With IBM, their value proposition was quite clear and we could get along happily. Microsoft is a much trickier case. They frequently do things that are not necessarily in their best interest in the short term in order to destroy their competition and achieve long-term control.
And this results in things like IE languishing for years because nobody else is a credible threat in the browser arena. People who say that Microsoft is simply interested in making things better for their customers are blind. Microsoft had no interest in making IE better because they had no interest in the browser as a platform. It did not further their ability to control.
Microsoft would prefer a smaller and less innovative market that they completely owned to a much larger market in which they were simply a player, even if they could make a bigger profit in the larger market.
So your request to look for hidden dangers is a cogent one. And we should be looking for dangers in which Microsoft sacrifices profitability for control and destroying competition. Microsoft has repeatedly shown a willingness to do that in the past.
And I have references for all the places I have worked who will tell you that they felt I contributed a great deal, and who will confirm that I write good code and know what I'm doing.
Unfortunately, driver development is not something I've ever done before, and it would take me time to learn the things I'd need to know to do it.
In my opinion that's the result of people substituting arbitrary rules and stupid policy for human judgement. That's not how good code is written. Code is a craft, not wholly an art or an engineering discipline but something of both.
And simply completely avoiding the use of ?: or (in C++) the struct keyword is, again, substituting arbitrary rules for judgement. They are both useful constructs that are perfectly valid in certain situations.
Well, that particular bug would've cropped up randomly, literally. It would've been extremely vexing and totally unacceptable. And it would definitely have bit people. And not just people who performed a certain set of actions. It would've bitten anybody who used a default-on feature at random but rare intervals.
Code reviews have a lot of value in two ways completely independent of how good they are at catching errors. First, they are a way to enforce various stylistic guidelines on code that make future maintenance much easier. Secondly, they are a tool for spreading knowledge about the code around to other members of your development team.
They can also catch some errors that are very hard to catch in any other way. I recently worked on a project in which I found an error that would've caused code to only fail in a very limited and non-obvious set of circumstances. The thing is, somebody would've almost inevitably encountered those circumstances and the phantom and nearly unrepeatable bug reports resulting from this would likely have never been solved.
I fear code ever stepping off into the land of incorrect behavior as there are few corrective mechanisms that will cajole the errant program back into doing something sane. The longer it goes without abject failure, the more weirdly wrong it will be. Therefore I think any and all measures to keep it from ever going there and making sure it dies as quickly as possible if it does are useful.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for the information. I generally believe you, but if you have any references you'd be willing to point me at, I'd really appreciate it.
From what I know, it's been discovered in the past decade or so to not be a constant. The expansion of the universe is accelerating. This is a minor nitpick, I know.:-)
I live in the city and don't drive. It's been forever since I've seen the Milky Way and I'm rather sad about that.:-( I don't really know how it can be solved, and I really do believe that this fact has a strongly negative effect on people's interest in space.
I think there's a difference between verbally bullying a vulnerable 14 year old with a fake account and releasing details of actual vulnerability in a piece of software written by a company owned by a 32 year old.
But, I agree with you that cyber-bullying laws are really problematic.
And, of course, the current generation of programs running an Airbus are there to make sure the pilot keeps the plane within the flight envelope, not to attempt a tricky water landing in the absence of a pilot. I have no doubt though that eventually (quite possibly within 10-20 years) there will be software that is capable of making the decision to go for a tricky water landing when the situation calls for it, and can even carry out said landing.
I would guess it's an old debate. But I don't think the debate is best answered by resorting to arguments from ideology.
If the article had linked to various instances of this debate between knowledgeable parties and talked about how this crash revived the debate, I wouldn't have responded nearly so heatedly.
As it is, the article basically gives an answer to the question that comes from a solely ideological basis. And I don't think that's the right place to be arguing about airplane safety from.
What a dumb phrase. Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes? How exactly is that going to keep you up in the air in a civilian airliner experiencing an electronic or mechanical malfunction?
And if what you really mean is experienced pilots, what about some pilot who's been flying for years and has never had an emergency situation and then makes a mistake and then (s)he makes a judgement error in a critical situation? Are you then going to call for the iron calm of a computer rather than a fallible human pilot?
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
The very wording of this ridiculous post presupposes an answer. And in the future it is very likely the wrong answer. Sure computers will make errors. But in general people will make them more often, and computers are just going to get better.
