cisco is the company that designed and built the "special" routers for china, that enable the chinese gov't to track email to its source, so the gov't can arrest dissidents. they built these to spec for the chinese gov't. i wonder who in senegal is the beneficiary of this cisco "special" treatment.
How do you just "accidently" spam a bunch of people?
1. read first, then comment.
2. when reading, pay attention.
there was no spam. there was a template used in the site design that contained the sentence referring to the mailing list. this entire incident arose from a lazy reporter who came across that sentence and who, like you and so many others, never bothered to actually find out what was going on.
criminy, is critical thinking completely absent from the world these days?
That right there sounds like a job i'd want to do. Sure programming and security fascinate me, but consulting is much more satisfying. I have no qualms about spending 2 hours explaining my neighbors new computer to them, even if i don't get paid for it. Although i simply hate being crammed in planes (shouldn't they be considered sardine cans now?), so i don't know if i could put up with that for long.:)
yeah, i refer to planes as flying cattlecars. mooo!;-)
Bruce Williams? The guy who writes an advice column for the Jewish World Review? [jewishworldreview.com] He's supposed to be an expert on hiring?
well, the bruce williams to whom i was referring used to have a 'how to succeed in business' radio talk show... probably still does. according to himself, he put himself through college while working three jobs (stay-at-home wife & several kids, too) & went on to found a number of businesses which made him a millionaire. then he got into the business of telling other people how to be successful in business.
But I've started building some new skills, skills that have a purpose. In my case, its woodworking.
Have you seen the utter crap they sell at Art Van lately? I can make furniture at the same prices that is SO MUCH more durable and attractive.
too bad you aren't in the ct area, my fiance is looking for some decent loft beds for her kids.;-) but, she doesn't -- well, actually I don't -- want to pay $1000+ for them. (we are talking about beds for a 2 & 4 y/o.)
in my own case, i started out on the tech floor for my current employer, moved to the 'eservices' group when it started up and now i am moving (hopefully) into the professional services group. basically, i travel and consult with customers on installing, implementing and using some of our software products.
a couple things are nice about this. one is, i'm outta the freaking office 3-4 days a week! yeah!! another is, what i do actually generates revenue for the company. you have to be able to pay $2000 a day or you won't see me on your doorstep. air travel sucks, hotels suck, but working directly with customers is great (mostly) and when you're done -- you're done. mission accomplished. i'm a very task-oriented person, so i like the sense of completion -- something you don't get from tech support or any related function.
but i'm just "too proud" to go from IT to making someone's food. it would disturb me, cuz i'd always feel that i'm doing less than i'm capable of.
well, i guess the obvious question is: is what you are doing now all that you are capable of doing? do you really feel that you'll never be doing anything better?
some years ago, i was listening to bruce williams on the radio one night and he commented that he would never hire anyone who was unemployed. The reason, he said, was that anyone who really wanted to work could find a job. in his opinion, someone ready to take an 'inferior' job just to be self-sufficient was an employee who would do whatever it might take to get a job done. someone 'too proud' to take an 'inferior' job was someone who would only do those parts of a job that he felt were 'worthy' of him.
Franz has some case studies of high-end solutions with CL.
more info can be found at XANALYS Lisp Works, which includes this comment:
"Advanced numeric types. The Common Lisp arithmetic package includes unlimited size integers, fractions, complex numbers, and a complete floating point library. Conversion between numeric types occurs automatically."
The language I mean, not what it can do. It was hacked together by Netscape to somewhat resemble C++ but with the feature set of GWBASIC, so you really get the worst of two world.
Variables can be declared or not, line termination is optional, it's supposed to be object-oriented but there's no way to decalare class or methods, some construct are really horrible:
value =selectBox[selectdBox.selectedIndex].value
then you also don't like perl, i take it, since all your complains apply there, as well.
while you can't declare classes as simply as you can in some other languages, you can use the javascript prototype mechanism to do the same thing; and you certainly can create constructors and methods. evidently, you need to study up on the language a bit more. the book under discussion here would be a good place to start.
JavaScript is a solid language and can be used to interesting and useful things on the web. the fact is, people abuse every language, in one way or another. no user is forced to be lazy and propagate write-only code; it's done all the time in C, C++, perl and probably any other language you would care to name.
