My bad. Sorry. You are fully justfied in being irritated. I was in a hurry and given the amount of poorly explained stories, I didn't just want to throw "Steve Kondik" out there and expect people to recognize the name. So I picked his pet project, rather than his nick.
Steve Kondik said what he said - we shouldn't put words into his mouth. You're talking about my speculation about what this kind of approach ultimately means.
You're missing the big picture. In order to design API's or extensions that remove the need for elevated privileges for certain use cases, you need to know what those uses cases are. So you can, you know, design for them. This is the antithesis of unanticipated.
The point of administrator privileges on a system you own isn't to facilitate a set of standard activities agreed upon in advance by a group that decides those activities are worth supporting. The point of administrator privileges on a system is to allow you, the administrator, to use the system as you see fit, for the needs you deem worthy. Being limited to activities someone else deemed worthy enough to design, implement, test and deploy APIs and extensions isn't really compatible with this notion.
The reason Kondik can make such a proposal is that Android as a young platform lacks some capabilities that administrators or owners take for granted on other platforms. Naturally people would address the low hanging fruit first to bring their Android systems up to par with their other systems. The low hanging fruit is what Kondik and most people responding his post are talking about. Those things should probably be part of any mature computing platform these days, so why not add them?
But.
Once the low hanging fruit has been picked, I predict that people will turn to other things they want their little pocket computers/communicators to do so that they are more useful to them. At some point those activities won't be amenable to some sort of homogenous API that suits everyone. The things people want to do will be specific to their purposes. There won't be an API or extension to enable their new idea, so they will be limited in what they can do.
That's what I mean by using a device in ways that are unanticipated.
He's not talking about root going away, he's talking about reducing the need for it
Submitter here. I'm probably a little thick, clearly Kondik meant something more subtle by naming his post "The Death of Root" than I was able to discern. Shame on me for taking that as a suggestion of where his thoughts might be turning.
That depends on where you were and what you consider damage. Irene was much worse here in Connecticut in terms of wind effects (downed trees on roads/houses/etc) than Sandy. Several hours later as the storm moved north, flooding in southern Vermont was horrible and the effects still being felt 2 years later.
The wind effects were exacerbated by the fact that Irene hit in August - late summer - when trees and plants had full foliage. Lots of trees came down as a result - if you were lucky they didn't fall on anything important (I just lost a section of fence). Even more crowns and major limbs came down as well. It was pretty bad in terms of the magnitude of the destruction over a wide area. It didn't make big news because we're not New York/New Jersey and the population density here is pretty low. For what it's worth, power was out for 5-7 days for most people, which wasn't much fun either.
Sandy, on the other hand, hit in late October when the leaves had fallen, so despite somewhat higher winds, there was nowhere near as much damage. A few twigs fell on my roof and that was about it. I was out on the deck grilling dinner during the peak winds (to use up some frozen food in anticipation of the inevitable week-long power loss) and it was nowhere near as scary or dangerous as Irene. A few trees came down here and there in the region, but not nearly as many as the previous year. As a storm to be caught outside in, Irene was much scarier.
The flooding caused by Sandy was much worse, though limited mostly to the coastal towns here. The fact that the storm was larger in area and impacted regions with higher population density and correspondingly greater economic devastation was what made it newsworthy. Irene was the more damaging storm in terms of broad effect on the countryside from my observation.
I remember telling a friend on 9-11 that we would do way more damage to OURSELVES with our response to 9-11 than 9-11 or any other terrorist attack would ever do directly. That's the whole point of terrorism, really.
That's not the "point of terrorism" at all. *snip* The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden.
I'd call those "stretch" goals. Usually accompanied by a rippling effect on the screen as the scene shifts to the fantasy montage where our protagonist has a waking dream about what could be.
I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal".
Probably not. And as the son of a billionaire, I suspect the wishful thinking about world domination occurred in a venue a little less primitive than a campsite. But thanks for that imagery. Since the people in question weren't unintelligent, they were probably able to discern the difference between best-case-scenario and hurt-them-enough-to-get-publicity. Any astute student of history knows that it's not the big things that bring down empires, but the little things that jam the gears and bring it down from the inside. Hail Eris, Goddess of Discord.
The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.
