Before I say my 2c worth first a confession I am a BAD BOY I have already moderated a comment in this discussion and I am not supposed to comment.
However I would like to comment on the Oracle buying "Best of Breed" while this is strictly a true statement, a more correct statement would be:- "Oracle buys the best of the competition and..... "
If anti-trust legislation was interpreted even very loosly Oracle would be in breach for buying Siebel and Peoplesoft. Oracle would like to be Monopoly Capitalists, and, they already have 3 Hotels on "Park Lane" ( I think its "Marvin Gardens" on your board) selling database,plus application, plus hardware without anyone else get a penny for the OS must be quite appealing.
Remember "Open source insn't just for geeks billionares can use it too!"
Its interesting that IBM is going after the "One click shopping" patent holder. (surely the patent for storing a cookie belongs to netscape?)
IBM makes lots of money from hardware and basic technoligy payments, but, doesnt have a history of enforcing software patents, I mean you dont here of IBM demanding money for SQL, semaphores, emulating an instruction set etc. etc.
I think the main motivation is that they realise that in a world where "Hello World" attracts 200 patent claims only the lawers will take home any money.
If the US is defending itself against hypothetical attacks by claiming owner ship of space then I think I should be able to claim ownership on Donald Rumsfeld.
If anyone finds my Rummy could they please top up his rabies shots and DHL him to;
The cave,
Back Of Beyond
Afqganistan 1000
Not a lot more really the rest is service industry installing software made in the US or India.
The biggest system level software suppliers are MySQL and SUSE (sadly now American owned) both of which are opensource -- so the evidence would favour OpenSource as a model for growing the undersized european software industry.
Or we could always persuade the French government to pour millions into a version Francais of "YouTube" "VousEtUneTube.fr".
Normaly I would be in there knocking Microsoft with the rest of them.
But anyone who has ever had more than a cursory look at ".net" has come away impressed.
When you consider that the main competion in this area is the J2EE ( a maze of twisty little APIs..... ) it would not be hard to impress. But even so it all looks so right!
Whats more its interoperable -- MS have gone to a lot of trouble to publish real standards for the CLR, C# etc.
I would seriously prefer to use mono on linux over J2EE.
What there software has identified is either paths through the code where the software given the right set of variables could just possibly leak memory , and, paths which when taken will leak memory.
This does not necceserily translate to memory leaks in real life.
Commercial products such as "purify" have been doing this stuff for years. The main problem with using these tools (apart from the queasy feeling you get when it generates a 200 lines of warnings and errors for your 50 lines of code) is identifing real leaks in the mass of potential leaks reported.
Fixing them all is not really an option as they report things like:--
Storage blocks you intend to use in other routines but you stored the
the address somewhere else.
Things you don't bother releasing because you are bailing out as
quickly as possible.
You have your free tucked inside a conditional as in:
if (lasttime == true) { freemem(stuff); }
You you use memalloc as a way of allocating what is essentially
static storage. e.g. You have "buffersize" set in a config file
and allocate the memory during intialisation and never free it.
If you try to get round this by coding extra freemems you just end up with lots of "possable memory free twice" error messages.
C programers usally code a wrapper for malloc and freemem so they can track these problems themselves.
To be honest it is probably in the interest of most of the corporate sponsers for the standards process to stick in the bueruecratic mud, Firstly because an unexpected change to standards plays havoc with your release schedule, and, secondly all those whizzy proprietry bits your customers are locked into would get replaced by a standards based method if the process worked properly.
Havinf said that I think the problem hear is that most of the money is being divied up by large corporations because its a "good thing" and they are not really that interested what happenstothe money. IBM, HP, SUN dont make web browsers any more (and though they do make Web servers they are pretty much legacy apps,)
So you have a bunch of corparations that dont care paying for a stanards org that doesnt listen.
Whats going on here. In the "related links" to the left of the article. I have a couple of links "Compare prices on Linux Software" duh! Curious as to how they can do a price comparison between free beer "a" and free beer "b" I clicked the link -- which takes me to a pricegrabber.com site full of adverts for windows PCs.
Why bother! Who is going to by a windows PC when they were looking for cheaper Linux software?
This sort of poorly directed advertising just brings the whole browsing eexperience down a notch in the same way that each spam received makes e-mail that much less useful.
