If data is outlawed, only outlaws will have data. If everyone has access to information on everyone else's personal lives, nobody will actually make use of it for fear of repercussion.
Your argument makes no sense. The one guarantee that all the online privacy battles have shown us is that people abuse access to other people's private information. If everybody on Slashdot could lookup your address and phone number to flame you every time there was a disagreement, what would happen isn't that everyone would use restraint but instead that several slashdot flamefests may spill into the real world. Remember several people have threatened trolls with violence for posting to slashdot, do you really think it would be great for everyone to have access to every other person's informtion?
For a real world example, do you think it is safe for anybody a woman happens to give her phone number to have immediate access to her address? If these sites catch on, it would make dating turn into an even bigger game of Russian roulette (and probably completely kill chances of most people ever meeting anybody at a nightclub) than it is now.
PS: Your text in bold is exactly the point. Currently if someone has an excessive information amount of information about me and/or is tracking me then they are stalking me. Your post seems to want to make stalking a legal right. Whatever.
PPS: Your many eyes watching theory of keeping peace, was a hallmark of communism in its heydey. Citizens were encouraged to spy on each other and weekly denouncements were held in local meetings. This lead to the tyranny of the majority opinion on those of minorities. It is far easier to enforce conformity when all deviation is available for public consumption. How many people would be actively gay if all it took was a website lookup to determine their sexual preference? Even better how many Wiccans are Satan worshippers would practice their religion of their religious preference was available for all to view? Think about it...
By Jonathan Sidener The Arizona Republic July 21, 2000
The future has been postponed, at least slightly. Bluetooth, the wireless technology to link computers, home entertainment appliances and other gadgets will not debut this summer as some manufacturers had hoped.
"This is a technology that's going to affect thousands and thousands of products," said Joyce Putscher, director for converging markets and technologies research for Cahners In-Stat Group in Scottsdale. "With any emerging technology, especially one with such far-reaching ramifications, they're making sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed."
Putscher and several manufacturers say consumers will have to wait until the end of the year for the promising wireless technology.
Bluetooth uses tiny, inexpensive short-range radios to connect digital devices. Any Bluetooth device can talk to any other, no matter what brand name is on the label or what software forms their operating systems.
Motorola is making Bluetooth chips for its cellular phones and for outside customers. The company plans to make the chips in the Valley.
Initially, Bluetooth would be used to untether us from the wires that connect our computers and other devices. Wireless connections between headsets and cell phones and between desktop and laptop computers are expected to be among the first products to market.
More advanced applications are expected to create personal networks, with devices communicating differently for different people, sending Mr. Jones e-mail from the PC to his handheld computer, for example, and routing Mrs. Jones' e-mail to hers.
Maybe if you and the others who posted to that story didn't bother to read Cmdr Taco's intro to the story:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 20, @08:15AM from the but-think-of-the-alternatives dept. alessio writes: "On the front page of Linux Weekly News there is a report from the Ottawa Linux Symposium where the adorable Miguel de Icaza supposedly states that Unix has been built wrong from the ground up." It's actually a pretty cool interview, and as always, Miguel makes his point without any candy coating! The major point is the lack of reusable code between major applications (a major problem that both KDE and GNOME have been striving to fix for some time now).
Seems to me like he explained pretty well what it was about plus "Unix Sucks" was what Miguel's seminar was entitled. So what is your problem?
PS: About the the fact that slashdot publishes links to opinions on webboards...isn't that what people read slashdot for? Major Linux and Perl were made and are made not with press releases but via discussions on USENET and webboards.
PPS: Slashdot posts stories submitted by readers. The headlines are not picked by slashdot authors but instead are the ones that the readers submitted the stories with (I know because 5 or 6 of my submissions have been posted). If you want to blame someone for the sensationalistic headlines, blame the readers who spice up the headlines so that there is a greater chance their stories are read by the editors and submitted.
You'll notice that I said Now on the other hand, Unix applications until very recently did not have the cross communication problem that Windows apps had before the line you quoted.
Until very recently (the advent of Linux on the desktop) Unix was primarily used by developers and systems administrators. These are people who's primary tasks can all be solved by either editing text files or piping together applications on the command line. There was and still is no major need for developers and/or sysadmins to be able to embed applications or objects in one another in a GUI.
On the other hand, several end user applications can benefit of being able to embed applications within each other and share data in a uniform manner. That is why I noted that maybe it is time for the paradigm to shift.
PS: Of course there are many pitfalls that have to be avoided such as the library version conflicts (Windows DLL hell) that occur when an app is upgraded and uses more recent components than its the others on the system.
Wow, it seems Miguel was more taken by Microsoft and COM/COM+/DCOM than was obvious from the last time he mentioned components on slashdot. Miguel is right that Unix would benefit from a component model but he needs to put things in historical context.
COM is descended from Object Linking and Embedding which was a way to have objects created in one application to be reusable by another. Basically MSFT's entire component revolution can be traced back to the "drag and drop an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document" problem. Everything that has occurred since then COM+ (reusable components independent of language), DCOM (distributed reusable components) and now.NET (cross language inheritance of objects/components) can all be traced back to trying to solve that problem and variations thereof. The early implementations of COM were not some grand ngineering effort to great a modular componentized system but sophisticated hacks to solve the drag N drop problem. This is not to say that MSFT's COM is has not come a long way, after all it has enabled them to create what has been described as the largest software engineering feat of all time. 35 million lines of code and counting.
Now on the other hand, Unix applications until very recently did not have the cross communication problem that Windows apps had. Everything is a file, if I want to communicate between applications I simply use a pipe. All files I could possibly want to edit can be viewed in Emacs. To put it simply there was no need for a reusable component model simply to share data between applications.
