Is getting financial benefits, in and of itself, really selling out?
No, but who you are getting the financial benefits from does matter. Many slashdotters have sgort memories as is evidenced by the fact that one day a story on how evil the MPAA is being by pursuing the SSSCA and the DMCA can run and the next day a movie review gushing about the latest overpriced, overhyped crap from George Lucas or one of his cronies is run.
AOL Time Warner is directly responsible (via lobbying) for laws that restrict the freedom of their customers to utilize the products they have bought in a means which is generally considered to be fair (the DMCA). They are responsible for cops breaking into a teenage hacker's home (Jon Johansen's) and treating him like a criminal for writing a program that would make viewing DVDs under Linux easier. They are responsible for proposing laws that would force all electronics and computers to ship with copy protection (the SSSCA).
Given the fact that the actions of the Time Warner branch of AOL/TW are orthogonal to the beliefs of anyone involved in Free Software I am stunned that people on Slashdot can question Alan Cox's decision. I guess that the adage "be careful when you fight monsters lest you become one yourself" applies in this case with regards to Slashdotters looking for a way to defeat MSFT by any means necessary.
Anyways, I take some offense at the "ignorant citizenry" bit. Am I to educate myself on every fucking thing the gov't does? This is a hallmark of American society. We, at least what appears to me to be a large majority, trust our gov't to do the right things.
You have just pointed out what the problem with democracy in America today is. For a democracy to truly work it requires an educated populace that is well informed about the issues of the day and participates in electoral activities frequently so as to give politicians feedback on what actions they like and dislike.
Sadly, a lot of Americans are like you and think that their duty in a democracy doesn't extend beyond voting along party lines (if they do vote at all) in what has slowly become a popularity contest akin to high school elections where discussion of the issues or of the past performance of incumbents is not debated but instead mudslinging and name calling are the order of the day.
Anyway so this isn't completely offtopic.
In real life, the character played by Ewan McGregor in Black Hawk Down is based on real-life Army Ranger John "Stebby" Stebbins, who, aside from being a hero in the Battle of Mogadishu, is now a convicted child molesterwho
is now serving a 30-year sentence for raping and molesting a young girl.
What follows is a repost of a comment I made on Kuro5hin.
On Slashdot the news of potential purchase of RedHat by AOL has mostly been received with much rejoicing at the potential demise of MSFT's monopoly power.
I am curious as to why people don't fear AOL/TW. From where I sit they already own too much and already influence the perceptions of millions of people with their ownership of Netscape, Nullsoft, ICQ, Time magazine, CNN, WB television network, Time Warner records, Warner Bros. movies, and a lot more that I can't remember right now.
Microsoft may own the OS that most people run but AOL/TW controls the news magazines they read, the music they listen to, the movies and television shows they watch, and how they connect to the Internet as well as most of what they view while online.
Interestingly I'd like to see how a user modifiable OS like Linux interacts with AOL/TW's music and movie divisions that would like to see DRM support implemented in all software from operating systems to browsers. This should be interesting (kinda like NullSoft releasing Gnutella only for AOL to get mad)
Netscape 4's perhaps, but with regard to IE 6 vs. Mozilla 0.9.8 (effectively Netscape 6.3; 0.9.8 is due to be released in a week), I have to hand this round to Mozilla. Mozilla starts faster than IE, supports more CSS, supports XHTML (as opposed to IE just bailing and dumping the XML tree),
My webpage is Fully Compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional and renders better in IE 6.0 than in Mozilla (as text and images not this "dumping the XML tree that you speak of). Mozilla is a great browser but when I see people spreading lies in an effort to spread its usage I feel disgusted.
Let the browser stand on its own merits instead of spreading FUD to promote it. This sullies the name of Mozilla and all that work on it.
She protested, saying it was legit because she'd paid 5 dollars for it on her travels in Malaysia.
This is a great example of the wackiness of intellectual property law as it applies to software, in the eyes of most consumers. Because, for just about anything else except software, she'd be right!
Cool, if I'm ever pulled over by a cop and have a happen to have some marijuana or hashish on me, I'll just tell him I bought it in Amsterdam since it's legal there and I paid for it fair and square.
