Where do you get this idea that it's fundamentally illegitimate to use contractors long-term? Hiring employees is very dangerous and expensive. Some businesses make the handling of employees a core competency: for example, Walmart. They are experts at hiring, firing, suing, being sued, all that junk. But if a company's core competency is in technology, why should they take on this immense burden? Why not use outside companies (like Addeco, etc.) to provide contract workers?
When you consider that 1 in N departing employees will sue the employer, and 1 in M such lawsuits will result in a substantial judgement/settlement, employing people directly is just gambling. Leave it to the staffing companies that are experts in the area.
I also worked as a long-term contractor, and was quite happy. The compensation was good and I was insulated from political fights. Sure, I couldn't use the company gym, but I belong to my own gym. I'm not looking for a company to be Mom and Dad to me, just a source of income.
To me the greatest thing about being a contractor was that my contract was renewed periodically, proving my continued value to the company. When you're a FTE, you're never sure if you're still pulling your weight.
This topic is obviously an invitation to blatant OS advocacy, so here goes. I'm most productive in Linux, which for me mostly means xterms and fluxbox. When I use Windows, I feel like it's fighting me. Whatever task I'm focused on, I have to grit my teeth and charge through the hurricane of nonsense and distractions that Windows throws at me.
I seem to spend a lot of time painfully guiding Windows Explorer to the directory I want and visually scanning lists of things - usually files - for the element I want. In Linux I never have to scan. Grep and '/' are my friends.
In Windows XP, network mounted paths are not visible from the shell. What on earth is wrong with these people? Isn't it obvious that network filesystems are a sufficiently low-level concept that they should look like local filesystems from an application's viewpoint?
When I am coding in vi, roughly none of my attention goes to the editor - I can focus completely on the code and concepts. When I code in Visual Studio, I am much slower and more cautious, because it's so easy to screw up. If text is highlighted and I type a character, that text is erased. This means I always have to look for a highlight before typing. If I highlight text, realize it's off by a few chars, and redo it, Visual Studio thinks I'm trying to "drag" the text. The whole setup seems designed to erode speed and confidence.
Moving around in Visual Studio is so painful that I will often omit fixing cosmetic issues, while in vi I can navigate with less stress and effort, and only half an eye on the terminal.
And the VS "Project Settings" dialog is a perfect example of why GUIs don't work in reasonably complex domains. To pick just one highlight: under Project Settings/Link the "Object/library modules" text box contains libraries you're linking against. It's wide enough for about 6 file names, so horizontal scrolling is a must. There is no obvious way to search in this box. There are no obvious power tools, like vi-keys or emacs-keys to navigate this box. In a large project this can become a substantial text buffer which you must view and edit with the most primitive tools.
To think that someone must have considered this an improvement over a normal Makefile!
But since you do bring up Bush and the US let's remember that there are lots of examples of very un-free places in the world that are left well enough alone by the US because of any number of reasons...
This is called realpolitik - in essence a pragmatic, unprincipled approach to foreign policy which the US has embraced since Nixon. President Bush is opposed to realpolitik and wants a more idealistic and combative foreign policy. This is a very scary idea to foreign policy professionals, who think global stability must be the first consideration.
US realpolitik was partly a result of the balance between the US and USSR. It's expressed in saying of a dictator, "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard." With the USSR gone, it may be possible for the US to play a bolder role.
E.g., if I remember right, for example, the file server security in NT 3.5 and the pre-SP1 NT 4.0 was entirely in the client.
He then used MS Bob as an example of a client that exposed this security flaw to the user. He was not criticizing MS Bob. He was criticizing the operating system.
And the problem was not a "hole" or "flaw" - it was a lack of actual security in a system that claimed to provide it.
I don't think that wafer lock is intended to slow down a serious attacker. Rather it's intended to stop someone who has daily access to the outside of the safe from trying every combination over time. Typical situation - kids and gun safes.
BSD Socket API for Windows means presenting the programmer with the socket API from Unix. Specifying the API says nothing about the implementation. Windows has its own native socket API, and also supports the BSD API.
That does not say that there is BSD code in this DLL.
I had the same opinion when the first big wave of blogs hit. There was nothing interesting there, and I couldn't see the point.
During the election, I found that blogs with an agenda and inside information can be quite interesting. There are Iraqi, military and right-wing blogs that provide very different perspectives from the media.
Sorry, but if you think both sides do it equally, you've missed something. If Kerry had won, the Republicans wouldn't have been shocked, just dissapointed. They weren't under the illusion that the whole country was on their side.
Absolutely. In a larger sense, this was the problem of the Democrats. They created a "bubble reality" in which Bush was evil and stupid and had stolen the election. They felt like the vast majority, because they never heard dissenting voices. Those who disagreed frequently kept silent from fear. The silent ones spoke with their votes.
