Stop making sense on a Slashdot MS two minutes of hate!

I wish I could disagree with you but I know this is what happened.

Yes, there is money to be made as an investigator... a lot more to STOP the investigators. You could take every machine in my home (assuming you could find them all which is a lot harder than it sounds - take a notebook out of its case and slurp off of a line in the wall and unless they are REALLY motivated, someone generally won't find it). For all of the respect a lot of agencies get, you've got to remember that the best and brightest DON'T WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Why would they? I've worked with the government enough to know this. For every competent INFOSEC professional, there're 10s if not 100s of incompetent ones. The smart ones get a clearance on their resume and then go work for six figures in the private sector. Just one thing to remember.... crypto isn't meant to stop someone... only delay them. In 1973-1974 IBM came up with a crypto algorithm based on Lucifer, the NSA took it, played with it some (they swapped the S-boxs), and gave it back, it later became known as DES. For years (and even now... which is really silly) people thought that the NSA weakened the code or put in some kind of backdoor. Why the NSA did it (and IBM knew of this method but agreed to keep it secret) didn't come out until about 20 years later. Eli Biham and Adi Shamir published a paper on differential cryptanalysis, the best method for breaking block cryptos. The changes the NSA made actually the code RESISTANT to the attack. This tells us two things. One, the NSA (and IBM) had attacks that others didn't figure out for almost 20 years. Two, they managed to keep it a secret. Hidden volumes, crypto, and solid tradecraft are all good things but when against and enemy with nearly limitless resources (and the tax-free money to rent... er hire for consultation the ones they need) you really don't stand a chance.

He was given the silly interview questions. You know like, "How many quarters does it take to reach the top of the Empire state building?". He took offense to that being:

1. Who he was

2. What he was

3. He help CREATE A LANGUAGE

I've always hated those questions, not becuase I couldn't answer them, but because they don't show WHAT I KNOW, only how I solve problems. Sure you COULD say that if you know how to solve a problem you can apply it anywhere but in my experience, knowing not only how to solve a problem, but actually creating a viable solution is far more important.

Just my two cents...

Anything better? My biggest gripe with this Core War (yes I know, old school game fun as hell) is that almost nothing seems to really benefit. The only apps I know are SQL, some web servers, rendering, cubes, and code breaking/intense math. Beyond that, many things aren't embarassing parallel enough to make this matter.

The other part is that until we have better tools (or devs as many of the ones I know are REALLY dependent on Visual Studio and .NET languages doing the hard stuff for them. I know that with the advent of the newer proc archs ASM is damn near impossible, I don't think it's unreasonable for someone other than kernel or driver guys to understand the ramifications of multithreaded app design. I've been looking at what it'd take to consider each proc it's on VM and use transparent memory sharing (like VMWare does) to treat each proc like a system unto itself and then treat things more like a distributed computing problem.

My only issue is that it's NOT a distributed compute problem so maybe I'm approaching it incorrectly but this highlights my problem, not many are well trained and experienced in this type of dev.

Screw a command center, though whenever I'm evaluating a new display tech that IS the first thing that comes to mind.

I'm waiting on my transparent screen that displays XXXGA graphics and yet somehow I don't get distracted by everything happening BEHIND the screen. (

Looks cool on screen but just like Gorilla arms from Minority Report, I think it wouldn't really be practical unless you....)

Umm... actually yeah I did. Don't answer Slashdot posting while figuring out an Active Directory FUBAR....

I think we could forgive them for the 3rd movie since the 2nd one rocked so hard.

It's rather annoying that so many franchises and movies are getting the reboot/rewrite treatment. It's almost like Hollywood is afraid that most multimillon dollar investments won't turn a buck.

Oh,wait....

BTW, I thought the Batman reboot was needed but am not ashamed to say I loved the first hulk (Eric Bana not Nick Cage). Hulk was never really about mass destruction,as awesome as it is to watch, but his inner conflict.

I don't see this as a pricing war. This is a war on the control of Internet commerce. A war in which Amazon is going to lose if they allow it to be a war of attrition. He who has the larger war chest will win. Hearts and minds sounds great on paper but Walmart can give away stuff and lose a quarter or two and take the stock hit. Amazon can't do that on the same level because of what they sale. The also at as an eBay with no bidding for smaller companies that want a very public web presence but can't afford large scale advertising and shipping logistics overhead. Amazon does that for them. As a comparison Walmart can demand that suppliers use particular technologies (cough-UPC-cough, cough-rfid-cough) or they won't do business with them or levy "handling charges" (read:fines). Who do you think will win *THAT* sort of fight. For Amazon to win, they've got to reach into middle America and sell nicer things at a rate near Walmart's and offer free shipping. To make that work they'd need a VERY good distribution network set up, which Walmart already has, and Walmart has buddy-buddy deals with FedEx and UPS. It'll be a *VERY* bloody battle and the only way I see this working is if Costco and Amazon leverage each other's strengths. Just my two cents though.

Just think, somewhere right now, Ballmer is kicking a Chinese pirate in the nads right now.

...a quote from HHGTTG fits this very well: "to Arthur's embarrassment he found himself curled in a ball on the floor"

Are they in a position to:

A: buy ANYTHING? (being a rural Chinese peasant doesn't pay too well I hear)

B: *KNOW* that it's a bad deal and go to the China equivalent of NewEgg and build a better machine (being a rural Chinese peasant doesn't pay too well I hear)

Seriously, where do people get these numbers? My thing about this is this. We know many small companies don't pay for their software HERE in the states (one of my biggest challenges as a small biz IT consultant/freelancer). We also know that Chinese piracy is considered an art form in some places. Taken together, the market share statement makes little sense. How can you know what the share is, if you've no legit data? One other thing, to someone who NEVER USED a computer and just want web, email, and simple things like YouTube or word processing(most people don't use even a tenth the total capabilities of Word or Excel). They will see nothing special about Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD as they all can do that with no real issue. Let me preface this with, I'm writing this on my Ubuntu powered notebook, that's authed against my 2008 AD that also auths my kid's Gallery running on another Linux server. Most people will cry, "But those other OSes have hardware issues please help us", and I'll whisper, "No." .... and then remember that these machines came with Linux and thus should already work fine since it's 2009 and not 1999.

I think this was the most subtle Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference I've seen for awhile!!!