That's the ultimate goal. Few outside the fanatical and delusional expect the big goals to actually be realized. Not for long, anyhow. But causing a little pain? Everybody can get behind that and the results are achievable.
Established "vets" like the ones mentioned in the article are a real problem. Most only have one real success under their belt, with a whole string of mediocre or outright crappy games to follow. The idea that they are somehow the lone voice of quality in the industry is just crap.
I'd have to agree. There were only three sentences in the summary. The error wasn't exactly hard to spot, given that the sentence in question was both grammatically and factually incorrect.
I still have to trust that i really do have your public key for this to work. How do I get it? Certificates, yeah that's fucked. DNS? does the NSA have the DNSSEC private key? DH? Well again how do I know I'm really exchanging a key with you?
You're talking to yourself about Galt. No one else was. Rand, what her views actually were (originally raised by the parent of this thread as peripherally relevant to the question of innovation in large modern corporations)? Yes. Galt? No. Let it go. There will be other opportunities - wait for them. You're waaaay off topic here.
Just to be clear, I didn't say "THE ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy", I said "RAND's ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy" in an attempt to concisely summarize the "Ayn Rand mentality". Didn't mean to imply that an unforgiving meritocracy was ideal or that I thought it was. To be fair, that isn't really what Rand considered ideal either, but that's a conversation for another venue. Your points are well taken, though possibly veering even more off-topic than my response to the GP.:-)
Not to be pedantic, but the "Ayn Rand mentality" is pretty much the opposite of what you think it is. The tyrants stealing credit (and everything else) are the *villains* and the "little guy (and gal)" entrepreneurs are the *heroes*. The current status quo would be considered a dystopia according to the Ayn Rand mentality.
What may be confusing you is that some of the protagonists were successful industrialists who admittedly aren't "the little guy" at that point in their careers, but they were in the minority compared to those that acted as you say. They didn't rise to the top by stealing from underlings but earned it by actually being the best. Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy. That last bit is what usually rubs people the wrong way, causing them to reject Rand in knee-jerk fashion without really understanding what she was saying.
This just pushes security out to the edges. It would cost too much to set up airport-level security (theater) checkpoints at each train stop, not to mention monitoring the entire track for unauthorized entry/egress. And it would bring the levels of of misery for train travel up to the standards for air travel rather than making travel more pleasant again.
Nice idea, but not compatible with modern reality.
In particular, note the conspicuous absence of any historical examples explaining why the fifth amendment came about in the first place. There are plenty - the reasons for the fifth amendment date back to the Magna Carta. There are plenty of historical examples, but none are mentioned. I accuse the researcher of terminal laziness. The reason for the lack of modern examples should be obvious: The Fifth Amendment was doing it's job.
Nice theory, but it smells strongly of Nerd Tunnelvision.
You speak of gaming as if it is something rare and new, limited at first to the savvy, forward looking early adopters but teetering at the brink of widespread adoption as the rest of the Bell curve awakens to the realization that games are fun.
"Gamification". What rubbish. People have been playing games since the beginning of time. There is no vast untapped population waiting to be "newly exposed" to games for the first time so they can be "gamified". Games are all around us, from dice to solitaire to poker to chess to boardgames to RPGs to sports to, yes, electronic games. Most people have been exposed to the spectrum of games available to them already, including consoles, and have had a chance to develop a preference for the kind of gameplay they enjoy. The degree to which they do so depends on time available, inclination and interest. Some people play games a lot and enjoy games that require significant commitment, some people play games infrequently, preferring casual games that can be enjoyed without a huge investment of time, energy and equipment. People that enjoy phone and tablet games very likely do so because those games fit their preferences and happen to be on a device they already carry around with them for other, more practical reasons. They aren't potential gaming addicts just waiting to be gamified so they can spend lots of money on expensive consoles and games, then spend increasing amounts of time playing them. That's just not going to happen.
Learn your history. Eric Bina [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bina] co-authored Mosaic along with Mr. Andreesen, and I'll bet there were other team members at the NCSA who made non-trivial contributions to the project. At Netscape I doubt he did any development at all. Marc's fame came from being a well-known dot-com businessman, not for single-handedly developing the graphical web browser.