CmdrTaco says: Cuz remember programmers: in the real world you are fired if you consult with a co-worker;)
As someone who TAed classes at GA Tech, I take a lot of offense at this comment. There is a difference between working as a team on project based classes (of which GA Tech has a good number off including classes where we got to hack the Linux kernel and another where we got to deliver a product to a customer) once you've shown you understand the basics of programming and wholesale copying of other people's work in entry level classes where you are supposed to be learning to program on your own.
Beginning programmers need to learn how to program, find information from MAN pages & API docs, and come up with solutions on their own before being introduced into team based environments. If not they never learn how to be self sufficient or even if they are cut out for programming at all.
It is true that in the real world no man is an island but on the flip side, how many people have worked with co-workers who completely clueless about how to perform their jobs but held degrees or certifications that implied they shoould be knowledgeable about programming? These are the kind of people who hid behind the work of others in team based projects and submitted others work on individual projects.
How the HELL is this News? This is such an elementary part of human nature that I can't believe that anyone has failed to notice this.
So it takes a high bunch of high flying Swedish economics to realize that if a community contributes to create something and others can derive benefits from this creation without helping to build it then OBVIOUSLY the people who contribute will be less motivated to contribute or stop entirely. On the other hand if a mechanism exists to punish free loaders then more people will be motivated to contribute?
WTF??? Who didn't know this?
I learned this by the time I was age 10 and we used to have a neighborhood watch. I slowly realized that the people who didn't participate in the watch still got the benefits of people looking after their belongings. So few people actually participated counting on the fact that others would watch their cars and apartments but even at that age I realized that if we decided to only watch cars and belongings of those that participated in the watch and allow the property of the non-participants to be vandalized and stolen [thus punishing them] then this would give them incentive to join the watch.
I wrote an article on Kuro5hin entitled The Spyware Invasion when I found out that there was a piece of Spyware(WebHancer) on my machine that was logging EVERY URL I VISITED. It turns out that this company sells these statistics that they obtain from over 16 million unsuspecting users to businesses for over $12,000 a pop.
What bothered me in particular about this approach is that I know a few websites that log users in with their pasword in the URL (Slashdot is one of them) and I wondered exactly how many of my passwords and userIDs had been sent to webHancer over the past weeks I had it unknowingly running on my machine. Of course, I quickly ran Ad-Aware on my machine and changed all my online passwords.
PS: The offending application that installed this spyware was AudioGalaxy.
Unfortunately, SOAP is a bit heavy for the most simple web services (what ever it means to microsoft).
SOAP is the standard protocol accepted INDUSTRY WIDE for web services. This is not just across companies from Microsoft to Sun to Oracle, etc. but across programming languages from C# to Java to Perl.
The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes.
One does not need a DOM to validate an XML document. There are many validating SAX readers and in fact there also validating Pull-based XML APIs like Microsoft's XmlValidatingReader or XPP.
It's too bad microsoft's whitepapers don't credit the orginal authors, since a lot of people worked to push XML forward. In some ways, it feels like SOAP and.NET is a bastardized version of Burners Lee's vision of a semantic web using XML web services and RDF. Perhaps all the press.NET has generated for XML services will help create the critical mass needed to get semantic web [w3.org] moving.
Now it is clear you have no idea what you are talking about. The push for the semantic web is a push for a richer web experience by adding more meta data to the content of the web.
SOAP is a distributed computing protocol similar to predefined protocol the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) for CORBA, the Object Remote Procedure Call (ORPC) for DCOM, and the Java Remote Method Protocol (JRMP) for Java/RMI but defined in XML instead of a binary format.
Isn't it wonderful having C# and.NET on Linux, after all they won't have the problems that Samba boys have trying to keep up with MS deliberately changing things to stop them, and it won't be miles worse.
Dare Obasanjo: Similarly what happens if
Dan Kusnetzky's prediction comes true and
Microsoft changes the.NET APIs in the
future? Will the Mono project play catchup or will it
become an incompatible implementation
of.NET on UNIX platforms?
Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft is remarkably good
at keeping their APIs backwards
compatible (and this is one of the reasons I think
they have had so
much success as a platform vendor). So I think that
this would not be
a problem.