Now decades after Unix was invented (which predates Windows and COM by over a decade) maybe time has come for that paradigm to shift.
This is the reason I believe Perl needs work before being used for anything serious. The above example though contrived shows one of the dangers of Perl. In a strongly typed language if I do
I will get an error or thrown Exception for trying to convert a float to a string without a cast while in Perl this error will be allowed to silently propagate through the system causing wasted time later glancing at line-noise-like syntax trying to track down a bug that is due to the typelessness of the language.
PS: Automatic initialization of variables thus causing typos to be treated as variables is another pet peeve of mine. Besides that Perl is really good at quick-and-dirty text manipulation which is what it excels in.
The email is stored on a server, your mail client retrieves it and then parses it before storing it in your inbox. According to the MSFT security release, Outlook doesn't check that all the fields are the correct size while parsing it...thus buffer overflow.
I thought by now, we'd be rid of buffer overflow bugs.
Read the ARTICLE on kuro5hin before posting
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 3
kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!", postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post
Why did you mention that? There is no point other then to cast K5 in a bad light, a light which is certainly not true.
Isn't this a Slashdot is censoring the story post?. How about this one? The post isn't attacking K5, all it points out is that there were several posters on kuro5hin who post slashdot-is-censoring-the-story-messages daily on kuro5hin. Frankly I read K5 everyday and literally every two or three stories has somebody complaining about how slashdot is censoring the story.
PS: Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others on kuro5hin but is always rejected.
Unfortunately kuro5hin is currently slashdotted so I cannot link to the post to the conversation of the original submitter of the story. This story broke yesterday, the reason it got to kuro5hin so quickly was because someone read Alan Cox's diary and posted it.
To put things in perspective kuro5hin has an average of 2 or 3 stories in its submission bin at anytime while slashdot has over 400 (the last few times I've submitted a story it's been 450). So it is understandable if it takes them a little longer than kuro5hin to get a story posted since all it takes is a handful of yays to get it to the front page.
Remember also that just yesterday slashdot got bitten by a fake story and don't forget the story about the Oracle NIC violating the GPL that turned out to be bogus (can't find the link for some weird reason). Frankly I applaud Slashdot for showing restraint in posting this instead of rushing this to the front page like the many Bruce-Perens-someone-is-violating-the-GPL stories that could have been settled amicably by sending an email or two but instead turned into public tar-and-featherings.
I just took the Linux Administration Certification test at brainbench.com, a company which provides free certification in many categories, both technical and non-technical. Would listing these free certifications on a resume be helpful, neutral, or a hindrance, particularly for someone with little or no relevant job experience, formal education, or "real" certifications?
My suggestion to you is to pickup relevant experience on your own. If you are looking for a developer position; create your own app that shows of your skill (mine was an online survey that used Java servlets and an Oracle database). If you want to be a sysadmin, create a page that documents your skills and resurrect some old machines and manage a home network. Remember, the one thing employers value more than certificates and degrees, is an ability to work and a penchant for learning because the rest can always be bought later. After all several people who are being educated at the expense of their employers because of their potential. The key here is that you are trying to get a job with the certificates as your only source of legitimacy. Especially since it is trivial for one person to amass several certificates simply by scoring above average on an online multiple choice test. I suggest using online certificates simply as coating on the cake. If you have no relevant job experience or formal education I suggest scratching some of your personal itches. I'm currently working at a Fortune 500 company designing and implementing an extensible, regression testing framework for large B2B websites they plan to launch later this year. Besides getting a good salary my rent, cable and phone are paid for by them (because I'm an intern). The interesting thing is that the clincher that got me hired was work I had done on my own free time during spring break.
Being born outside of America and only having been here for a few years, the amount of violence in American entertainment from music and movies to video games and television has left me stunned.
In a country were the average youth (especially minorities) is disenfranchised, ignored by their parents and has easy access to mind altering substances it is in my opinion a deadly combination to combine that with the current cocktail mix of easy access to firearms and constant daily diet of violence in all forms that children get.
That Americans are desensitized to violence is no longer news, but it amazes me when someone claims that a diet of gratuitious violence and entertainment that consists of 1, 2,3,4,5,6 and 7 is their constitiutional right. Now I do not claim that violence would not exist without violent games nor that video games cause violence but even a blind person can tell that we (in America) are extremely disensitized to violence. Nowhere else in the world is so much violence consumed by the public nor is it as easily accessible to minors as in America.
In my opinion until there is a movement to curtail the excessive amount of firepower in the community then moves like this are a stop gap measure on the journey to ridding our communities of violence. Yes, I know violence goes beyond violent video games and is more likely due to other factors (abuse at home, poverty, feelings of persecution, resentment) but the fact is that violent video games are not blameless. But two wrongs do not make a right (allow violent video games to minors since they have access to other violence), after all, the Columbine kids didn't play long games of Pokemon before going on their killing spree.
PS; If you've ever lived in a neighborhood were you go to sleep hearing gunshots and wakeup to sirens you'll know where I'm coming from. Lakewood, Atlanta, GA.
It seems they disallow all indexing of any sort on their search site but there is no robots.txt for the main site or on the eBay pages sites.
Frankly I agree that if eBay has spent time and money creating a world class brand, it is wrong for anyone who can write a Perl script to be able to steal their customers especially when some of these are paying customers (people pay eBay to have their auctions highlighted and so on).
. Even simple things like not letting your biff update until you change focus out of a word processor. (mind you the anti-ms block on Slashdot will of course equate microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague, but what are ya gonna do?)
