Compared to java yes. Compared to it's brethren (ruby, python, etc) - no. They've fixed the horrendous performance of early versions and now it's just regular-old-scripting language slow, but with the advantage that you can trivially code anything that needs better performance in java which is a lot easier than doing the equivalent cross-platform C extension for the native versions of the other languages.
> For the record, Jython or PHP on Caucho integrates to the Java stuff exactly as same.
No. This is one of the big things groovy does: it puts interop with java as a #1 priority where in the other languages it comes as an afterthought. In particular, when you get into nitty gritty like nested annotations with complex argument lists, or cyclic references b/w languages (groovy depending on java which depends on groovy), groovy has solved all these issues and supports them natively. And if there is a problem and you report it they'll treat it as a high priority whereas in the other languages it will be seen as a niche use case.
The worst thing about groovy IMHO is the god-awful stack traces, which is actually just a side effect of the problem that it has incredibly deeply nested call stacks which is a problem for lots of other reasons than just that it looks bad. However that is something that is bound to be improved over time.
a) have a maximum limit on number of emails you can send (budget of say, $10 / month) b) have a slightly arduous process by which you can claim back money, after giving assurances you have cleaned up your pc, etc.
It might actually be a useful way to finally get through to people the impact of allowing their pc's to become zombified.
> It makes forgetting your decryption key/passphrase/whatever illegal.
I'm totally talking out of my ass here, but giving the legal system *some* tiny shred of benefit of doubt, I imagine it is necessary to provide some kind of reasonable evidence that the person concerned *does* know the encryption key.
For example, a colleague or family member admitting (on witness stand, whatever) that they have seen you enter the key to access the data regularly or in recent times, combined with corrobarating evidence from the computer (file access, modification timestamps, etc).
Or perhaps, some unencrypted data on the hard drive that indicates you know the key (eg: an email or slashdot posting stating that you've encrypted your drive and memorized the key).
Now: even taking this into account the law is stupid and dangerous and open to abuse. But I hope it is not so bad as to allow random conviction of anybody in the vicinity of an encrypted file.
Because Flash is a giant security hole that does an end run around the browser and stores it's own cookies completely separately. Your browser has no better idea of what flash cookies you are storing than it does what word processor documents you saved last week.
The security settings on Flash are simply obnoxious - changing them in any permanent manner is tedious, fragile and difficult. It's the main reason I have no flash plugin in my default browser (if I want to use flash I open the page in a different browser which I use only for that stuff).
Whoa, I can't see anywhere that the submitter stated they wanted to store confidential PHI on google docs. I imagine we're talking about email and calendaring - things that are generally insecure by nature anyway and which don't contain PHI. A doctor couldn't put patient appointments into google calendar, but I doubt they put them in outlook either - they have dedicated software for that. They could certainly put any other business related stuff in google apps (staff meetings, training, holidays, business appointments...). The biggest risk I see is that there would be a temptation to "leak" patient information into the insecure systems, but they face that anyway (you won't find your doctor sending you your test results by email) - it's a matter of training and policy.
I agree with you when it comes to actual confidential patient data.
However HIPAA only applies to what is considered 'PHI' - data applicable to individual patients relating to their health.
There is an awful lot of other business that goes on even in a medical practice that doesn't contain this kind of information. Why not consider Google docs for this stuff? They totally suck as office software but on the other hand, they are tremendously useful - almost revolutionary - for their collaboration features. I can't see why a business couldn't use them as long as they have clear policies about when and where such use is appropriate.
> We can expect to find better copy/paste support.
The fact you quote something that has been a rudimentary feature of every computing experience since about 1989 as an exciting up and coming feature of the iPhone is hilarious.
