer developed the code and then took it with him. It seems to be a fairly cut and dried case of theft. He was paid to produce the code by Goldman Sachs. They sealed the court room because they did not want their code and the underlying methodologies that went into the development of the code being exposed to the public.
You are not paying for my email account with your tax dollars. On the other hand, our tax dollars are paying for the US government. FOIA is often a joke and circumvented by the government. We are engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Our government is engaged in some pretty bone headed foreign policy that is making the world less safe for Americans, not more so.
If you send your kid to school, do you expect to see a report card? Should you have to hack into the school computers to get a copy of your child's activities?
Why do you believe that our elected representatives should be able to operate in secret and conduct actions that our deterimental to our well being, without any oversight?
The scope / context of the crime is different. If you read the list again, you will realize that all of those crimes involve large numbers of victims. They are also large scale crimes that have a lot of moving parts and are multi-faceted.
While rape is a serious crime, it is not something that falls within the scope of Interpol's jurisdiction.
make him out to be a martyr... he'll be replaced just as quickly as he disappears.
What makes you so sure about that? I bet once Assange goes down, WikiLeaks follows soon after. There are not very many people with the financial means to stay on the run all the time. Among those who do exist, how many of them want to compromise their comfy lifestyle by pissing off powerful interests?
Assange is not some drug dealer pushing crack on the corner. He is not some kid swapping pirated movies and music. There are not legions of people doing what he does who will just step up and keep it going if he disappears.
Last I heard the telcos were whining about not having enough bandwidth and needing to traffic shape. I guess they just do not have enough bandwidth for ME. If the US Government needs some spare bandwidth to DDoS a site or two, they have some to spare.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing to consider is, what will you do with the time saved when you are not squashing bugs. It could be that the employer has factored the OPs salary into the cost of maintaining the application and it is less expensive to have the OP squashing bugs than it is to invest in a testing process.
I don't think that Microsoft knows how to fix their own code. I work with new Microsoft software all the time. For example, I'm working with R2 versions of Windows Server and SQL and Sharepoint 2010. Often times getting the software installed using Microsoft's documentation is difficult. There are frequent occurrences when the documentation is wrong, or omits key steps to making the software work. Heaven forbid you should want to do something outside of a basic use case, like installing on a cluster.
I have come to the conclusion (completely talking out of my ass here mind you) that at Microsoft, there is ONE way of doing things. Their developers delicately balance this house of code. They QA it through a set process through which they know it will work under exact conditions. Then they ship it with semi-complete documentation.
When issues like this one with the fuzzer come along, they are at a complete loss. They barely got the software working in the first place. They do not have the programming talent or processes in place to handle these situations. If there are more than a dozen people at Microsoft who truly understand x86 assembly, I would be surprised.
Microsoft wants their customers to live in a sandbox. When their applications are setup right, some of the functionality that they bring to the table is pretty damn cool. The problem is that they are fragile. They fall apart in the real world. They fall apart when people start poking at them. Microsoft as a company can't deal with it. It seems to be the antithesis of their corporate culture. They try to get around it by forcing their customers into "certified" solutions. The reality seems to be that they're a company in a slow death spiral. They seem like that inbred family that was once very powerful, but they have polluted their gene pool. They can try to maintain what they once had, but they lack the talent to build anything new.
Maybe a simple mathematical algorithm? Each developer gets the equivalent of a "developer key" that is then combined with the UDID and a special third key that only Apple knows.
The guy you are replying to is an idiot. Don't bother trying to discuss things from the sysadmin POV. He can't grasp it.
What does this mean for hacks and other programs that modify program code or execute and stay resident alongside game code? Does the cracking of the keys allow custom boot loaders that will open the doors for hacking?
If so, this is a sad day. The primary reason I bought a PS3 was to play in a hack free environment.
Thanks for the post. It was completely intelligible. Once you get everything sorted out there, you might consider putting your resume out there. Your skills are right where they need to be and the economy is picking up.
Any legit company who is pushing VDI and thin clients will tell you that the ROI on the hardware does not materialize until the first hardware refresh. Instead of doing a full refresh every three to five years and having to buy mid-range to high end workstations, you can buy the least expensive hardware available, and then buy extended warranties for it.
The only thing that made any sense to me was the support aspect of it. Instead of having to touch every single desktop every time there is an application update, you just update the main image. If the update goes haywire, you just roll back to the previous image.
Instead of having to have multiple images for different application configurations (accounting, general office, etc.), you can have one image for the actual client itself and then everything else is controlled via policies. The application profiles determine which user has access to which applications.
VDI is a good way for medium to large sized organizations to save on IT costs. That is bad news for the workstation jockeys but good news for the accountants and every else who can spend less on IT. Of course the savings aren't huge. Realistically you might be able to reduce a couple of head counts, or put off having to hire more entry level IT folks.