And casting this as some kind of bizarre collectivist vs. individualist ideology debate is ridiculous as well. What does towing some ideological line have to do with safely getting to your destination in an airplane?
This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.
The linked to text is much, much better, even though offering people a choice is problematic given how the whole non-refundable ticket system and airline logistics systems currently work, not to mention that making a choice at the gate when you get on the plane will throw off your schedule.
It's like NOW jumping all over Clarence Thomas and ignoring Bill Clinton for very similar behavior. I do not see principle at work here, only political expediency.
I take that back. Somehow all the silly birth certificate ones are near the top. And this from the crowd who wanted to change the constitution so that Arnold could run for president. *chuckle*
From looking at the top vote getters, it looks like all of those are well thought out ideas that are not simply trolls. I think the voting system is their abuse and policy system.
No, you're not a real spy until you actually become a part of the North Korean military in order to report on what it's up to and what kind of orders you're getting.
Our intelligence agencies have lost their edge precisely because they don't want to do that kind of thing. But that's what real spies do and where useful intelligence comes from.
And citizens could get involved in this if there were people who lived in North Korea wanted to do something horribly risky because they wanted to make their government look bad. I actually hope the Internet does spawn this kind of spying.
I notice that law mentions motor vehicles, but not computers. I fail to understand its relevance to this discussion. Was this computer extremely heavily modded or something so it fell under this law?
IBMs are backwards compatible to a degree that is almost insane. Programs that think they're working with rotating drums still work on a modern IBM mainframe.
Um, if you're describing that right, isn't he right to reject your patch? What if I'm a user of another EBDDIC system, and that system uses the choice that's in the library? Does that mean that if your patch is accepted, my patch to undo yours should be equally accepted?
I suppose that is sort of correct. But the major EBCDIC system out there that people use these days is z/OS. I sort of doubt you could've actually found another system the change affected because it didn't change all EBCDIC encodings, just a specific version of the EBCDIC encoding.
What I did is I created my own encoding that was named very similarly and carefully rebuilt glibc with every update. But that was a poor solution in several respects because that encoding is mentioned by name in several IBM manuals.
I guess I would've appreciated a tiny bit of discussion, or perhaps the mention of a different system my change would've affected negatively. Neither were forthcoming, and I really doubt there is such a system.
I've been wishing for ages for maintainership to be taken away from Ulrich Drepper. Every single bug report I've seen submitted to him has been shot down for some stupid, insane reason, even when it's been accompanied by a patch. He's a bad maintainer.
One example, I submitted and update to an EBCDIC encoding used on IBM mainframes. The encoding had several choices for what should be encoded as the newline character. It wasn't clear which one should be used, but the z/OS system I was using had definitely chosen a particular one. Glibc had chosen a different one. I submitted a patch that changed it and Ulrich rejected it saying that there wasn't a standard and so my version was no more valid than the version that was in the library.
And, on another case, it was clear that the/etc/localtime was being read for each and every field that was being printed in strftime. This both caused things to be slow, and it also created a race condition if that file was changed. I recommended to the person who found the bug that he submit it. He did, and Ulrich rejected it for some bizarre reason I can't recall.
He is an awful maintainer, and I really hope the project is taken away from him by this fork.
However, AdBlock is illegally manipulating the author's content to remove ads designed to produce revenue. It's not merely disabling features, it's changing the presentation of web pages.
In a sense, AdBlock is acting as malicious software, because it's altering the site author's message, without their permission.
Oh no! People are installing AdBlock to control the presentation of web pages! Web page authors should be allowed to force their viewers to see exactly the web page they want them to see! AdBlock is evil!
Not.
I installed the software specifically to do exactly what you are complaining about. That's what I want it to do. If you don't like it, tough cookies.
Personally, I would've had no outrage had NoScript chosen to tell me that it would disable itself if I didn't get rid of AdBlock. I would've then gotten rid of NoScript and been happy.
If he can encourage the abuse a public resource in the name of a joke, he can take a joke and have a flu named after him. He has a history of such encouragement, from Wikipedia to the NASA poll. While I think he's an excellent comedian in many respects, he deserves a bit of comeuppance.
Slashdot Mirror
With IBM, their value proposition was quite clear and we could get along happily. Microsoft is a much trickier case. They frequently do things that are not necessarily in their best interest in the short term in order to destroy their competition and achieve long-term control.
