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verdant

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[dead] 15 years ago

Clearly you should upgrade your hardware and just use a brute force method.

I loathe policies about expiring passwords because it breeds insecurity in the manner you mention. However, my company has this same policy, not because its been evaluated as being a good policy, but because our SOX audits require it.

Another reason to grumble over SOX.

[dead] 16 years ago

I have no inside knowledge, but I have generally found that things are usually not as good as people say they are, nor as bad as people say they are. Nevertheless, Yahoo clearly has some issues to resolve.

Perhaps they are wishing they had taken the Microsoft buyout offer?

If enough would choose opt out (despite the obvious intimidation tactics), then the entire process would become so inefficient that an easy, efficient alternate would be provided (or the scanners removed altogether). It would likely take a majority of people opting out though.

My signature is company mandated, was done by our marketing department (along with all email signatures in our company) and includes 6 lines of contact information, an image of the company logo, and then a disclaimer paragraph (which only gets attached to external email). I don't know how prevalent this is, but many people may (like myself) have no control over the content of their signatures.

[dead] 16 years ago

99% of bottled water drinkers agree that other people should drink less bottled water

[dead] 16 years ago

Perhaps the new web meme should be "Animated Gifs are cruise control for cool"

An apology... 16 years ago

I hadn't heard about this incident until I read this link, and had to google Gray Powell. This, at least in my case, caused some more attention to Gizmodo, rather than less.

one of the early stated goals of Stack Overflow was to be a better version of Experts Exchange. It looks like they are accomplishing that goal, in terms of users switching (which of course, the graph does not prove but does seem to suggest).

Every job I have ever had I have gotten either through personal contacts or by sending my resume to a company that I was interested in. It wasn't that people were doing me favors, its just that it put me in the right place at the right time and that was much more effective than browsing online ads. I have read statistics that say most hires are made through personal contacts, otherwise known as "networking"

I read this tutorial a long time ago for a basic app I was working on and found it quite helpful. It was my first brush with css positioning

Valuations usually are calculated in a way to benefit whomever is doing the calculating.

That said, a company is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. If Twitter (or anyone) can create the perception that their company is worth x, and then sell it for x, then it really was worth x.

[dead] 17 years ago

Wow. Predicting a Great Depression 2 leading to a second American revolution. Overreact much?

They have a point about easy credit and debt creating a bubbles, but I think they might take the conclusion to the extreme. A good general rule to go by is "Things are never as bad as people tell you, or as good as people tell you"

I think it typically boils down to the following: "We spent quite a bit of money on the website/newsletter redesign that we need to justify. The big bosses want to make sure we promote it"

Very interesting. I was just going off the ethical arguments and data raised from a course I took while at the university where we studied the Milgram experiment.

I guess that's what I get for just going along with someone who was an "authority" on the subject.

Experiments like the Milgram experiment would not be considered ethical today because of the mental effect it has on the test subjects afterward (feeling bad about themselves for not stopping). I'm undecided if that's good or not - It just seems to have exposed a truth about human nature, which remains true even if you don't expose it. But, if it a lasting psychological impact on the test subjects... that doesn't seem desirable.

The point of the article is correct from a business standpoint as well as a moral one. Too often we fail to question processes and procedures because "that's the way its always been done."

The day pain died 17 years ago

Many times it seems culture or taboos or tradition seem to keep us from doing what's best. I've seen it in corporate culture in seemingly making the right decision for the company and I've seen it in life, too. People tend to resist change.

Real Programmers... 17 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that C and C++ were from a bygone era. Even Fortran is still used today, (though of course C and C++ are still in very wide use).

I just meant to draw a parallel about those who learned to program after the era of mainframes and terminals, on operating systems like Unix, Windows, and Mac OS but before the Web really became a true platform and how they would feel about web programmers. I included Pascal because it was discussed in the article extensively.

Real Programmers... 17 years ago

Seems to parallel how some of the Pascal/C/C++ era programmers feel about Python/Ruby/PHP web developers of today.

Interesting move, although I'd bet it will turn out to be a challenge to enforce, if the Scientologists decide to try to fight it. It will also be interesting to see how this move would hold up in court. I can certainly understand Wikipedia's point of view - they aren't discriminating against an organization but rather dealing with a group that has been quite disruptive to them. It could be interesting to see which way it swings and what the ramifications are.