Let me guess. A women left you for a non-white person (probably African American with a larger penis then yourself) and your logical reasoned response was to go full homo and join the KKK?
The other option is enclose the cockpit and do everything with cameras./quote
That is probably the optimal way to do it.
Electrostatic windshields that turn opaque while supplied with energy. Gracefully fails to transparent when no energy is present. Transparent displays layered over the top would allow you to see outside as well as providing an interface for flight data and navigation.
For landing especially that could be useful in bad weather. Have the landing strips outlined in the display along with visual clues for wind patterns.
I would love it to see the pilots come on board wearing huge fucking goggles, perhaps with leather caps as well. Give a thumbs up to the passengers before the flight.
I was wondering that too. A couple of searches though seems to indicate that the Sun will not start to enter the Red Giant phase for another 5 billion years.
However, after only another billion years the oceans should boil off due to the extra solar output. I sincerely doubt a gold disk is going to survive in orbit long enough to be destroyed by the beginnings of the Red Giant phase.
I love the Japanese. A little pubic hair and a flash of vagina? No No No No No. You pixelate that shit right now.
A bunch of tentacle monsters hanging little schoolgirls in the air while they are violated in every orifice? Yep. Totally Okay. Let's distribute it everywhere.
Ground Control - Bob? Bob you there? Bob - Bob here. What's going on ground control. We got all kinds of alarms going off up here. Ground Control - We got confirmation from the sensors that g237 escaped containment and you might be infected. You're on lock down right now and I've ordered a flight plan to break orbit around Deimos and head for the Sun. SOP, you understand. Bob - Wait, what? Ground Control - SOP. Standard Operating Procedure, Bob. Keep up. Bob - I know what the fuck it means. Why are you sending us into the SUN! Ground Control - g237 is quite nasty. Wait... stand by... new development Bob. The suits are really concerned about this. Bob - I should think so. Thank god. Ground Control - Yes.. Yes.. Okay, they've told me to accelerate the flight plan and get you to the sun faster. Bob - FML Ground Control - Good news though Bob. If you can get containment under control and go through a 14 day quarantine period in the escape pods, i'm told we can authorize release and you can make it back to the quarantine facility on Phobos. Bob - Oh god... thank you.... how much time do we have. Ground Control - Oooohhhh. The flight plan only gives you 12 days though..... tough break Bob.
Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie
on
Aircraft Carriers In Space
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not so obvious. It seems you implied the moment the heat was released from the engine it could be sensed instantly by remote craft. That is the biggest obstacle to space battles, the speed at which information travels.
IMO, it is often overlooked because in conventional battles light and sound is transmitting fast enough that information is only delayed by fractions of second, if that.
Additionally, one might be overlooking the amount of information. Take a fighter jet involved in a dog fight in Earth's atmosphere. It's onboard sensors only have to monitor a small area compared to space. Take a fighter jet orbiting Saturn. How much information does that fighter jet need to process to detect heat patterns around Mercury?
Having information of what happened 10 minutes ago is not all that tactically valuable for immediate offensive maneuvers. You would need to gather a lot of data and predict where that fighter would be in the future and coordinate your weapons to arrive on target.
Most weapons are not FTL either, not that it would matter. Firing instantly where they were is pointless unless you are operating under the believe they are stationary. Something that would seem to be suicidal in my book. Even with near light speed weapons like lasers, fusion beams, whatever, you still need to hit a target most likely in motion, and from predicted targeting data with lag time measured in minutes.
Space battles will truly be an example of where information is power. Strength will mostly likely be measured in stealth and information processing abilities, not firepower.
Sorry, I just don't buy into the "the only way to guarantee software developers don't screw up is to lock down every single thing they do". I've worekd there. Bosses that monitor every URL visited by their employees, Companies that don't trust their developers to work, and instead make them fill out time cards for every 15 mintues spent on a task throughout the day (not for billing purposes), Internet firewalls that only let through a whitelist of sites, Full Disk Encryption on Desktop PCs so that build times go up by 4x but we can check the box with some IT blowhard, IT departments that control every single piece of software that goes on your computer, Threats of firing unless you comply with some silly IT regulation (really, you threaten to FIRE HIGHLY PAYED EMPLOYEES as a matter of general procedure??). Man, the list goes on and sounds whiny, I guess. But it sucks, it's an awful atmosphere to work in.
