Depends - do you think a government should govern according to the will of the people, or do you think the people should be ruled by men of ideas?
As a fan of democracy, I have absolutely no problems with a candidate finding out what the people want and need, and using that as a platform from which to run.
The reason why we aren't receiving radio signals from distant civilizations is that they're not using radios to communicate... they've figured out something better.
First, I don't think you are working from a good definition of "racist." If someone insinuated that Cisco had a backdoor deal with the NSA, I doubt people would be screaming "racist" or even do anything more than shrug and frown. It's sound strategy, and the Chinese government is very good at infosec and cyberwar - the reason why people are up in arms isn't because the Chinese are a different race, it's that the Chinese government has been caught repeatedly engaging in corporate espionage as well as old fashioned espionage, where the US generally only bothers with the latter.
Second, almost anyone who has a real infrastructure to protect knows that Huawei works arm-in-arm (or hand-in-pocket, more likely) with the 7th Bureau of the 3rd People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military infosec unit responsible for network penetration. The 7B3PLA has investments all through China's technology sector, to the point where individual chips on routers made elsewhere need to be vetted, as they might be compromised from the factory, and counterfeit devices are a real issue.
Again, not a race issue. China is a global power, and it's acting like one with a solid strategy. It's likewise a solid strategy to avoid cheap off-brand network equipment for your infrastructure. TANSTAAFL, you get what you pay for.
How well or poorly does NewEgg treat its warehouse workers? How about Overstock, or Buy.com, or any of the other comparable online retailers?
Most warehouse work is well paid with reasonable working conditions. An honest day's pay for an honest day's work is something that's fallen out of fashion in the Great Recession - Amazon just took it to the next level, and leveraged its considerable IT expertise to wring every last dime out of people desperate for work. Once the recession fades, they are going to be in real trouble when there's competition for their workforce, their reputation as an employer is permanently stained. If it doesn't fade, the workers will unionize and take what the company refuses to give - fair wages and decent working conditions - and they'll be in even deeper trouble when they can no longer meet their obligations to Prime customers, as the local distribution center is on strike.
Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.
And now we're back to politics. The Senator who was largely responsible for the legislation opening up the internet for business and personal use, allowing those private providers of capital to invest and grow was......come on, say it with me kids......Al Gore.
One of those instances where a lie runs twice 'round the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots.
Macs have fewer viruses because they are not nearly as numerous as Windows Machines, less machines == Fact. Macs have the same kind of malware Windows machines, Flashback proved that == Fact.
Please explain the disparity in scale. The amount of malware simply isn't proportional... there was one self-installing bit of malware available for the Mac platform. One. In the entire history of the platform, dating back to the '80s, when it was NeXT, up until just this year. And you're really going to say it's because the Mac has a smaller user base? Really? Don't Mac developers make money hand over fist on the platform? Isn't it mostly comprised of home machines, which would be more likely to have valuable personal information to strip-mine?
Your hand-waving is alarming. It indicates you don't understand security, or worse, believe it's a problem solved by third party software - a common problem for Windows enthusiasts.
The old (but still true) fact is that Mac OS X has less malware because it is a smaller target (about 10% market share) than Windows for the bad guys to be cost effective.
Baloney. If Apple and Mac developers are making money off of the platform - and they are - then malware writers should be as well. We're not talking "a tenth of the malware of Windows", we're talking a significant order of magnitude less malware, almost all of it trojans requiring user intervention to install itself, and just two that were self-propagating (drive-by downloads rather than viruses), and one of those required you to run a version of MacOS X best described as "antique."
Mac OS X is more secure than Windows on an ongoing basis - that fact is indisputable. This isn't theory, this is stark, cold reality when you look at the numbers of "in the wild" rather than theoretical exploits. The reason for it is that the tricks to bypass the Windows security model with third party software are all still there - where Apple ruthlessly roots out and deprecates without notice unsupported API's and other system hooks that cause trouble. Mac devs need to play nicely with the security model, and make changes to accomodate new OS releases, or their software breaks. This makes many devs and users screamingly angry, and none more so than malware writers, who find months worth of development rendered useless overnight.
Microsoft goes out of its way to make backwards compatibility happen for even its most wayward developers, and that means keeping around the kluges and hacks and workarounds that have been floating in the Windows ecosphere since forever. This gives everyone the warm fuzzies, especially the malware writers.
Microsoft plays whack-a-mole with security, Apple plays nuke-them-from-orbit.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly.
CISC. Translating CISC into RISC and then back again was still faster than a native CISC instruction set - which is basically what x86 does these days, with some vector processing instruction-set special sauce.