Call me niave but I did expect better of Slashdot. I know the articles can be out of date and/or lame, and, many of the posters (probably including myself) have a warped world view but I always though/. had a pleasingly shambolic integrity.
So you just pass the password through to the "Man In The Middle"!
The MiM is the hardest security problem by far there are no easy answers.
It would make more sense for your bank to do it the other way around -- display a password on the screen which you send them via SMS, this provides two checks -- the password and your mobile number.
Tough if you lose your mobile though -- you lose access to your account as well!
Much of the article seems to be a diatribe against JavaScript more properly called ECMA script. I was always prejudiced against JavaScript but a couple of years ago I was stuck with a problem which could only be done in JavaScript (The selections in the second emnu depended on you choice in the first menu, all other checkboxes and menus depended on the second menu selection) or with about 50 static pages. I actually came to like it its actually a very clean and consistent programing language albeit with very few builtin features. After a couple of days the only times I ever felt the need to RTFM was for the exact names of the various bits of the web browsers DOM structure.
How anyone could recomend VB over javascript is beyond me, and, I note no one has suggested the return of the Java Applet!
As for buggy, well there are javascripts with bugs in but there are very, very few bugs in the ECMAscript implementations I have dealt with.
I recently crashed the disk on my laptop while I was on the road. I needed the machine back again quickly so I got a new hard drive, couldnt get hold of the recovery disks easily so I popped down to the local computer store and had a choice of Mandriva or Suse. Suse was more expensive but I had previous experience of version 6.0. On the whole the experience is rather disapointing. The basic Linux stuff works just fine but the suse extras particularly YAST can be a real pain. e.g. You double click on an.rpm file and it fires up yast software install which is nice, except that yast cant find the file as it deals in package lists and not rpms. e.g. It keeps shifting the ethernet and wireless adapters between eth0 and eth1 depending on what was active last. So you need to keep amending your wireless signon script (which you will need as yast gets you a wireless connection but no DNS server.)
The web site is now just abysmal it is 90% support for Novell legacy products with the suse support hidden in nooks and crannys which is a pity as suse's online support used to be excellent.
The main point to be made here is that you do not store sensitive data in a location which is not physicaly secure. Not a home office , not a desktop machine anywhere and certainly not a laptop.
But in a locked and secure server room.
Also if you want a secure environment -- disable your companies desktop USB ports:-
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0606.html#6
They could paint the soles of the Robots feet blue, so when it went Titsup users could report Blue Soles of Death.
Re:What a ridiculous trend... CORBA to WebServices
on
The Rise and Fall of Corba
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I always had the impression that nobody at OMG had ever worked on a real system in a real environment.
The killer for CORBA in the real world was how the f*** do you get 5000 copies of the IDL to 10 platforms at the same time?
The very few succesfull implementations of CORBA had a single IDL that went:
int msg_type;
long msg_length;
char[] msg_buffer;
Thus quietly dumping 97% of CORBA and implementing a solution that could more easily be done with BSD sockets but without any architects/managers loosing face.
Currently the only widespread use of CORBA is as the transport for J2EE, and yes they use a single IDL not too far removed form the one above.
Don't be such wimps! When we were kids at camp meths was the standard way of getting a primus stove or tilly lamp going. There were several burnt fingers but no one died that I know of.
I was a baby boomer and it may be that there was a hidden agenda to reduce the surplus supply of kids.
Who cares what features its got if they are all a pain to use.
Notes is the classic "we know whats good for you" big arrogant IT department application, organisations that have notes tend to have big arrogant unresponsive IT departments.
How can any IT professional listen to complaint after complaint about how difficult an application is to use then smugly claim that they are just not good enough users?
Just think how much these people will enjoy recomending your department is outsourced to Elbonia.
As email is the main application for the all singing all dancing groupware/database product, couldn't they make it a decent email application!
And it is bad! It got its own special section on the old "user interface hall of shame" website, there were about 20 pages detailing what was so awful about nearly every aspect of the interface! The standard line from all the Lotus freaks was then as now "..But its not an email.......".
Most people would assume that if the email is so bad every other crud^h^h^h^hgroupware application would be just as bad or worse, and, if my experience is anything to go by they would be right.
I have never understood the Lotus/IBM position on this, other divisions of IBM do feedback and respond (however slowly) to user input. Confronted with a near unamimous loathing of thier interface the Lotus developers respond " you just don't understand.....".