Agreed. This election was a big reality check. Candidates exist to get votes, not to push side issues. They would be fools to even mention the DMCA because it would dilute their message.
Frankly, our pet issues pale beside the deadly serious issues that drove this election. The best we can hope for is benign neglect.
... undermined the credibility of key evidence in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service...
Undermined? They caught Dan Rather red-handed spreading phony documents about the President. And the article further trivializes this by listing it along with John Stewart's rant.
This article carefully avoids mentioning right-wing and Iraqi blogs, but I think they had an effect. For the first time, the media lost control of the "message". Also, the article only mentions military blogs run by unhappy troops. All the military blogs I've seen were pro-America and pro-war.
Bush's proposal should be seen in context. The US already relies heavily on Mexican migrant labor - some of it legal, most illegal. Lots of Mexicans have died in border crossings. Lots of social problems are created by having a hidden, illegal class of people. And the smuggler channels we've created are natural conduits for terrorists. The current situation is not good, although most of us don't feel the pain.
To claim that it's always better to have a larger voter turnout, regardless of the outcome, is to imply that you don't have a preference.
Sounds like a waste of effort, doesn't it? It's one of the many riddles of American politics. The answer is that both sides share an unspoken assumption: that stupid, impressionable people are more likely to vote Democrat. Thus, the "rock the vote" message is really a "vote for Kerry" message.
Note that in the "butterfly ballot" scandal, where a ballot had a parallax error which could cause a vote to fall to the adjacent candidate, all parties assumed this could only benefit republicans. Anything which makes voting harder or less accessible is presumed to benefit republicans.
I am actually very shocked by this ruling. It looks like we Americans still have at least ONE branch of governemt that is working "For The People". The rest have all sold out to big business.
The court ruled on the law. They decided that Lexmark was stretching the DMCA beyond what Congress intended. It has nothing to with being for or against "the people".
If Congress had written the DMCA to support this scenario, the court would probably have upheld it.
I just read some sad news on slashdot - scientific submersible Alvin was found dead in his home at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contribution to oceanography. Truly an American icon.
The fourth reason is that the house absorbed a lot of energy. If you look at the picture, the satellite must have been greatly cushioned in its landing compared to a satellite that hit the ground. So maybe the Chinese cleverly guided the descending capsule to hit a four-story building.
Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 1
Technically, *nix is vulnerable, but there will be enough response and effective enough response that the malware won't get much of anywhere.
Response? Only works if users will download fixes. Most of the huge Microsoft problems occurred after Microsoft had responded with a fix. Once there are tons of Linux PCs operated by normal people who don't care about computers, there will be a tendency towards Linux viruses.
Re:Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you are still viewing the problem from an old Unix viewpoint of hacking, not viruses. Maybe the point of the virus was to forward itself to your friends, pretending to be you. Maybe its point was to use your computer as a spam relay for 30 minutes. Maybe the virus will find all your original content (word processing documents, HTML, GIMP files, etc) and insert spam into them. Therefore the ability to restore/bin is not very relevant.
Fixing fundamental design mistakes?
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Q. How can Linux avoid the security problems that have affected Windows?
A. Better design and actually caring about them. Having the guts to really fixing fundamental design mistakes, rather than trying to work around them.
Some folks still think that *nix is inherently virus proof because anything a mere user runs couldn't touch the really important stuff in/bin. I think most Unix programmers understand by now that the really important stuff is under $HOME; what's under/bin is easily replaceable. There are many pathways for effective viruses on Linux - the biggest obstacle to viruses is the lack of standardization.
Maybe Linus is saying that as viruses start attacking Linux, he's willing to radically rethink permissions. GRsecurity and SElinux point in that direction, but wouldn't work for a normal user. Could there be a future Linux kernel that prevents an image library exploit from modifying your.bashrc?
If you think that machinists are the modern-day blacksmiths, you missed the point. Almost any metal object you have in your home was not made by a machinist. It was made by a low-paid, low-skilled, easily replaceable factory worker after being designed by engineers. The blacksmith was engineer and craftsman in one.
The point is that skilled labor occupations vanish. The labor part is moved to machines or deskilled labor, and the skill is moved to knowledge workers. But less knowledge workers are needed than the skilled laborers they replace, because their knowledge product is reusable.
To the extent that programmer are "skilled labor" they face the same fate.
At least that's the thesis - not sure I agree with it.
After meandering through a comparison of blacksmiths and bookkeepers, the author concludes that programmers will be replaced by AI. Nerds will be obsolete and touchy-feely types will rule the day. I think this prediction has been made twice a week since Admiral Hopper was picking insects out of her computer.
Here's my prediction: doom-predicting authors will be replaced by a Perl script called Mix'n'Meme, a boutique doom predictor. Whenever you need a pomo prediction, you just run Mix'n'Meme and it randomly scrapes a 19th century poem off the net and bases a half-plausible prediction thereon.
