Well I can be just as pedantic as you if you will; stack-based 'structs' (perl arrays and hashes) don't use dots at all; they're indexed by [] and {}, respectively. 'heap-based' structs (pointers) _do_ use '->' and are mirrored perfectly adequately in perl with the use of the same operator for references. So there.
I think that computer repair people, telephone support people and the like, are in forefront of OSS adoption. Just yesterday I was in some hardware shop, getting myself a new mouse (having to ask twice for a behind-the-counter model, because the ones they had on display all looked retarded to me (I said as much; I like simple mice)). In front of me was this somewhat older, but obviously educated (in some other field than CS, that is) guy, wanting something. He spoke bullshit like it was somehow a magical thing, computers, with the guy in front of him. The shop-guy tried to make out like he understood it all, but it was very obvious that neither was willing to break the magical-speak spell, each for their own reason. So it went on for a while, and eventually resolved itself because they had enough - no deal was made. But no understanding was created, either.
I occurred to me that if anyone was in a position to educate the guy, however, and/or make him change his ways, it was the guy behind the counter. For most people computers are a magical thing, and if the wizard or the witch-doctor tells you what to do about your ailment, you'd damn better do it. These people are our prime evangelists. They go with cool and new. OSS needs to be cooler and newer.
Philosophically speaking, IP rights determine politcal left- or rightwingness. Rightwingness (society, what society ?) would mean that you're for stricter IP rights, leftwingness (individual, what individual ?) would mean that you're for more sharing through society to advance it as a whole. Ironically, even though the average slashdotter would probably be classified as more left-leaning (which they show whenever something about the RIAA comes up), in this very case they show very right-leaning tendencies because it affects them (high-school and university people, who are graded on papers) personally.
I say; fuck IP (I'm a liberal through and through) - if those teachers want to compare your stuff against a database - fine ! If those students want to set up websites with papers for you to copy and equip it with a thesaurus to change words for you on the fly so as to alter it - fine. Don't expect a high grade or my sympathy when you're caught, but still - fine. But then, what do I know - I'm not a student anymore. Nor do I sympathise with them.
I also very much like the is_computer_on() functioncall, documented on the same page, which returns 1 if your computer is on, otherwise undefined. Very clever.
This is insightful shit. Personally, although I've never tried or been forced into XP, I think it's typically something for young people; you know, the psychological approach. Young geeks work a lot (good), make many mistakes (bad), and don't communicate very well with other people other than their peers, and communication is what XP is all about. This frustrates managers, so they make sure, through XP, that they can still work a lot, but make fewer mistakes (through pairing, and testing a lot), and communicate more (by releasing often, and testing a lot (which requires documentation)). For older, more experienced programmers, I can't see XP be any good.
Nerd. A sailing powered boat can't sail when there's no wind, and it can't sail against the wind. Sailing boats going across the atlantic have to go through special passat wind 'lanes' (north on the way to the US, south on the way back); a solar boat would have no issues with that.
but since I know what they are trying to say then their communication was succesful so why complain?
That's a mentality that bothers me - cavemen can have quite successfull communication using grunts, groans and farts. We didn't go through all this bloody progress just to have it broken down by imprecision. Two techies would understand each other when they said 'virii', but an overhearing Latin dude would go nuts over it. This is why, in your argument, it's perfectly Ok for a politician to be talking to a housewife about 'tubes' as a fitting metaphore for internet; they're both not techies and they understand each other - so what's the big deal ? But it _is_ a big deal. Metaphores have to be apt, and language has to be precise. The reasons people have for using imprecise language may vary, but most of them aren't pretty (lying, deception, etc.). In this case, people saying 'virii' are trying to show that they understand some principles behind Latin noun conjugation. But they don't; they're just grandstanding and it makes them look stupid.
Many people have a cellphone of their own and supplied with one by their work. They won't give up the one they had, because they might change jobs and the family, friends and relatives all have that number, and the company will insist on supplying them with one, because they have a policy about these things, or the number comes with the position, or whatnot. This happened to me, and I'm no exception.
They never, ever have believed in, and have only on a few occasions under very great pressure given in to, *removing* software (Clippy?); they just keep on adding instead. They must have missed that one important rule that everyone in a creative profession must once discover; 'writing is scratching', or 'prepare to throw one away' as it's called in software-land. If MS were a person, he'd be declared anally retentive; some many layers of compatibility, so many stick-on solutions that are supposed to work from below. Please guys - this is a seductive, but wrong approach - think again.