You know what is sad? It's not going to end like that. It's going to end instead with so many high profile people getting burned (read: sons and daughters of politicians) that they will use it as propaganda to introduce laws to control / regulate / filter / disable the internet as we know it today. You'll have to be licensed to run a web site. Compulsory training. Mandatory insurance. Complex data security and logging laws that make it so burdensome to operate a simple web site that it will retreat to being something only possible for big corporations and beauracracies to do. You can already see it starting in the EU but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the real problem with Facebook. They've cleverly engineered a system which *allows* you to control your privacy but then seduces or fools you into giving it up by making settings so obtuse, difficult to find and anticipate that almost nobody successfully does.
Example: I thought I had my facebook settings locked down pretty good. I turned off access of just about everything to anybody except direct friends. A few months later, my birthday comes around and all my friends start sending me happy birthday messages via Facebook! Turns out, there is / was a completely different location for the control of your birth date privacy. Not only did my friends see my birthday, but half of them had installed some kind of 'notify about your friends birthday' application so my birth date (something used commonly as security verification data) was now spread into some unknown number of 3rd party applications around the globe. There is basically no way to know now who on the planet might have gathered my birth date, be correlating it with other data and on selling it for the purposes of identity theft. It's just one small example, but this is everywhere in Facebook.
I don't know how you can love it. Slashdot is one of the most awful web sites around. I come back for the community and the comments but really, especially for a community of highly opinionated geeks it's just pathetic.
For example, this very post page I am writing in fails to render correctly in Chrome, one of the most standards compliant browsers you can get. A simple thing, the "Reply to This" button with padding that overflows so it looks crap.
Apparently there is some whiz bang ajax interface for expanding and collapsing comments - except I don't see it in Chrome, IE or the new version of FireFox (I did see it in FF3.0). I assume they are doing some kind of user agent sniffing and are so hopeless they only manage to support a single version of one browser in the whole universe... or something like that.
If someone working for me wrote code as bad as Slashdot, I'd fire them. Compared to modern sites like Reddit it's a disaster.
Completely agree, but perhaps have another slant on it.
We might consider it acceptable to patent a pure idea but when taken to court compensation should only be awarded based on a realistic estimate of the companies actual losses due to infringement. Which is to say, if the patent owner cannot produce any evidence of a reasonable attempt to design a working version of the device or idea then there simply are no damages at all.
I don't mind people patenting things (even pure ideas) that they make a true and sincere investment to bring into the world. It's the patenting of things with no intention to ever invest in the idea beyond the patent that is pure evil.
> This is great for Microsoft shareholders in the short to medium term, but it is terrible for society as a whole
You are subtly wrong here. Anti-trust laws are usually set up to protect *the consumer*, not *society*. This may seem like a subtle distinction but it's quite important. We are not trying engineer a better world through anti-trust legislation. They do not care about the collective, only the individual. If society ends up the worse for the individual consumer winning out then so be it. They don't care, for example, whether the world ends up following web standards or not. That's an ideological nicety. If consumers in general are better served by everyone following Microsoft's perverted implementations then anti-trust law is fine with that. And I think a lot of people will agree this is actually the way it should be - the last thing we need is a bunch of people in anti-trust courts deciding how the world should be.
So what is my point? The only question that should matter is whether *consumers* - ie: people actually buying computers - are hurt or helped by Microsoft including a browser. In my opinion: all the users of Windows lose out because they are put through the considerable inconvenience of receiving an almost non-functional computer with a fresh install of windows (a computer without a browser in this day and age being nearly useless). The users of other OSes? They gain very little if anything. There is plenty of competition in the browser "market" now. The consumer has numerous choices and almost no web sites depend on IE any more. On balance, this move by the EU is anti-consumer and makes a complete mockery of the whole purpose of anti-trust legislation.
> they are leveraging that Monopoly in order to gain one in another market.