It's not about you screwing up. I paid you to develop software, not be a security expert. Machines are locked down to an extent, but some developers may not have some restrictions.
White list and Internet firewalls? Absolutely. Not going to change anytime soon. You don't need Facebook to do your job, or Twitter, or CNN, or Slashdot, etc. StackOverFlow? Sure. Any reasonable site, that is trustworthy enough, can get on the white list if it is beneficial to the job.
Threats of firing? Only if you are persistent in violating or circumventing the security policies. I don't care what software you install, as long as it is relevant to the job. Actual termination would only occur in extreme circumstances. In the few times that is happened, quite frankly, there were laundry lists of other actions and character flaws. IT related stuff was minor.
If I'm going to write software for you for a living, there is a better way. It's called trust.
I work for a company that trusts its employees. However, you're not all security experts, nor do you have an expert grasp on what is and is not a threat. The security policies exist not because I don't trust you, but that I need to protect the company.
Do remember that people can use your credentials to access data and systems too. While I trust you, that does not mean I can give you root access to everything. You don't need to be insulted just because your access is limited. That's like being mad at your operating system because it wants you to run as a user most of the time instead of God Mode.
Sometimes thieves steal things. No IT policy prevents it 100%
Of course not. However, good security policies can greatly mitigate the damage and in quite a number of cases catch people before they can harm the company fatally. For instance, if you are logging all access to customer files, and heavily restrict direct access to any systems that have customer data, you can see that Bob in customer service attempted to access 6000 customer files when the average customer service agent only accesses maybe 50 per day. Stuff like that.
Some security can prevent you from doing your job. Lack of unfettered access to the Internet is not one of them. Restricting developers to exactly what programs they can install and run is pretty stupid though. Depending on what you are developing, you might even need root access to do it.
The OP (AC) said "would you have ANY machine with access to the source code, connected in any way whatsoever to the outside world?". I would not work at that company. If I can't get to the internet while I work (and access the source code), I won't work for you. Call that entitled, call it childish, but I call it normal business in 2012
It's not normal business for anyone that is serious about staying in business. Quite frankly, it is entitled.
Question. If I refuse to give you access to the Internet on your computer to check Facebook, Twitter, etc. but provided separate access for you
Not having Internet access to every site you want is not cubicle prison. Sometimes security is quite necessary, because as you can see, shit like this happens.
While you sit there and complain about cubicle prisons are you also thinking about the risks to the customers? How would they be impacted if your company lost their private data? Security is about cooperation. You're not there to surf the Internet. You're there to work.
How many horror stories and tanked companies do you need to hear about before it sinks in that security, especially when dealing with business data, is paramount?
You would not be downloading source to your laptop at my company. In fact, your laptop could not even connect to the corporate network at all. Fuck that BYOD hippie utopia shit. USB is even disabled to prevent data leakage. Not just from you either. You know that the majority of the day you are not actually sitting in front of those computers right?
All this may make me sound like a tyrant, but I am huge proponent of breaks. I provide guest wireless everywhere in the company, and as long as it a personal device, you can go nuts doing whatever you want.
I still think people have become far too addicted to online communications to the point where it is unhealthy. You don't need to be running a full check on the Internet every 5 minutes to see if somebody twittered something new and interesting. Hey, as long as you are meeting your deadlines and getting stuff done, it's not my business where and when you take your breaks.
Anon does have a point about a sense of entitlement. It really does seem like all the new workers coming into companies these days believe that if they can't have full control over the system and access anything in the world they want, when they want it, that it is all of the sudden "fascism" and "cubicle prisons". When you try to calmly explain why security is important to protect business data, invariably, they roll their eyes and exclaim that you are too uptight and paranoid.
One of the side affects of all of the loss of privacy. None of those sadly naive little children will understand when the company goes out of business after being sued by customers. Ironically, I am sure they will ask why IT was not doing its job to protect them....
most pdfs you can download from the internet anyway.
Except all the ones used by businesses like insurance companies, financial companies, banks, etc. So many of them actually require Acrobat to open and run. More than a couple of the websites used for employees and 3rd party companies use embedded PDF to exchange documents relating to customers.
Adobe is not making any money on the majority of PDFs freely available for download. It's the corporations actually purchasing Acrobat and its related products that are creating revenue. You won't see any of that stuff on a public site.