You forgot to mention the long term strategic aspect of this move - which is to be able to get back to a business model that charges 'per tick' according to type of content and the need for it. It's been a long, bad pain in the ass for telcos that any type of data, be it smtp, http, telephone, tv can be carried over the same wire at speeds regulated by the end-user (through their PC). That is definitely _not_ how they like it. They want you to have a different bill every month, simply because you watched more tv, and called more, but did less browsing. Never mind it all went over the same line with the same bandwidth cap, they want to charge your luxuries. Charging google (a popular website) more than my own website (definitely not a very popular website) is just the first step in this plan. Because google (and later skype, and audio broadcasters) will find a way to charge _you_ again in the process. And before you know it, you have to get a google-subscription on top of your telco, simply because your telco will not carry Google without a surcharge. And when things are back to luxury charging again, telcos will feel like they're all in know territory again; hiding their inefficiency in changing monthly bills.
The whole problem of an OS is drenched in the way it has to differentiate between users. Everything else is under its control, but it doesn't (yet) have a way to determine whether a user is present, if (s)he is involved with it (and not looking away) and whether a process has been started up by a user or by the machine itself (something UNIX refuses to address).
You see, as soon as an OS can be safely determined to be a single user's OS (the computer in someone's mom's bedroom), the box and its possibilities can be thrown wide open (I'll get to the network bit later). When we have a box on which countless amounts of users are all competing for the CPU, and are possibly using it with malicious intent, it has to be locked down.
Why is there (yet) no mechanism to determine whether a process (and its children) were actually started off through a CLI or a GUI ? I mean, the windoze way of differentiating between services and windows-apps is ugly, hackprone and not well thought-through, but it does have one advantage; I can always tell which processes are user-initiated, which ones are services, which one run as scheduled jobs, and which ones are unreliable.
If this aforementioned flag was properly implemented, then a (accidentally, or stupidly) downloaded executable would not be trusted, could never run as a service, and would always have (some form of) a user interface. In other words, it could never become malicious before the user actually agreed to its actions, and it could never install itself as a service and live in the shadows beyond where an average user would dare to look.
Software firewalls on the machine itself can do something hardware firewalls can't; it can check to see that the outbound traffic is coming from a trusted application running as an actually logged on user. Without this option, a firewall must assume that all traffic with a destination port 80 or 443 (or 25 or whatever) will be legit, allowing all sorts of malware to pretend to browse while doing their actual nasty stuff. On windows, a firewall could even check whether the app in question has a window open, which creates an extra check (this visible application is making network connections).
They might port Office to Linux, but like apple, they'll forego creating or supporting a decent VBscript parser. And that's what all these businesses want. Never mind that it's impossible anyway, since all of these scripts will be full of hardcoded paths like 'C:\Program Files\myapp\some path I thought was cute.ini' that no UNIX will eat.
Do they deliver a client CD with it ? I can imagine it now - a Linux live CD that simply takes control of the hard-disk of a machine that you put it in. Does apache, samba, postgres, CUPS, some MTA + some CGI inside apache to configure it all, shouts out some broadcast to see if we've bought two CDs accidentally and we're running more than one server with which we can synch + a client installer CD for windows with; firefox, activestate perl, some scheduled jobs for the client PCs to synch with the server; evolution... I'm gonna be rich ! - starts klicking away frantically
I'd like to second that opinion. I'm not from the US and I'm a fairly left-wing person, but initially, in 2000, I favoured Bush over his democratic opponent (I forget who it was), simply because I thought that a republican US president wouldn't be so bothered with other countries in the way Clinton was (you know, bombing some country to divert attention away from the fact that someone licked his pecker). Boy was I wrong ! So yes, we non-USians have opinions of US presidents because their person can affect us so much. Also, our reasonings may seem a bit orthogonal sometimes. Hey - we're only defending our own interests ! And don't critisize us - we can't even vote for him !
Are you employed as a J2EE programmer, by any chance ? Btw, that should have been 'DefaultStrategyFactory', not 'DefaultFactory' - have you forgotten that java programs with identifiers of less then 32 characters are frowned upon by the Gang of Four, and cannot be properly parsed by Eclipse ?
Unfortunately,.net is also pretty much married to M$ software on intel hardware. That setup won't be obsolete quite soon (on workstations), but clever people that run big hardware setups usually won't go for it. Which leaves java in a very interesting position; it will run both on the client and the server no matter what configuration. The difficulty for M$ will be to get.net onto the server, and I have a hard time believing that they can pull that off. Especially when java goes open source, so that everything that M$ stole, can easily be stolen back again. Then again, java would also have to completely revise their J2EE APIs, but that's a different rant...
Slashdot Mirror
Well I can be just as pedantic as you if you will; stack-based 'structs' (perl arrays and hashes) don't use dots at all; they're indexed by [] and {}, respectively. 'heap-based' structs (pointers) _do_ use '->' and are mirrored perfectly adequately in perl with the use of the same operator for references. So there.
-> becomes ., like the rest of the world uses.
I don't get it - the rest of the world doesn't use C or C++ ? Is that what you're saying ?
to say: wow. I think my jaw just dropped.