Sort of. In practice, taking on an unmaintained library yourself (whether as a public project or just internally) means taking on unknown amounts of technical debt. ("Legacy code" can IMO usefully be approximated to "code dumped on you with unknown technical debt involved".) It might be lovely, it might be a goddamned nightmare.
Is your hypothetical nightmare worse than the nightmares created by the choices you have with an abandoned closed library? It pretty much boils down to:
a). Doing nothing and living with a buggy closed library you can't fix at all, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk? b). Being forced to migrate entirely to a new library with all the "technical debt" that entails, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk?
Those are just about the only two choices with a closed source library (aka binary blob), commercial or not. I could add a few more extreme cases:
c). Reverse engineer the closed library and write your own code d). Sue the vendor for support if the contract or license gives you a toehold.
That's about it.
Having the source available gives you more choices. More choices lets you manage the risk more adroitly. Having source available means you can fix things well enough to live with what you have while you migrate to something else at a pace of your own choosing, with risks and cost known and controlled by you. Having source available means you can weigh the cost between migration, short-term internal patching, long-term internal adoption, hiring a contractor, resurrecting the project and building a community etc. Having more options seems a superior situation to me, and source available gives you those options.
In fact, if you look back at the genesis of FLOSS, the whole point was that source gives you the option of fixing problems yourself rather than being at the mercy of a greedy, irresponsible (or no longer existing) vendor.
You conveniently left the time others did your work for you at little or no cost to you out of your technical debt calculations. That's a gift you're not entitled to in perpetuity and you should always be prepared to bear the cost yourself should the situation arise.
Slashdot Mirror
My bad. Sorry. You are fully justfied in being irritated. I was in a hurry and given the amount of poorly explained stories, I didn't just want to throw "Steve Kondik" out there and expect people to recognize the name. So I picked his pet project, rather than his nick.
Steve Kondik said what he said - we shouldn't put words into his mouth. You're talking about my speculation about what this kind of approach ultimately means.
You're missing the big picture. In order to design API's or extensions that remove the need for elevated privileges for certain use cases, you need to know what those uses cases are. So you can, you know, design for them. This is the antithesis of unanticipated.
The point of administrator privileges on a system you own isn't to facilitate a set of standard activities agreed upon in advance by a group that decides those activities are worth supporting. The point of administrator privileges on a system is to allow you, the administrator, to use the system as you see fit, for the needs you deem worthy. Being limited to activities someone else deemed worthy enough to design, implement, test and deploy APIs and extensions isn't really compatible with this notion.
The reason Kondik can make such a proposal is that Android as a young platform lacks some capabilities that administrators or owners take for granted on other platforms. Naturally people would address the low hanging fruit first to bring their Android systems up to par with their other systems. The low hanging fruit is what Kondik and most people responding his post are talking about. Those things should probably be part of any mature computing platform these days, so why not add them?
But.
Once the low hanging fruit has been picked, I predict that people will turn to other things they want their little pocket computers/communicators to do so that they are more useful to them. At some point those activities won't be amenable to some sort of homogenous API that suits everyone. The things people want to do will be specific to their purposes. There won't be an API or extension to enable their new idea, so they will be limited in what they can do.
That's what I mean by using a device in ways that are unanticipated.
He's not talking about root going away, he's talking about reducing the need for it
Submitter here. I'm probably a little thick, clearly Kondik meant something more subtle by naming his post "The Death of Root" than I was able to discern. Shame on me for taking that as a suggestion of where his thoughts might be turning.
That depends on where you were and what you consider damage. Irene was much worse here in Connecticut in terms of wind effects (downed trees on roads/houses/etc) than Sandy. Several hours later as the storm moved north, flooding in southern Vermont was horrible and the effects still being felt 2 years later.
The wind effects were exacerbated by the fact that Irene hit in August - late summer - when trees and plants had full foliage. Lots of trees came down as a result - if you were lucky they didn't fall on anything important (I just lost a section of fence). Even more crowns and major limbs came down as well. It was pretty bad in terms of the magnitude of the destruction over a wide area. It didn't make big news because we're not New York/New Jersey and the population density here is pretty low. For what it's worth, power was out for 5-7 days for most people, which wasn't much fun either.
