When I get a contract with a clause like that, I say "this bit is just a minor problem, but needs fixing." If they balk, then the job is a bad fit anyway.
In your situation, you need to renegotiate that contractual provision. I can't think of a way that won't involve a credible threat to leave. "i'd like to stay, but this is not really workable."
Don't try to moonlight anonymously - success on a proprietary project will make you a great big target, and doing this on an open source project is laying legal minefields for whoever else tries to work on your project. You need to fix the actual problem.
Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
People don't seem to get that for a seriously popular site that must not go down, it's just not the same class of phenomenon as picking a registrar more or less at random (the same process by which people ended up on GoDaddy in the first place) to move your blog's DNS to. It's literally taken weeks to make absolutely sure that the transition damn well will go smoothly. This on top of, like, the actual work the WMF is supposed to do. AIUI, there should be an announcement next week or so.
Perl, or at least PCRE, is the basic problem: the parser is a series of processing steps, many of which are regular expressions. You could translate that directly into Perl without much work, but it's entirely unclear it would actually buy you anything.
The bidi problem is not display - per the link I helpfully provided, it's editing. Wherever LTR (usually Latin) and RTL (usually Hebrew or Arabic) are mixed, which is everywhere Hebrew or Arabic are.
Scheme is a Lisp. It was specifically a reaction to Common Lisp's baroque excesses, but it's accepted by all as a Lisp. Assume I'm asking in the sense that Scheme is a Lisp.
What Lisp-type DSLs are there that people actually use much? The only one I can think of is Guile in GIMP, but it doesn't have a community. (And Emacs Lisp, of course, but Emacs is for goddamn geeks.) Most DSLs that even become popular enough in their area for many people to use them are not far above batch files, with Turing-completeness pretty much a bolt-on. This results in crawling horrors and a need to replace it with a real language, but the beginner user wants something very like batch files.
That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.
So WMF is (a) throwing money as well as brilliance at the problem, and (b) has put Brion Vibber onto sorting out what is to be removed from wikitext, because he's one of two people (Tim Starling the other) that people will accept the opinion of on this matter. All proceeds well:-)
So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly - a hard requirement for an international project, and one that is not done quite properly by anyone else. Something where mere dev brilliance has half a chance:-)
That's because it's the devs. They tend to solve stuff in relatively short order.
(The reason a visual editor has taken so long is that it involved not merely an impossibly difficult problem - analysing wikitext - but politics as well - ten years' existing data and a requirement to keep the shitty, shitty format. Wikimedia has lots of sheer brilliance on tap, but this problem also required money and politics.)
The trouble with domain-specific languages is that they are Turing complete. This is a fatal trap: your hammer may be a great hammer, but if it's Turing-complete you will (this is a law of the universe) one day be forced to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon, and nail. You will end up having to build a working full-scale replica of the Titanic from toothpicks and spit, complete with iceberg.
Your rule is more like - any domain-specific language will eventually evolve into brainfuck. ParserFunctions certainly did.
Shelved, not killed
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The blogger is a bit overenthusiastic at the bill behing shelved. It's far from dead.
Same here. Our stuff runs the same on Windows, Linux, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC.
The last incompatiblity we had was the sort of bug where you go "how did that ever work?" - it turned out it only worked at all because of an implementation-defined quirk found in the Solaris versions of 6u26 but not in the Linux version.
Sadly, it's little heisenbugs like these that are why you test the shit out of your code on a new JVM before moving. We'll be doing that for OpenJDK 7 in a few months, to move off Sun Java 6.
This is precisely what any sensible company is doing. We have Sun Java 6 on Linux (and I've even rolled a deb for internal use), but we'll be starting testing on OpenJDK 7 as soon as we've finished the migration we're in the middle of.
It's a standard wingnut talking point. They say "but the richest people can buy anything they want!" as if it answers in any way the point being made, that normal people can't bloody afford the care in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Cross out and initial.
In a case of such a clause being ambiguous, I got a letter from HR clarifying that what I did off company time and equipment was mine mine mine.
When I get a contract with a clause like that, I say "this bit is just a minor problem, but needs fixing." If they balk, then the job is a bad fit anyway.
In your situation, you need to renegotiate that contractual provision. I can't think of a way that won't involve a credible threat to leave. "i'd like to stay, but this is not really workable."
Don't try to moonlight anonymously - success on a proprietary project will make you a great big target, and doing this on an open source project is laying legal minefields for whoever else tries to work on your project. You need to fix the actual problem.
Russian hackers have accepted EUR800,000 in donations from customers of Nordea, Sweden's largest bank, after a sophisticated "phishing" campaign recruited customers into downloading a Trojan horse program that recorded their account login details.
The Russians had looked up the definition of "hacker" in the Jargon File and been inspired to leverage the creative power of open source Free Software. The first campaign took place in August 2006 and was detected a month later, having affected around 250 Nordea customers.
The emails claimed to be from the Nordea Open Trojan Foundation, telling recipients to install an anti-spam and donation tool. Their computers were then infected by the Trojan HaxDoor.RMS.w32, which installs itself in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and sends your passwords to its creators, but only after you have read through and accepted the GNU General Public License and checked the README file for known problems. The email also included full source code.