Somebody failed with the acronyms. Is that with or without the P? Either way the word does not seem to exist and the closest match is a congenital defect.......
Since the sound is virtual... then eventually it will be themed, just like we skin and theme everything else to suit personal tastes.
The Death Star super laser would sound differently to different people.
I could see militaries enforcing such themes the same way they do dress codes.
Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie
on
Aircraft Carriers In Space
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly
Since when is anything in space instant?
Light from the sun takes a full 8 minutes to get to Earth. If I am halfway between the Sun and the Earth than anything that I do will take 4 minutes to reach Earth.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle. However, the information and light is not moving at FTL at all. When you come into a system at FTL and commence your run on the Death Thingie it won't even know you are there for a few minutes, and even then needs to calculate your trajectory to determine you are coming at.
You would need some impressive FTL sensors that gather information at a distance without such limitations before you can start treating space battles as anything close to dog fights around carriers in the ocean where information is being transmitted between units in very small fractions of second instead of minutes.
Christ this is fucking pitiful. You get a +5 insightful for an impossibly stupid argument that the mistake is indicative of how a political party will govern.
Really?
Slashdot actually runs the article here.... and has a fucking icon to represent Democrats. I know there are a ton of people here frothing at the mouth about Democrats, and Republicans (only to be drowned out by people who hate government period), but how more more ridiculous can this get?
This was on Slashdot? Some staffer who could not identify Russian warships in a presentation he was putting together becomes news worthy? Really?
This was simply some poor fool who did a Google image search and did not get "lucky" . People do stupid shit like this every 60 seconds in Corporate America.
You're trying to tell me you can develop a SAAS platform without Javascript? Don't tell me something ridiculous like use Flash instead either, or write one big massive Java applet.
It's impossible. You can't have a HTML only website do anything remotely like a Javascript website. Sure, you might be able to cause the page to continuously reload to have a real time updated chart for call volume on a call center, but it will look clunky and crappy doing it.
That's what it really comes down to. We can try and go back to reloading the whole page after each and every action. That's why Javascript was created. To intelligently modify the DOM client side instead of having the server keep track of the whole page and send modifications every time a user action was sent back.
I'm not talking about a public facing web page, or a landing page. I'm talking about authenticated access to secure pages running a SAAS business platform.
Uhhh, the cost of testing your software in 5 different browsers is quite a bit less than the cost of developing a Linux, Mac, and PC client. That's if you want just them. Add the cost for an Android app, Apple app, Blackberry app, and Windows Phone app if you want to support mobile.
Those costs that you mention are peanuts compared to that.
Ohhh, yeah, sure. It's just that simple. Write a client.
There is a *reason* why a web browser is used:
- Cross platform. Linux, Mac, Windows, embedded whatever. - No development costs directly associated with the client. - Upgrades are instantaneous. CTRL-F5 effectively reloads all the software for a site. - For some use cases it means a significantly cheaper interface to business platforms. No expensive licenses client side, or maintenance costs for a fat client. - For some use cases, it does not mean SAAS. It could be an internal, proprietary, business platform delivered through a web interface only. - For some use cases, it could mean greatly enhanced security as you have an internal website that services all interactions with customer data. No direct access to back end data is even possible.
Subscription models make perfect sense in some cases. You're rather simplistic rant about those fees completely ignores the fact that for businesses it often makes financial sense. In order to run your own platform you need to:
- Absorb 100% of the costs of development. - Absorb 100% of the costs of maintenance, which includes keeping software engineers on staff who designed it. - Absorb 100% of the costs of operating the platform. Includes servers, bandwidth, software licenses, etc.
I'm sure there are other costs and caveats I am not mentioning too.
I've looked into some very expensive SAAS platforms (30k per month subscription fee). I can tell you it actually made sense. To develop that platform would have taken me a team of developers and minimum 18 months to deliver. I have no doubt that I could have pulled it off, but in the end it would have cost more than the fees and required almost the subscription fee per month just to keep some of the developers on staff to maintain it, and continue to develop features we may need in the future.
Holding customer's data hostage? That only happens if you're an idiot . Have a very well spelled out legal contract, and make nightly incremental backups of your data. Some of the SAAS providers I have worked with set up an rsync of our data to our own servers. We back that up incrementally as well.