May I point you to this little choice quote. It is by a certain Margareth Thatcher, a person no one could mistake for a liberal.
I think that computer repair people, telephone support people and the like, are in forefront of OSS adoption. Just yesterday I was in some hardware shop, getting myself a new mouse (having to ask twice for a behind-the-counter model, because the ones they had on display all looked retarded to me (I said as much; I like simple mice)). In front of me was this somewhat older, but obviously educated (in some other field than CS, that is) guy, wanting something. He spoke bullshit like it was somehow a magical thing, computers, with the guy in front of him. The shop-guy tried to make out like he understood it all, but it was very obvious that neither was willing to break the magical-speak spell, each for their own reason. So it went on for a while, and eventually resolved itself because they had enough - no deal was made. But no understanding was created, either.
I occurred to me that if anyone was in a position to educate the guy, however, and/or make him change his ways, it was the guy behind the counter. For most people computers are a magical thing, and if the wizard or the witch-doctor tells you what to do about your ailment, you'd damn better do it. These people are our prime evangelists. They go with cool and new. OSS needs to be cooler and newer.
Philosophically speaking, IP rights determine politcal left- or rightwingness. Rightwingness (society, what society ?) would mean that you're for stricter IP rights, leftwingness (individual, what individual ?) would mean that you're for more sharing through society to advance it as a whole. Ironically, even though the average slashdotter would probably be classified as more left-leaning (which they show whenever something about the RIAA comes up), in this very case they show very right-leaning tendencies because it affects them (high-school and university people, who are graded on papers) personally.
I say; fuck IP (I'm a liberal through and through) - if those teachers want to compare your stuff against a database - fine ! If those students want to set up websites with papers for you to copy and equip it with a thesaurus to change words for you on the fly so as to alter it - fine. Don't expect a high grade or my sympathy when you're caught, but still - fine. But then, what do I know - I'm not a student anymore. Nor do I sympathise with them.
I also very much like the is_computer_on() functioncall, documented on the same page, which returns 1 if your computer is on, otherwise undefined. Very clever.
This is insightful shit. Personally, although I've never tried or been forced into XP, I think it's typically something for young people; you know, the psychological approach. Young geeks work a lot (good), make many mistakes (bad), and don't communicate very well with other people other than their peers, and communication is what XP is all about. This frustrates managers, so they make sure, through XP, that they can still work a lot, but make fewer mistakes (through pairing, and testing a lot), and communicate more (by releasing often, and testing a lot (which requires documentation)). For older, more experienced programmers, I can't see XP be any good.
It's Zonk's way to correct his spelling mistakes, you see. First he posts, then he dupes, but the second time the spelling mistakes are gone.
Nerd. A sailing powered boat can't sail when there's no wind, and it can't sail against the wind. Sailing boats going across the atlantic have to go through special passat wind 'lanes' (north on the way to the US, south on the way back); a solar boat would have no issues with that.
but since I know what they are trying to say then their communication was succesful so why complain?
That's a mentality that bothers me - cavemen can have quite successfull communication using grunts, groans and farts. We didn't go through all this bloody progress just to have it broken down by imprecision. Two techies would understand each other when they said 'virii', but an overhearing Latin dude would go nuts over it. This is why, in your argument, it's perfectly Ok for a politician to be talking to a housewife about 'tubes' as a fitting metaphore for internet; they're both not techies and they understand each other - so what's the big deal ? But it _is_ a big deal. Metaphores have to be apt, and language has to be precise. The reasons people have for using imprecise language may vary, but most of them aren't pretty (lying, deception, etc.). In this case, people saying 'virii' are trying to show that they understand some principles behind Latin noun conjugation. But they don't; they're just grandstanding and it makes them look stupid.
Many people have a cellphone of their own and supplied with one by their work. They won't give up the one they had, because they might change jobs and the family, friends and relatives all have that number, and the company will insist on supplying them with one, because they have a policy about these things, or the number comes with the position, or whatnot. This happened to me, and I'm no exception.
Good. I see the connection: Scott McNealy is from Sun, Sun produced java, and Jigsaw was written in java. Glad there's no namespace confusion here.
It don't matters for slashdot; nobody here cans doing it anyway.
They never, ever have believed in, and have only on a few occasions under very great pressure given in to, *removing* software (Clippy?); they just keep on adding instead. They must have missed that one important rule that everyone in a creative profession must once discover; 'writing is scratching', or 'prepare to throw one away' as it's called in software-land. If MS were a person, he'd be declared anally retentive; some many layers of compatibility, so many stick-on solutions that are supposed to work from below. Please guys - this is a seductive, but wrong approach - think again.