Now, even if this was a problem, it is always possible
to have
multiple implementations of the same APIs and use the
correct one by
choosing at runtime the proper "assembly". Assemblies
are a new
way of dealing with software bundles and the files
that are part of an
assembly can be cryptographically checksummed and
their APIs
programmatically tested for compatibility.
[Dare -- Description
of Assemblies from MSDN gloassary]
So even if they deviate from the initial release, it
would be possible
to provide assemblies that are backwards compatible
(we can both do
that: Microsoft and ourselves)
.NET isn't a revolution, its a way to build poor quality mainframes, lots of boxes, poor IO. I
No.NET isn't a revolution, it's simply a slight improvement on an old idea of how things can be done. The same way Linux, Apache, BSD, Perl, Java, XML, P2P, the world wide web, etc. aren't revolutions but simply new spins on decades old concepts.
However, does this somehow preclude their usefulness or the fact that they are all innovative in their own way?
Would you care to explain how sterile seeds can "spread"?
Under certain conditions the pollen from a "terminator" plant could be used to cross-pollinate other plants as shown in this BBC article
Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the movies
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I never thought companies like Monsanto existed outside of the paranoid writings of science fiction writers or in surreal alternate reality fantasy stories until I found out about their infamous Monsanto Terminator Seeds?
Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
Actually you can. All the company e-mail is on Exchange Servers, and so anybody within the company forwarding it would be using those servers, and the admins can see it.
It's for this very reason that I doubt that Brian Valentine would be stupid enough to warn whoever was going to leak this email to NOT forward it.
So now even if the leaker was going to simply forward it from their @microsoft email account, he/she now knows to either cut and paste it into some web based email instead or even copy it to a floppy and mail it from some off-Microsoft-campus site instead.
<conspiracy-theory>
This could just be a plot like all those vapor-ware announcements from years past to make the UNIX and Linux folk chase after phantoms in the wind while MSFT executes it's real plans after having led their competitors on a wild goose chase.
yodav("Machiavellian indeed, that would be");/* Yoda Voice */
Imagine if someone went to a photographer and had some "personal" photos taken for their spouse. And that the photographer made poster-size prints and put them in the front window with a sign saying, "Please don't look at these."
Would you prosecute the 13-year-old kid who came by and looked at them? How about if he took picutres of the posters and put them up on his web site? The originals are still "secure" in the studio's safe. How can you blame the photographer?
Your analogy only makes sense if cracking a site requires a passive activity such as accidentally visiting a URL or attempting to connect via FTP. Unfortunately, most cracking involves active malicious intent by the perpetrators which doesn't jibe with your analogy.
A better analogy would be if the photographer had the pictures in a drawer marked
CONFIDENTIAL NUDE PICTURES! DO NOT OPEN.
and some teenager felt that he/she couldn't resist looking at the pictures. The teenager is still in the wrong but one can also blame the photographer for not taking better precautions which means both parties are at fault which is the case in most cases of cracking websites.
I was wondering when next you'd post to Slashdot, you've been amusing me ever since I read this thread.
Keep it up, your paranoia is highly amusing.
PS: By the way, who said I work for Microsoft? It's interesting that you stalk me over the 'net but happen to ignore simple facts like the fact that I interned at MSFT and not that I work there now.
Looks like supression remains the best way to promote innovation.
<tongue-in-cheek>
There's nothing quite as innovative as an operating system with the sole goal of reimplementing APIs from other operating systems until it can run their binaries.:)
</tongue-in-cheek>
StatMarket publishes statistics based on the combined data from tens of millions of daily Internet users visiting the tens of thousands of sites that use WebSideStory's HitBox Enterprise and other HitBox Web audience analysis services. HitBox is an outsourced Web site measurement and analysis service that provides real-time statistics about online visitor behavior.
...
While the 125,000+ Web sites worldwide that HitBox monitors are self-selected, StatMarket's figures are culled from more than 50 million unique visitors who visit those sites every day
It looks like you read the first few paragraphs of the article and rushed to post your curt dismissal of the article in a what is now a slashdot clichè response.
Premise: "Nick" is acting weird.
Premise: His parents are software engineers.
Conclusion: Nick's behavior is an effect of his parents' occupation.
Let's explore your simple minded interpretations of the article using some of the context from the article.
