HN user

GregQuinn

39 karma
Posts0
Comments17
View on HN
No posts found.

A very interesting caveat from the paper:

"It is important to note that it is assumed that the victim is wearing the WAD on the wrist of the preferred hand used to interact with keyboards. In fact, in our attack scenario it would be harder, if not impossible, for the attacker to infer keystrokes if the victim is right-handed but is wearing the WAD on the left hand for example."

A WAD is any wearable arm band device.

How I Interview 11 years ago

The whole purpose of the offer is to let the client decide how much you're worth to them. I provide no up-front rate or fee.

It's always the clients who claim to be 'innovative', 'game changing', 'disruptive' etc. that are the most risk averse. They seem completely blind to the cognitive dissonance.

How I Interview 11 years ago

You grossly underestimate how conservative and risk averse most clients are.

As a consultant I have tried a variation on your approach. I've offered to work for a client for 2-3 weeks. At the end of which THEY get to decide how much I'm worth. I reserve the right not to carry on working for them but for those 2-3 weeks I will accept whatever they pay including nothing.

In over a decade not one client has accepted this deal.

Although his comments are accurate there's nothing terrible profound about them.

For quite a while everybody has realized that out sourcing was never anything more than labour cost arbitrage, dressed up with fairly empty "sales" rhetoric.

However he misses a more fundamental way in which clients and outsourcers interest are misaligned. Because outsourcers are essentially selling bodies they have no incentive to become more efficient through labour cost reduction.

I suspect this failure is the real reason for the current "in sourcing" vogue. As software development and delivery becomes increasingly automated the labour cost component will drop, along with the pressure to outsource.

The outsourcers business model is fundamentally broken and it's only a matter of time before this shows up in the bottom line.

Nearly all the standard data modelling tools(ERwin,System Architect, Enterprise Architect ...) have a facility for reverse engineering a schema. This produces an ER diagram for the schema. It's worth pointing out however that this diagram gives you structure not semantics. The latter has to come from elsewhere.