Sandy, on the other hand, hit in late October when the leaves had fallen, so despite somewhat higher winds, there was nowhere near as much damage. A few twigs fell on my roof and that was about it. I was out on the deck grilling dinner during the peak winds (to use up some frozen food in anticipation of the inevitable week-long power loss) and it was nowhere near as scary or dangerous as Irene. A few trees came down here and there in the region, but not nearly as many as the previous year. As a storm to be caught outside in, Irene was much scarier.
The flooding caused by Sandy was much worse, though limited mostly to the coastal towns here. The fact that the storm was larger in area and impacted regions with higher population density and correspondingly greater economic devastation was what made it newsworthy. Irene was the more damaging storm in terms of broad effect on the countryside from my observation.
Caught in a landslide ...
I remember telling a friend on 9-11 that we would do way more damage to OURSELVES with our response to 9-11 than 9-11 or any other terrorist attack would ever do directly. That's the whole point of terrorism, really.
That's not the "point of terrorism" at all.
*snip*
The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden.
I'd call those "stretch" goals. Usually accompanied by a rippling effect on the screen as the scene shifts to the fantasy montage where our protagonist has a waking dream about what could be.
I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal".
Probably not. And as the son of a billionaire, I suspect the wishful thinking about world domination occurred in a venue a little less primitive than a campsite. But thanks for that imagery. Since the people in question weren't unintelligent, they were probably able to discern the difference between best-case-scenario and hurt-them-enough-to-get-publicity. Any astute student of history knows that it's not the big things that bring down empires, but the little things that jam the gears and bring it down from the inside. Hail Eris, Goddess of Discord.
The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.
That's the ultimate goal. Few outside the fanatical and delusional expect the big goals to actually be realized. Not for long, anyhow. But causing a little pain? Everybody can get behind that and the results are achievable.
Read blow for the rest of Michael's review.
No matter how eloquent it is, Java(ECMA)Script still blows.
Established "vets" like the ones mentioned in the article are a real problem. Most only have one real success under their belt, with a whole string of mediocre or outright crappy games to follow. The idea that they are somehow the lone voice of quality in the industry is just crap.
Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero
It is called the equal protection clause. "The Declaration of Independence" is not a law and has zero barring on any decision of the Supreme Court.
And it has zero bearing, too.
... is pants.
I'd have to agree. There were only three sentences in the summary. The error wasn't exactly hard to spot, given that the sentence in question was both grammatically and factually incorrect.
I still have to trust that i really do have your public key for this to work. How do I get it? Certificates, yeah that's fucked. DNS? does the NSA have the DNSSEC private key? DH? Well again how do I know I'm really exchanging a key with you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust (Do read all about it, including the description of problems - it's not a perfect system).
You're talking to yourself about Galt. No one else was. Rand, what her views actually were (originally raised by the parent of this thread as peripherally relevant to the question of innovation in large modern corporations)? Yes. Galt? No. Let it go. There will be other opportunities - wait for them. You're waaaay off topic here.
It is difficult to discuss anything with people who demand acceptance of their opinion of the subject as a foregone conclusion and prerequisite.
Just to be clear, I didn't say "THE ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy", I said "RAND's ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy" in an attempt to concisely summarize the "Ayn Rand mentality". Didn't mean to imply that an unforgiving meritocracy was ideal or that I thought it was. To be fair, that isn't really what Rand considered ideal either, but that's a conversation for another venue. Your points are well taken, though possibly veering even more off-topic than my response to the GP. :-)
Not to be pedantic, but the "Ayn Rand mentality" is pretty much the opposite of what you think it is. The tyrants stealing credit (and everything else) are the *villains* and the "little guy (and gal)" entrepreneurs are the *heroes*. The current status quo would be considered a dystopia according to the Ayn Rand mentality.
What may be confusing you is that some of the protagonists were successful industrialists who admittedly aren't "the little guy" at that point in their careers, but they were in the minority compared to those that acted as you say. They didn't rise to the top by stealing from underlings but earned it by actually being the best. Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy. That last bit is what usually rubs people the wrong way, causing them to reject Rand in knee-jerk fashion without really understanding what she was saying.
This just pushes security out to the edges. It would cost too much to set up airport-level security (theater) checkpoints at each train stop, not to mention monitoring the entire track for unauthorized entry/egress. And it would bring the levels of of misery for train travel up to the standards for air travel rather than making travel more pleasant again.