However I predict that Mix'n'Meme will use words correctly. For example, the word enjoin, which the author seems to like greatly, means to instruct or direct. I'm not sure what the author thinks it means.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you get this idea that it's fundamentally illegitimate to use contractors long-term? Hiring employees is very dangerous and expensive. Some businesses make the handling of employees a core competency: for example, Walmart. They are experts at hiring, firing, suing, being sued, all that junk. But if a company's core competency is in technology, why should they take on this immense burden? Why not use outside companies (like Addeco, etc.) to provide contract workers?
When you consider that 1 in N departing employees will sue the employer, and 1 in M such lawsuits will result in a substantial judgement/settlement, employing people directly is just gambling. Leave it to the staffing companies that are experts in the area.
I also worked as a long-term contractor, and was quite happy. The compensation was good and I was insulated from political fights. Sure, I couldn't use the company gym, but I belong to my own gym. I'm not looking for a company to be Mom and Dad to me, just a source of income.
To me the greatest thing about being a contractor was that my contract was renewed periodically, proving my continued value to the company. When you're a FTE, you're never sure if you're still pulling your weight.
This topic is obviously an invitation to blatant OS advocacy, so here goes. I'm most productive in Linux, which for me mostly means xterms and fluxbox. When I use Windows, I feel like it's fighting me. Whatever task I'm focused on, I have to grit my teeth and charge through the hurricane of nonsense and distractions that Windows throws at me.
I seem to spend a lot of time painfully guiding Windows Explorer to the directory I want and visually scanning lists of things - usually files - for the element I want. In Linux I never have to scan. Grep and '/' are my friends.
In Windows XP, network mounted paths are not visible from the shell. What on earth is wrong with these people? Isn't it obvious that network filesystems are a sufficiently low-level concept that they should look like local filesystems from an application's viewpoint?
When I am coding in vi, roughly none of my attention goes to the editor - I can focus completely on the code and concepts. When I code in Visual Studio, I am much slower and more cautious, because it's so easy to screw up. If text is highlighted and I type a character, that text is erased. This means I always have to look for a highlight before typing. If I highlight text, realize it's off by a few chars, and redo it, Visual Studio thinks I'm trying to "drag" the text. The whole setup seems designed to erode speed and confidence.
Moving around in Visual Studio is so painful that I will often omit fixing cosmetic issues, while in vi I can navigate with less stress and effort, and only half an eye on the terminal.
And the VS "Project Settings" dialog is a perfect example of why GUIs don't work in reasonably complex domains. To pick just one highlight: under Project Settings/Link the "Object/library modules" text box contains libraries you're linking against. It's wide enough for about 6 file names, so horizontal scrolling is a must. There is no obvious way to search in this box. There are no obvious power tools, like vi-keys or emacs-keys to navigate this box. In a large project this can become a substantial text buffer which you must view and edit with the most primitive tools.
To think that someone must have considered this an improvement over a normal Makefile!
This is called realpolitik - in essence a pragmatic, unprincipled approach to foreign policy which the US has embraced since Nixon. President Bush is opposed to realpolitik and wants a more idealistic and combative foreign policy. This is a very scary idea to foreign policy professionals, who think global stability must be the first consideration.
US realpolitik was partly a result of the balance between the US and USSR. It's expressed in saying of a dictator, "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard." With the USSR gone, it may be possible for the US to play a bolder role.
He then used MS Bob as an example of a client that exposed this security flaw to the user. He was not criticizing MS Bob. He was criticizing the operating system.
And the problem was not a "hole" or "flaw" - it was a lack of actual security in a system that claimed to provide it.
I don't think that wafer lock is intended to slow down a serious attacker. Rather it's intended to stop someone who has daily access to the outside of the safe from trying every combination over time. Typical situation - kids and gun safes.
BSD Socket API for Windows means presenting the programmer with the socket API from Unix. Specifying the API says nothing about the implementation. Windows has its own native socket API, and also supports the BSD API.
That does not say that there is BSD code in this DLL.
I had the same opinion when the first big wave of blogs hit. There was nothing interesting there, and I couldn't see the point.
During the election, I found that blogs with an agenda and inside information can be quite interesting. There are Iraqi, military and right-wing blogs that provide very different perspectives from the media.
Check out Chrenkoff and Iraq the Model for starters.
Sorry, but if you think both sides do it equally, you've missed something. If Kerry had won, the Republicans wouldn't have been shocked, just dissapointed. They weren't under the illusion that the whole country was on their side.
Read about Etzer Jerome for another insight.
Absolutely. In a larger sense, this was the problem of the Democrats. They created a "bubble reality" in which Bush was evil and stupid and had stolen the election. They felt like the vast majority, because they never heard dissenting voices. Those who disagreed frequently kept silent from fear. The silent ones spoke with their votes.