Besides the fact that most MSFT technologies sound good on paper (the Paperclip is an artificially intelligent agent that molds itself to the users behavior and acts accordingly) they are usually horrible in implementation. Somehow I have a problem with software that will stop IMs from popping up because it's 2 AM and I'm reading Slashdot or that will not announce email notifications because I'm coding. The fact is there are more variables in whether I want certain activities to occur than where my eyes are positioned and what time of the day it is, after all if such things were so easily distilled into algorithms we would all love the paper clip.
From what I saw (talk of Bayesian Networks and agents) this is the same team that brought us the Paper Clip. I would hold of on applauding what will more than likely be another highly disparaged piece of MSFT bloatware until it is actually implemented and is no longer vapor. I remember taking a class where our professor described how some company had started research on using cameras to manage User Interfaces but the project was a failure because people do not act predictably when using a computer and a camera also distracts them. It turned out that the best thing it was useful for was for tracking how long users read banner ads.
From the articleThere have been other missteps indicating that Bayesian techniques must be added to software with great care. In December 1998, for example, Blue Mountain Arts, the Internet greeting card company, filed suit after it discovered that a preliminary version of Microsoft's electronic mail software mistakenly filtered Blue Mountain's e-mail greeting cards into users' trash cans. The filter, which had been based on software developed by Horvitz's researchers, was repaired in the final release of the program. It was an important lesson, he said, in the risk of artificial intelligence making poor judgments.
PS: I wish them luck, but this is one piece of bloat I'll definitely be avoiding.
But seriously (read before moderating this as Troll of Flamebait), the reason that the e-mail script viruses we've seen all attack MS Outlook isn't because of how terrible Windows is. It's because most computers run Windows! They're targetted just because they're more common! If you wanted to write a malicious virus, would you target at a rarely-used platform or the most common?
Obviously you do not have *nix background. In Unixland there is this concept called security which implies that a user's email program would never be able to run as root. It is ludicrous to think that a script in an email can modify your registry... were the Outlook team drunk when they designed Outlook without any sort of sandbox?
A killer net virus that would destroy the Net as we know it has been very easily in reach once the majority of computers on the Internet became homogenized Windows//MSFT Office//Outlook boxes.
Whenever I read about a Mellissa or an I Love You I smile to myself and think "I would have trashed their hard drives after spamming myself to all their friends.". If Mellissa or I Love You hadn't been content with simply bogging down net servers and had decided to set the file length of all.doc ,.xls,.sys,.bat,.dll,.html and.jar to 0, I am sure corporations would probably be fuming about Trillions of dollars in irreparable damages (after all how much stuff is actually backed up or centrally stored in a Windows world).
In my opinion the article is overkill, a virus doesn't have to be particularly clever or well designed to cause havok anymore thanks to the beauty of MSFT operating systems. Any script kiddie or MSCE with a passable knowledge of Virus Building Script can bring it all toppling down.
Off course, none of us will ever do it because we know it would do so much damage to the 'Net (government would step in hard) and also hurt many of us financially in some indirect way.
I don't care if this gets moderated down because some anti-microsoft moderator hates what I write here, but I have to say it: Microsoft releases a LOT OF sourcecode, free for all.: The duwamish bookstore, a complete e-commerce application ready to roll (a complete online store), with code, docs etc. numerous examples, tutorials and docs.
I developed a lot in java but I'm very willing to swap to C# once it's there. Why? because the tradition of well done documentation (not generated CRAP like Sun gives us), lots of examples and full applications, complete in sourcecode will be extended when.NET is fully released.
First of all it is obvious that you have never truly investigated Sun's Java documentation. All the source code you claim MSFT releases are simply tutorials and examples on how to use their proprietary languages. Sun does the exact same thing for Java, at the online Java tutorial siteSun releases a LOT OF sourcecode, free for all . Here's a list of examples as useful as the Duwamish example I found in less than five minutes of browsing the online Java tutorial.
Bingo - Client/Server version of Bingo that shows how to use JFC ("Swing") User Interface classes,Multi-threading and thread synchronization, Inter-application communication APIs , Digital signatures , a Customized EventQueue , Managing program settings.
Duke's Bookstore -An online bookstore that utilizes the power of Java servlets and shows various aspects of session management, handling HTTP GET requests, and more .
Dozens of Applets- that are used to show how use various Swing layouts, GUI threading, event handling and playing sounds. There are over a 100 classes whose source code is available in the various examples. MSFT's MSDN does not come close when it comes to releasing source code.
As for documentation, I learned Java primarily from the aforementioned tutorial and the Online API(which I happened to download for free) and am currently implementing an extensible regression testing framework that will be used on large B2B websites for a Fortune 500 company. All the Java knowledge I have I picked up online less than a year ago, I dare you to find someone who learned COM from online documentation only who can implement a large scale, cross platform, extensible automated regression testing toolkit in a month. The key here is from online documentation only. Call me when hell freezes over.
PS: Plus Sun's tutorials and API's are available for free download here, while do only way to get the entire MSDN collection is to pay for it by subscribing to MSDN and getting a CD.
PPS: The company I worked for was very glad that all my code has HTML javadocs that the QA team and other developers can look at to get an overview of how my code works. What is MSFT's generated CRAP alternative, as you so call it?
For the non-Americans who haven't seen the show or people like me who don't watch TV here's a very good episode guide from Salon. The show actually seems very interesting, the interplay of personalities and double dealing as well as how low people will go for money is entertaining in a surrreal kind of way.