To all the genius-level deep thinkers who are dissing RMS: put your code where your mouths are. Get every bit of GNU software off your systems. Then see what your "linux" system is worth. Sure, you can get by without gcc, gimp, gnome, ncurses, emacs, bash. But you can start by getting glibc off your systems. And after you delete it, reboot.
Idiots. There is no "linux" without GNU. Not only does GNU software provide the bedrock on which the system rests, GNU and the FSF provides the intellectual framework on which rests the whole conception of a "free" operating system. If it wasn't for the FSF and RMS, you wouldn't have "linux," period.
But don't worry. Nobody really expects any of you to actually DO anything in defense of free software. It's clear enough that with you folks, it's all take and no give.
On the contrary, ORA is hardly faultless in this arena. I have found more typos in ORA books than in Addison-Wesley's or MIT Press's or even good old McGraw Hill!
That has not been my experience. ORA books have some faults but my experience has been that the production values are far better than average.
I buy a variety of books for reference and upgrading my knowledge. What I would like to see is technical books that actually appear to have been proofread before publication. With the possible exception of ORA, publishers of programming books seem to think that mispelled words, bad grammar and broken sentences are not worth bothering about.
That attitude does not inspire my confidence in the content of the books.
Also useful would be requiring that someone (not the author) actually follow the instructions in a book, to insure that the instructions actually lead to the correct result. I'm just now reading a book where it's clear that this was not done, because the instructions leave out important information; which information I then had to acquire through research, in order to reach the desired result. Very annoying.
Chomsky and his ilk are not popular here on Slashdot - for good reason. The overall Slashdot political mix is, well, mixed, but most techie types tend to be of the rationalist variety, whichever side they fall on. They like to rely on rational analysis of facts to come to conclusions, rather than the usual technique of far right and far left wingers of making the facts fit your own view of the world (think Creationists, think Chomsky, think radical Corporatists, etc.).
Crap. Most of the sensible commentary on slashdot comes from non-Americans. American "techie-types" overwhelmingly are white, middle class, selfish males of the "I'm alright jack, fuck you" classification. It has nothing to do with "rationalism," and it has everything to do with a culture that encourages its inhabitants to focus only on their own personal desires and disregard the effects of their actions on others. This attitude is denominated politically as "libertarianism."
Chomsky and his "ilk" are not popular because they do not participate in the cult of selfishness. They believe in moral responsibility -- a concept totally repugnant to your typical American slashdotter -- and they believe that citizens have a moral obligation to participate in their government in such a way as to prevent abuse. But American slashdotters don't care about abuses -- they just want a JOB that pays A LOT OF MONEY so they can buy all their cool tech toys. And their only political concern is LOWERING TAXES so they can buy more toys.
In any university liberal arts course -- english, history, philosophy, you name it -- it's easy to pick out the "techie-types": they're the ones whining about how it's a waste of time for them to study literature or history. They're not interested. And it's obvious, when you come to slashdot. They are as ignorant as the day is long. They can't write a complete sentence. They can't spell. They can't construct an argument. They have no concept of how the present day fits into the pattern of life in America or the world at large. All their spewing boils down to one concept: Mo' Money For Me.
I'll wager less than 50% of American slashdotters have even bothered to vote. When they do vote, they vote Republican and Libertarian for one reason only -- lower taxes. 90% of them would have no problem eating in a restaurant with a sign out front that read "whites only." Probably 10% of them ever do community service. Going up against a crowd like that, it's obvious that Chomsky and his "ilk" are pissing into the wind. They are to be commended for continuing to do what is right -- and take the abuse -- when surrounded by hedonistic goons who couldn't give a rip about doing what is right.
Two things:
1. The law clearly makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of age in any circumstances. Period.
2. Consult an attorney now. Don't wait until the shoe drops and then scramble around trying to get out from under it. Know exactly what you need to be able to do to take your case to court. Know exactly how to conduct yourself on the job in the interim. Know exactly how to conduct yourself in the event you do get fired.
Being properly prepared will not only help you win a legal case but it will improve your own attitude at work because you will have taken positive steps to protect yourself.
The really sad thing is that age discrimination is pretty much a one way street. The guy would have a better-than-even shot at collecting compensation if he were a 42 year-old coder being forced out because of his age (most HR departments demand such heavy documentation that managers don't even bother trying), but the chance that a 20 year-old can win on an age discrimination claim is approaching zero.