So where is the data being held hostage? It's not. What you are held hostage to is the platform. That is going to be true whether the platform exists some place else, or is a local executable on a local server in your company. That you are not always going to be able to get around very quickly. Switching business platforms is not something one just does for the heck of it.
Things shift around of course, but right now local clients that connect to business platforms are going the way of the dinosaur. Honestly, why even do it at all? Does not a standardized client that runs across multiple platforms not make sense to you at all? It happens to be a web browser right now, and in a more limited fashion Java, but it makes perfect sense to have one. Perhaps that is why SAAS has been taking off so fast. You know... the benefits to the end users.
From the summary, which is essentially the article too by the way, it seems they were going to restrict or eliminate the javascript abilities to interact with the server.
They mention HTML extensions, but give no real information on them, or why they will be inherently more secure and leak proof.
I'm all for users having robust mechanisms for control. That's not the same as breaking existing functionality though.
It's better to just assume everything is being logged and recorded; And then pass laws limiting its use -- that way, it'll never become widespread or systematic.
Sounds fine in theory, but there will always be extremely powerful entities that will not limit their use. Like governments for instance. Legislation after the fact does not mitigate the risk, particularly from the most dangerous entities.
What about less dangerous entities, but nonetheless, very disruptive with their actions like corporations? What if a company could get their hands on that data and deny access to services and products? Like insurance carriers? Sure the law may say no, but how would you know it was actually part of the decision? It would require a whistle blower to really bring down a company, and usually there are tens of thousands, if not millions of people impacted along the way.
No, I really think there needs to be legislation against the logging of data. Strong legislation. Possession needs to be a crime, not use.
Slashdot Mirror
How quaint. A homosexual racist.
Let me guess. A women left you for a non-white person (probably African American with a larger penis then yourself) and your logical reasoned response was to go full homo and join the KKK?
The other option is enclose the cockpit and do everything with cameras./quote
That is probably the optimal way to do it.
Electrostatic windshields that turn opaque while supplied with energy. Gracefully fails to transparent when no energy is present. Transparent displays layered over the top would allow you to see outside as well as providing an interface for flight data and navigation.
For landing especially that could be useful in bad weather. Have the landing strips outlined in the display along with visual clues for wind patterns.
Why do that?
I would love it to see the pilots come on board wearing huge fucking goggles, perhaps with leather caps as well. Give a thumbs up to the passengers before the flight.
Yes... if potatoes were wrinkled and had hair....
I was wondering that too. A couple of searches though seems to indicate that the Sun will not start to enter the Red Giant phase for another 5 billion years.
However, after only another billion years the oceans should boil off due to the extra solar output. I sincerely doubt a gold disk is going to survive in orbit long enough to be destroyed by the beginnings of the Red Giant phase.
I love the Japanese. A little pubic hair and a flash of vagina? No No No No No. You pixelate that shit right now.
A bunch of tentacle monsters hanging little schoolgirls in the air while they are violated in every orifice? Yep. Totally Okay. Let's distribute it everywhere.
He said the same thing about weed. It's just not as well published :)
LMFAO. You're a riot.
Ground Control - Bob? Bob you there?
Bob - Bob here. What's going on ground control. We got all kinds of alarms going off up here.
Ground Control - We got confirmation from the sensors that g237 escaped containment and you might be infected. You're on lock down right now and I've ordered a flight plan to break orbit around Deimos and head for the Sun. SOP, you understand.
Bob - Wait, what?
Ground Control - SOP. Standard Operating Procedure, Bob. Keep up.
Bob - I know what the fuck it means. Why are you sending us into the SUN!
Ground Control - g237 is quite nasty. Wait... stand by... new development Bob. The suits are really concerned about this.
Bob - I should think so. Thank god.
Ground Control - Yes.. Yes.. Okay, they've told me to accelerate the flight plan and get you to the sun faster.
Bob - FML
Ground Control - Good news though Bob. If you can get containment under control and go through a 14 day quarantine period in the escape pods, i'm told we can authorize release and you can make it back to the quarantine facility on Phobos.
Bob - Oh god... thank you.... how much time do we have.
Ground Control - Oooohhhh. The flight plan only gives you 12 days though..... tough break Bob.
Not so obvious. It seems you implied the moment the heat was released from the engine it could be sensed instantly by remote craft. That is the biggest obstacle to space battles, the speed at which information travels.