Nice idea, but not compatible with modern reality.
Don't forget it's fully open-source so you can run your own server if you desire (or contribute fixes if so inclined).
The latter.
... also smells like "write my thesis for me".
In particular, note the conspicuous absence of any historical examples explaining why the fifth amendment came about in the first place. There are plenty - the reasons for the fifth amendment date back to the Magna Carta. There are plenty of historical examples, but none are mentioned. I accuse the researcher of terminal laziness. The reason for the lack of modern examples should be obvious: The Fifth Amendment was doing it's job.
When is SlashDot going to post the Verizon story?
I know a lot of us have heard or seen the "NSA box" in our closets, but now it's official:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
Off-topic, I know, but this one is boring. (Everyone already knows class action suits screw consumers.)
You must have been asleep and missed it. This was the first story posted today, 27 minutes after midnight:
Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSA
Posted by samzenpus on 12:27 AM June 6th, 2013
Go to the front page and scroll down a bit, difficult as that apparently is. You should see the story you were hoping for.
Down the *censorship* hole, more accurately.
Nice theory, but it smells strongly of Nerd Tunnelvision.
You speak of gaming as if it is something rare and new, limited at first to the savvy, forward looking early adopters but teetering at the brink of widespread adoption as the rest of the Bell curve awakens to the realization that games are fun.
"Gamification". What rubbish. People have been playing games since the beginning of time. There is no vast untapped population waiting to be "newly exposed" to games for the first time so they can be "gamified". Games are all around us, from dice to solitaire to poker to chess to boardgames to RPGs to sports to, yes, electronic games. Most people have been exposed to the spectrum of games available to them already, including consoles, and have had a chance to develop a preference for the kind of gameplay they enjoy. The degree to which they do so depends on time available, inclination and interest. Some people play games a lot and enjoy games that require significant commitment, some people play games infrequently, preferring casual games that can be enjoyed without a huge investment of time, energy and equipment. People that enjoy phone and tablet games very likely do so because those games fit their preferences and happen to be on a device they already carry around with them for other, more practical reasons. They aren't potential gaming addicts just waiting to be gamified so they can spend lots of money on expensive consoles and games, then spend increasing amounts of time playing them. That's just not going to happen.
There, fixed that subject line for you.
Learn your history. Eric Bina [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bina] co-authored Mosaic along with Mr. Andreesen, and I'll bet there were other team members at the NCSA who made non-trivial contributions to the project. At Netscape I doubt he did any development at all. Marc's fame came from being a well-known dot-com businessman, not for single-handedly developing the graphical web browser.
Sort of. In practice, taking on an unmaintained library yourself (whether as a public project or just internally) means taking on unknown amounts of technical debt. ("Legacy code" can IMO usefully be approximated to "code dumped on you with unknown technical debt involved".) It might be lovely, it might be a goddamned nightmare.
Is your hypothetical nightmare worse than the nightmares created by the choices you have with an abandoned closed library? It pretty much boils down to:
a). Doing nothing and living with a buggy closed library you can't fix at all, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk?
b). Being forced to migrate entirely to a new library with all the "technical debt" that entails, at unknown cost, placing your business at risk?
Those are just about the only two choices with a closed source library (aka binary blob), commercial or not. I could add a few more extreme cases:
c). Reverse engineer the closed library and write your own code
d). Sue the vendor for support if the contract or license gives you a toehold.
That's about it.
Having the source available gives you more choices. More choices lets you manage the risk more adroitly. Having source available means you can fix things well enough to live with what you have while you migrate to something else at a pace of your own choosing, with risks and cost known and controlled by you. Having source available means you can weigh the cost between migration, short-term internal patching, long-term internal adoption, hiring a contractor, resurrecting the project and building a community etc. Having more options seems a superior situation to me, and source available gives you those options.
In fact, if you look back at the genesis of FLOSS, the whole point was that source gives you the option of fixing problems yourself rather than being at the mercy of a greedy, irresponsible (or no longer existing) vendor.
You conveniently left the time others did your work for you at little or no cost to you out of your technical debt calculations. That's a gift you're not entitled to in perpetuity and you should always be prepared to bear the cost yourself should the situation arise.