People with autism show extreme ability in some area of scientific or artistic endeavor but extreme retardation in basic human social and communication skills (i.e. some can barely speak).
Asperger's syndrome is a milder form of autism where people have less of both extremes than autism.
Software development is one of the few fields where extreme ability in technical tasks and an inability to socialize properly are welcome and in fact may be encouraged as being part of the "culture".
Silicon Valley is home to some of the most talented (and eccentric) software developers and probably has more software developers per square mile than most other places in the world.
The rise in autistic cases in Silicon valley has been rather dramatic and has also coincided with the recent dotcomm boom and the influx of programmers to the Silicon Valley area.
Since autism has been shown to be a genetic disease, isn't it likely that when people with mild cases of autism mate their child will more than likely be born with some degree of autism ?
Considering that the Travelling Salesman Problem is NP complete and affects almost any problem that involves delivering something to several destinations in an optimal fashion. A solution to NP problems ould have widespread ramifications in improving many aspects of businesses that involve deliveries (including the airline business now that I think about it).
This is not about discussion but about cold ware politics. It is very close to calling linux a communist OS. (Hmm, it is used in china?) the word "marx" and capitalism are used so much, but only to trigger response.
It is sad that many people like you due to Cold War propaganda and misinformation somehow equate Marxism and Communism with evil. The fact of the matter is that the basis behind Marxism is how to benefit society as a whole while not exploiting the workers in the community and creating classes of haves and have-nots. Unfortunately Marxism, like democracy and capitalism, is an ideal that has yet to be properly implemented in reality on a large scale, although some would say that there are communes in various parts of the world that are Marxist.
The problem with communism in the real world is that it came up against a number of harsh realities such as the fact that goods and services are not infinite, and cannot be distributed to the populace as if they were. This is not the case with software or any other sort of intellectual property.
With Free Software, the most able developers can distribute the fruit of their efforts to multitudes of users with little, if any expectation of reward. To each according to his ability (i.e. contribute what you can be it code, documentation or testing) and to each according to his wants (everybody gets the software they desire) is close to becoming a reality in the microcosm that is the Free Software world and this was exactly one of the guiding principles of Marxism.
However, I don't believe this means that Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon. Instead I take it to be an indication that if technology advances to the degree that devices like Star Trek replicators are possible, then maybe we'll see a resurgence of communism/Marxism as a major political/economic movement.
Since Google updated their archive, a search for USENET posts I have made turns up a big fat zero even though this same search pulled up ozens of posts just last week.
How about holding various companies whose products are exploited the most (re: MS) liable for their lack of security?
There was a recent security seminar sponsored by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center by Gene Spafford who is the director of the Purdue CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security), where he mentioned the problems with security and the software industry. One of his slides in his presentation showed that Windows NT and Windows 2000 (combined), RedHat Linux and Solaris are respectively the first, second and third on the lists of OSes that have had vulnerabilities discovered in the past five years.
Legislation that aims to punish companies for writing insecure software would harm almost every company that writes any software that is aimed at being used in a server/multi-user environment since security is an absolute that most non-trivial software does not reach.
Secondly, who will be forced to pay when it comes to Open Source vulnerabilities? wu-ftp is notoriously broken
, as is telnetd , sendmail, BIND and some would consider recent bugs in the Linux kernel as OS vulnerabilities. Opening the door to lawsuits to software developers for writing software would probably kill a number of projects rather quickly.
I'd rather that we let capitalism take its course. If customers want secure products then they should stop buying insecure products or they should communicate to the vendors that security is of importance to them. As long as consumers (both individuals and corporate entities) continue to accept the status quo then no change will be made but I don't believe that lawsuits will solve anything except make some lawyers rich and significantly increase the cost of software as the effects of the lawsuits are passed on to consumers.
Except for some people who think choosing an operating system of importance equivalent to choosing a religion most of us don't care what OS we use. Instead most people care about what apps they can run on a given OS. My favorite apps/tools are Emacs, Perl, Internet Explorer, WinAmp, ICQ, ssh, bash, grep and Word. Windows runs all of them with the least amount of hassle and that's why I use it. This is true for most of the computer users in the world, the OS that the app happens to run on is incidental.