The failure of the RISC powerhouses (with the exception of SPARC, which always kind of sucked except for the Fujitsu chips) was mostly due to the internal politics of the companies using them. In the late '90s, early 00's, it was common knowledge that HP and Intel's new IA-64 chip family was going to be lightyears faster than RISC and that Windows was going to rule the universe. SGI and HP were incredibly invested in this strategy, to the point where they let their advanced RISC architectures wither and die, and stopped moving their Unix OS development forward.
Well, SGI did. It spun off MIPS into its own company, and didn't give it any funding for high-performance R&D, though MIPS is still doing well as an embedded processor company. HP was a bit more prudent - probably as they were the ones actually developing the Itanium in partnership wit Intel - they kept PA-RISC and HP-UX development humming along, and it likely saved the company. Meanwhile the mighty Alpha was given a kiss goodnight after HP bought Compaq, who had bought DEC. HP already had two high performance chip families (well, one and a half, Itanium wasn't ready yet) and didn't need a third, even if it was faster and better.
So, since IA-64 was a decade late in arriving and didn't live up to the hype once it arrived, that left the platforms who relied on RISC hanging in the wind. HP, who kept development of PA-RISC active until IA-64 was ready for primetime, managed to hang on, and is now happily selling giant IA-64 Unix servers (or they were until Oracle pulled the rug out from under them). SGI is now owned by Rackspace, and they just shove lots of x86 system boards in racks to run Linux these days. DEC lives on as HP OpenVMS running on Itanium servers. IBM is still kicking much ass with its POWER RISC architecture, although it's no longer in the high performance workstation game, and really, killing the desktop-class chip designs was a golden opportunity to screw over Steve Jobs(which backfired). Sun still kind of sucks, except for the Fujitsu chips.
...so I found an article on the history of Electronic Mail that names all of the relevant RFCs and their date of publication, beginning in 1972, with links:
Chomsky sucks at websearch... altho the crux of his argument is linguistic, where "email" was not in use before '81, and therefore Ayyadurai's innovation was a new contraction. I can see how that would be a big deal to a linguist - using "email" instead of "electronic mail" or "mail." It's an innovation of the profound nature of McDonald's coining the phrase "chicken nugget!" Before, we were adrift in a benighted age of the chicken crouquette.
OK. You're talking about SDN. While it is a fundamental leap forward in configuration management, it shifts the responsibility of knowing how the hell the network is put together from network engineers and admins to programmers. Those "five lines of XML" (Just in time for JSON to completely take over) represent features offered by the network, storage and/or virtualization systems, each with a =vast= domain of knowledge. Can your system tune itself for distributed database performance based on your application? Of course it can't. Oracle and IBM have been trying for 35 years. ("NoSQL" vendors have gone from "next big thing" to "the new standard to replace the obsolete RDBMS" to "a valuable component in a larger infrastructure" to "Hey, everyone, let's go do NewSQL now!" in less than half a decade.) Howabout load balancers? Take a look at a F5 or Fortibalance manual lately? Application-specific firewalls from Imperva? Client compliance and patching systems from Juniper?
It's possible to push these decisions to "the cloud", but they will be simple default configurations that will fall over and die, and when you contact the "cloud" vendor, solutions will be expensive - optimization for reliability and performance takes money, time and manpower, in-house or outsourced. Also, now that manpower has to be both a network/database engineer =and= a software developer, and those five lines of XML sure bred like bunnies, didn't they? So now the configuration needs to be integrated into a development workflow, and sent through QA (a specialized QA who knows about modern load balancing and database optimization) and then through the compliance tools and possibly a manual audit.
I'm not saying SDN isn't the way forward - it clearly is - I'm saying it's barely keeping up with advances in technology, and in no position to obsolete anyone in the IT department. Silver Bullets are, as ever, a myth.
Driverless car is a car that, by definition, is a perfectly law-abiding driver.
One, trips will take longer, as the car will adhere strictly to speed limits, won't roll through empty intersections, and will always drive within its limits. It won't drive without its registration (verified wirelessly with the DMV)
For another, this means no more traffic tickets, which are a huge source of revenue for the city and state. What's more, revenues from gasoline taxes will go down as well, as a car that isn't speeding is a more efficient car. This will dramatically increase property and income taxes.
I'm OK with this, as traffic fines were essentially a regressive tax, applied inequitably to minorities and the poor at the whim of the police.
You want to compare track records? MacOS X, since its inception as NeXT, has been around since the late '80s.