And this results in things like IE languishing for years because nobody else is a credible threat in the browser arena. People who say that Microsoft is simply interested in making things better for their customers are blind. Microsoft had no interest in making IE better because they had no interest in the browser as a platform. It did not further their ability to control.
Microsoft would prefer a smaller and less innovative market that they completely owned to a much larger market in which they were simply a player, even if they could make a bigger profit in the larger market.
So your request to look for hidden dangers is a cogent one. And we should be looking for dangers in which Microsoft sacrifices profitability for control and destroying competition. Microsoft has repeatedly shown a willingness to do that in the past.
I haven't done all that much HTML.
And I have references for all the places I have worked who will tell you that they felt I contributed a great deal, and who will confirm that I write good code and know what I'm doing.
Unfortunately, driver development is not something I've ever done before, and it would take me time to learn the things I'd need to know to do it.
I use Mercurial, and I don't know why it wasn't mentioned along with the other three.
In my opinion that's the result of people substituting arbitrary rules and stupid policy for human judgement. That's not how good code is written. Code is a craft, not wholly an art or an engineering discipline but something of both.
And simply completely avoiding the use of ?: or (in C++) the struct keyword is, again, substituting arbitrary rules for judgement. They are both useful constructs that are perfectly valid in certain situations.
Well, that particular bug would've cropped up randomly, literally. It would've been extremely vexing and totally unacceptable. And it would definitely have bit people. And not just people who performed a certain set of actions. It would've bitten anybody who used a default-on feature at random but rare intervals.
Code reviews have a lot of value in two ways completely independent of how good they are at catching errors. First, they are a way to enforce various stylistic guidelines on code that make future maintenance much easier. Secondly, they are a tool for spreading knowledge about the code around to other members of your development team.
They can also catch some errors that are very hard to catch in any other way. I recently worked on a project in which I found an error that would've caused code to only fail in a very limited and non-obvious set of circumstances. The thing is, somebody would've almost inevitably encountered those circumstances and the phantom and nearly unrepeatable bug reports resulting from this would likely have never been solved.
I fear code ever stepping off into the land of incorrect behavior as there are few corrective mechanisms that will cajole the errant program back into doing something sane. The longer it goes without abject failure, the more weirdly wrong it will be. Therefore I think any and all measures to keep it from ever going there and making sure it dies as quickly as possible if it does are useful.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for the information. I generally believe you, but if you have any references you'd be willing to point me at, I'd really appreciate it.
From what I know, it's been discovered in the past decade or so to not be a constant. The expansion of the universe is accelerating. This is a minor nitpick, I know. :-)
No, they do nothing to reduce light pollution, they just use less energy. :-/
*chuckle* Yes, that might work. :-)
I live in the city and don't drive. It's been forever since I've seen the Milky Way and I'm rather sad about that. :-( I don't really know how it can be solved, and I really do believe that this fact has a strongly negative effect on people's interest in space.
I think there's a difference between verbally bullying a vulnerable 14 year old with a fake account and releasing details of actual vulnerability in a piece of software written by a company owned by a 32 year old.
But, I agree with you that cyber-bullying laws are really problematic.
And, of course, the current generation of programs running an Airbus are there to make sure the pilot keeps the plane within the flight envelope, not to attempt a tricky water landing in the absence of a pilot. I have no doubt though that eventually (quite possibly within 10-20 years) there will be software that is capable of making the decision to go for a tricky water landing when the situation calls for it, and can even carry out said landing.
I would guess it's an old debate. But I don't think the debate is best answered by resorting to arguments from ideology.
If the article had linked to various instances of this debate between knowledgeable parties and talked about how this crash revived the debate, I wouldn't have responded nearly so heatedly.
As it is, the article basically gives an answer to the question that comes from a solely ideological basis. And I don't think that's the right place to be arguing about airplane safety from.
What a dumb phrase. Do you only want former airforce pilots who've actually seen combat flying commercial planes? How exactly is that going to keep you up in the air in a civilian airliner experiencing an electronic or mechanical malfunction?
And if what you really mean is experienced pilots, what about some pilot who's been flying for years and has never had an emergency situation and then makes a mistake and then (s)he makes a judgement error in a critical situation? Are you then going to call for the iron calm of a computer rather than a fallible human pilot?
No, the answer is statistics. What's safer and more reliable in the long run? How many crashes have we had due to computer error rather than human error given x hours flown by each?