If that wasnt bad enough every site with Lotus installed seems to have a deluded Lotus evengelist who fights every attempt to dump it for something a normal person would enjoy using.
The problem with cell phones is that they depend on phone companies. Call phones have the potential to be the ultimate thin client, all the technoligy is there -- processing power on the handset, local storage, the ability to send/receive data to any server based system via gprs they even have unique device identifiers and the potential for stronger authentication than is possable on PC systems.
Plus with the phone you have a payment/billing mecahnism is place, forget paypal and 16 digit credit card numbers, you just press the OK button on your phone.
But with the exception of DoCoMo in Japan the potential is hampered by service providers who think SMS is gee whiz technoligy; who price any useful innovation out of the market (like gprs, it once cost me 3 euros to use my phones web browser to access the phone companies site to get a support number); and who are not interested in third party services where they do not collect the bulk of the money from the transaction.
The reality is that the cheapest form of thin client is an off the shelf PC. In most places I have worked recently, most PCs are effectivly thin clients.
That hotel reservation on the PC on the fornt desk mentioned above is more than likely an illusion. The PC will only be frontending a server based application. This frontending can be very basic such as the PC running a vt100 emulation for a unix app, or it may be a very sophisticated VB or Java front end which give the illusion the whole app is running on the PC, a more recently written system will probably be web browser based.
Only a very poorly run it department would host an application on desktop PC as it is the worst possable place to store data. Insecure, hard to backup and easy to lose.
The only applications I see where the PC is used fully are word and powerpoint. If you have read as many corporate word documents and sat through as may presentations as I have you will realise that nobody but the author cares if these files are trashed.
Slashdot Mirror
Before I say my 2c worth first a confession I am a BAD BOY I have already moderated a comment in this
..... "
discussion and I am not supposed to comment.
However I would like to comment on the Oracle buying "Best of Breed" while this is strictly a true
statement, a more correct statement would be:-
"Oracle buys the best of the competition and
If anti-trust legislation was interpreted even very loosly Oracle would be in breach for buying Siebel and Peoplesoft. Oracle would like to be Monopoly Capitalists, and, they already have 3 Hotels on "Park Lane" ( I think its "Marvin Gardens" on your board) selling database,plus application, plus hardware without anyone else get a penny for the OS must be quite appealing.
Remember "Open source insn't just for geeks billionares can use it too!"
Its interesting that IBM is going after the "One click shopping" patent holder.
(surely the patent for storing a cookie belongs to netscape?)
IBM makes lots of money from hardware and basic technoligy payments, but,
doesnt have a history of enforcing software patents, I mean you dont here of
IBM demanding money for SQL, semaphores, emulating an instruction set etc. etc.
I think the main motivation is that they realise that in a world where "Hello World" attracts 200 patent claims only the lawers will take home any money.
If about nothing he everything knew then truly the force would be with him!
If the US is defending itself against hypothetical attacks by claiming owner ship of space
then I think I should be able to claim ownership on Donald Rumsfeld.
If anyone finds my Rummy could they please top up his rabies shots and DHL him
to;
The cave,
Back Of Beyond
Afqganistan 1000
ThankingYou In Advance
We got SAP and SAGE and .......
Not a lot more really the rest is service industry installing software made in the US or India.
The biggest system level software suppliers are MySQL and SUSE (sadly now American owned)
both of which are opensource -- so the evidence would favour OpenSource as a model for
growing the undersized european software industry.
Or we could always persuade the French government to pour millions into a version Francais of "YouTube"
"VousEtUneTube.fr".
Normaly I would be in there knocking Microsoft with the rest of them.
..... ) it would not be hard to impress.
But anyone who has ever had more than a cursory look at ".net" has
come away impressed.
When you consider that the main competion in this area is the J2EE
( a maze of twisty little APIs
But even so it all looks so right!
Whats more its interoperable -- MS have gone to a lot of trouble to
publish real standards for the CLR, C# etc.
I would seriously prefer to use mono on linux over J2EE.
Ah the joys of mechanical bug tracking!
What there software has identified is either paths through the code
where the software given the right set of variables could just possibly
leak memory , and, paths which when taken will leak memory.
This does not necceserily translate to memory leaks in real life.
Commercial products such as "purify" have been doing this stuff for years.