Only now, in 2012, are we seeing the first widespread outbreak of malware. I don't buy the installed base argument. If Mac developers can make money off of the platform, then malware writers sure as hell can, too - more, with its exclusivity, it means they have a large pool of potential targets largely to themselves. I think Apple's willingness to gut and rebuild their systems when desired, and to ruthlessly deprecate old revs, a feature some users and devs absolutely hate about the company, has done more to thwart malware writers than anything else.
Lots of zero-day exploits out there, but very, very few of them survive the next Software Update. This is rough for malware, which relies on crufty old code surviving =years= past its sell-by date, which is pretty common in the Windows world (How YOU doin', WinXP?)
In the latest round of Macageddon (the ONLY round of Macageddon), we have either ancient and unsupported Macs targeted by APT, or an unpatched Zero-day sploit Apple took a loooooong time to fix. Don't get me wrong, Apple made a boo-boo of Kodiak Bear proportions, but I don't think this is an opportunity for AV and Anti-Spyware and firewalling and other security-scam vendors, and it's not the herald of a new age of mass Mac attacks. Instead, it's a signal Apple needs to make sure this stuff is properly sandboxed in future revs, and critical security updates moved on early and quickly.
This entire thread has been a trainwreck from top to bottom. It ignores two critical concepts:
Security is hard.
Programming is hard.
Programmers screw up, even the good ones, and brilliant software architects make the occasional bone-headed blunder, or the slick new library or framework has a hidden bug or backdoor you didn't count on. Yet programmers keep saying security is easy, if only everyone uses Silver Bullet Tool or the Simple Fix Pattern or just fire all the bozos, then everything will be swell! What a load of baloney.
This is a new class of firewalls that filter based on deep packet inspection and application-specific criteria, and they are going to be deployed pretty much everywhere in the next couple of years. In addition to database-specific firewalls and proxies, I've deployed web-application firewalls designed to identify and kill XSS attacks. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's insanely hard to configure and troubleshoot. Yes, it adds latency. No, it's not 100% guaranteed effective in all cases, there is no silver bullet. Our network security architects and our webmasters are thrilled to have it... because the alternative - "y u no get more better programs?" - is stupid. I mean, one mouth-breather in this thread suggested we only buy open-sourced products, as if we'd have the domain experience and budget to run a code audit on a major database-dependent application from a third party.
Next up in the lab? IP-Telephony specific firewalls - it will pick out and validate SiP packets without letting anything else thru, and block malicious traffic based on known attack signatures. Yes, the signatures are updated constantly, and the firewall "learns" new ones. Pretty slick actually. More of its kind are headed our way. Open Source, until now, has been really lagging behind in network defense. It's a shame, as OSS tools are pretty up to date in IDS and network hardening.
Newsflash! Software products require good marketing, film at 11:00.
Seriously. If you have a great product, you need a business plan to sell it, even if it's a smartphone app. "Stick it on the app store and hope for the best, because some guy made a million bucks with a fart simulator" isn't a business plan.
Philosophical objections are valid. It's why people decided to go with Open Source solutions in the first place... chose the right philosophy, and you're buying into a system that will have developer and user support for a long time, and pay off in more features implemented in satisfactory ways.
If a tech has the right vision, it will go a long, long way, where pure technical excellence on its own is no guarantee the tech will grow with the user.
You're describing a classic "salt" con - You buy an abandoned mine, salt it with uncut gemstones or precious metal ores, and let the investor "discover" that the old mine isn't played out after all. You can then sell him a worthless hole in the ground for millions.
A variation of the scheme is the "counterfeiter machine" - You sell the mark a machine that takes ordinary newspaper, and prints perfect counterfeit 100 bills! It even "distresses" them to make them look like real circulated money! It pops out a new bill once every half hour. Yours for only thirty grand! Of course, you don't tell them there's only a timer-controlled release mechanism and a thousand dollars worth of real money inside and not a magic printing press...
This scheme has that sort of smell to it.
In this case, I think it's black market Russian radioisotope batteries rather than AA's... they can keep producing a surprising amount of energy for decades.
Careful measurement to detect the presence of nuclear material is probably warranted for anyone wanting to invest.
There's a tried and true con game, called "salting." Criminals would "salt" an exhausted mine with uncut gemstones or the ore of precious metals, and let the investor "find" them, and thus trick the investor into giving them millions for a worthless hole in the ground.
If this power plant does work, I'd bring a geiger counter with me to check that these "fusion" devices weren't simply black market radioisotope batteries from Russia.
"Working with someone who's productive but not trustworthy" is not an issue of working with bozos, either. These days, trustworthy means separation of duties - you're armoring the system in case of future bozos, and by extension, social engineering hacks.
