I'm sure your legally-inclined family knows what they're talking about, but there HAS been at least one civil case where exactly what I described actually happened. The defendent (the guy who left the car unlocked) was found liable. --
Or literature. Or biology. Or math. It really doesn't matter, because education is for learning how to learn and apply knowledge, and gain a work ethic - not for technical skills, which may be irrelevant in 2 years let alone 10. Most of the low-level coding jobs ask for 1 or 2 years of experience "in the industry" and a CS "or related" degree. Translation: do your time in QA reporting bugs, and then graduate upward. Not that QA/QE departments aren't technically challenging (some of our best coders are in QE, designing test suites), but those departments tend to have a high turnover, and that's where you're most likely to find work.
I was a psychology major, so I didn't even hit the "or related" part of the job requirements. I got into QA because when they interviewed me I knew the current tech, backwards and forwards. They saw I was smart and worked hard, and 4 years/2 department changes later, I'm now where I want to be, designing and implementing parts of the application server that drives our company.
The interviewers for good companies will be able to tell if you're technically skilled. They will want to know that you went to college, and they may care if you graduated or where you graduated from, but that's about it.
--
With this release, Moz has finally turned the corner. Everything works the way it's supposed to, and although some stuff doesn't render right (www.php.net being one example - the widgets work, but it's pretty ugly), functionally, Moz is all there now, caught up with IE. Even the desktop integration with Windows works well (not perfectly).
It's now to the point where it's a browser I can use for everything I used a browser for before, and I pretty much use a browser for everything so that's saying a lot;). There's still some strides to make in performance, but it's good enough.
--
Logical extremist arguments always piss me off, so I'm responding to this one.
You're civilly liable if you leave your car door unlocked and someone steals your car and causes property or personal damage with it. You're liable if someone sneaking onto your property at night falls into an open well, or steps in a hidden beartrap you left out. You're liable for all kinds of careless things. Just because you're the victim doesn't mean you're not ALSO responsible for the harm caused by your carelessness. This doesn't apply to everything - otherwise we'd have parents held responsible for the crimes of their 35-year-old adult children. But there is clear precedent, and a lot of sensibility, in the argument that you should be held liable for damage caused by computer crimes that were facilitated by your negligence.
Taking things to the logical extreme is stupid. The universe is gray. --
There's a very real chance that the NDA issue WILL go away with the 3dfx purchase. I may just be blowing smoke here, but it seems to me that, because 3dfx comes with fullblown OGL drivers, it's not outside the realm of possibility that NVidia will adopt them and stop paying SGI. --
The extra CPU needed to do SSL is about 2-5% over what it would normally take to load the web page. This is about the same on both the browser and the web server, slightly higher on the web server mainly because the web server doesn't have to render images.
I don't consider this a huge cost. Encryption naysayers have been bugling the CPU costs for years, but they just don't bear out in benchmarks or in real-world application. --
By now, we have a pretty good idea of what the Web is all about and what it can offer. We are also increasingly beginning to see its limitations and shortcomings. In one word, we are entering an era of realism.
This is a fairly arrogant statement I had to address, even though it doesn't deal with the central point I'm about to make except indirectly. He's saying HE knows what the Web is all about and what it can offer. Well, clearly, nobody knows what the Web can offer, because I haven't seen timetravel.php on freshmeat yet.
I have a guess though, and recent trends are giving my guess some weight. Back many years ago Sun said "the network is the computer", and began pushing to have every workstation in the world be an audience member in that big crazy show we call the Internet. MS jumped on this boat by integrating a browser into the OS without bothering to include a web server. They assumed what most of us did - it was too difficult to actually offer content, so they looked at their TV's and said, "Hey! This is what the Web's gonna be like too!"