The main problem with using these tools (apart from the queasy feeling
you get when it generates a 200 lines of warnings and errors for your
50 lines of code) is identifing real leaks in the mass of potential
leaks reported.
Fixing them all is not really an option as they report things like:--
Storage blocks you intend to use in other routines but you stored the
the address somewhere else.
Things you don't bother releasing because you are bailing out as
quickly as possible.
You have your free tucked inside a conditional as in:
if (lasttime == true) { freemem(stuff); }
You you use memalloc as a way of allocating what is essentially
static storage. e.g. You have "buffersize" set in a config file
and allocate the memory during intialisation and never free it.
If you try to get round this by coding extra freemems you just end
up with lots of "possable memory free twice" error messages.
C programers usally code a wrapper for malloc and freemem so they can
track these problems themselves.
To be honest it is probably in the interest of most of the corporate sponsers for the standards process to stick in the bueruecratic mud,
Firstly because an unexpected change to standards plays havoc with your release schedule, and, secondly all those whizzy proprietry bits your customers are locked into would get replaced by a standards based method if the process worked properly.
Havinf said that I think the problem hear is that most of the money is being divied up by large corporations because its a "good thing" and they are not really that interested what happenstothe money. IBM, HP, SUN dont make web browsers any more (and though they do make Web servers they are pretty much legacy apps,)
So you have a bunch of corparations that dont care paying for a stanards org that doesnt listen.
Sounds like its time for the IETF to step in,
Whats going on here. In the "related links" to the left of the article.
/. had a pleasingly shambolic integrity.
I have a couple of links "Compare prices on Linux Software" duh!
Curious as to how they can do a price comparison between free beer "a" and free beer "b"
I clicked the link -- which takes me to a pricegrabber.com site full of adverts for windows PCs.
Why bother! Who is going to by a windows PC when they were looking for cheaper Linux software?
This sort of poorly directed advertising just brings the whole browsing eexperience down a notch in the same way that each spam received makes e-mail that much less useful.
Call me niave but I did expect better of Slashdot. I know the articles can be out of date and/or lame, and, many of the posters (probably including myself) have a warped world view but I always though
Oh well I am too old for a MYSPACE account?
filthy law breaking unearthly quasars should be hunted down and expelled from the galaxy.
So you just pass the password through to the "Man In The Middle"!
The MiM is the hardest security problem by far there are no easy answers.
It would make more sense for your bank to do it the other way around --
display a password on the screen which you send them via SMS, this provides
two checks -- the password and your mobile number.
Tough if you lose your mobile though -- you lose access to your account as well!
I did a search for oingo on google and yahoo and got a pretty much identical list.
The home page redirects to "applied semmantics" which prodly boasts of being bought by google.
Whats your beef?
Much of the article seems to be a diatribe against JavaScript more properly called ECMA script.
I was always prejudiced against JavaScript but a couple of years ago I was stuck with a problem which could only be done in JavaScript (The selections in the second emnu depended on you choice in the first menu, all other checkboxes and menus depended on the second menu selection) or with about 50 static pages.
I actually came to like it its actually a very clean and consistent programing language albeit with very few builtin features. After a couple of days the only times I ever felt the need to RTFM was for the exact names of the various bits of the web browsers DOM structure.
How anyone could recomend VB over javascript is beyond me, and, I note no one has suggested the return of the Java Applet!
As for buggy, well there are javascripts with bugs in but there are very, very few bugs in the ECMAscript implementations I have dealt with.
I recently crashed the disk on my laptop while I was on the road. I needed the machine back again quickly so I got a new hard drive, couldnt get hold of the recovery disks easily so I popped down to the local computer store and had a choice of Mandriva or Suse. .rpm file and it fires up yast software install which is nice, except that yast cant find the file as it deals in package lists and not rpms.
Suse was more expensive but I had previous experience of version 6.0.
On the whole the experience is rather disapointing. The basic Linux stuff works just fine
but the suse extras particularly YAST can be a real pain.
e.g. You double click on an
e.g. It keeps shifting the ethernet and wireless adapters between eth0 and eth1 depending on what was
active last. So you need to keep amending your wireless signon script (which you will need as yast gets you a wireless connection but no DNS server.)
The web site is now just abysmal it is 90% support for Novell legacy products with the suse support hidden in nooks and crannys which is a pity as suse's online support used to be excellent.