Example: your network design team needs a unix host running syslog NG, VSFTP, and a custom app from a vendor that needs a couple of daemons for network analysis. They're good and smart people, but they're not Unix people, they're Cisco-and-Juniper people. So they come to you to run their Unix host, because you know how to rig up a virtual host, but they don't necessarily want or need you every time they reconfig their syslog config or the app needs to be kicked over because it froze.
On the other hand, they sure as hell don't want to be responsible for opening up a security hole or taking down the system. They don't have time to be Unix admins, and you don't have time to be an application support engineer.
This is where sudo and now Vsys comes in. It lets them screw with their mission-specific configs and processes without the risk of knocking over the box. This makes everyone happy.
Yes, it's a really recent development. All of the major Unix vendors would supply their own compiler and build tools, tuned for the platform. Graphical IDE's were pretty much a Macintosh thing, and stone-axe primitive compared to the laser scalpels out there today - but lightyears better than the hex code editors and assemblers used on other personal computer platforms.
The explosion of high quality dev tools in the past 10 years is unreal... from Eclipse to X-Code, from GIT to Firebug, it's a developer's world out there right now... except most of the languages suck. Syntactic morasses overly reliant on ASCII line noise to achieve basic goals. New rule - experimental languages are forbidden from requiring any symbol that needs the shift key to type. Rely on the UI rather than the charset.
It's just Smalltalk on JVM. Smalltalk evangelists are as deranged as Lisp evangelists - only the Smalltalkers are also laboring under the delusion that their language is the most intuitive and easy; so easy, children should learn it! To see this philosophy in action, check out the Squeak environment. It's smalltalk in microcosm: Massively powerful, but a syntactic, disorganized mess.
This has about as much chance of dethroning Java as Clojure. But it's going to be nice for the smalltalkers, who despite their derangement, tend to be immensely talented programmers. (I think it's a matter of a certain mindset meeting its ideal tool, rather than the tool creating the mindset.)
Opinion polls are scientific data, or "facts" if you would. They are based in solid theory collected and refined by sociologists and psychologists and produced using very powerful mathematical analysis, and this sort of scientific data has made the fortunes of many billionaires and put people into positions of nearly unimaginable political power.
Just because the data is gathered and analyzed in ways you don't like, producing results you wish weren't true, doesn't mean it's ineffective or useless or not worthy of consideration. Which is kind of the point of the article.
While it's true that a profession can be oversaturated due to swings in the market - Law and finance are suffering a glut right now, just as comp-sci grads started working at coffee shops to get by in 2001 - these ebbs and flows even out over the course of time.
Auditoriums full of attorneys are massively inefficient and error-prone. It's not a good use of a law degree - come to think of it, billable hours and the organization of the law firm are both obsolete. Prix-fixe legal billing is the new school, and lawyers using technology to make it possible are making a ton of money, and there's going to be more demand as the cost barrier is lowered: Lawyers get to make more money working less hours for more clients. I don't mean there will be more lawsuits, I mean there will be more wills, living trusts, estate planning, contracts entrepreneurs and investors, setting up LLCs and corporations, etc... stuff that increases wealth for the middle class, and was once reserved only for the wealthy. So it's a net positive.
Technology does close some doors and obsolete some careers. It creates far more than it destroys, tho... and there are still craftsmen who cobble shoes by hand, just like old Ned Ludd, and they make enough to support a middle class lifestyle.
The larger problem is that colleges funnel their best and brightest into law instead of other fields of study, and business looks at college as a 6-year trade school. An employee with an advanced history or english degree will be very damn valuable - they can organize research into any number of issues, think critically and analytically about what they've found and communicate what they've decided about it clearly. That's worth more than knowing how to get "hello world" to run in LISP. Yet it's a "useless degree" to many hiring managers...
Both business and higher education are not acting in their own long term best interests in search of short-term profit.
There's more than one free app called Chess. If you've got the one by Aart Bik, I think you're OK - his site and his blog all indicate he's an on-the-square android dev working for Google.
Heard the same thing about iPods vs. MP3 Players, Macs vs. PC's, and before that about Apple II's vs. CPM. There was a five year stretch where Apple wasn't doing so hot, but it turned out this was because they weren't being proprietary enough... once Steve brought out the iMac, nuked the clones and axed compatibility with obsolete or inefficient standards, they've been selling exceptionally well, and delivering a much thicker profit margin than competing profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends - do you think a government should govern according to the will of the people, or do you think the people should be ruled by men of ideas?