I used to think that linux on the desktop wasn't a goal worth persuing at the moment - then I realized every Windows/Office purchase is money for Microsoft to use on its quest to eliminate linux.
Short of acquiring a genie and using their three wishes to wish away Linux, Open Source, and college classes on operating systems there's no way that anyone can eliminate Linux. Most reasonable people realize this (including Linus) and rightfully don't see Linux vs. Microsoft as some sort of war that should be won at all costs.
Finally Learning From The Open Source Community
on
Windows XP Embedded
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While I was at MSFT over the summer, a friend at work asked me why Open Source projects had such a community around them no matter how small they were while it seemed harder for MSFT products to build a community around them (as opposed to users which they had plenty of). He mistakenly assumed that the availability of source code was what built the community which from my minor participation in a number of Open Source projects was incorrect.
The main reason users tend to form a community around Open Source projects is that there is direct communication between the users of the product and the developers of the product without the layer of bullshit introduced by marketing and management. If I post to the dbXML, Scoop or JDEE mailing list, I know I'll get at least one response from an actual developer of the product who will make a solid attempt to solve my problem as opposed to paying umpteen dollars to be put on hold by some pimply faced teenager who probably couldn't code his way out of a paper bag.
While at MSFT I planned to evangelize such a user-centric view of interaction but never got around to doing it on as large a scale as I liked. I did however try my best to make sure that as many questions to the newsgroup of our product were answered by someone at MSFT, if not me then someone whom I felt could answer the question. It looks that finally some like minded people are springing up in other parts of MSFT.
Slashdot Mirror
Is getting financial benefits, in and of itself, really selling out?
No, but who you are getting the financial benefits from does matter. Many slashdotters have sgort memories as is evidenced by the fact that one day a story on how evil the MPAA is being by pursuing the SSSCA and the DMCA can run and the next day a movie review gushing about the latest overpriced, overhyped crap from George Lucas or one of his cronies is run.
AOL Time Warner is directly responsible (via lobbying) for laws that restrict the freedom of their customers to utilize the products they have bought in a means which is generally considered to be fair (the DMCA). They are responsible for cops breaking into a teenage hacker's home (Jon Johansen's) and treating him like a criminal for writing a program that would make viewing DVDs under Linux easier. They are responsible for proposing laws that would force all electronics and computers to ship with copy protection (the SSSCA).
Given the fact that the actions of the Time Warner branch of AOL/TW are orthogonal to the beliefs of anyone involved in Free Software I am stunned that people on Slashdot can question Alan Cox's decision. I guess that the adage "be careful when you fight monsters lest you become one yourself" applies in this case with regards to Slashdotters looking for a way to defeat MSFT by any means necessary.
Anyways, I take some offense at the "ignorant citizenry" bit. Am I to educate myself on every fucking thing the gov't does? This is a hallmark of American society. We, at least what appears to me to be a large majority, trust our gov't to do the right things.
You have just pointed out what the problem with democracy in America today is. For a democracy to truly work it requires an educated populace that is well informed about the issues of the day and participates in electoral activities frequently so as to give politicians feedback on what actions they like and dislike.
Sadly, a lot of Americans are like you and think that their duty in a democracy doesn't extend beyond voting along party lines (if they do vote at all) in what has slowly become a popularity contest akin to high school elections where discussion of the issues or of the past performance of incumbents is not debated but instead mudslinging and name calling are the order of the day.
Anyway so this isn't completely offtopic. In real life, the character played by Ewan McGregor in Black Hawk Down is based on real-life Army Ranger John "Stebby" Stebbins, who, aside from being a hero in the Battle of Mogadishu, is now a convicted child molesterwho is now serving a 30-year sentence for raping and molesting a young girl.
What follows is a repost of a comment I made on Kuro5hin.
On Slashdot the news of potential purchase of RedHat by AOL has mostly been received with much rejoicing at the potential demise of MSFT's monopoly power.
I am curious as to why people don't fear AOL/TW. From where I sit they already own too much and already influence the perceptions of millions of people with their ownership of Netscape, Nullsoft, ICQ, Time magazine, CNN, WB television network, Time Warner records, Warner Bros. movies, and a lot more that I can't remember right now.