The law is quite unambiguous -- discrimination on the basis of age is illegal: period. It doesn't matter whether the discrimination is based on youth or elderliness. If you can demonstrate that decisions were being made solely on the basis of age and not on competence, you win.
That said, I find this guy's complaint to be a bit of the "shoe on the other foot." In fact, the majority of age discrimination in the tech business is by guys like him running out the "old folks" so they can get their video-game-playing buddies in. Sorry, he's in the right legally and morally, but I just don't have much sympathy for him. I suspect that, if he were in a management position, he'd treat an older cow-orker exactly the way he is being treated now.
It sounds like you need an education. What he is pointing out is well-documented in the HR field. When someone puts time and effort into completing a degree, they show dedication to the field and discipline. You or I might point out that the experience is more an indicator of this, and you or I might point out that knowlege is the most important. However, I don't know about you but I am not hiring anyone right now.
In fact, by all accounts I've seen there are hundreds of thousands of tech jobs that go begging because companies won't hire for reasons that have nothing to do with degrees. Ever hear of H-1B visas? And, if you're over about 35, you are dead in the water as far as most programming jobs are concerned.
There just was a writeup in the local rag recently about a guy with 15 years experience -- most of that with the same company, formerly senior programmer, x86 assembler/C/C++, can't even get an interview. Nobody wants to pay for that experience when they can get some guy off a boat for 50% less. One of our product dept QA teams worked 28 days straight prior to the last release because the cheap bastards running things won't hire more people. Oh, they've got the "reqs" out, alright, but somehow, they just can't seem to find the "right" candidate.
I more or less agree with the rationale about why a degree is so often used. But, it's also used simply to reduce the number of applications to a manageable level. Any advertised job opening will likely draw several hundred to a thousand applications. Even large companies do not have the resources to screen 200 or 1000 people to fill a single position. That job typically is being done by one or two people. Trust me, after reading a mere dozen resumes, your eyes start to glaze.
More than ever, getting a job is a crapshoot. Your resume gets your toe in the door and then you have to survive the regimen of interviews -- I went through 4 interviews to get my present position -- background checks &c.
This, of course, assumes that you're not filtering them out [dyndns.org]. Since they're one of the many purveyors of third-party cookies (and since exclusion of third-party cookies in browsers is a fairly recent development), they're filtered out.
This, of course, assumes that you don't have better things to do with your time than worry about web site traffic analysis. Frankly, that is something that is very low on my priority list. Unless you have figured out a way to keep your activity from being logged by the server (which would be quite an achievement), the point is moot. Software already exists that allows web admins to track you live on the site, in real time. And server log analysis can give the site owner far more detail about your activity than JavaScript tracking.
If its got anything to do with Hitbox, it's not sites that are polled but ISPs...
[HitBox take proxy logs from ISPs and process those - generating the stats and providing clickthrough information to sites].
Hitbox does nothing of the kind. It uses JavaScript included on the site pages. Every time the page is opened in a browser, information about the visitor is returned to Hitbox.
Because it uses JavaScript, it can get exactly the same useragent information that would show in the server logs -- and more.
This method of retrieving information is an accurate reflection of what web browsers are doing at a particular moment, with caveats. They must have JavaScript enabled in the browser and usually they must accept cookies. (About 4-5% of browsers disable JavaScript and 10-15% disable cookies.) The kinds of sites that are using Hitbox and its competitors are likely to be commercial and windows-centric. Also, I think it is worth noting that an estimated 40% of web browsing is done from work, where people have access to high-speed connections not available at home. This naturally skews the results, since offices are presently far more likely to be Windows-based.
This type of traffic analysis is rapidly becoming popular among the major enterprise-level sites, such as Major League Baseball, Ticketmaster and so forth. If you have a Windows machine, you can run bugnosis for a while and see what I mean.
mp
Re:Move to Redmond and start a multi-billion $ cor
on
Volunteer Work Abroad?
·
· Score: 0
You'd be doing the world a lot more good if you stayed in the States and used your most productive years to start a business that employed gazillions of people. There are two advantages to this: In the interim, gazillions of employees have enough disposable income to be able to settle down and raise families, and, in the long run, when you get old you will have enough money to really help the beneficiary of your choice.
PS: Most charities are, at best, fraudulent, but are more likely to be detrimental to the very people they are supposed to help.
100% pure libertarian tripe.
No-account wannabees use this kind of thinking as an excuse for not behaving decently toward their fellow human beings.