IMO, it is often overlooked because in conventional battles light and sound is transmitting fast enough that information is only delayed by fractions of second, if that.
Additionally, one might be overlooking the amount of information. Take a fighter jet involved in a dog fight in Earth's atmosphere. It's onboard sensors only have to monitor a small area compared to space. Take a fighter jet orbiting Saturn. How much information does that fighter jet need to process to detect heat patterns around Mercury?
Having information of what happened 10 minutes ago is not all that tactically valuable for immediate offensive maneuvers. You would need to gather a lot of data and predict where that fighter would be in the future and coordinate your weapons to arrive on target.
Most weapons are not FTL either, not that it would matter. Firing instantly where they were is pointless unless you are operating under the believe they are stationary. Something that would seem to be suicidal in my book. Even with near light speed weapons like lasers, fusion beams, whatever, you still need to hit a target most likely in motion, and from predicted targeting data with lag time measured in minutes.
Space battles will truly be an example of where information is power. Strength will mostly likely be measured in stealth and information processing abilities, not firepower.
You're right.
I'm a CTO, not a manager. Won't say which company since I value my privacy and keep a strong separation between my Internet identities and real life.
In any case, my arguments should be weighed on their merit. Not whether or not I may actually hold a position.
Do you have any positions or just profanity?
Sorry, I just don't buy into the "the only way to guarantee software developers don't screw up is to lock down every single thing they do". I've worekd there. Bosses that monitor every URL visited by their employees, Companies that don't trust their developers to work, and instead make them fill out time cards for every 15 mintues spent on a task throughout the day (not for billing purposes), Internet firewalls that only let through a whitelist of sites, Full Disk Encryption on Desktop PCs so that build times go up by 4x but we can check the box with some IT blowhard, IT departments that control every single piece of software that goes on your computer, Threats of firing unless you comply with some silly IT regulation (really, you threaten to FIRE HIGHLY PAYED EMPLOYEES as a matter of general procedure??). Man, the list goes on and sounds whiny, I guess. But it sucks, it's an awful atmosphere to work in.
It's not about you screwing up. I paid you to develop software, not be a security expert. Machines are locked down to an extent, but some developers may not have some restrictions.
White list and Internet firewalls? Absolutely. Not going to change anytime soon. You don't need Facebook to do your job, or Twitter, or CNN, or Slashdot, etc. StackOverFlow? Sure. Any reasonable site, that is trustworthy enough, can get on the white list if it is beneficial to the job.
Threats of firing? Only if you are persistent in violating or circumventing the security policies. I don't care what software you install, as long as it is relevant to the job. Actual termination would only occur in extreme circumstances. In the few times that is happened, quite frankly, there were laundry lists of other actions and character flaws. IT related stuff was minor.
If I'm going to write software for you for a living, there is a better way. It's called trust.
I work for a company that trusts its employees. However, you're not all security experts, nor do you have an expert grasp on what is and is not a threat. The security policies exist not because I don't trust you, but that I need to protect the company.
Do remember that people can use your credentials to access data and systems too. While I trust you, that does not mean I can give you root access to everything. You don't need to be insulted just because your access is limited. That's like being mad at your operating system because it wants you to run as a user most of the time instead of God Mode.
Sometimes thieves steal things. No IT policy prevents it 100%
Of course not. However, good security policies can greatly mitigate the damage and in quite a number of cases catch people before they can harm the company fatally. For instance, if you are logging all access to customer files, and heavily restrict direct access to any systems that have customer data, you can see that Bob in customer service attempted to access 6000 customer files when the average customer service agent only accesses maybe 50 per day. Stuff like that.
Some security can prevent you from doing your job. Lack of unfettered access to the Internet is not one of them. Restricting developers to exactly what programs they can install and run is pretty stupid though. Depending on what you are developing, you might even need root access to do it.
The OP (AC) said "would you have ANY machine with access to the source code, connected in any way whatsoever to the outside world?". I would not work at that company. If I can't get to the internet while I work (and access the source code), I won't work for you. Call that entitled, call it childish, but I call it normal business in 2012
It's not normal business for anyone that is serious about staying in business. Quite frankly, it is entitled.
Question. If I refuse to give you access to the Internet on your computer to check Facebook, Twitter, etc. but provided separate access for you
Not having Internet access to every site you want is not cubicle prison. Sometimes security is quite necessary, because as you can see, shit like this happens.