The Web hasn't peaked yet or anything like it because the real web is just getting under way. The real web is characterized by this statement: Every workstation in the world will be a server on the Internet. That's my prediction. The Internet is there, and it works, to offer interactivity, not passive absorption of banner ads. And as such, tools for offering content--Napster, Gnutella, freenet, and half a million open source modules for turning your little cable modem into an IRC bot shell account server or free porn story archive--are appearing every day. These tools are so usable that kindergarten teachers and auto workers and lawyers and janitors are setting up servers at home right next to the electrical engineers' and the web gurus'. Even/. and Usenet and other such resources that allow interactive commentary are an example of what I'm talking about - people using their bandwidth to contribute to the overall charater of the web.
We're seeing the birth of the next web right now--the altruistic web, where everyone pushes their knowledge out to everyone else, and accepts the knowledge of their users in return, instead of just waiting for their search engine to turn up the content. Broadband will help with this, but we need to work out a few kinks (like short-sighted ISP end-user agreements that forbid the setting-up of servers, and like getting fiber or power-line internet access rolled out to everyone). When these things start to bear fruit the Web will be more than just a convenient form of entertainment, it will become part of the cultural tapestry.
--
Since you insist that real property and "intellectual property" are the same thing, fine. Let's put the analogy in real-world terms. You dropped your wallet on the street and left it lying there. Five years later some homeless person finds it (now empty and covered with dust), picks it up, brushes it off, and puts it to its original use. Do you claim you still own that wallet? --
Precisely. It's not as if I WANT to be reached by phone - I don't even leave mine on.:P Behaviorism in action - send me an email, you phone-using bastards! --
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This is a sneaky little POS law snuck in by our beloved drug czar. It's to prevent drug dealers from getting bank accounts with cell phones and no provable address. Thanks, drug czar! I'm one of the many people who would ditch his land line if it weren't for the War on Some Drugs.
And BTW, because of that, it only applies in the States. --
Any major app can be designed to make happy use of large volumes of RAM. Even Mozilla. Suppose you designed a desktop system to be left on forever, with the browser always in memory and all file cache memory resident instead. You'd have a blazing fast browser thanks to your mondo memory.
For a less pie-in-the-sky example, most any RDBMS will use up every byte of memory you can throw at it. Page cache, page cache, page cache. High-volume enterprise systems suck up RAM like no tomorrow, and put it to good use.
--
And features are not. You can go to the store and buy more memory for your computer. Can you go to the store and buy more features for your firewall software? Maybe when the next version comes out; maybe if you know how to write your own firewall, you don't need to buy it at all - but it's still not cheap. It takes manhours well beyond the actual coding time to produce a software product (read: training, testing, packaging, delivery. . . )
Users want features. They don't mind buying RAM. The people who complain about always having to upgrade their systems are invariably the people who get the least out of them. And if you're not planning to use more features, why would you upgrade your software? And if you don't upgrade your software, what difference does it make to you that the newest systems out there have more bus bandwidth or higher clock speeds?
Now, excepting for that handful of software products that force you into an upgrade because everyone else already has and you need compatibility (no reason to name names), the degree to which your software does or does not do what you need it to do, is determined when you bring it home from the store or download it off the local FTP site. If it does everything you need it to do, you don't need a faster computer, you don't need upgrades, and you don't need to worry about programmers making everything slower. However, for the vast majority of users, there's always something they can think that their computer ought to be doing and isn't. If they want it, they'd better expect to cough up a little extra for it, because free software or not, the WORLD isn't free.
--
Jesus, VA Linux is really getting ripped off every time one of these stories goes up. 4/5 times the thing being auctioned is something/.ers are rabid for, and consequently the/. effect makes the price go through the roof. I'm surprised it was only up to $18k by the time I checked it.
Hey VA, get your money's worth, make the seller kick in a little scratch before you let/. post stories like this in the future:P --
This link may shed some light on whether this guy is legit or not - it's a request form to get his most recent seller ID. It's the rating of THAT ID you'd want to go by. I didn't check it myself, quite frankly I don't care that much:P --
We are already able to directly observe brain processes on nearly a molecular level - which is the level where all the work is actually done - and we can even observe the molecules, if we don't worry too much about the subject being alive.:-)
On the other end, building these bad boys, we can achieve the same effect if we work with matter on a LARGE enough scale. Right now it's an even bet whether the first device to pass the Turing test reliably will be made of lots of very tiny things, or will be gigantic and fill up a warehouse.