As a fan of democracy, I have absolutely no problems with a candidate finding out what the people want and need, and using that as a platform from which to run.
The radioactive tool's gone missing in Texas? Did they check his dad's compound in Kennebunkport?
The reason why we aren't receiving radio signals from distant civilizations is that they're not using radios to communicate... they've figured out something better.
First, I don't think you are working from a good definition of "racist." If someone insinuated that Cisco had a backdoor deal with the NSA, I doubt people would be screaming "racist" or even do anything more than shrug and frown. It's sound strategy, and the Chinese government is very good at infosec and cyberwar - the reason why people are up in arms isn't because the Chinese are a different race, it's that the Chinese government has been caught repeatedly engaging in corporate espionage as well as old fashioned espionage, where the US generally only bothers with the latter.
Second, almost anyone who has a real infrastructure to protect knows that Huawei works arm-in-arm (or hand-in-pocket, more likely) with the 7th Bureau of the 3rd People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military infosec unit responsible for network penetration. The 7B3PLA has investments all through China's technology sector, to the point where individual chips on routers made elsewhere need to be vetted, as they might be compromised from the factory, and counterfeit devices are a real issue.
Again, not a race issue. China is a global power, and it's acting like one with a solid strategy. It's likewise a solid strategy to avoid cheap off-brand network equipment for your infrastructure. TANSTAAFL, you get what you pay for.
How well or poorly does NewEgg treat its warehouse workers? How about Overstock, or Buy.com, or any of the other comparable online retailers?
Most warehouse work is well paid with reasonable working conditions. An honest day's pay for an honest day's work is something that's fallen out of fashion in the Great Recession - Amazon just took it to the next level, and leveraged its considerable IT expertise to wring every last dime out of people desperate for work. Once the recession fades, they are going to be in real trouble when there's competition for their workforce, their reputation as an employer is permanently stained. If it doesn't fade, the workers will unionize and take what the company refuses to give - fair wages and decent working conditions - and they'll be in even deeper trouble when they can no longer meet their obligations to Prime customers, as the local distribution center is on strike.
And now we're back to politics. The Senator who was largely responsible for the legislation opening up the internet for business and personal use, allowing those private providers of capital to invest and grow was... ...come on, say it with me kids... ...Al Gore.
One of those instances where a lie runs twice 'round the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots.
Macs have fewer viruses because they are not nearly as numerous as Windows Machines, less machines == Fact.
Macs have the same kind of malware Windows machines, Flashback proved that == Fact.
Please explain the disparity in scale. The amount of malware simply isn't proportional... there was one self-installing bit of malware available for the Mac platform. One. In the entire history of the platform, dating back to the '80s, when it was NeXT, up until just this year. And you're really going to say it's because the Mac has a smaller user base? Really? Don't Mac developers make money hand over fist on the platform? Isn't it mostly comprised of home machines, which would be more likely to have valuable personal information to strip-mine?
Your hand-waving is alarming. It indicates you don't understand security, or worse, believe it's a problem solved by third party software - a common problem for Windows enthusiasts.
The old (but still true) fact is that Mac OS X has less malware because it is a smaller target (about 10% market share) than Windows for the bad guys to be cost effective.
Baloney. If Apple and Mac developers are making money off of the platform - and they are - then malware writers should be as well. We're not talking
"a tenth of the malware of Windows", we're talking a significant order of magnitude less malware, almost all of it trojans requiring user intervention to install itself, and just two that were self-propagating (drive-by downloads rather than viruses), and one of those required you to run a version of MacOS X best described as "antique."
Mac OS X is more secure than Windows on an ongoing basis - that fact is indisputable. This isn't theory, this is stark, cold reality when you look at the numbers of "in the wild" rather than theoretical exploits. The reason for it is that the tricks to bypass the Windows security model with third party software are all still there - where Apple ruthlessly roots out and deprecates without notice unsupported API's and other system hooks that cause trouble. Mac devs need to play nicely with the security model, and make changes to accomodate new OS releases, or their software breaks. This makes many devs and users screamingly angry, and none more so than malware writers, who find months worth of development rendered useless overnight.
Microsoft goes out of its way to make backwards compatibility happen for even its most wayward developers, and that means keeping around the kluges and hacks and workarounds that have been floating in the Windows ecosphere since forever. This gives everyone the warm fuzzies, especially the malware writers.
Microsoft plays whack-a-mole with security, Apple plays nuke-them-from-orbit.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly.
CISC. Translating CISC into RISC and then back again was still faster than a native CISC instruction set - which is basically what x86 does these days, with some vector processing instruction-set special sauce.