I was about to take this article seriously and post a comment on how this case can be easily resolved. If a company hires another to write a piece of software, standard practice is to give them a requirements document containing specifications which range from must-haves to wish-list items. So unless the New Economy has discarded common business practices of the past several decades, this issue can be resolved by checking on the requirements document, unless of course it contains crap like "The website must be cool!!!".
Unfortunately after reading the entire article twice I realized that this was simply another failed dot comm in it's death throes clutching at straws, rhetoric like "IAM.com is informed that virtually every aspect of the site developed by Razorfish fails to meet IAM.com's needs, or basic levels of workmanship in the (W)eb development industry." sounds exactly the kind of E-commerce/E-marketplace/New Economy newspeak that such entities are prone to use. Also
From the article: IAM, which laid off 25 percent of its staff last month, is currently embroiled in a legal battle with four former employees that it says violated their contracts by trying to start a competing company and fraudulently dealing with IAM. The four in turn are suing IAM, alleging that IAM stole their business plan. --
A Better Written article on Why X-Windows is Bad
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 5
Anyone who reads this article may be inclined to yell FUD, FUD, FUD as has been written in comments to this article or MSFT supporter but not in this case.
Don Box is a migrant user interface designer and graphics programmer. Don received a BSCS degree from the University of Maryland while working as a researcher at the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Don has worked at UniPress Software, Sun Microsystems, the Turing Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Kaleida Labs, and Interval Research. He ported SimCity to NeWS and X11 for DUX Software.
X-Windows has serious problems that are evident to anyone who has ever done any serious investigation but since it's *nix most people put up with it's clunkiness. Similar to how an alternative to GNU getopt(3c) has not been written yet, because getopt works well enough (or so people think). --
I posted this ealier but was a bit vociferous, here's a calmer version of my earlier post:
The article is belaboring something that has been a fact of web development for at least the past year or two. Both browsers have had things that only work on only their platform for years. Anyone remember BLINK and MARQUEE? How about javascript? They use different DOMs so different code has to be used to do the same thing. Sites like Dynamic Drive have been seperating their scripts into IE-only and Netscape only for as long as I've been going there.
Netscape has been flouting standards for as long than MSFT with their proprietary LAYER tag and inventing Javascript. Frankly as at now (but not for long with Mozilla in the works) MSIE supports more of CSS1 than Netscape for proof of this check out this page and use this image as a reference. In MSIE it renders with few flaws while in Netscape it looks like a Picasso. The problem is therefore not with MSIE's support of CSS1 standards at least not now.
The problem is that MSFT's proprietary additions to their browser such as the XML parser built into the browser which is available for scripting and others are so tempting to developers that they ignore the fact that these things work only on IE and rationalize (if you can call it that) this away with "Most people use IE." The fact that W3C takes a long time to ratify standards has not helped this either. PS: For all those who do not realize how long both browsers have been incompatible and flouting standards read Dynamic Html : The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman for an informative read.
PS: The above post is very correct, MSFT doesn't force websites to use it's proprietary additions or to script only for IE, bad web developers do this. If people didn't use the IE specific things in the browser for websites on the world wide web (as opposed to a local intranet were such things can be mandated) then this would not be an issue. Web developers are more to blame for the browser segregation than MSFT. --
Oops I forgot to included the reference gif but not the actual standards test. click here to test which browser conforms more to the CSS1 standards. If it looks like a Picasso (as in Netscape) then the browser is not conforming to standards, while if it looks like a bunch of boxes (like in MSIE) then it is standards compliant. --
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
It seems to me that if Napster acts against what this protester is doing then by all rights they are no longer a service provider but admitting that they are in the business of providing content (in this case copyrighted music that they have no right to distribute). Doing this would invalidate all the arguments about Napster not being in business specifically to violate the copyright of artists and record labels and instead reinforce the greedy VC funded company trying to get rich of other peoples work image. --
Stop Speculating: Here's An Article On Their Plans
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 5
Quote: So, the company is hitching its wagon to--what else?--Linux. SCO has been selling support services for Caldera (Nasdaq: CALD - news) and TurboLinux for about 6 months, and it has already given some intellectual property to the Linux open source community. But SCO hasn't yet taken the big step--distributing Linux.
But that's coming. Sources say it's working out an arrangement with France's MandrakeSoft to distribute its Linux-Mandrake operating system. SCO will use Linux-Mandrake as the base OS and add some features like clustering, which is a complex way to improve the performance and expansion of servers. MandrakeSoft also has offices in Altadena, Calif. --
Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess
Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book. It's easy to look back now and sneer at choices that people made a thousand years ago, after all hindsight is 20/20. But who is to say what future generations will think about ours. I can easily imagine snide comments that will be made about how we callously destroyed the environment, pumped millions in a giant Internet Ponzi scheme when there were more worthwhile causes to support and amassed Nuclear weapons whose poisonous waste will exist for longer than humanity has existed. Think about that next time.
I generally agree with arguments for no censorship except for pedophilia. Pedophilia involves mentally and physically abusing children, it is reviled most cultures and for good reason. The existence of a market for pedophilia means that somewhere in the world a child is being abused to satisfy that market. Censorship reduces this market and frankly I will support it to my dying day. A persons rights to express themselves should stop short of abusing another person's rights and pedophilia does abuse the rights of others.
Slashdot Mirror
If data is outlawed, only outlaws will have data. If everyone has access to information on everyone else's personal lives, nobody will actually make use of it for fear of repercussion.
Your argument makes no sense. The one guarantee that all the online privacy battles have shown us is that people abuse access to other people's private information. If everybody on Slashdot could lookup your address and phone number to flame you every time there was a disagreement, what would happen isn't that everyone would use restraint but instead that several slashdot flamefests may spill into the real world. Remember several people have threatened trolls with violence for posting to slashdot, do you really think it would be great for everyone to have access to every other person's informtion?