What totally bemuses me is that anybody considers "web browsers" a market in a commercial sense, or if they do, that it is considered a separate "market" to the "OS" market. The days when an OS would ship without a web browser are so long behind us that it is silly to even contemplate. We are so far beyond that now that the debate these days is whether an OS is anything *other* than a web browser. And then let us consider this so-called "web browser market" - how much do consumers pay for a web browser? How much extra money are they being extorted to pay because MS is "forcing" them to use the MS "built in" web browser through their OS monopoly? Hmmm, let's see:
My goodness, someone must stand up for the consumer and defend their choice of Free against Free! Do you suppose that if IE was not bundled or not free then the others would be making billions of $$$ from their Free web browser offerings? Of course not, we'd have the same line up of contenders and they'd all be free. The whole thing is a just a joke. MS should definitely be forced to *allow* installation of any browser as the default (including deep integration into APIs such as help, explorer etc. which they do not currently do) but this idea that them including a browser in their OS hurts the consumer is just ridiculous. I *want* deep integration of the web into my computer - I want it on my desktop, in my taskbar, in my start menu, in my email, in my word processing documents. The web is everything and everything is the web. Preventing MS or anybody else from doing that hurts me, not helps me.
I mostly agree with your comment. One thing additional though: I think Zed may well be doing precisely the *wrong* thing if he wants to not be ignored - he will probably now experience a new kind of being ignored where *nobody uses his software at all*. This will happen because:
a) he's now licensing it under a restrictive license where it's unclear what liability someone will be taking on by using his code. This is poison to commercial businesses.
b) he's portraying a public persona that shows significant problems and will probably drive anyone who would normally considering doing business with him away
So - enjoy your new GPL life Zed, but please don't expect more people to notice your software now that you've decided to be a hostile participant rather than a generous collaborator. It's far more likely to be the other way around.
Your analogy is the strawman they want to present. The reality is actually that nearly all whitehats subscribe to a policy of full disclosure only after notifying the vendor / owner of the software and giving them a period of time to address it. Full disclosure occurs when that process fails. So it's not the same as displaying your security code on TV - it's like sending the company that makes the security system a letter warning them about a fault in their system that applies to everybody using that system, then hearing nothing back, then realizing that a significant number crooks are probably aware of the problem and then finally publishing an ad in the newspaper when it is clear that there is enormous risk to the community.
You're right, but many of the things you see as negatives I remember as positives.
Microsoft commoditized and opened up an industry that was headed in a completely different direction: closed, proprietary, expensive silos of independent architectures that couldn't interoperate.
Suddenly independent software vendors all over the world could write applications based on Microsoft's APIs and ship them and make money. Loads of money. Hardware vendors all over the world could make hardware that worked on the Wintel platform and make money. Loads of money. And consumers could purchase a piece of hardware that could (in theory) work with any of the hardware or any of the software. This was such a contrast to platforms like the Mac where the whole thing was a sealed box and unless you were blessed by Apple you had no way into the game. This was a vendor recognizing that they were a part of an ecosystem, not the ruler of the universe. Later on they got too powerful and started to think they were the latter, but in the early days it wasn't like that.
And yes, MS destroyed a lot of small companies by copying or moving in on their products. In many cases it was ruthless and unfair, but in many cases they won by actually producing better products. I remember when copy / paste of rich content between independent applications seemed like magic - and anyone could do it. You didn't need Microsoft's blessing to write a Paint application that could make pictures that would paste (like magic!) right into Microsoft word. People like to criticize things like COM and OLE but that architecture was what enabled businesses to build enormous amounts of automation into their applications with VBA - stuff that even today, OpenOffice is only just catching up on. I have no idea how much of this stuff was copied rather than innovated, but MS popularised it and made it usable to the public, and that's something they *do* deserve credit for.
That part made me wonder what on earth they are going to do?
The only way to achieve an OS that cannot be affected by any kind of malware is to have one with absolutely no persistent state and no ability to run any kind of user installed program. So is that code for, "we're going to cripple it so bad it'll be useless for anything except running Chrome"? Or is there some fundamental way around this that I'm not seeing?
I too like Win7, my only complaint is that I think Microsoft is charging about double what they should be for it. So what really interests me about this announcement is that it throws the gauntlet down to Win7 in the netbook space and *I hope* will give Microsoft a serious rethink wrt pricing. They're going to have to really justify every dollar extra they add to the price of a netbook when Google is out there with a product that is not only free but actually superior in many ways (superior meaning: instant on, zero viruses, etc. etc.).