Microsoft may own the OS that most people run but AOL/TW controls the news magazines they read, the music they listen to, the movies and television shows they watch, and how they connect to the Internet as well as most of what they view while online.
Interestingly I'd like to see how a user modifiable OS like Linux interacts with AOL/TW's music and movie divisions that would like to see DRM support implemented in all software from operating systems to browsers. This should be interesting (kinda like NullSoft releasing Gnutella only for AOL to get mad)
Netscape 4's perhaps, but with regard to IE 6 vs. Mozilla 0.9.8 (effectively Netscape 6.3; 0.9.8 is due to be released in a week), I have to hand this round to Mozilla. Mozilla starts faster than IE, supports more CSS, supports XHTML (as opposed to IE just bailing and dumping the XML tree),
My webpage is Fully Compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional and renders better in IE 6.0 than in Mozilla (as text and images not this "dumping the XML tree that you speak of). Mozilla is a great browser but when I see people spreading lies in an effort to spread its usage I feel disgusted.
Let the browser stand on its own merits instead of spreading FUD to promote it. This sullies the name of Mozilla and all that work on it.
Cool, if I'm ever pulled over by a cop and have a happen to have some marijuana or hashish on me, I'll just tell him I bought it in Amsterdam since it's legal there and I paid for it fair and square.
That should keep me out of jail.
CmdrTaco says: ;)
Cuz remember programmers: in the real world you are fired if you consult with a co-worker
As someone who TAed classes at GA Tech, I take a lot of offense at this comment. There is a difference between working as a team on project based classes (of which GA Tech has a good number off including classes where we got to hack the Linux kernel and another where we got to deliver a product to a customer) once you've shown you understand the basics of programming and wholesale copying of other people's work in entry level classes where you are supposed to be learning to program on your own.
Beginning programmers need to learn how to program, find information from MAN pages & API docs, and come up with solutions on their own before being introduced into team based environments. If not they never learn how to be self sufficient or even if they are cut out for programming at all.
It is true that in the real world no man is an island but on the flip side, how many people have worked with co-workers who completely clueless about how to perform their jobs but held degrees or certifications that implied they shoould be knowledgeable about programming? These are the kind of people who hid behind the work of others in team based projects and submitted others work on individual projects.
How the HELL is this News? This is such an elementary part of human nature that I can't believe that anyone has failed to notice this.
So it takes a high bunch of high flying Swedish economics to realize that if a community contributes to create something and others can derive benefits from this creation without helping to build it then OBVIOUSLY the people who contribute will be less motivated to contribute or stop entirely. On the other hand if a mechanism exists to punish free loaders then more people will be motivated to contribute?
WTF??? Who didn't know this?
I learned this by the time I was age 10 and we used to have a neighborhood watch. I slowly realized that the people who didn't participate in the watch still got the benefits of people looking after their belongings. So few people actually participated counting on the fact that others would watch their cars and apartments but even at that age I realized that if we decided to only watch cars and belongings of those that participated in the watch and allow the property of the non-participants to be vandalized and stolen [thus punishing them] then this would give them incentive to join the watch.
I wrote an article on Kuro5hin entitled The Spyware Invasion when I found out that there was a piece of Spyware(WebHancer) on my machine that was logging EVERY URL I VISITED. It turns out that this company sells these statistics that they obtain from over 16 million unsuspecting users to businesses for over $12,000 a pop.
What bothered me in particular about this approach is that I know a few websites that log users in with their pasword in the URL (Slashdot is one of them) and I wondered exactly how many of my passwords and userIDs had been sent to webHancer over the past weeks I had it unknowingly running on my machine. Of course, I quickly ran Ad-Aware on my machine and changed all my online passwords.
PS: The offending application that installed this spyware was AudioGalaxy.
Unfortunately, SOAP is a bit heavy for the most simple web services (what ever it means to microsoft).
.NET is a bastardized version of Burners Lee's vision of a semantic web using XML web services and RDF. Perhaps all the press .NET has generated for XML services will help create the critical mass needed to get semantic web [w3.org] moving.
SOAP is the standard protocol accepted INDUSTRY WIDE for web services. This is not just across companies from Microsoft to Sun to Oracle, etc. but across programming languages from C# to Java to Perl.
The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes.