For a real world example, do you think it is safe for anybody a woman happens to give her phone number to have immediate access to her address? If these sites catch on, it would make dating turn into an even bigger game of Russian roulette (and probably completely kill chances of most people ever meeting anybody at a nightclub) than it is now.
PS: Your text in bold is exactly the point. Currently if someone has an excessive information amount of information about me and/or is tracking me then they are stalking me. Your post seems to want to make stalking a legal right. Whatever.
PPS: Your many eyes watching theory of keeping peace, was a hallmark of communism in its heydey. Citizens were encouraged to spy on each other and weekly denouncements were held in local meetings. This lead to the tyranny of the majority opinion on those of minorities. It is far easier to enforce conformity when all deviation is available for public consumption. How many people would be actively gay if all it took was a website lookup to determine their sexual preference? Even better how many Wiccans are Satan worshippers would practice their religion of their religious preference was available for all to view? Think about it...
Debut of futuristic wireless technology delayed
By Jonathan Sidener
The Arizona Republic
July 21, 2000
The future has been postponed, at least slightly. Bluetooth, the wireless technology to link computers, home entertainment appliances and other gadgets will not debut this summer as some manufacturers had hoped.
"This is a technology that's going to affect thousands and thousands of products," said Joyce Putscher, director for converging markets and technologies research for Cahners In-Stat Group in Scottsdale. "With any emerging technology, especially one with such far-reaching ramifications, they're making sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed."
Putscher and several manufacturers say consumers will have to wait until the end of the year for the promising wireless technology.
Bluetooth uses tiny, inexpensive short-range radios to connect digital devices. Any Bluetooth device can talk to any other, no matter what brand name is on the label or what software forms their operating systems.
Motorola is making Bluetooth chips for its cellular phones and for outside customers. The company plans to make the chips in the Valley.
Initially, Bluetooth would be used to untether us from the wires that connect our computers and other devices. Wireless connections between headsets and cell phones and between desktop and laptop computers are expected to be among the first products to market.
More advanced applications are expected to create personal networks, with devices communicating differently for different people, sending Mr. Jones e-mail from the PC to his handheld computer, for example, and routing Mrs. Jones' e-mail to hers.
Maybe if you and the others who posted to that story didn't bother to read Cmdr Taco's intro to the story:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 20, @08:15AM
from the but-think-of-the-alternatives dept.
alessio writes: "On the front page of Linux Weekly News there is a report from the Ottawa Linux Symposium where the adorable Miguel de Icaza supposedly states that Unix has been built wrong from the ground up." It's actually a pretty cool interview, and as always, Miguel makes his point without any candy coating! The major point is the lack of reusable code between major applications (a major problem that both KDE and GNOME have been striving to fix for some time now).
Seems to me like he explained pretty well what it was about plus "Unix Sucks" was what Miguel's seminar was entitled. So what is your problem?
PS: About the the fact that slashdot publishes links to opinions on webboards...isn't that what people read slashdot for? Major Linux and Perl were made and are made not with press releases but via discussions on USENET and webboards.
PPS: Slashdot posts stories submitted by readers. The headlines are not picked by slashdot authors but instead are the ones that the readers submitted the stories with (I know because 5 or 6 of my submissions have been posted). If you want to blame someone for the sensationalistic headlines, blame the readers who spice up the headlines so that there is a greater chance their stories are read by the editors and submitted.
You'll notice that I said Now on the other hand, Unix applications until very recently did not have the cross communication problem that Windows apps had before the line you quoted.
Until very recently (the advent of Linux on the desktop) Unix was primarily used by developers and systems administrators. These are people who's primary tasks can all be solved by either editing text files or piping together applications on the command line. There was and still is no major need for developers and/or sysadmins to be able to embed applications or objects in one another in a GUI.
On the other hand, several end user applications can benefit of being able to embed applications within each other and share data in a uniform manner. That is why I noted that maybe it is time for the paradigm to shift.
PS: Of course there are many pitfalls that have to be avoided such as the library version conflicts (Windows DLL hell) that occur when an app is upgraded and uses more recent components than its the others on the system.
Wow, it seems Miguel was more taken by Microsoft and COM/COM+/DCOM than was obvious from the last time he mentioned components on slashdot. Miguel is right that Unix would benefit from a component model but he needs to put things in historical context.
.NET (cross language inheritance of objects/components) can all be traced back to trying to solve that problem and variations thereof. The early implementations of COM were not some grand ngineering effort to great a modular componentized system but sophisticated hacks to solve the drag N drop problem. This is not to say that MSFT's COM is has not come a long way, after all it has enabled them to create what has been described as the largest software engineering feat of all time. 35 million lines of code and counting.
COM is descended from Object Linking and Embedding which was a way to have objects created in one application to be reusable by another. Basically MSFT's entire component revolution can be traced back to the "drag and drop an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document" problem. Everything that has occurred since then COM+ (reusable components independent of language), DCOM (distributed reusable components) and now
Now on the other hand, Unix applications until very recently did not have the cross communication problem that Windows apps had. Everything is a file, if I want to communicate between applications I simply use a pipe. All files I could possibly want to edit can be viewed in Emacs. To put it simply there was no need for a reusable component model simply to share data between applications.
Now decades after Unix was invented (which predates Windows and COM by over a decade) maybe time has come for that paradigm to shift.