Agreed. This election was a big reality check. Candidates exist to get votes, not to push side issues. They would be fools to even mention the DMCA because it would dilute their message.
Frankly, our pet issues pale beside the deadly serious issues that drove this election. The best we can hope for is benign neglect.
Undermined? They caught Dan Rather red-handed spreading phony documents about the President. And the article further trivializes this by listing it along with John Stewart's rant.
This article carefully avoids mentioning right-wing and Iraqi blogs, but I think they had an effect. For the first time, the media lost control of the "message". Also, the article only mentions military blogs run by unhappy troops. All the military blogs I've seen were pro-America and pro-war.
For a taste of what the article missed, check out Iraq The Model and Chrenkoff.
Bush's proposal should be seen in context. The US already relies heavily on Mexican migrant labor - some of it legal, most illegal. Lots of Mexicans have died in border crossings. Lots of social problems are created by having a hidden, illegal class of people. And the smuggler channels we've created are natural conduits for terrorists. The current situation is not good, although most of us don't feel the pain.
Sounds like a waste of effort, doesn't it? It's one of the many riddles of American politics. The answer is that both sides share an unspoken assumption: that stupid, impressionable people are more likely to vote Democrat. Thus, the "rock the vote" message is really a "vote for Kerry" message.
Note that in the "butterfly ballot" scandal, where a ballot had a parallax error which could cause a vote to fall to the adjacent candidate, all parties assumed this could only benefit republicans. Anything which makes voting harder or less accessible is presumed to benefit republicans.
I can see you've been completely brainwashed by Karl Rove and Fox News. Your above statement is an outright, vicious, republican lie.
They do not drill a hole in the baby's skull. They insert a pair of scissors, then open it to enlarge the hole.
I hope this will teach you not to swallow wingnut propaganda in the future!
The court ruled on the law. They decided that Lexmark was stretching the DMCA beyond what Congress intended. It has nothing to with being for or against "the people".
If Congress had written the DMCA to support this scenario, the court would probably have upheld it.
I just read some sad news on slashdot - scientific submersible Alvin was found dead in his home at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contribution to oceanography. Truly an American icon.
The fourth reason is that the house absorbed a lot of energy. If you look at the picture, the satellite must have been greatly cushioned in its landing compared to a satellite that hit the ground. So maybe the Chinese cleverly guided the descending capsule to hit a four-story building.
Response? Only works if users will download fixes. Most of the huge Microsoft problems occurred after Microsoft had responded with a fix. Once there are tons of Linux PCs operated by normal people who don't care about computers, there will be a tendency towards Linux viruses.
I think you are still viewing the problem from an old Unix viewpoint of hacking, not viruses. Maybe the point of the virus was to forward itself to your friends, pretending to be you. Maybe its point was to use your computer as a spam relay for 30 minutes. Maybe the virus will find all your original content (word processing documents, HTML, GIMP files, etc) and insert spam into them. Therefore the ability to restore /bin is not very relevant.
Some folks still think that *nix is inherently virus proof because anything a mere user runs couldn't touch the really important stuff in
Maybe Linus is saying that as viruses start attacking Linux, he's willing to radically rethink permissions. GRsecurity and SElinux point in that direction, but wouldn't work for a normal user. Could there be a future Linux kernel that prevents an image library exploit from modifying your
If you think that machinists are the modern-day blacksmiths, you missed the point. Almost any metal object you have in your home was not made by a machinist. It was made by a low-paid, low-skilled, easily replaceable factory worker after being designed by engineers. The blacksmith was engineer and craftsman in one.
The point is that skilled labor occupations vanish. The labor part is moved to machines or deskilled labor, and the skill is moved to knowledge workers. But less knowledge workers are needed than the skilled laborers they replace, because their knowledge product is reusable.
To the extent that programmer are "skilled labor" they face the same fate.
At least that's the thesis - not sure I agree with it.
After meandering through a comparison of blacksmiths and bookkeepers, the author concludes that programmers will be replaced by AI. Nerds will be obsolete and touchy-feely types will rule the day. I think this prediction has been made twice a week since Admiral Hopper was picking insects out of her computer.
Here's my prediction: doom-predicting authors will be replaced by a Perl script called Mix'n'Meme, a boutique doom predictor. Whenever you need a pomo prediction, you just run Mix'n'Meme and it randomly scrapes a 19th century poem off the net and bases a half-plausible prediction thereon.
However I predict that Mix'n'Meme will use words correctly. For example, the word enjoin, which the author seems to like greatly, means to instruct or direct. I'm not sure what the author thinks it means.
The author seems to think that smithy means the same thing as smith or blacksmith. A smithy is a smith's workplace.
You reckon?