There are plenty of freeware (or easy to concoct) lightweight schemes to add some nominal protection and that's all you want. For the products I sell, I just issue a license key that is tied to the name of the real person who purchased (so they type in their name and the key to activate). That
a) gives them a sense of ownership and connection to it b) they will only share it with people they trust absolutely, since they are not going to allow pirated copies to be traced back to their own name.
> While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations.... Basically, Theora and Vorbis are huge unknowns with potential patent bombs in them..
If that's your benchmark then there is no technology on earth that will satisfy you. Just as you cannot prove a negative you will never be able to prove that there is not some submarine patent in any piece of tech you use. Unless someone identifies an actual patent problem this just sounds like complete FUD.
You're right, I probably could have phrased the last question better.
When I say "use design patterns", what I really mean is put them front and center in the design process, using them as building blocks when designing software. This was definitely the vision people had at one point. My experience however has been that they are rarely successful when used that way. I'd say everyone does in fact use design patterns by definition - design patterns are after all just descriptions of common designs, so you'd have to be going out of your way and doing very unusual things to avoid them. But my experience is that in successful designs the patterns tend to emerge *after* you've built the software and become useful as way to discuss it and communicate about it, and possibly to critique it, but not really to build it in the first place. Somehow, conceptualizing designs as made out of pattern building blocks always seems to lead to over-engineering. My theory is that, with software, anything that distracts from the principle of "the simplest thing that could possibly work" ends up being a negative. We are enchanted by the idea of software being like buildings - let's put an arch over there, a staircase here, split level room here... in architecture that makes buildings beautiful, but in software it just makes it unnecessarily complex.
So - hopefully that clarifies what I mean. I'm curious if this is also his experience, or not.
I came into professional software development just as patterns were emerging as the "next big thing".
It seems to me looking back that at best we would have to rate the success of design patterns as mixed. One the one hand they've formed a useful vocabulary for discussing software designs and a useful tool for thinking about software in general. However on the other hand it seems like in a huge number of cases they have inspired large amounts of complexity and over-engineering and get misused more often than not. By and large the software world seems to have moved on.
So, I'm curious what you make of them now, looking back? Do you think design patterns as a concept has been a success or not? Do you yourself still use them in daily work?
You're absolutely right that linking is legal, but facilitating a crime is not and this is where it gets murky. For example, it's legal to drive a car, but you are rightly still in trouble if you intentionally drive it as a getaway car in a bank robbery (even if you are not the person who actually entered bank).
This is the whole core of the Pirate Bay problem: they intend to help people breach copyright. The intent is clearly expressed through the name of their web site. There's no two ways around it.
Like you, I earnestly hope that this case does not set a precedent to indicate that sharing links to unauthorized content is considered equivalent to sharing the content. That would be outrageous. However the answer is not to defend the Pirate Bay for what is clearly a step too far but to ensure that the verdict is not misinterpreted. They screwed up, and actually endangered our rights more than help protect them by giving the copyright industries an easy win where they should not have had one.
Re:Would you let it die already?
on
PHP 5.3 Released
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· Score: 1
You forgot... create a "terminator" to send back in time and eliminate the millions of moronic PHP hackers who have already created a legacy of horrendous PHP code that the world is now stuck with like radioactive waste from a dirty nuclear bomb.
Honestly, modern PHP used in a correct manner is tolerable... but the legacy will never go away and nor will the millions of infected PHP coders who will continue to perpetrate the sins of that legacy into the future. Keeping those people out is actually the number one reason I steer clear of PHP whenever possible these days.
You go to the effort of paying for a legal license to use the software... but you do it fraudulently! (unless you really are a commercial system builder). So the license you end up with is worthless, because it doesn't qualify you to use the software, but you still think it was worth buying nonetheless!
If your intent is to disregard the license, why don't you just pirate it from the outset?