One does not need a DOM to validate an XML document. There are many validating SAX readers and in fact there also validating Pull-based XML APIs like Microsoft's XmlValidatingReader or XPP.
It's too bad microsoft's whitepapers don't credit the orginal authors, since a lot of people worked to push XML forward. In some ways, it feels like SOAP and
Now it is clear you have no idea what you are talking about. The push for the semantic web is a push for a richer web experience by adding more meta data to the content of the web.
SOAP is a distributed computing protocol similar to predefined protocol the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) for CORBA, the Object Remote Procedure Call (ORPC) for DCOM, and the Java Remote Method Protocol (JRMP) for Java/RMI but defined in XML instead of a binary format.
Mono is not a clone of
Secondly as miguel said in my interview with him which originally ran on Slashdot and then on MSDN
No
However, does this somehow preclude their usefulness or the fact that they are all innovative in their own way?
Would you care to explain how sterile seeds can "spread"?
Under certain conditions the pollen from a "terminator" plant could be used to cross-pollinate other plants as shown in this BBC article
I never thought companies like Monsanto existed outside of the paranoid writings of science fiction writers or in surreal alternate reality fantasy stories until I found out about their infamous Monsanto Terminator Seeds?
Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
Artists Get Paid.
Actually you can. All the company e-mail is on Exchange Servers, and so anybody within the company forwarding it would be using those servers, and the admins can see it.
/* Yoda Voice */
It's for this very reason that I doubt that Brian Valentine would be stupid enough to warn whoever was going to leak this email to NOT forward it.
So now even if the leaker was going to simply forward it from their @microsoft email account, he/she now knows to either cut and paste it into some web based email instead or even copy it to a floppy and mail it from some off-Microsoft-campus site instead.
<conspiracy-theory>
This could just be a plot like all those vapor-ware announcements from years past to make the UNIX and Linux folk chase after phantoms in the wind while MSFT executes it's real plans after having led their competitors on a wild goose chase.
yodav("Machiavellian indeed, that would be");
</conspiracy-theory>
Would you prosecute the 13-year-old kid who came by and looked at them? How about if he took picutres of the posters and put them up on his web site? The originals are still "secure" in the studio's safe. How can you blame the photographer?
Your analogy only makes sense if cracking a site requires a passive activity such as accidentally visiting a URL or attempting to connect via FTP. Unfortunately, most cracking involves active malicious intent by the perpetrators which doesn't jibe with your analogy.
A better analogy would be if the photographer had the pictures in a drawer marked and some teenager felt that he/she couldn't resist looking at the pictures. The teenager is still in the wrong but one can also blame the photographer for not taking better precautions which means both parties are at fault which is the case in most cases of cracking websites.
I was wondering when next you'd post to Slashdot, you've been amusing me ever since I read this thread.
Keep it up, your paranoia is highly amusing.
PS: By the way, who said I work for Microsoft? It's interesting that you stalk me over the 'net but happen to ignore simple facts like the fact that I interned at MSFT and not that I work there now.
Looks like supression remains the best way to promote innovation.
:)
<tongue-in-cheek>
There's nothing quite as innovative as an operating system with the sole goal of reimplementing APIs from other operating systems until it can run their binaries.
</tongue-in-cheek>
Premise: "Nick" is acting weird.
Premise: His parents are software engineers.
Conclusion: Nick's behavior is an effect of his parents' occupation.
Let's explore your simple minded interpretations of the article using some of the context from the article.
Considering that the Travelling Salesman Problem is NP complete and affects almost any problem that involves delivering something to several destinations in an optimal fashion. A solution to NP problems ould have widespread ramifications in improving many aspects of businesses that involve deliveries (including the airline business now that I think about it).
This is not about discussion but about cold ware politics. It is very close to calling linux a communist OS. (Hmm, it is used in china?) the word "marx" and capitalism are used so much, but only to trigger response.
It is sad that many people like you due to Cold War propaganda and misinformation somehow equate Marxism and Communism with evil. The fact of the matter is that the basis behind Marxism is how to benefit society as a whole while not exploiting the workers in the community and creating classes of haves and have-nots. Unfortunately Marxism, like democracy and capitalism, is an ideal that has yet to be properly implemented in reality on a large scale, although some would say that there are communes in various parts of the world that are Marxist.