This is the reason I believe Perl needs work before being used for anything serious. The above example though contrived shows one of the dangers of Perl. In a strongly typed language if I do
String ssn = rs.getFloat(4);
String firstname = rs.getString(2);
String lastname = rs.getString(3);
float cash = rs.getString(1);
I will get an error or thrown Exception for trying to convert a float to a string without a cast while in Perl this error will be allowed to silently propagate through the system causing wasted time later glancing at line-noise-like syntax trying to track down a bug that is due to the typelessness of the language.
PS: Automatic initialization of variables thus causing typos to be treated as variables is another pet peeve of mine. Besides that Perl is really good at quick-and-dirty text manipulation which is what it excels in.
The email is stored on a server, your mail client retrieves it and then parses it before storing it in your inbox. According to the MSFT security release, Outlook doesn't check that all the fields are the correct size while parsing it...thus buffer overflow.
I thought by now, we'd be rid of buffer overflow bugs.
kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!", postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post
Why did you mention that? There is no point other then to cast K5 in a bad light, a light which is certainly not true.
Isn't this a Slashdot is censoring the story post?. How about this one? The post isn't attacking K5, all it points out is that there were several posters on kuro5hin who post slashdot-is-censoring-the-story-messages daily on kuro5hin. Frankly I read K5 everyday and literally every two or three stories has somebody complaining about how slashdot is censoring the story.
PS: Now for a real conspiracy, ask why slashdot hasn't posted this story. It has beeen submitted several times by myself and others on kuro5hin but is always rejected.
Unfortunately kuro5hin is currently slashdotted so I cannot link to the post to the conversation of the original submitter of the story. This story broke yesterday, the reason it got to kuro5hin so quickly was because someone read Alan Cox's diary and posted it.
To put things in perspective kuro5hin has an average of 2 or 3 stories in its submission bin at anytime while slashdot has over 400 (the last few times I've submitted a story it's been 450). So it is understandable if it takes them a little longer than kuro5hin to get a story posted since all it takes is a handful of yays to get it to the front page.
Remember also that just yesterday slashdot got bitten by a fake story and don't forget the story about the Oracle NIC violating the GPL that turned out to be bogus (can't find the link for some weird reason). Frankly I applaud Slashdot for showing restraint in posting this instead of rushing this to the front page like the many Bruce-Perens-someone-is-violating-the-GPL stories that could have been settled amicably by sending an email or two but instead turned into public tar-and-featherings.
I just took the Linux Administration Certification test at brainbench.com, a company which provides free certification in many categories, both technical and non-technical. Would listing these free certifications on a resume be helpful, neutral, or a hindrance, particularly for someone with little or no relevant job experience, formal education, or "real" certifications?
My suggestion to you is to pickup relevant experience on your own. If you are looking for a developer position; create your own app that shows of your skill (mine was an online survey that used Java servlets and an Oracle database). If you want to be a sysadmin, create a page that documents your skills and resurrect some old machines and manage a home network. Remember, the one thing employers value more than certificates and degrees, is an ability to work and a penchant for learning because the rest can always be bought later. After all several people who are being educated at the expense of their employers because of their potential. The key here is that you are trying to get a job with the certificates as your only source of legitimacy. Especially since it is trivial for one person to amass several certificates simply by scoring above average on an online multiple choice test. I suggest using online certificates simply as coating on the cake. If you have no relevant job experience or formal education I suggest scratching some of your personal itches. I'm currently working at a Fortune 500 company designing and implementing an extensible, regression testing framework for large B2B websites they plan to launch later this year. Besides getting a good salary my rent, cable and phone are paid for by them (because I'm an intern). The interesting thing is that the clincher that got me hired was work I had done on my own free time during spring break.
Being born outside of America and only having been here for a few years, the amount of violence in American entertainment from music and movies to video games and television has left me stunned.
,3 , 4 , 5 , 6 and 7 is their constitiutional right. Now I do not claim that violence would not exist without violent games nor that video games cause violence but even a blind person can tell that we (in America) are extremely disensitized to violence. Nowhere else in the world is so much violence consumed by the public nor is it as easily accessible to minors as in America.
In a country were the average youth (especially minorities) is disenfranchised, ignored by their parents and has easy access to mind altering substances it is in my opinion a deadly combination to combine that with the current cocktail mix of easy access to firearms and constant daily diet of violence in all forms that children get.
That Americans are desensitized to violence is no longer news, but it amazes me when someone claims that a diet of gratuitious violence and entertainment that consists of 1, 2
In my opinion until there is a movement to curtail the excessive amount of firepower in the community then moves like this are a stop gap measure on the journey to ridding our communities of violence. Yes, I know violence goes beyond violent video games and is more likely due to other factors (abuse at home, poverty, feelings of persecution, resentment) but the fact is that violent video games are not blameless. But two wrongs do not make a right (allow violent video games to minors since they have access to other violence), after all, the Columbine kids didn't play long games of Pokemon before going on their killing spree.
PS; If you've ever lived in a neighborhood were you go to sleep hearing gunshots and wakeup to sirens you'll know where I'm coming from. Lakewood, Atlanta, GA.
Here's eBay's robot.txt
Available at http://search.ebay.com/robots.txt and http://listings.ebay.com/robots.txt
It seems they disallow all indexing of any sort on their search site but there is no robots.txt for the main site or on the eBay pages sites.
Frankly I agree that if eBay has spent time and money creating a world class brand, it is wrong for anyone who can write a Perl script to be able to steal their customers especially when some of these are paying customers (people pay eBay to have their auctions highlighted and so on).
. Even simple things like not letting your biff update until you change focus out of a word processor. (mind you the anti-ms block on Slashdot will of course equate microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague, but what are ya gonna do?)