Slashdot Mirror
> Groovy is a hell slow
Compared to java yes. Compared to it's brethren (ruby, python, etc) - no. They've fixed the horrendous performance of early versions and now it's just regular-old-scripting language slow, but with the advantage that you can trivially code anything that needs better performance in java which is a lot easier than doing the equivalent cross-platform C extension for the native versions of the other languages.
> For the record, Jython or PHP on Caucho integrates to the Java stuff exactly as same.
No. This is one of the big things groovy does: it puts interop with java as a #1 priority where in the other languages it comes as an afterthought. In particular, when you get into nitty gritty like nested annotations with complex argument lists, or cyclic references b/w languages (groovy depending on java which depends on groovy), groovy has solved all these issues and supports them natively. And if there is a problem and you report it they'll treat it as a high priority whereas in the other languages it will be seen as a niche use case.
The worst thing about groovy IMHO is the god-awful stack traces, which is actually just a side effect of the problem that it has incredibly deeply nested call stacks which is a problem for lots of other reasons than just that it looks bad. However that is something that is bound to be improved over time.
a) have a maximum limit on number of emails you can send (budget of say, $10 / month)
b) have a slightly arduous process by which you can claim back money, after giving assurances you have cleaned up your pc, etc.
It might actually be a useful way to finally get through to people the impact of allowing their pc's to become zombified.
> It makes forgetting your decryption key/passphrase/whatever illegal.
I'm totally talking out of my ass here, but giving the legal system *some* tiny shred of benefit of doubt, I imagine it is necessary to provide some kind of reasonable evidence that the person concerned *does* know the encryption key.
For example, a colleague or family member admitting (on witness stand, whatever) that they have seen you enter the key to access the data regularly or in recent times, combined with corrobarating evidence from the computer (file access, modification timestamps, etc).
Or perhaps, some unencrypted data on the hard drive that indicates you know the key (eg: an email or slashdot posting stating that you've encrypted your drive and memorized the key).
Now: even taking this into account the law is stupid and dangerous and open to abuse. But I hope it is not so bad as to allow random conviction of anybody in the vicinity of an encrypted file.
Because Flash is a giant security hole that does an end run around the browser and stores it's own cookies completely separately. Your browser has no better idea of what flash cookies you are storing than it does what word processor documents you saved last week.
The security settings on Flash are simply obnoxious - changing them in any permanent manner is tedious, fragile and difficult. It's the main reason I have no flash plugin in my default browser (if I want to use flash I open the page in a different browser which I use only for that stuff).
Whoa, I can't see anywhere that the submitter stated they wanted to store confidential PHI on google docs. I imagine we're talking about email and calendaring - things that are generally insecure by nature anyway and which don't contain PHI. A doctor couldn't put patient appointments into google calendar, but I doubt they put them in outlook either - they have dedicated software for that. They could certainly put any other business related stuff in google apps (staff meetings, training, holidays, business appointments ...). The biggest risk I see is that there would be a temptation to "leak" patient information into the insecure systems, but they face that anyway (you won't find your doctor sending you your test results by email) - it's a matter of training and policy.
I agree with you when it comes to actual confidential patient data.
However HIPAA only applies to what is considered 'PHI' - data applicable to individual patients relating to their health.
There is an awful lot of other business that goes on even in a medical practice that doesn't contain this kind of information. Why not consider Google docs for this stuff? They totally suck as office software but on the other hand, they are tremendously useful - almost revolutionary - for their collaboration features. I can't see why a business couldn't use them as long as they have clear policies about when and where such use is appropriate.
> We can expect to find better copy/paste support.
The fact you quote something that has been a rudimentary feature of every computing experience since about 1989 as an exciting up and coming feature of the iPhone is hilarious.
You know what is sad? It's not going to end like that. It's going to end instead with so many high profile people getting burned (read: sons and daughters of politicians) that they will use it as propaganda to introduce laws to control / regulate / filter / disable the internet as we know it today. You'll have to be licensed to run a web site. Compulsory training. Mandatory insurance. Complex data security and logging laws that make it so burdensome to operate a simple web site that it will retreat to being something only possible for big corporations and beauracracies to do. You can already see it starting in the EU but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the real problem with Facebook. They've cleverly engineered a system which *allows* you to control your privacy but then seduces or fools you into giving it up by making settings so obtuse, difficult to find and anticipate that almost nobody successfully does.