I'd rather my desktop not look like a digital wasteland out of Tron. Vast expanses of black grids are a bit...depressing, don't you think? How about some nice grassy hills in the background or something. --
If the exploit is sufficienly high priority (and -- not to dig at Microsoft -- most Microsoft patches are high priority because of the length of time they take to release them and the likelihood that a real-world exploit already exists for them) there is only one way to be sure. Shut down access to everything that doesn't have it yet, and only bring it back online when it does. --
Is how you tell. It's not how hot the person is - it's how good the photographer is. Shots that are totally in focus, set in some exotic location, with the model perfectly posed, etc. are obvious BS.
I made a point of rating them 1's. I like real women. --
I'm sure your legally-inclined family knows what they're talking about, but there HAS been at least one civil case where exactly what I described actually happened. The defendent (the guy who left the car unlocked) was found liable.
--
I was a psychology major, so I didn't even hit the "or related" part of the job requirements. I got into QA because when they interviewed me I knew the current tech, backwards and forwards. They saw I was smart and worked hard, and 4 years/2 department changes later, I'm now where I want to be, designing and implementing parts of the application server that drives our company.
The interviewers for good companies will be able to tell if you're technically skilled. They will want to know that you went to college, and they may care if you graduated or where you graduated from, but that's about it.
--
Can EverCode get their phone numbers? I think that's what he's trying to say.
--
It's now to the point where it's a browser I can use for everything I used a browser for before, and I pretty much use a browser for everything so that's saying a lot ;). There's still some strides to make in performance, but it's good enough.
--
You're civilly liable if you leave your car door unlocked and someone steals your car and causes property or personal damage with it. You're liable if someone sneaking onto your property at night falls into an open well, or steps in a hidden beartrap you left out. You're liable for all kinds of careless things. Just because you're the victim doesn't mean you're not ALSO responsible for the harm caused by your carelessness. This doesn't apply to everything - otherwise we'd have parents held responsible for the crimes of their 35-year-old adult children. But there is clear precedent, and a lot of sensibility, in the argument that you should be held liable for damage caused by computer crimes that were facilitated by your negligence.
Taking things to the logical extreme is stupid. The universe is gray.
--
There's a very real chance that the NDA issue WILL go away with the 3dfx purchase. I may just be blowing smoke here, but it seems to me that, because 3dfx comes with fullblown OGL drivers, it's not outside the realm of possibility that NVidia will adopt them and stop paying SGI.
--
I don't consider this a huge cost. Encryption naysayers have been bugling the CPU costs for years, but they just don't bear out in benchmarks or in real-world application.
--
This is a fairly arrogant statement I had to address, even though it doesn't deal with the central point I'm about to make except indirectly. He's saying HE knows what the Web is all about and what it can offer. Well, clearly, nobody knows what the Web can offer, because I haven't seen timetravel.php on freshmeat yet.
I have a guess though, and recent trends are giving my guess some weight. Back many years ago Sun said "the network is the computer", and began pushing to have every workstation in the world be an audience member in that big crazy show we call the Internet. MS jumped on this boat by integrating a browser into the OS without bothering to include a web server. They assumed what most of us did - it was too difficult to actually offer content, so they looked at their TV's and said, "Hey! This is what the Web's gonna be like too!"
The Web hasn't peaked yet or anything like it because the real web is just getting under way. The real web is characterized by this statement: Every workstation in the world will be a server on the Internet. That's my prediction. The Internet is there, and it works, to offer interactivity, not passive absorption of banner ads. And as such, tools for offering content--Napster, Gnutella, freenet, and half a million open source modules for turning your little cable modem into an IRC bot shell account server or free porn story archive--are appearing every day. These tools are so usable that kindergarten teachers and auto workers and lawyers and janitors are setting up servers at home right next to the electrical engineers' and the web gurus'. Even /. and Usenet and other such resources that allow interactive commentary are an example of what I'm talking about - people using their bandwidth to contribute to the overall charater of the web.