The main point to be made here is that you do not store sensitive data in a location which is not physicaly secure. Not a home office , not a desktop machine anywhere and certainly not a laptop. But in a locked and secure server room. Also if you want a secure environment -- disable your companies desktop USB ports:- http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0606.html#6
They could paint the soles of the Robots feet blue, so when it went Titsup users could report Blue Soles of Death.
I always had the impression that nobody at OMG had ever worked on a real system in a real environment.
The killer for CORBA in the real world was how the f*** do you get 5000 copies of the IDL to 10 platforms at the same time?
The very few succesfull implementations of CORBA had a single IDL that went:
int msg_type;
long msg_length;
char[] msg_buffer;
Thus quietly dumping 97% of CORBA and implementing a solution that could more easily be done with BSD sockets but without any architects/managers loosing face.
Currently the only widespread use of CORBA is as the transport for J2EE, and yes they use a single IDL
not too far removed form the one above.
.. may be the more interesting question.
After all in the 70s and early 80s all the interesting stuff came from a DEC and various other companies clustered around MIT.
They just lost it at some point, its easy to see that with the demise of SGI and the apparent decline of Sun hardware central could be on the move.
Software central has already moved to Seatle (microsoft view) or cyberspace (opensource view).
before a chimp became attractive enough to mate with.
I mean all that hair and leathery lips! Gotta be some serious drinking before she looks good.
Don't be such wimps!
When we were kids at camp meths was the standard way of getting a primus stove or tilly lamp going. There were several burnt fingers but no one died that I know of.
I was a baby boomer and it may be that there was a hidden agenda to reduce the surplus supply of kids.
Who cares what features its got if they are all a pain to use.
Notes is the classic "we know whats good for you" big arrogant IT department application, organisations that have notes tend to have big arrogant unresponsive IT departments.
How can any IT professional listen to complaint after complaint about how difficult an application is to use then smugly claim that they are just not good enough users?
Just think how much these people will enjoy recomending your department is outsourced to Elbonia.
I have said before and will say it again!
As email is the main application for the all singing all dancing groupware/database product, couldn't they make it a decent email application!
And it is bad! It got its own special section on the old "user interface hall of shame" website, there were about 20 pages detailing what was so awful about nearly every aspect of the interface! The standard line from all the Lotus freaks was then as now "..But its not an email .......".
Most people would assume that if the email is so bad every other crud^h^h^h^hgroupware application would be just as bad or worse, and, if my experience is anything to go by they would be right.
I have never understood the Lotus/IBM position on this, other divisions of IBM do feedback and respond (however slowly) to user input. Confronted with a near unamimous loathing of thier interface the Lotus developers respond " you just don't understand .....".
If that wasnt bad enough every site with Lotus installed seems to have a deluded Lotus evengelist who fights every attempt to dump it for something a normal person would enjoy using.
The problem with cell phones is that they depend on phone companies.
Call phones have the potential to be the ultimate thin client, all the technoligy is there -- processing power on the handset, local storage, the ability to send/receive data to any server based system via gprs they even have unique device identifiers and the potential for stronger authentication than is possable on PC systems.
Plus with the phone you have a payment/billing mecahnism is place, forget paypal and 16 digit credit card numbers, you just press the OK button on your phone.
But with the exception of DoCoMo in Japan the potential is hampered by service providers who think SMS is gee whiz technoligy; who price any useful innovation out of the market (like gprs, it once cost me 3 euros to use my phones web browser to access the phone companies site to get a support number); and who are not interested in third party services where they do not collect the bulk of the money from the transaction.
The reality is that the cheapest form of thin client is an off the shelf PC. In most places I have worked recently, most PCs are effectivly thin clients.
That hotel reservation on the PC on the fornt desk mentioned above is
more than likely an illusion. The PC will only be frontending a server based application. This frontending can be very basic such as the PC running a vt100 emulation for a unix app, or it may be a very sophisticated VB or Java front end which give the illusion the whole app is running on the PC, a more recently written system will probably be web browser based.
Only a very poorly run it department would host an application on desktop PC as it is the worst possable place to store data. Insecure, hard to backup and easy to lose.
The only applications I see where the PC is used fully are word and powerpoint. If you have read as many corporate word documents and sat through as may presentations as I have you will realise that nobody but the author cares if these files are trashed.
If UTC is a French term shouldnt the lunchhour does not contain 9,000 seconds?