Example: I thought I had my facebook settings locked down pretty good. I turned off access of just about everything to anybody except direct friends. A few months later, my birthday comes around and all my friends start sending me happy birthday messages via Facebook! Turns out, there is / was a completely different location for the control of your birth date privacy. Not only did my friends see my birthday, but half of them had installed some kind of 'notify about your friends birthday' application so my birth date (something used commonly as security verification data) was now spread into some unknown number of 3rd party applications around the globe. There is basically no way to know now who on the planet might have gathered my birth date, be correlating it with other data and on selling it for the purposes of identity theft. It's just one small example, but this is everywhere in Facebook.
I don't know how you can love it. Slashdot is one of the most awful web sites around. I come back for the community and the comments but really, especially for a community of highly opinionated geeks it's just pathetic.
For example, this very post page I am writing in fails to render correctly in Chrome, one of the most standards compliant browsers you can get. A simple thing, the "Reply to This" button with padding that overflows so it looks crap.
Apparently there is some whiz bang ajax interface for expanding and collapsing comments - except I don't see it in Chrome, IE or the new version of FireFox (I did see it in FF3.0). I assume they are doing some kind of user agent sniffing and are so hopeless they only manage to support a single version of one browser in the whole universe ... or something like that.
If someone working for me wrote code as bad as Slashdot, I'd fire them. Compared to modern sites like Reddit it's a disaster.
Completely agree, but perhaps have another slant on it.
We might consider it acceptable to patent a pure idea but when taken to court compensation should only be awarded based on a realistic estimate of the companies actual losses due to infringement. Which is to say, if the patent owner cannot produce any evidence of a reasonable attempt to design a working version of the device or idea then there simply are no damages at all.
I don't mind people patenting things (even pure ideas) that they make a true and sincere investment to bring into the world. It's the patenting of things with no intention to ever invest in the idea beyond the patent that is pure evil.
> This is great for Microsoft shareholders in the short to medium term, but it is terrible for society as a whole
You are subtly wrong here. Anti-trust laws are usually set up to protect *the consumer*, not *society*. This may seem like a subtle distinction but it's quite important. We are not trying engineer a better world through anti-trust legislation. They do not care about the collective, only the individual. If society ends up the worse for the individual consumer winning out then so be it. They don't care, for example, whether the world ends up following web standards or not. That's an ideological nicety. If consumers in general are better served by everyone following Microsoft's perverted implementations then anti-trust law is fine with that. And I think a lot of people will agree this is actually the way it should be - the last thing we need is a bunch of people in anti-trust courts deciding how the world should be.
So what is my point? The only question that should matter is whether *consumers* - ie: people actually buying computers - are hurt or helped by Microsoft including a browser. In my opinion: all the users of Windows lose out because they are put through the considerable inconvenience of receiving an almost non-functional computer with a fresh install of windows (a computer without a browser in this day and age being nearly useless). The users of other OSes? They gain very little if anything. There is plenty of competition in the browser "market" now. The consumer has numerous choices and almost no web sites depend on IE any more. On balance, this move by the EU is anti-consumer and makes a complete mockery of the whole purpose of anti-trust legislation.
> they are leveraging that Monopoly in order to gain one in another market.