VDI won't revolutionize the corporate IT landscape, but for organizations who can leverage it, it will make certain things easier and more efficient. I would have killed for it at my last company. They had a near zero budget for workstations, and an application that was used by 50% of the organization and updated a half dozen times a year. Every update required visiting about 50 PCs, and spending 15-30 minutes running the patch. They didn't have SCCM / MOM / SMS and even if they did, the app updater would bork 15-20% of the time. It would have been great to have a Citrix style published app.
Apple is trying to construct a structure large enough to contain Steve Jobs' ego. I predict failure.
Is that even 10% of their entire production capacity?
How do you use the terms "free market" and "force competition" in the same thought? Are you sure that YOU understand "free market"? A free market is a market free from regulation, of any sort. In a FREE market, companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
They do not need to improve. They need to do one thing and do that one thing well. I want my water company and my power company to have a regulated environment in which they can plan on having a fixed rate structure. With that structure they can then develop long term plans to keep the lights on and the water running. They do not need to be inventing new ways to deliver water.
The growth of society forces them to improve. Water is a finite resource. Power is finite as well. Population growth seems to be expanding despite any efforts to curb it. They have to improve, or society will falter and stumble. Do you want one agency planning your highways, or would you prefer dozens, each with their own way of doing things and own ideas about building codes. Maybe we should just dump the building codes. After all, those come from an evil government monopoly too.
Despite what the article seems to be getting at, the Wii thrives due to its multi-player gaming. Go figure. I'm not a big fan of the Wii, but my girlfriend and her friends seem to have a great with it. To each their own.
Split screen is okay for FPS type games, but for driving games the person on the top always seems to be at a disadvantage. It could just be that the people that I game with are all mentally wired in a similar way. With that caveat, we all seem to have problems with the "ground" moving beneath us when we're trying to drive. It is way more distracting to have the bottom of the screen out of sync (when you're on top), than it is to have the top of the screen out of sync. Then again, it's probably just old age catching up with me. I played split screen Gran Tourismo and never had a problem.
And this is why our legal system is screwed up and corrupt. The defendant is supposed to be subjected to a trial by their peers. What they end up with is a trial by a bunch of strangers who are only allowed to consider what the judge tells them to consider. The concept of jurisprudence is completely dead in this country. It is the hidden travesty of our legal system, and yet another example of how Americans are coerced into giving up our rights.
I like the way that Chase is setup. If I have not accessed their website from a particular computer, they require a second form of authentication that they send out via SMS or phone.
But why should Twitter build the data center? There are companies out there that just build data centers. I almost went to work for one two years ago. They own the One Wilshire building in Los Angeles. They were planning on building something stupid amount (15?) of data centers over the next couple of years. It would be interesting to see the ROI figures on Twitter's data center build out.
Why do they need to be in the data center business? What benefit do they gain from having to deal with HVAC and power and all the other nonsense that comes from running a data center? They could just co-locate in a current data center and probably negotiate one hell of a good deal if they really are big enough that they were able to build their own center. How much space do they REALLY need? All they are doing is tossing around 160 (?) character text bursts. It isn't like they have persistent connections for those hundreds of millions of users.
I would love to see a study funded by X that does not then show X as being the best product. Given that it seems $ > Truth, I doubt such a thing will ever happen.
The only way they could have made it more secure would have been to use fnordadmin. Then it would have been REALLY obscured.
Read the related articles. I believe that the one I submitted a month or so ago has the details. In brief, the programmer developed the code and then took it with him. It seems to be a fairly cut and dried case of theft. He was paid to produce the code by Goldman Sachs. They sealed the court room because they did not want their code and the underlying methodologies that went into the development of the code being exposed to the public.
What does phone fraud have to do with DDoS scripts?
You are not paying for my email account with your tax dollars. On the other hand, our tax dollars are paying for the US government. FOIA is often a joke and circumvented by the government. We are engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Our government is engaged in some pretty bone headed foreign policy that is making the world less safe for Americans, not more so.
If you send your kid to school, do you expect to see a report card? Should you have to hack into the school computers to get a copy of your child's activities?
Why do you believe that our elected representatives should be able to operate in secret and conduct actions that our deterimental to our well being, without any oversight?
This should be modded up but I'm short of mod points. This is the most concise description of the issue I have read.
The scope / context of the crime is different. If you read the list again, you will realize that all of those crimes involve large numbers of victims. They are also large scale crimes that have a lot of moving parts and are multi-faceted.
While rape is a serious crime, it is not something that falls within the scope of Interpol's jurisdiction.
make him out to be a martyr... he'll be replaced just as quickly as he disappears.
What makes you so sure about that? I bet once Assange goes down, WikiLeaks follows soon after. There are not very many people with the financial means to stay on the run all the time. Among those who do exist, how many of them want to compromise their comfy lifestyle by pissing off powerful interests?
Assange is not some drug dealer pushing crack on the corner. He is not some kid swapping pirated movies and music. There are not legions of people doing what he does who will just step up and keep it going if he disappears.
Last I heard the telcos were whining about not having enough bandwidth and needing to traffic shape. I guess they just do not have enough bandwidth for ME. If the US Government needs some spare bandwidth to DDoS a site or two, they have some to spare.