We're seeing the birth of the next web right now--the altruistic web, where everyone pushes their knowledge out to everyone else, and accepts the knowledge of their users in return, instead of just waiting for their search engine to turn up the content. Broadband will help with this, but we need to work out a few kinks (like short-sighted ISP end-user agreements that forbid the setting-up of servers, and like getting fiber or power-line internet access rolled out to everyone). When these things start to bear fruit the Web will be more than just a convenient form of entertainment, it will become part of the cultural tapestry.
--
Not to mention keystroke monitors, hidden microphones, and the random execution of anyone caught surfing inappropriate websites.
--
Since you insist that real property and "intellectual property" are the same thing, fine. Let's put the analogy in real-world terms. You dropped your wallet on the street and left it lying there. Five years later some homeless person finds it (now empty and covered with dust), picks it up, brushes it off, and puts it to its original use. Do you claim you still own that wallet?
--
Precisely. It's not as if I WANT to be reached by phone - I don't even leave mine on. :P Behaviorism in action - send me an email, you phone-using bastards!
--
I agree. You've just pointed out one of the (many) reasons this is a bad law.
--
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Earn money hawking anti-spam products!
Qualify for that second mortgage!
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Click here to read something completely unrelated to the rest of this comment
--
And BTW, because of that, it only applies in the States.
--
Whatever you do, don't try to release another damn Linux distro. Like we need another one of those.
--
For a less pie-in-the-sky example, most any RDBMS will use up every byte of memory you can throw at it. Page cache, page cache, page cache. High-volume enterprise systems suck up RAM like no tomorrow, and put it to good use.
--
Users want features. They don't mind buying RAM. The people who complain about always having to upgrade their systems are invariably the people who get the least out of them. And if you're not planning to use more features, why would you upgrade your software? And if you don't upgrade your software, what difference does it make to you that the newest systems out there have more bus bandwidth or higher clock speeds?
Now, excepting for that handful of software products that force you into an upgrade because everyone else already has and you need compatibility (no reason to name names), the degree to which your software does or does not do what you need it to do, is determined when you bring it home from the store or download it off the local FTP site. If it does everything you need it to do, you don't need a faster computer, you don't need upgrades, and you don't need to worry about programmers making everything slower. However, for the vast majority of users, there's always something they can think that their computer ought to be doing and isn't. If they want it, they'd better expect to cough up a little extra for it, because free software or not, the WORLD isn't free.
--
This guy ripped off banks. I won't be losing any sleep if I decide to buy and enjoy his book.
--
Hey VA, get your money's worth, make the seller kick in a little scratch before you let /. post stories like this in the future :P
--
This link may shed some light on whether this guy is legit or not - it's a request form to get his most recent seller ID. It's the rating of THAT ID you'd want to go by. I didn't check it myself, quite frankly I don't care that much :P
--
On the other end, building these bad boys, we can achieve the same effect if we work with matter on a LARGE enough scale. Right now it's an even bet whether the first device to pass the Turing test reliably will be made of lots of very tiny things, or will be gigantic and fill up a warehouse.
But one way or another, it will be done.
--
I'd rather my desktop not look like a digital wasteland out of Tron. Vast expanses of black grids are a bit...depressing, don't you think? How about some nice grassy hills in the background or something.
--
If the exploit is sufficienly high priority (and -- not to dig at Microsoft -- most Microsoft patches are high priority because of the length of time they take to release them and the likelihood that a real-world exploit already exists for them) there is only one way to be sure. Shut down access to everything that doesn't have it yet, and only bring it back online when it does.
--
I made a point of rating them 1's. I like real women.
--
0.04. "You have the reflexes of a snake."
--