What totally bemuses me is that anybody considers "web browsers" a market in a commercial sense, or if they do, that it is considered a separate "market" to the "OS" market. The days when an OS would ship without a web browser are so long behind us that it is silly to even contemplate. We are so far beyond that now that the debate these days is whether an OS is anything *other* than a web browser. And then let us consider this so-called "web browser market" - how much do consumers pay for a web browser? How much extra money are they being extorted to pay because MS is "forcing" them to use the MS "built in" web browser through their OS monopoly? Hmmm, let's see:
IE - Free
FireFox - Free
Chrome - Free
Opera - Free
Safari - Free
My goodness, someone must stand up for the consumer and defend their choice of Free against Free! Do you suppose that if IE was not bundled or not free then the others would be making billions of $$$ from their Free web browser offerings? Of course not, we'd have the same line up of contenders and they'd all be free. The whole thing is a just a joke. MS should definitely be forced to *allow* installation of any browser as the default (including deep integration into APIs such as help, explorer etc. which they do not currently do) but this idea that them including a browser in their OS hurts the consumer is just ridiculous. I *want* deep integration of the web into my computer - I want it on my desktop, in my taskbar, in my start menu, in my email, in my word processing documents. The web is everything and everything is the web. Preventing MS or anybody else from doing that hurts me, not helps me.
I mostly agree with your comment. One thing additional though: I think Zed may well be doing precisely the *wrong* thing if he wants to not be ignored - he will probably now experience a new kind of being ignored where *nobody uses his software at all*. This will happen because:
a) he's now licensing it under a restrictive license where it's unclear what liability someone will be taking on by using his code. This is poison to commercial businesses.
b) he's portraying a public persona that shows significant problems and will probably drive anyone who would normally considering doing business with him away
So - enjoy your new GPL life Zed, but please don't expect more people to notice your software now that you've decided to be a hostile participant rather than a generous collaborator. It's far more likely to be the other way around.
Your analogy is the strawman they want to present. The reality is actually that nearly all whitehats subscribe to a policy of full disclosure only after notifying the vendor / owner of the software and giving them a period of time to address it. Full disclosure occurs when that process fails. So it's not the same as displaying your security code on TV - it's like sending the company that makes the security system a letter warning them about a fault in their system that applies to everybody using that system, then hearing nothing back, then realizing that a significant number crooks are probably aware of the problem and then finally publishing an ad in the newspaper when it is clear that there is enormous risk to the community.
You're right, but many of the things you see as negatives I remember as positives.
Microsoft commoditized and opened up an industry that was headed in a completely different direction: closed, proprietary, expensive silos of independent architectures that couldn't interoperate.
Suddenly independent software vendors all over the world could write applications based on Microsoft's APIs and ship them and make money. Loads of money. Hardware vendors all over the world could make hardware that worked on the Wintel platform and make money. Loads of money. And consumers could purchase a piece of hardware that could (in theory) work with any of the hardware or any of the software. This was such a contrast to platforms like the Mac where the whole thing was a sealed box and unless you were blessed by Apple you had no way into the game. This was a vendor recognizing that they were a part of an ecosystem, not the ruler of the universe. Later on they got too powerful and started to think they were the latter, but in the early days it wasn't like that.
And yes, MS destroyed a lot of small companies by copying or moving in on their products. In many cases it was ruthless and unfair, but in many cases they won by actually producing better products. I remember when copy / paste of rich content between independent applications seemed like magic - and anyone could do it. You didn't need Microsoft's blessing to write a Paint application that could make pictures that would paste (like magic!) right into Microsoft word. People like to criticize things like COM and OLE but that architecture was what enabled businesses to build enormous amounts of automation into their applications with VBA - stuff that even today, OpenOffice is only just catching up on. I have no idea how much of this stuff was copied rather than innovated, but MS popularised it and made it usable to the public, and that's something they *do* deserve credit for.
That part made me wonder what on earth they are going to do?
The only way to achieve an OS that cannot be affected by any kind of malware is to have one with absolutely no persistent state and no ability to run any kind of user installed program. So is that code for, "we're going to cripple it so bad it'll be useless for anything except running Chrome"? Or is there some fundamental way around this that I'm not seeing?
I too like Win7, my only complaint is that I think Microsoft is charging about double what they should be for it. So what really interests me about this announcement is that it throws the gauntlet down to Win7 in the netbook space and *I hope* will give Microsoft a serious rethink wrt pricing. They're going to have to really justify every dollar extra they add to the price of a netbook when Google is out there with a product that is not only free but actually superior in many ways (superior meaning: instant on, zero viruses, etc. etc.).