The failure of the RISC powerhouses (with the exception of SPARC, which always kind of sucked except for the Fujitsu chips) was mostly due to the internal politics of the companies using them. In the late '90s, early 00's, it was common knowledge that HP and Intel's new IA-64 chip family was going to be lightyears faster than RISC and that Windows was going to rule the universe. SGI and HP were incredibly invested in this strategy, to the point where they let their advanced RISC architectures wither and die, and stopped moving their Unix OS development forward.
Well, SGI did. It spun off MIPS into its own company, and didn't give it any funding for high-performance R&D, though MIPS is still doing well as an embedded processor company. HP was a bit more prudent - probably as they were the ones actually developing the Itanium in partnership wit Intel - they kept PA-RISC and HP-UX development humming along, and it likely saved the company. Meanwhile the mighty Alpha was given a kiss goodnight after HP bought Compaq, who had bought DEC. HP already had two high performance chip families (well, one and a half, Itanium wasn't ready yet) and didn't need a third, even if it was faster and better.
So, since IA-64 was a decade late in arriving and didn't live up to the hype once it arrived, that left the platforms who relied on RISC hanging in the wind. HP, who kept development of PA-RISC active until IA-64 was ready for primetime, managed to hang on, and is now happily selling giant IA-64 Unix servers (or they were until Oracle pulled the rug out from under them). SGI is now owned by Rackspace, and they just shove lots of x86 system boards in racks to run Linux these days. DEC lives on as HP OpenVMS running on Itanium servers. IBM is still kicking much ass with its POWER RISC architecture, although it's no longer in the high performance workstation game, and really, killing the desktop-class chip designs was a golden opportunity to screw over Steve Jobs(which backfired). Sun still kind of sucks, except for the Fujitsu chips.
...so I found an article on the history of Electronic Mail that names all of the relevant RFCs and their date of publication, beginning in 1972, with links:
http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm
Chomsky sucks at websearch... altho the crux of his argument is linguistic, where "email" was not in use before '81, and therefore Ayyadurai's innovation was a new contraction. I can see how that would be a big deal to a linguist - using "email" instead of "electronic mail" or "mail." It's an innovation of the profound nature of McDonald's coining the phrase "chicken nugget!" Before, we were adrift in a benighted age of the chicken crouquette.
OK. You're talking about SDN. While it is a fundamental leap forward in configuration management, it shifts the responsibility of knowing how the hell the network is put together from network engineers and admins to programmers. Those "five lines of XML" (Just in time for JSON to completely take over) represent features offered by the network, storage and/or virtualization systems, each with a =vast= domain of knowledge. Can your system tune itself for distributed database performance based on your application? Of course it can't. Oracle and IBM have been trying for 35 years. ("NoSQL" vendors have gone from "next big thing" to "the new standard to replace the obsolete RDBMS" to "a valuable component in a larger infrastructure" to "Hey, everyone, let's go do NewSQL now!" in less than half a decade.) Howabout load balancers? Take a look at a F5 or Fortibalance manual lately? Application-specific firewalls from Imperva? Client compliance and patching systems from Juniper?
It's possible to push these decisions to "the cloud", but they will be simple default configurations that will fall over and die, and when you contact the "cloud" vendor, solutions will be expensive - optimization for reliability and performance takes money, time and manpower, in-house or outsourced. Also, now that manpower has to be both a network/database engineer =and= a software developer, and those five lines of XML sure bred like bunnies, didn't they? So now the configuration needs to be integrated into a development workflow, and sent through QA (a specialized QA who knows about modern load balancing and database optimization) and then through the compliance tools and possibly a manual audit.
I'm not saying SDN isn't the way forward - it clearly is - I'm saying it's barely keeping up with advances in technology, and in no position to obsolete anyone in the IT department. Silver Bullets are, as ever, a myth.
Driverless car is a car that, by definition, is a perfectly law-abiding driver.
One, trips will take longer, as the car will adhere strictly to speed limits, won't roll through empty intersections, and will always drive within its limits. It won't drive without its registration (verified wirelessly with the DMV)
For another, this means no more traffic tickets, which are a huge source of revenue for the city and state. What's more, revenues from gasoline taxes will go down as well, as a car that isn't speeding is a more efficient car. This will dramatically increase property and income taxes.
I'm OK with this, as traffic fines were essentially a regressive tax, applied inequitably to minorities and the poor at the whim of the police.
You want to compare track records? MacOS X, since its inception as NeXT, has been around since the late '80s.