Selfishness is not a virtue, despite Ayn Rand's asseverations to the contrary. The reason you will never amount to much is that you never stop thinking about yourself long enough to do anybody any good. The life of Howard Hughes is a good parable for you to ponder.
To be on topic again, I even think that those stereotypical bonding-rituals described in the "Ask Slashdot", don't really exist. It's all TV and you shouldn't believe what is on TV.;-)
Yeah, they do. I haven't seen that in the cubicle world but in the real world it's fairly common. Lots of places I've worked, we would go for beers at the end of the day, shoot pool, talk cars, camping, motorcycles, whatever. Some ritual bitching about the job. A lot of times, the people at your job are the only people with whom you relate on a certain level, who can understand what is going on in your life. That's usually because they are in the same situations.
It may be different in the dilbert world because you actually spend very little of your work time interacting with your workmates. You send email and make phone calls all day long, rather than engage in any kind of real working "together."
I have been a happy slack user for a long time. Every time I make a switch, I come back. A couple weeks ago, I installed mandrake 8.1. Yeah, it has a nice interface but nothing worked right. X would not run AT ALL. I had to monkey it manually to get it to work. No sound. No printing.
I d/l'ed the slack isos for 8.0, burned 'em, installed. Beauty! Sound! Printer! And X fired right up and worked the way it is supposed to work. That is the best, sweetest install I ever have had. Hell, even the screensavers in Gnome work OOB, something I don't think ever has happened before.
In sum, I'm totally happy with God's Own Distro (tm) (using God's Own Editor (tm), emacs).
I read the RAND statement at W3C site and I cannot see in it any statement that directly assesses the actual effect of the policy on web usage and users.
How is usage of the web going to be improved for users as a result of the implementation of this new policy? And, as a followup, if there's no clear perception of the impact, why is this policy being put into place?
And people wonder why Politicians ignore them. No one -- EVER -- has proposed defining all hackers as terrorists. What has been proposed is recognizing that hackers can be terrorists. Obviously if a hacker hacked into the right computer system, havoc could be wreaked.
Rule number 1 of writing to your representatives is having a clue of what you're talking about, and not look like a knee-jerk crackpot.
That's certainly true, and if you had one, you wouldn't be playing the ignoramus in this thread.
"Most of the terrorism offenses are violent crimes, or crimes involving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But the list also includes the provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that make it illegal to crack a computer for the purpose of obtaining anything of value, or to deliberately cause damage. Likewise, launching a malicious program that harms a system, like a virus, or making an extortionate threat to damage a computer are included in the definition of terrorism."
BTW, this issue was discussed by Prof. Peter Swire of the George Washington University Law School on Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list, and he included a list of past cases that would fall under the "terrorism" category under the new law.
It seems that everyone has something to say about encryption, except about actually using it. In the aftermath of the torpedoing of the WTC, I spent several days working on setting up GPG in several different computers. Basically, the result of the experiment was: if you want easy-to-use encryption using free software, you're screwed. Here are some outcomes:
1. Mutt does not recognize (by default, anyway) a PGP message that is not PGP/MIME. A plain old text-encrypted message has to be saved to a file and decrypted. IMO, that's broken.
2. Outlook does not recognize PGP/MIME and handles it as an attachment. This means, if I encrypt a message using Mutt and send it to someone who is using Outlook, that person again has to save it to a file to decrypt. That's broken.
3. Out of a half-dozen or so options which I examined, there is a single functional plugin for Outlook that enables you to easily encrypt/decrypt mail. That's from a site in Germany. It seems like a good product, but since Outlook's handling of PGP/MIME is broken, it's not useful for incoming mail.
4. This plugin produces the old-fashioned text-encrypted message that Mutt won't handle correctly.
I would love to be able to get together with my friends and help them set up encrypted mail. But the plain fact is, there is no "easy" way to do it. Going from one type of mail client to another is a pain in the ass. And what about Eudora, fatal OE, Pine, Pegasus and all the other clients?
Like it or not, mail encryption is the geek equivalent of "classic" books -- those books "everybody talks about and nobody reads."
I don't know much about the JCE, but when downloading the beta version of JDK 1.4, I saw a page to download "unlimited strength jurisdiction policy files". Does this mean I can use keys of any bit length?