That's about the worst thing you can do.
There are plenty of freeware (or easy to concoct) lightweight schemes to add some nominal protection and that's all you want. For the products I sell, I just issue a license key that is tied to the name of the real person who purchased (so they type in their name and the key to activate). That
a) gives them a sense of ownership and connection to it
b) they will only share it with people they trust absolutely, since they are not going to allow pirated copies to be traced back to their own name.
> While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations. ... Basically, Theora and Vorbis are huge unknowns with potential patent bombs in them..
If that's your benchmark then there is no technology on earth that will satisfy you. Just as you cannot prove a negative you will never be able to prove that there is not some submarine patent in any piece of tech you use. Unless someone identifies an actual patent problem this just sounds like complete FUD.
You're right, I probably could have phrased the last question better.
When I say "use design patterns", what I really mean is put them front and center in the design process, using them as building blocks when designing software. This was definitely the vision people had at one point. My experience however has been that they are rarely successful when used that way. I'd say everyone does in fact use design patterns by definition - design patterns are after all just descriptions of common designs, so you'd have to be going out of your way and doing very unusual things to avoid them. But my experience is that in successful designs the patterns tend to emerge *after* you've built the software and become useful as way to discuss it and communicate about it, and possibly to critique it, but not really to build it in the first place. Somehow, conceptualizing designs as made out of pattern building blocks always seems to lead to over-engineering. My theory is that, with software, anything that distracts from the principle of "the simplest thing that could possibly work" ends up being a negative. We are enchanted by the idea of software being like buildings - let's put an arch over there, a staircase here, split level room here ... in architecture that makes buildings beautiful, but in software it just makes it unnecessarily complex.
So - hopefully that clarifies what I mean. I'm curious if this is also his experience, or not.
I came into professional software development just as patterns were emerging as the "next big thing".
It seems to me looking back that at best we would have to rate the success of design patterns as mixed. One the one hand they've formed a useful vocabulary for discussing software designs and a useful tool for thinking about software in general. However on the other hand it seems like in a huge number of cases they have inspired large amounts of complexity and over-engineering and get misused more often than not. By and large the software world seems to have moved on.
So, I'm curious what you make of them now, looking back? Do you think design patterns as a concept has been a success or not? Do you yourself still use them in daily work?
You're absolutely right that linking is legal, but facilitating a crime is not and this is where it gets murky. For example, it's legal to drive a car, but you are rightly still in trouble if you intentionally drive it as a getaway car in a bank robbery (even if you are not the person who actually entered bank).
This is the whole core of the Pirate Bay problem: they intend to help people breach copyright. The intent is clearly expressed through the name of their web site. There's no two ways around it.
Like you, I earnestly hope that this case does not set a precedent to indicate that sharing links to unauthorized content is considered equivalent to sharing the content. That would be outrageous. However the answer is not to defend the Pirate Bay for what is clearly a step too far but to ensure that the verdict is not misinterpreted. They screwed up, and actually endangered our rights more than help protect them by giving the copyright industries an easy win where they should not have had one.
You forgot ... create a "terminator" to send back in time and eliminate the millions of moronic PHP hackers who have already created a legacy of horrendous PHP code that the world is now stuck with like radioactive waste from a dirty nuclear bomb.
Honestly, modern PHP used in a correct manner is tolerable ... but the legacy will never go away and nor will the millions of infected PHP coders who will continue to perpetrate the sins of that legacy into the future. Keeping those people out is actually the number one reason I steer clear of PHP whenever possible these days.
I find the OEM argument kind of bizarre.
You go to the effort of paying for a legal license to use the software ... but you do it fraudulently! (unless you really are a commercial system builder). So the license you end up with is worthless, because it doesn't qualify you to use the software, but you still think it was worth buying nonetheless!
If your intent is to disregard the license, why don't you just pirate it from the outset?