The very wording of this ridiculous post presupposes an answer. And in the future it is very likely the wrong answer. Sure computers will make errors. But in general people will make them more often, and computers are just going to get better.
And casting this as some kind of bizarre collectivist vs. individualist ideology debate is ridiculous as well. What does towing some ideological line have to do with safely getting to your destination in an airplane?
This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.
The linked to text is much, much better, even though offering people a choice is problematic given how the whole non-refundable ticket system and airline logistics systems currently work, not to mention that making a choice at the gate when you get on the plane will throw off your schedule.
It's like NOW jumping all over Clarence Thomas and ignoring Bill Clinton for very similar behavior. I do not see principle at work here, only political expediency.
I take that back. Somehow all the silly birth certificate ones are near the top. And this from the crowd who wanted to change the constitution so that Arnold could run for president. *chuckle*
From looking at the top vote getters, it looks like all of those are well thought out ideas that are not simply trolls. I think the voting system is their abuse and policy system.
No, you're not a real spy until you actually become a part of the North Korean military in order to report on what it's up to and what kind of orders you're getting.
Our intelligence agencies have lost their edge precisely because they don't want to do that kind of thing. But that's what real spies do and where useful intelligence comes from.
And citizens could get involved in this if there were people who lived in North Korea wanted to do something horribly risky because they wanted to make their government look bad. I actually hope the Internet does spawn this kind of spying.
I notice that law mentions motor vehicles, but not computers. I fail to understand its relevance to this discussion. Was this computer extremely heavily modded or something so it fell under this law?
IBMs are backwards compatible to a degree that is almost insane. Programs that think they're working with rotating drums still work on a modern IBM mainframe.
Um, if you're describing that right, isn't he right to reject your patch? What if I'm a user of another EBDDIC system, and that system uses the choice that's in the library? Does that mean that if your patch is accepted, my patch to undo yours should be equally accepted?
I suppose that is sort of correct. But the major EBCDIC system out there that people use these days is z/OS. I sort of doubt you could've actually found another system the change affected because it didn't change all EBCDIC encodings, just a specific version of the EBCDIC encoding.
What I did is I created my own encoding that was named very similarly and carefully rebuilt glibc with every update. But that was a poor solution in several respects because that encoding is mentioned by name in several IBM manuals.
I guess I would've appreciated a tiny bit of discussion, or perhaps the mention of a different system my change would've affected negatively. Neither were forthcoming, and I really doubt there is such a system.
I've been wishing for ages for maintainership to be taken away from Ulrich Drepper. Every single bug report I've seen submitted to him has been shot down for some stupid, insane reason, even when it's been accompanied by a patch. He's a bad maintainer.
One example, I submitted and update to an EBCDIC encoding used on IBM mainframes. The encoding had several choices for what should be encoded as the newline character. It wasn't clear which one should be used, but the z/OS system I was using had definitely chosen a particular one. Glibc had chosen a different one. I submitted a patch that changed it and Ulrich rejected it saying that there wasn't a standard and so my version was no more valid than the version that was in the library.
And, on another case, it was clear that the /etc/localtime was being read for each and every field that was being printed in strftime. This both caused things to be slow, and it also created a race condition if that file was changed. I recommended to the person who found the bug that he submit it. He did, and Ulrich rejected it for some bizarre reason I can't recall.
He is an awful maintainer, and I really hope the project is taken away from him by this fork.
However, AdBlock is illegally manipulating the author's content to remove ads designed to produce revenue. It's not merely disabling features, it's changing the presentation of web pages.
In a sense, AdBlock is acting as malicious software, because it's altering the site author's message, without their permission.
Oh no! People are installing AdBlock to control the presentation of web pages! Web page authors should be allowed to force their viewers to see exactly the web page they want them to see! AdBlock is evil!
Not.
I installed the software specifically to do exactly what you are complaining about. That's what I want it to do. If you don't like it, tough cookies.
Personally, I would've had no outrage had NoScript chosen to tell me that it would disable itself if I didn't get rid of AdBlock. I would've then gotten rid of NoScript and been happy.
If he can encourage the abuse a public resource in the name of a joke, he can take a joke and have a flu named after him. He has a history of such encouragement, from Wikipedia to the NASA poll. While I think he's an excellent comedian in many respects, he deserves a bit of comeuppance.