Get Java Cryptography by Jonathan Knudsen. It's good. Creating a class to encrypt/decrypt with JCE is almost trivial. JCE includes classes for pretty much all types of cryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
mp
But your sig is from probably one of the funniest commercials in recent history... Gave me a good laugh. (:
agreed. the programming was horrible but the adverts were a hoot.
mp
1. read first, then comment.
2. when reading, pay attention.
there was no spam. there was a template used in the site design that contained the sentence referring to the mailing list. this entire incident arose from a lazy reporter who came across that sentence and who, like you and so many others, never bothered to actually find out what was going on.
criminy, is critical thinking completely absent from the world these days?
mp
yeah, i refer to planes as flying cattlecars. mooo! ;-)
mp
well, the bruce williams to whom i was referring used to have a 'how to succeed in business' radio talk show ... probably still does. according to himself, he put himself through college while working three jobs (stay-at-home wife & several kids, too) & went on to found a number of businesses which made him a millionaire. then he got into the business of telling other people how to be successful in business.
the radio show was often interesting.
mp
Have you seen the utter crap they sell at Art Van lately? I can make furniture at the same prices that is SO MUCH more durable and attractive.
too bad you aren't in the ct area, my fiance is looking for some decent loft beds for her kids. ;-) but, she doesn't -- well, actually I don't -- want to pay $1000+ for them. (we are talking about beds for a 2 & 4 y/o.)
in my own case, i started out on the tech floor for my current employer, moved to the 'eservices' group when it started up and now i am moving (hopefully) into the professional services group. basically, i travel and consult with customers on installing, implementing and using some of our software products.
a couple things are nice about this. one is, i'm outta the freaking office 3-4 days a week! yeah!! another is, what i do actually generates revenue for the company. you have to be able to pay $2000 a day or you won't see me on your doorstep. air travel sucks, hotels suck, but working directly with customers is great (mostly) and when you're done -- you're done. mission accomplished. i'm a very task-oriented person, so i like the sense of completion -- something you don't get from tech support or any related function.
mp
well, i guess the obvious question is: is what you are doing now all that you are capable of doing? do you really feel that you'll never be doing anything better?
some years ago, i was listening to bruce williams on the radio one night and he commented that he would never hire anyone who was unemployed. The reason, he said, was that anyone who really wanted to work could find a job. in his opinion, someone ready to take an 'inferior' job just to be self-sufficient was an employee who would do whatever it might take to get a job done. someone 'too proud' to take an 'inferior' job was someone who would only do those parts of a job that he felt were 'worthy' of him.
<shrug> ymmv.
mp
Franz has some case studies of high-end solutions with CL.
more info can be found at XANALYS Lisp Works, which includes this comment:
"Advanced numeric types. The Common Lisp arithmetic package includes unlimited size integers, fractions, complex numbers, and a complete floating point library. Conversion between numeric types occurs automatically."
mp
Variables can be declared or not, line termination is optional, it's supposed to be object-oriented but there's no way to decalare class or methods, some construct are really horrible:
value =selectBox[selectdBox.selectedIndex].value
then you also don't like perl, i take it, since all your complains apply there, as well.
while you can't declare classes as simply as you can in some other languages, you can use the javascript prototype mechanism to do the same thing; and you certainly can create constructors and methods. evidently, you need to study up on the language a bit more. the book under discussion here would be a good place to start.
JavaScript is a solid language and can be used to interesting and useful things on the web. the fact is, people abuse every language, in one way or another. no user is forced to be lazy and propagate write-only code; it's done all the time in C, C++, perl and probably any other language you would care to name.
mp
Idiots. There is no "linux" without GNU. Not only does GNU software provide the bedrock on which the system rests, GNU and the FSF provides the intellectual framework on which rests the whole conception of a "free" operating system. If it wasn't for the FSF and RMS, you wouldn't have "linux," period.
But don't worry. Nobody really expects any of you to actually DO anything in defense of free software. It's clear enough that with you folks, it's all take and no give.
mp
That has not been my experience. ORA books have some faults but my experience has been that the production values are far better than average.
mp
That attitude does not inspire my confidence in the content of the books.