Besides the fact that most MSFT technologies sound good on paper (the Paperclip is an artificially intelligent agent that molds itself to the users behavior and acts accordingly) they are usually horrible in implementation. Somehow I have a problem with software that will stop IMs from popping up because it's 2 AM and I'm reading Slashdot or that will not announce email notifications because I'm coding. The fact is there are more variables in whether I want certain activities to occur than where my eyes are positioned and what time of the day it is, after all if such things were so easily distilled into algorithms we would all love the paper clip.
From what I saw (talk of Bayesian Networks and agents) this is the same team that brought us the Paper Clip. I would hold of on applauding what will more than likely be another highly disparaged piece of MSFT bloatware until it is actually implemented and is no longer vapor. I remember taking a class where our professor described how some company had started research on using cameras to manage User Interfaces but the project was a failure because people do not act predictably when using a computer and a camera also distracts them. It turned out that the best thing it was useful for was for tracking how long users read banner ads.
From the article There have been other missteps indicating that Bayesian techniques must be added to software with great care. In December 1998, for example, Blue Mountain Arts, the Internet greeting card company, filed suit after it discovered that a preliminary version of Microsoft's electronic mail software mistakenly filtered Blue Mountain's e-mail greeting cards into users' trash cans. The filter, which had been based on software developed by Horvitz's researchers, was repaired in the final release of the program. It was an important lesson, he said, in the risk of artificial intelligence making poor judgments.
PS: I wish them luck, but this is one piece of bloat I'll definitely be avoiding.
But seriously (read before moderating this as Troll of Flamebait), the reason that the e-mail script viruses we've seen all attack MS Outlook isn't because of how terrible Windows is. It's because most computers run Windows! They're targetted just because they're more common! If you wanted to write a malicious virus, would you target at a rarely-used platform or the most common?
Obviously you do not have *nix background. In Unixland there is this concept called security which implies that a user's email program would never be able to run as root. It is ludicrous to think that a script in an email can modify your registry... were the Outlook team drunk when they designed Outlook without any sort of sandbox?
WHY C SUCKS
-----------
int i =0;
i = i + 1;
A killer net virus that would destroy the Net as we know it has been very easily in reach once the majority of computers on the Internet became homogenized Windows//MSFT Office//Outlook boxes.
.doc , .xls, .sys, .bat, .dll, .html and .jar to 0, I am sure corporations would probably be fuming about Trillions of dollars in irreparable damages (after all how much stuff is actually backed up or centrally stored in a Windows world).
Whenever I read about a Mellissa or an I Love You I smile to myself and think "I would have trashed their hard drives after spamming myself to all their friends.". If Mellissa or I Love You hadn't been content with simply bogging down net servers and had decided to set the file length of all
In my opinion the article is overkill, a virus doesn't have to be particularly clever or well designed to cause havok anymore thanks to the beauty of MSFT operating systems. Any script kiddie or MSCE with a passable knowledge of Virus Building Script can bring it all toppling down.
Off course, none of us will ever do it because we know it would do so much damage to the 'Net (government would step in hard) and also hurt many of us financially in some indirect way.
WHY C SUCKS
-----------
int i =0;
i = i + 1;
I don't care if this gets moderated down because some anti-microsoft moderator hates what I write here, but I have to say it: Microsoft releases a LOT OF sourcecode, free for all.: The duwamish bookstore, a complete e-commerce application ready to roll (a complete online store), with code, docs etc. numerous examples, tutorials and docs.
.NET is fully released.
I developed a lot in java but I'm very willing to swap to C# once it's there. Why? because the tradition of well done documentation (not generated CRAP like Sun gives us), lots of examples and full applications, complete in sourcecode will be extended when
First of all it is obvious that you have never truly investigated Sun's Java documentation. All the source code you claim MSFT releases are simply tutorials and examples on how to use their proprietary languages. Sun does the exact same thing for Java, at the online Java tutorial site Sun releases a LOT OF sourcecode, free for all . Here's a list of examples as useful as the Duwamish example I found in less than five minutes of browsing the online Java tutorial.
Bingo - Client/Server version of Bingo that shows how to use JFC ("Swing") User Interface classes,Multi-threading and thread synchronization, Inter-application communication APIs , Digital signatures , a Customized EventQueue , Managing program settings.
Duke's Bookstore -An online bookstore that utilizes the power of Java servlets and shows various aspects of session management, handling HTTP GET requests, and more .
Dozens of Applets- that are used to show how use various Swing layouts, GUI threading, event handling and playing sounds. There are over a 100 classes whose source code is available in the various examples. MSFT's MSDN does not come close when it comes to releasing source code.
As for documentation, I learned Java primarily from the aforementioned tutorial and the Online API(which I happened to download for free) and am currently implementing an extensible regression testing framework that will be used on large B2B websites for a Fortune 500 company. All the Java knowledge I have I picked up online less than a year ago, I dare you to find someone who learned COM from online documentation only who can implement a large scale, cross platform, extensible automated regression testing toolkit in a month. The key here is from online documentation only. Call me when hell freezes over.
PS: Plus Sun's tutorials and API's are available for free download here, while do only way to get the entire MSDN collection is to pay for it by subscribing to MSDN and getting a CD.
PPS: The company I worked for was very glad that all my code has HTML javadocs that the QA team and other developers can look at to get an overview of how my code works. What is MSFT's generated CRAP alternative, as you so call it?