The problem with communism in the real world is that it came up against a number of harsh realities such as the fact that goods and services are not infinite, and cannot be distributed to the populace as if they were. This is not the case with software or any other sort of intellectual property.
With Free Software, the most able developers can distribute the fruit of their efforts to multitudes of users with little, if any expectation of reward. To each according to his ability (i.e. contribute what you can be it code, documentation or testing) and to each according to his wants (everybody gets the software they desire) is close to becoming a reality in the microcosm that is the Free Software world and this was exactly one of the guiding principles of Marxism.
However, I don't believe this means that Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon. Instead I take it to be an indication that if technology advances to the degree that devices like Star Trek replicators are possible, then maybe we'll see a resurgence of communism/Marxism as a major political/economic movement.
Since Google updated their archive, a search for USENET posts I have made turns up a big fat zero even though this same search pulled up ozens of posts just last week.
Even more surprising, I looked up a certain newsgroup only to find it contained zero posts when just last week there were several posts available via Google Groups.
How about holding various companies whose products are exploited the most (re: MS) liable for their lack of security?
There was a recent security seminar sponsored by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center by Gene Spafford who is the director of the Purdue CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security), where he mentioned the problems with security and the software industry. One of his slides in his presentation showed that Windows NT and Windows 2000 (combined), RedHat Linux and Solaris are respectively the first, second and third on the lists of OSes that have had vulnerabilities discovered in the past five years.
Legislation that aims to punish companies for writing insecure software would harm almost every company that writes any software that is aimed at being used in a server/multi-user environment since security is an absolute that most non-trivial software does not reach.
Secondly, who will be forced to pay when it comes to Open Source vulnerabilities? wu-ftp is notoriously broken , as is telnetd , sendmail, BIND and some would consider recent bugs in the Linux kernel as OS vulnerabilities. Opening the door to lawsuits to software developers for writing software would probably kill a number of projects rather quickly.
I'd rather that we let capitalism take its course. If customers want secure products then they should stop buying insecure products or they should communicate to the vendors that security is of importance to them. As long as consumers (both individuals and corporate entities) continue to accept the status quo then no change will be made but I don't believe that lawsuits will solve anything except make some lawyers rich and significantly increase the cost of software as the effects of the lawsuits are passed on to consumers.
Except for some people who think choosing an operating system of importance equivalent to choosing a religion most of us don't care what OS we use. Instead most people care about what apps they can run on a given OS. My favorite apps/tools are Emacs, Perl, Internet Explorer, WinAmp, ICQ, ssh, bash, grep and Word. Windows runs all of them with the least amount of hassle and that's why I use it. This is true for most of the computer users in the world, the OS that the app happens to run on is incidental.
I used to think that linux on the desktop wasn't a goal worth persuing at the moment - then I realized every Windows/Office purchase is money for Microsoft to use on its quest to eliminate linux.
Short of acquiring a genie and using their three wishes to wish away Linux, Open Source, and college classes on operating systems there's no way that anyone can eliminate Linux. Most reasonable people realize this (including Linus) and rightfully don't see Linux vs. Microsoft as some sort of war that should be won at all costs.
While I was at MSFT over the summer, a friend at work asked me why Open Source projects had such a community around them no matter how small they were while it seemed harder for MSFT products to build a community around them (as opposed to users which they had plenty of). He mistakenly assumed that the availability of source code was what built the community which from my minor participation in a number of Open Source projects was incorrect.
The main reason users tend to form a community around Open Source projects is that there is direct communication between the users of the product and the developers of the product without the layer of bullshit introduced by marketing and management. If I post to the dbXML, Scoop or JDEE mailing list, I know I'll get at least one response from an actual developer of the product who will make a solid attempt to solve my problem as opposed to paying umpteen dollars to be put on hold by some pimply faced teenager who probably couldn't code his way out of a paper bag.
While at MSFT I planned to evangelize such a user-centric view of interaction but never got around to doing it on as large a scale as I liked. I did however try my best to make sure that as many questions to the newsgroup of our product were answered by someone at MSFT, if not me then someone whom I felt could answer the question. It looks that finally some like minded people are springing up in other parts of MSFT.