Also useful would be requiring that someone (not the author) actually follow the instructions in a book, to insure that the instructions actually lead to the correct result. I'm just now reading a book where it's clear that this was not done, because the instructions leave out important information; which information I then had to acquire through research, in order to reach the desired result. Very annoying.
mp
Crap. Most of the sensible commentary on slashdot comes from non-Americans. American "techie-types" overwhelmingly are white, middle class, selfish males of the "I'm alright jack, fuck you" classification. It has nothing to do with "rationalism," and it has everything to do with a culture that encourages its inhabitants to focus only on their own personal desires and disregard the effects of their actions on others. This attitude is denominated politically as "libertarianism."
Chomsky and his "ilk" are not popular because they do not participate in the cult of selfishness. They believe in moral responsibility -- a concept totally repugnant to your typical American slashdotter -- and they believe that citizens have a moral obligation to participate in their government in such a way as to prevent abuse. But American slashdotters don't care about abuses -- they just want a JOB that pays A LOT OF MONEY so they can buy all their cool tech toys. And their only political concern is LOWERING TAXES so they can buy more toys.
In any university liberal arts course -- english, history, philosophy, you name it -- it's easy to pick out the "techie-types": they're the ones whining about how it's a waste of time for them to study literature or history. They're not interested. And it's obvious, when you come to slashdot. They are as ignorant as the day is long. They can't write a complete sentence. They can't spell. They can't construct an argument. They have no concept of how the present day fits into the pattern of life in America or the world at large. All their spewing boils down to one concept: Mo' Money For Me.
I'll wager less than 50% of American slashdotters have even bothered to vote. When they do vote, they vote Republican and Libertarian for one reason only -- lower taxes. 90% of them would have no problem eating in a restaurant with a sign out front that read "whites only." Probably 10% of them ever do community service. Going up against a crowd like that, it's obvious that Chomsky and his "ilk" are pissing into the wind. They are to be commended for continuing to do what is right -- and take the abuse -- when surrounded by hedonistic goons who couldn't give a rip about doing what is right.
mp
2. Consult an attorney now. Don't wait until the shoe drops and then scramble around trying to get out from under it. Know exactly what you need to be able to do to take your case to court. Know exactly how to conduct yourself on the job in the interim. Know exactly how to conduct yourself in the event you do get fired.
Being properly prepared will not only help you win a legal case but it will improve your own attitude at work because you will have taken positive steps to protect yourself.
mp
The law is quite unambiguous -- discrimination on the basis of age is illegal: period. It doesn't matter whether the discrimination is based on youth or elderliness. If you can demonstrate that decisions were being made solely on the basis of age and not on competence, you win.
That said, I find this guy's complaint to be a bit of the "shoe on the other foot." In fact, the majority of age discrimination in the tech business is by guys like him running out the "old folks" so they can get their video-game-playing buddies in. Sorry, he's in the right legally and morally, but I just don't have much sympathy for him. I suspect that, if he were in a management position, he'd treat an older cow-orker exactly the way he is being treated now.
mp
In fact, by all accounts I've seen there are hundreds of thousands of tech jobs that go begging because companies won't hire for reasons that have nothing to do with degrees. Ever hear of H-1B visas? And, if you're over about 35, you are dead in the water as far as most programming jobs are concerned.
There just was a writeup in the local rag recently about a guy with 15 years experience -- most of that with the same company, formerly senior programmer, x86 assembler/C/C++, can't even get an interview. Nobody wants to pay for that experience when they can get some guy off a boat for 50% less. One of our product dept QA teams worked 28 days straight prior to the last release because the cheap bastards running things won't hire more people. Oh, they've got the "reqs" out, alright, but somehow, they just can't seem to find the "right" candidate.
I more or less agree with the rationale about why a degree is so often used. But, it's also used simply to reduce the number of applications to a manageable level. Any advertised job opening will likely draw several hundred to a thousand applications. Even large companies do not have the resources to screen 200 or 1000 people to fill a single position. That job typically is being done by one or two people. Trust me, after reading a mere dozen resumes, your eyes start to glaze.
More than ever, getting a job is a crapshoot. Your resume gets your toe in the door and then you have to survive the regimen of interviews -- I went through 4 interviews to get my present position -- background checks &c.
mp
This, of course, assumes that you don't have better things to do with your time than worry about web site traffic analysis. Frankly, that is something that is very low on my priority list. Unless you have figured out a way to keep your activity from being logged by the server (which would be quite an achievement), the point is moot. Software already exists that allows web admins to track you live on the site, in real time. And server log analysis can give the site owner far more detail about your activity than JavaScript tracking.
mp
Hitbox does nothing of the kind. It uses JavaScript included on the site pages. Every time the page is opened in a browser, information about the visitor is returned to Hitbox.