While you sit there and complain about cubicle prisons are you also thinking about the risks to the customers? How would they be impacted if your company lost their private data? Security is about cooperation. You're not there to surf the Internet. You're there to work.
How many horror stories and tanked companies do you need to hear about before it sinks in that security, especially when dealing with business data, is paramount?
You would not be downloading source to your laptop at my company. In fact, your laptop could not even connect to the corporate network at all. Fuck that BYOD hippie utopia shit. USB is even disabled to prevent data leakage. Not just from you either. You know that the majority of the day you are not actually sitting in front of those computers right?
All this may make me sound like a tyrant, but I am huge proponent of breaks. I provide guest wireless everywhere in the company, and as long as it a personal device, you can go nuts doing whatever you want.
I still think people have become far too addicted to online communications to the point where it is unhealthy. You don't need to be running a full check on the Internet every 5 minutes to see if somebody twittered something new and interesting. Hey, as long as you are meeting your deadlines and getting stuff done, it's not my business where and when you take your breaks.
Anon does have a point about a sense of entitlement. It really does seem like all the new workers coming into companies these days believe that if they can't have full control over the system and access anything in the world they want, when they want it, that it is all of the sudden "fascism" and "cubicle prisons". When you try to calmly explain why security is important to protect business data, invariably, they roll their eyes and exclaim that you are too uptight and paranoid.
One of the side affects of all of the loss of privacy. None of those sadly naive little children will understand when the company goes out of business after being sued by customers. Ironically, I am sure they will ask why IT was not doing its job to protect them....
Bless your little hearts...
The truly sad part is that you really might be a manager. Plenty of executives walk around talking like this all day long.... and get paid for it.
most pdfs you can download from the internet anyway.
Except all the ones used by businesses like insurance companies, financial companies, banks, etc. So many of them actually require Acrobat to open and run. More than a couple of the websites used for employees and 3rd party companies use embedded PDF to exchange documents relating to customers.
Adobe is not making any money on the majority of PDFs freely available for download. It's the corporations actually purchasing Acrobat and its related products that are creating revenue. You won't see any of that stuff on a public site.
Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer
TALISE
Somebody failed with the acronyms. Is that with or without the P? Either way the word does not seem to exist and the closest match is a congenital defect.......
That opens up a whole *new* can of worms.
Since the sound is virtual... then eventually it will be themed, just like we skin and theme everything else to suit personal tastes.
The Death Star super laser would sound differently to different people.
I could see militaries enforcing such themes the same way they do dress codes.
As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly
Since when is anything in space instant?
Light from the sun takes a full 8 minutes to get to Earth. If I am halfway between the Sun and the Earth than anything that I do will take 4 minutes to reach Earth.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle. However, the information and light is not moving at FTL at all. When you come into a system at FTL and commence your run on the Death Thingie it won't even know you are there for a few minutes, and even then needs to calculate your trajectory to determine you are coming at.
You would need some impressive FTL sensors that gather information at a distance without such limitations before you can start treating space battles as anything close to dog fights around carriers in the ocean where information is being transmitted between units in very small fractions of second instead of minutes.
No doubt.
I'm waiting for the ground breaking research which supports the Road Runner's theories on gravity.
Christ this is fucking pitiful. You get a +5 insightful for an impossibly stupid argument that the mistake is indicative of how a political party will govern.
Really?
Slashdot actually runs the article here.... and has a fucking icon to represent Democrats. I know there are a ton of people here frothing at the mouth about Democrats, and Republicans (only to be drowned out by people who hate government period), but how more more ridiculous can this get?
This was on Slashdot? Some staffer who could not identify Russian warships in a presentation he was putting together becomes news worthy? Really?
This was simply some poor fool who did a Google image search and did not get "lucky" . People do stupid shit like this every 60 seconds in Corporate America.
Not News for Nerds. Not Stuff That Matters.
Seriously?
You're trying to tell me you can develop a SAAS platform without Javascript? Don't tell me something ridiculous like use Flash instead either, or write one big massive Java applet.
It's impossible. You can't have a HTML only website do anything remotely like a Javascript website. Sure, you might be able to cause the page to continuously reload to have a real time updated chart for call volume on a call center, but it will look clunky and crappy doing it.