Only now, in 2012, are we seeing the first widespread outbreak of malware. I don't buy the installed base argument. If Mac developers can make money off of the platform, then malware writers sure as hell can, too - more, with its exclusivity, it means they have a large pool of potential targets largely to themselves. I think Apple's willingness to gut and rebuild their systems when desired, and to ruthlessly deprecate old revs, a feature some users and devs absolutely hate about the company, has done more to thwart malware writers than anything else.
Lots of zero-day exploits out there, but very, very few of them survive the next Software Update. This is rough for malware, which relies on crufty old code surviving =years= past its sell-by date, which is pretty common in the Windows world (How YOU doin', WinXP?)
In the latest round of Macageddon (the ONLY round of Macageddon), we have either ancient and unsupported Macs targeted by APT, or an unpatched Zero-day sploit Apple took a loooooong time to fix. Don't get me wrong, Apple made a boo-boo of Kodiak Bear proportions, but I don't think this is an opportunity for AV and Anti-Spyware and firewalling and other security-scam vendors, and it's not the herald of a new age of mass Mac attacks. Instead, it's a signal Apple needs to make sure this stuff is properly sandboxed in future revs, and critical security updates moved on early and quickly.
This entire thread has been a trainwreck from top to bottom. It ignores two critical concepts:
Security is hard.
Programming is hard.
Programmers screw up, even the good ones, and brilliant software architects make the occasional bone-headed blunder, or the slick new library or framework has a hidden bug or backdoor you didn't count on. Yet programmers keep saying security is easy, if only everyone uses Silver Bullet Tool or the Simple Fix Pattern or just fire all the bozos, then everything will be swell! What a load of baloney.
This is a new class of firewalls that filter based on deep packet inspection and application-specific criteria, and they are going to be deployed pretty much everywhere in the next couple of years. In addition to database-specific firewalls and proxies, I've deployed web-application firewalls designed to identify and kill XSS attacks. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's insanely hard to configure and troubleshoot. Yes, it adds latency. No, it's not 100% guaranteed effective in all cases, there is no silver bullet. Our network security architects and our webmasters are thrilled to have it... because the alternative - "y u no get more better programs?" - is stupid. I mean, one mouth-breather in this thread suggested we only buy open-sourced products, as if we'd have the domain experience and budget to run a code audit on a major database-dependent application from a third party.
Next up in the lab? IP-Telephony specific firewalls - it will pick out and validate SiP packets without letting anything else thru, and block malicious traffic based on known attack signatures. Yes, the signatures are updated constantly, and the firewall "learns" new ones. Pretty slick actually. More of its kind are headed our way. Open Source, until now, has been really lagging behind in network defense. It's a shame, as OSS tools are pretty up to date in IDS and network hardening.
Newsflash! Software products require good marketing, film at 11:00.
Seriously. If you have a great product, you need a business plan to sell it, even if it's a smartphone app. "Stick it on the app store and hope for the best, because some guy made a million bucks with a fart simulator" isn't a business plan.
Philosophical objections are valid. It's why people decided to go with Open Source solutions in the first place... chose the right philosophy, and you're buying into a system that will have developer and user support for a long time, and pay off in more features implemented in satisfactory ways.
If a tech has the right vision, it will go a long, long way, where pure technical excellence on its own is no guarantee the tech will grow with the user.
You're describing a classic "salt" con - You buy an abandoned mine, salt it with uncut gemstones or precious metal ores, and let the investor "discover" that the old mine isn't played out after all. You can then sell him a worthless hole in the ground for millions.
A variation of the scheme is the "counterfeiter machine" - You sell the mark a machine that takes ordinary newspaper, and prints perfect counterfeit 100 bills! It even "distresses" them to make them look like real circulated money! It pops out a new bill once every half hour. Yours for only thirty grand! Of course, you don't tell them there's only a timer-controlled release mechanism and a thousand dollars worth of real money inside and not a magic printing press...
This scheme has that sort of smell to it.
In this case, I think it's black market Russian radioisotope batteries rather than AA's... they can keep producing a surprising amount of energy for decades.
Careful measurement to detect the presence of nuclear material is probably warranted for anyone wanting to invest.
There's a tried and true con game, called "salting." Criminals would "salt" an exhausted mine with uncut gemstones or the ore of precious metals, and let the investor "find" them, and thus trick the investor into giving them millions for a worthless hole in the ground.
If this power plant does work, I'd bring a geiger counter with me to check that these "fusion" devices weren't simply black market radioisotope batteries from Russia.