Because it uses JavaScript, it can get exactly the same useragent information that would show in the server logs -- and more.
This method of retrieving information is an accurate reflection of what web browsers are doing at a particular moment, with caveats. They must have JavaScript enabled in the browser and usually they must accept cookies. (About 4-5% of browsers disable JavaScript and 10-15% disable cookies.) The kinds of sites that are using Hitbox and its competitors are likely to be commercial and windows-centric. Also, I think it is worth noting that an estimated 40% of web browsing is done from work, where people have access to high-speed connections not available at home. This naturally skews the results, since offices are presently far more likely to be Windows-based.
This type of traffic analysis is rapidly becoming popular among the major enterprise-level sites, such as Major League Baseball, Ticketmaster and so forth. If you have a Windows machine, you can run bugnosis for a while and see what I mean.
mp
100% pure libertarian tripe.
No-account wannabees use this kind of thinking as an excuse for not behaving decently toward their fellow human beings.
Selfishness is not a virtue, despite Ayn Rand's asseverations to the contrary. The reason you will never amount to much is that you never stop thinking about yourself long enough to do anybody any good. The life of Howard Hughes is a good parable for you to ponder.
mp
Yeah, they do. I haven't seen that in the cubicle world but in the real world it's fairly common. Lots of places I've worked, we would go for beers at the end of the day, shoot pool, talk cars, camping, motorcycles, whatever. Some ritual bitching about the job. A lot of times, the people at your job are the only people with whom you relate on a certain level, who can understand what is going on in your life. That's usually because they are in the same situations.
It may be different in the dilbert world because you actually spend very little of your work time interacting with your workmates. You send email and make phone calls all day long, rather than engage in any kind of real working "together."
mp
I d/l'ed the slack isos for 8.0, burned 'em, installed. Beauty! Sound! Printer! And X fired right up and worked the way it is supposed to work. That is the best, sweetest install I ever have had. Hell, even the screensavers in Gnome work OOB, something I don't think ever has happened before.
In sum, I'm totally happy with God's Own Distro (tm) (using God's Own Editor (tm), emacs).
mp
How is usage of the web going to be improved for users as a result of the implementation of this new policy? And, as a followup, if there's no clear perception of the impact, why is this policy being put into place?
mp
Rule number 1 of writing to your representatives is having a clue of what you're talking about, and not look like a knee-jerk crackpot.
That's certainly true, and if you had one, you wouldn't be playing the ignoramus in this thread.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/257
"Most of the terrorism offenses are violent crimes, or crimes involving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. But the list also includes the provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that make it illegal to crack a computer for the purpose of obtaining anything of value, or to deliberately cause damage. Likewise, launching a malicious program that harms a system, like a virus, or making an extortionate threat to damage a computer are included in the definition of terrorism."
BTW, this issue was discussed by Prof. Peter Swire of the George Washington University Law School on Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list, and he included a list of past cases that would fall under the "terrorism" category under the new law.
Next time, read first and then write.
mp
1. Mutt does not recognize (by default, anyway) a PGP message that is not PGP/MIME. A plain old text-encrypted message has to be saved to a file and decrypted. IMO, that's broken.
2. Outlook does not recognize PGP/MIME and handles it as an attachment. This means, if I encrypt a message using Mutt and send it to someone who is using Outlook, that person again has to save it to a file to decrypt. That's broken.
3. Out of a half-dozen or so options which I examined, there is a single functional plugin for Outlook that enables you to easily encrypt/decrypt mail. That's from a site in Germany. It seems like a good product, but since Outlook's handling of PGP/MIME is broken, it's not useful for incoming mail.
4. This plugin produces the old-fashioned text-encrypted message that Mutt won't handle correctly.
I would love to be able to get together with my friends and help them set up encrypted mail. But the plain fact is, there is no "easy" way to do it. Going from one type of mail client to another is a pain in the ass. And what about Eudora, fatal OE, Pine, Pegasus and all the other clients?
Like it or not, mail encryption is the geek equivalent of "classic" books -- those books "everybody talks about and nobody reads."
mp
Get Java Cryptography by Jonathan Knudsen. It's good. Creating a class to encrypt/decrypt with JCE is almost trivial. JCE includes classes for pretty much all types of cryptography.
mp