That's what it really comes down to. We can try and go back to reloading the whole page after each and every action. That's why Javascript was created. To intelligently modify the DOM client side instead of having the server keep track of the whole page and send modifications every time a user action was sent back.
I'm not talking about a public facing web page, or a landing page. I'm talking about authenticated access to secure pages running a SAAS business platform.
Oh come on.
Instead of taking advantage of ubiquitous web browsers that allow cheap development you want us to absorb the costs of developing:
- A Windows client
- A Linux client
- A Mac client
- An Android client
- A Blackberry client
- An iPhone client
- A Windows phone client
Why? Just so we can lord it over others that we can write native compiled to ASM code and support that many different clients....
Ohhh, and then try to compete in the market passing off those costs of development and support of that many different code bases to the customers
Uhhh, the cost of testing your software in 5 different browsers is quite a bit less than the cost of developing a Linux, Mac, and PC client. That's if you want just them. Add the cost for an Android app, Apple app, Blackberry app, and Windows Phone app if you want to support mobile.
Those costs that you mention are peanuts compared to that.
Ohhh, yeah, sure. It's just that simple. Write a client.
There is a *reason* why a web browser is used:
- Cross platform. Linux, Mac, Windows, embedded whatever.
- No development costs directly associated with the client.
- Upgrades are instantaneous. CTRL-F5 effectively reloads all the software for a site.
- For some use cases it means a significantly cheaper interface to business platforms. No expensive licenses client side, or maintenance costs for a fat client.
- For some use cases, it does not mean SAAS. It could be an internal, proprietary, business platform delivered through a web interface only.
- For some use cases, it could mean greatly enhanced security as you have an internal website that services all interactions with customer data. No direct access to back end data is even possible.
Subscription models make perfect sense in some cases. You're rather simplistic rant about those fees completely ignores the fact that for businesses it often makes financial sense. In order to run your own platform you need to:
- Absorb 100% of the costs of development.
- Absorb 100% of the costs of maintenance, which includes keeping software engineers on staff who designed it.
- Absorb 100% of the costs of operating the platform. Includes servers, bandwidth, software licenses, etc.
I'm sure there are other costs and caveats I am not mentioning too.
I've looked into some very expensive SAAS platforms (30k per month subscription fee). I can tell you it actually made sense. To develop that platform would have taken me a team of developers and minimum 18 months to deliver. I have no doubt that I could have pulled it off, but in the end it would have cost more than the fees and required almost the subscription fee per month just to keep some of the developers on staff to maintain it, and continue to develop features we may need in the future.
Holding customer's data hostage? That only happens if you're an idiot . Have a very well spelled out legal contract, and make nightly incremental backups of your data. Some of the SAAS providers I have worked with set up an rsync of our data to our own servers. We back that up incrementally as well.
So where is the data being held hostage? It's not. What you are held hostage to is the platform. That is going to be true whether the platform exists some place else, or is a local executable on a local server in your company. That you are not always going to be able to get around very quickly. Switching business platforms is not something one just does for the heck of it.
Things shift around of course, but right now local clients that connect to business platforms are going the way of the dinosaur. Honestly, why even do it at all? Does not a standardized client that runs across multiple platforms not make sense to you at all? It happens to be a web browser right now, and in a more limited fashion Java, but it makes perfect sense to have one. Perhaps that is why SAAS has been taking off so fast. You know... the benefits to the end users.
From the summary, which is essentially the article too by the way, it seems they were going to restrict or eliminate the javascript abilities to interact with the server.
They mention HTML extensions, but give no real information on them, or why they will be inherently more secure and leak proof.
I'm all for users having robust mechanisms for control. That's not the same as breaking existing functionality though.
It's better to just assume everything is being logged and recorded; And then pass laws limiting its use -- that way, it'll never become widespread or systematic.
Sounds fine in theory, but there will always be extremely powerful entities that will not limit their use. Like governments for instance.
Legislation after the fact does not mitigate the risk, particularly from the most dangerous entities.
What about less dangerous entities, but nonetheless, very disruptive with their actions like corporations? What if a company could get their hands on that data and deny access to services and products? Like insurance carriers? Sure the law may say no, but how would you know it was actually part of the decision? It would require a whistle blower to really bring down a company, and usually there are tens of thousands, if not millions of people impacted along the way.
No, I really think there needs to be legislation against the logging of data. Strong legislation. Possession needs to be a crime, not use.