WHY C SUCKS
-----------
int i =0;
i = i + 1;
For the non-Americans who haven't seen the show or people like me who don't watch TV here's a very good episode guide from Salon. The show actually seems very interesting, the interplay of personalities and double dealing as well as how low people will go for money is entertaining in a surrreal kind of way.
I'll definitely give the next show a try.
WHY C SUCKS
-----------
int i =0;
i = i + 1;
I was about to take this article seriously and post a comment on how this case can be easily resolved. If a company hires another to write a piece of software, standard practice is to give them a requirements document containing specifications which range from must-haves to wish-list items. So unless the New Economy has discarded common business practices of the past several decades, this issue can be resolved by checking on the requirements document, unless of course it contains crap like "The website must be cool!!!".
Unfortunately after reading the entire article twice I realized that this was simply another failed dot comm in it's death throes clutching at straws, rhetoric like "IAM.com is informed that virtually every aspect of the site developed by Razorfish fails to meet IAM.com's needs, or basic levels of workmanship in the (W)eb development industry." sounds exactly the kind of E-commerce/E-marketplace/New Economy newspeak that such entities are prone to use. Also
From the article:
IAM, which laid off 25 percent of its staff last month, is currently embroiled in a legal battle with four former employees that it says violated their contracts by trying to start a competing company and fraudulently dealing with IAM. The four in turn are suing IAM, alleging that IAM stole their business plan.
--
Here's an article entitled the X-Windows Disaster written by Don Hopkins.
Anyone who reads this article may be inclined to yell FUD, FUD, FUD as has been written in comments to this article or MSFT supporter but not in this case.
Don Box is a migrant user interface designer and graphics programmer. Don received a BSCS degree from the University of Maryland while working as a researcher at the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Don has worked at UniPress Software, Sun Microsystems, the Turing Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Kaleida Labs, and Interval Research. He ported SimCity to NeWS and X11 for DUX Software.
X-Windows has serious problems that are evident to anyone who has ever done any serious investigation but since it's *nix most people put up with it's clunkiness. Similar to how an alternative to GNU getopt(3c) has not been written yet, because getopt works well enough (or so people think).
--
I posted this ealier but was a bit vociferous, here's a calmer version of my earlier post:
The article is belaboring something that has been a fact of web development for at least the past year or two. Both browsers have had things that only work on only their platform for years. Anyone remember BLINK and MARQUEE? How about javascript? They use different DOMs so different code has to be used to do the same thing. Sites like Dynamic Drive have been seperating their scripts into IE-only and Netscape only for as long as I've been going there.
Netscape has been flouting standards for as long than MSFT with their proprietary LAYER tag and inventing Javascript. Frankly as at now (but not for long with Mozilla in the works) MSIE supports more of CSS1 than Netscape for proof of this check out this page and use this image as a reference. In MSIE it renders with few flaws while in Netscape it looks like a Picasso. The problem is therefore not with MSIE's support of CSS1 standards at least not now.
The problem is that MSFT's proprietary additions to their browser such as the XML parser built into the browser which is available for scripting and others are so tempting to developers that they ignore the fact that these things work only on IE and rationalize (if you can call it that) this away with "Most people use IE." The fact that W3C takes a long time to ratify standards has not helped this either. PS: For all those who do not realize how long both browsers have been incompatible and flouting standards read Dynamic Html : The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman for an informative read.
PS: The above post is very correct, MSFT doesn't force websites to use it's proprietary additions or to script only for IE, bad web developers do this. If people didn't use the IE specific things in the browser for websites on the world wide web (as opposed to a local intranet were such things can be mandated) then this would not be an issue. Web developers are more to blame for the browser segregation than MSFT.
--
Oops I forgot to included the reference gif but not the actual standards test. click here to test which browser conforms more to the CSS1 standards. If it looks like a Picasso (as in Netscape) then the browser is not conforming to standards, while if it looks like a bunch of boxes (like in MSIE) then it is standards compliant.
--
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
It seems to me that if Napster acts against what this protester is doing then by all rights they are no longer a service provider but admitting that they are in the business of providing content (in this case copyrighted music that they have no right to distribute). Doing this would invalidate all the arguments about Napster not being in business specifically to violate the copyright of artists and record labels and instead reinforce the greedy VC funded company trying to get rich of other peoples work image.
--
Here's a Forbes article on SCO's Linux plans.
Quote: So, the company is hitching its wagon to--what else?--Linux. SCO has been selling support services for Caldera (Nasdaq: CALD - news) and TurboLinux for about 6 months, and it has already given some intellectual property to the Linux open source community. But SCO hasn't yet taken the big step--distributing Linux.
But that's coming. Sources say it's working out an arrangement with France's MandrakeSoft to distribute its Linux-Mandrake operating system. SCO will use Linux-Mandrake as the base OS and add some features like clustering, which is a complex way to improve the performance and expansion of servers. MandrakeSoft also has offices in Altadena, Calif.
--
Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess
Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book. It's easy to look back now and sneer at choices that people made a thousand years ago, after all hindsight is 20/20. But who is to say what future generations will think about ours.
I can easily imagine snide comments that will be made about how we callously destroyed the environment, pumped millions in a giant Internet Ponzi scheme when there were more worthwhile causes to support and amassed Nuclear weapons whose poisonous waste will exist for longer than humanity has existed. Think about that next time.
I generally agree with arguments for no censorship except for pedophilia. Pedophilia involves mentally and physically abusing children, it is reviled most cultures and for good reason.
The existence of a market for pedophilia means that somewhere in the world a child is being abused to satisfy that market. Censorship reduces this market and frankly I will support it to my dying day.
A persons rights to express themselves should stop short of abusing another person's rights and pedophilia does abuse the rights of others.