"Working with someone who's productive but not trustworthy" is not an issue of working with bozos, either. These days, trustworthy means separation of duties - you're armoring the system in case of future bozos, and by extension, social engineering hacks.
Example: your network design team needs a unix host running syslog NG, VSFTP, and a custom app from a vendor that needs a couple of daemons for network analysis. They're good and smart people, but they're not Unix people, they're Cisco-and-Juniper people. So they come to you to run their Unix host, because you know how to rig up a virtual host, but they don't necessarily want or need you every time they reconfig their syslog config or the app needs to be kicked over because it froze.
On the other hand, they sure as hell don't want to be responsible for opening up a security hole or taking down the system. They don't have time to be Unix admins, and you don't have time to be an application support engineer.
This is where sudo and now Vsys comes in. It lets them screw with their mission-specific configs and processes without the risk of knocking over the box. This makes everyone happy.
Yes, it's a really recent development. All of the major Unix vendors would supply their own compiler and build tools, tuned for the platform. Graphical IDE's were pretty much a Macintosh thing, and stone-axe primitive compared to the laser scalpels out there today - but lightyears better than the hex code editors and assemblers used on other personal computer platforms.
The explosion of high quality dev tools in the past 10 years is unreal... from Eclipse to X-Code, from GIT to Firebug, it's a developer's world out there right now... except most of the languages suck. Syntactic morasses overly reliant on ASCII line noise to achieve basic goals. New rule - experimental languages are forbidden from requiring any symbol that needs the shift key to type. Rely on the UI rather than the charset.
It's just Smalltalk on JVM. Smalltalk evangelists are as deranged as Lisp evangelists - only the Smalltalkers are also laboring under the delusion that their language is the most intuitive and easy; so easy, children should learn it! To see this philosophy in action, check out the Squeak environment. It's smalltalk in microcosm: Massively powerful, but a syntactic, disorganized mess.
This has about as much chance of dethroning Java as Clojure. But it's going to be nice for the smalltalkers, who despite their derangement, tend to be immensely talented programmers. (I think it's a matter of a certain mindset meeting its ideal tool, rather than the tool creating the mindset.)
Opinion polls are scientific data, or "facts" if you would. They are based in solid theory collected and refined by sociologists and psychologists and produced using very powerful mathematical analysis, and this sort of scientific data has made the fortunes of many billionaires and put people into positions of nearly unimaginable political power.
Just because the data is gathered and analyzed in ways you don't like, producing results you wish weren't true, doesn't mean it's ineffective or useless or not worthy of consideration. Which is kind of the point of the article.
While it's true that a profession can be oversaturated due to swings in the market - Law and finance are suffering a glut right now, just as comp-sci grads started working at coffee shops to get by in 2001 - these ebbs and flows even out over the course of time.
Auditoriums full of attorneys are massively inefficient and error-prone. It's not a good use of a law degree - come to think of it, billable hours and the organization of the law firm are both obsolete. Prix-fixe legal billing is the new school, and lawyers using technology to make it possible are making a ton of money, and there's going to be more demand as the cost barrier is lowered: Lawyers get to make more money working less hours for more clients. I don't mean there will be more lawsuits, I mean there will be more wills, living trusts, estate planning, contracts entrepreneurs and investors, setting up LLCs and corporations, etc... stuff that increases wealth for the middle class, and was once reserved only for the wealthy. So it's a net positive.
Technology does close some doors and obsolete some careers. It creates far more than it destroys, tho... and there are still craftsmen who cobble shoes by hand, just like old Ned Ludd, and they make enough to support a middle class lifestyle.
The larger problem is that colleges funnel their best and brightest into law instead of other fields of study, and business looks at college as a 6-year trade school. An employee with an advanced history or english degree will be very damn valuable - they can organize research into any number of issues, think critically and analytically about what they've found and communicate what they've decided about it clearly. That's worth more than knowing how to get "hello world" to run in LISP. Yet it's a "useless degree" to many hiring managers...
Both business and higher education are not acting in their own long term best interests in search of short-term profit.
There's more than one free app called Chess. If you've got the one by Aart Bik, I think you're OK - his site and his blog all indicate he's an on-the-square android dev working for Google.
Heard the same thing about iPods vs. MP3 Players, Macs vs. PC's, and before that about Apple II's vs. CPM. There was a five year stretch where Apple wasn't doing so hot, but it turned out this was because they weren't being proprietary enough... once Steve brought out the iMac, nuked the clones and axed compatibility with obsolete or inefficient standards, they've been selling exceptionally well, and delivering a much thicker profit margin than competing profits.
That's not arrogance, that's good business sense.