You forgot to mention the long term strategic aspect of this move - which is to be able to get back to a business model that charges 'per tick' according to type of content and the need for it. It's been a long, bad pain in the ass for telcos that any type of data, be it smtp, http, telephone, tv can be carried over the same wire at speeds regulated by the end-user (through their PC). That is definitely _not_ how they like it. They want you to have a different bill every month, simply because you watched more tv, and called more, but did less browsing. Never mind it all went over the same line with the same bandwidth cap, they want to charge your luxuries. Charging google (a popular website) more than my own website (definitely not a very popular website) is just the first step in this plan. Because google (and later skype, and audio broadcasters) will find a way to charge _you_ again in the process. And before you know it, you have to get a google-subscription on top of your telco, simply because your telco will not carry Google without a surcharge. And when things are back to luxury charging again, telcos will feel like they're all in know territory again; hiding their inefficiency in changing monthly bills.
The whole problem of an OS is drenched in the way it has to differentiate between users. Everything else is under its control, but it doesn't (yet) have a way to determine whether a user is present, if (s)he is involved with it (and not looking away) and whether a process has been started up by a user or by the machine itself (something UNIX refuses to address).
You see, as soon as an OS can be safely determined to be a single user's OS (the computer in someone's mom's bedroom), the box and its possibilities can be thrown wide open (I'll get to the network bit later). When we have a box on which countless amounts of users are all competing for the CPU, and are possibly using it with malicious intent, it has to be locked down.
Why is there (yet) no mechanism to determine whether a process (and its children) were actually started off through a CLI or a GUI ? I mean, the windoze way of differentiating between services and windows-apps is ugly, hackprone and not well thought-through, but it does have one advantage; I can always tell which processes are user-initiated, which ones are services, which one run as scheduled jobs, and which ones are unreliable.
If this aforementioned flag was properly implemented, then a (accidentally, or stupidly) downloaded executable would not be trusted, could never run as a service, and would always have (some form of) a user interface. In other words, it could never become malicious before the user actually agreed to its actions, and it could never install itself as a service and live in the shadows beyond where an average user would dare to look.
OT and nitpicking - but.. at what point in computer science history did a 'library' get to be called a 'framework' ?
Software firewalls on the machine itself can do something hardware firewalls can't; it can check to see that the outbound traffic is coming from a trusted application running as an actually logged on user. Without this option, a firewall must assume that all traffic with a destination port 80 or 443 (or 25 or whatever) will be legit, allowing all sorts of malware to pretend to browse while doing their actual nasty stuff. On windows, a firewall could even check whether the app in question has a window open, which creates an extra check (this visible application is making network connections).
They might port Office to Linux, but like apple, they'll forego creating or supporting a decent VBscript parser. And that's what all these businesses want. Never mind that it's impossible anyway, since all of these scripts will be full of hardcoded paths like 'C:\Program Files\myapp\some path I thought was cute.ini' that no UNIX will eat.
Do they deliver a client CD with it ? I can imagine it now - a Linux live CD that simply takes control of the hard-disk of a machine that you put it in. Does apache, samba, postgres, CUPS, some MTA + some CGI inside apache to configure it all, shouts out some broadcast to see if we've bought two CDs accidentally and we're running more than one server with which we can synch + a client installer CD for windows with; firefox, activestate perl, some scheduled jobs for the client PCs to synch with the server; evolution... I'm gonna be rich ! - starts klicking away frantically
I'd like to second that opinion. I'm not from the US and I'm a fairly left-wing person, but initially, in 2000, I favoured Bush over his democratic opponent (I forget who it was), simply because I thought that a republican US president wouldn't be so bothered with other countries in the way Clinton was (you know, bombing some country to divert attention away from the fact that someone licked his pecker). Boy was I wrong ! So yes, we non-USians have opinions of US presidents because their person can affect us so much. Also, our reasonings may seem a bit orthogonal sometimes. Hey - we're only defending our own interests ! And don't critisize us - we can't even vote for him !
Not to offend you, but - you went from a masters in biology to programmer to sql server admin ? Sounds to me like you've been demoted all the time.
Are you employed as a J2EE programmer, by any chance ?
Btw, that should have been 'DefaultStrategyFactory', not 'DefaultFactory' - have you forgotten that java programs with identifiers of less then 32 characters are frowned upon by the Gang of Four, and cannot be properly parsed by Eclipse ?
Unfortunately, .net is also pretty much married to M$ software on intel hardware. That setup won't be obsolete quite soon (on workstations), but clever people that run big hardware setups usually won't go for it. Which leaves java in a very interesting position; it will run both on the client and the server no matter what configuration. The difficulty for M$ will be to get .net onto the server, and I have a hard time believing that they can pull that off. Especially when java goes open source, so that everything that M$ stole, can easily be stolen back again. Then again, java would also have to completely revise their J2EE APIs, but that's a different rant...