Swedish police traced the attacks to Russia by looking at the contact details, including address and phone number, included in the README. They have filed over 100 bugs on the creators' SourceForge project and joined the mailing lists on the grass-roots marketing and publicity site SpreadHaxDoor.com.
A Nordea spokesman said the attacks have "quietened down" after the initial influx last Autumn. "We are constantly looking at the security of our online banking and many different measures are taken. We are updating our systems behind the scenes. Many already run on enterprise Linux distributions, but we will be moving desktops to Linux as well for more efficient funds transfer with less reverse engineering required, and may recommend that our customers do the same."
The Trojan only affects computers running Windows. "For unsupported platforms, we have an 'honor system' which gives our details so you can send some money in," said a spokesman for the hacker group. "We hope this will help and encourage contributors interested in porting the Trojan to other operating environments."
Photo: The penis on the 2 Eurocent coin.
Indeed - such as the other WIkipedia SOPA protest, which I understand had some small effectiveness.
Testers must have cackled with glee (and C++ developers cried) when fuzz testing was invented.
Yeah, doing it right is more important than doing it instantly. Also, Wikimedia's been a bit busy, what with the end of the fundraiser and another anti-SOPA protest that got just a bit of attention.
People don't seem to get that for a seriously popular site that must not go down, it's just not the same class of phenomenon as picking a registrar more or less at random (the same process by which people ended up on GoDaddy in the first place) to move your blog's DNS to. It's literally taken weeks to make absolutely sure that the transition damn well will go smoothly. This on top of, like, the actual work the WMF is supposed to do. AIUI, there should be an announcement next week or so.
Arharhar. PHP, of course, approaches Intercal rather than Brainfuck.
Per the page, they considered delegating it to the browsers, but the browser versions suck too badly. Read the link, it's informative.
Perl, or at least PCRE, is the basic problem: the parser is a series of processing steps, many of which are regular expressions. You could translate that directly into Perl without much work, but it's entirely unclear it would actually buy you anything.
The bidi problem is not display - per the link I helpfully provided, it's editing. Wherever LTR (usually Latin) and RTL (usually Hebrew or Arabic) are mixed, which is everywhere Hebrew or Arabic are.
Scheme is a Lisp. It was specifically a reaction to Common Lisp's baroque excesses, but it's accepted by all as a Lisp. Assume I'm asking in the sense that Scheme is a Lisp.
What Lisp-type DSLs are there that people actually use much? The only one I can think of is Guile in GIMP, but it doesn't have a community. (And Emacs Lisp, of course, but Emacs is for goddamn geeks.) Most DSLs that even become popular enough in their area for many people to use them are not far above batch files, with Turing-completeness pretty much a bolt-on. This results in crawling horrors and a need to replace it with a real language, but the beginner user wants something very like batch files.
That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.
So WMF is (a) throwing money as well as brilliance at the problem, and (b) has put Brion Vibber onto sorting out what is to be removed from wikitext, because he's one of two people (Tim Starling the other) that people will accept the opinion of on this matter. All proceeds well :-)
So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly - a hard requirement for an international project, and one that is not done quite properly by anyone else. Something where mere dev brilliance has half a chance :-)
They'll probably end up writing brainfuck in it, like they did with the existing ParserFunctions language.
That's because it's the devs. They tend to solve stuff in relatively short order.
(The reason a visual editor has taken so long is that it involved not merely an impossibly difficult problem - analysing wikitext - but politics as well - ten years' existing data and a requirement to keep the shitty, shitty format. Wikimedia has lots of sheer brilliance on tap, but this problem also required money and politics.)
The trouble with domain-specific languages is that they are Turing complete. This is a fatal trap: your hammer may be a great hammer, but if it's Turing-complete you will (this is a law of the universe) one day be forced to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon, and nail. You will end up having to build a working full-scale replica of the Titanic from toothpicks and spit, complete with iceberg.
Your rule is more like - any domain-specific language will eventually evolve into brainfuck. ParserFunctions certainly did.
The blogger is a bit overenthusiastic at the bill behing shelved. It's far from dead.
Adding hydrogen to nickel to make copper is a reaction that is so ridiculously unfeasible it doesn't even happen in any star we've ever observed. Not even a supernova can do what Rossi claims he can do in a lab. The entire enterprise is made of lies and bullshit.
The Excel loading speed will be a lot better in 3.5, which should be out next month.
Same here. Our stuff runs the same on Windows, Linux, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC.
The last incompatiblity we had was the sort of bug where you go "how did that ever work?" - it turned out it only worked at all because of an implementation-defined quirk found in the Solaris versions of 6u26 but not in the Linux version.
Sadly, it's little heisenbugs like these that are why you test the shit out of your code on a new JVM before moving. We'll be doing that for OpenJDK 7 in a few months, to move off Sun Java 6.
Yuh. There will be work maintaining Java code approximately forever, like Win32 and COBOL.
This is precisely what any sensible company is doing. We have Sun Java 6 on Linux (and I've even rolled a deb for internal use), but we'll be starting testing on OpenJDK 7 as soon as we've finished the migration we're in the middle of.
How to handroll a .deb of Oracle JDK 6u30. We are using the result in production at work on Ubuntu 10.04 server.
It's a standard wingnut talking point. They say "but the richest people can buy anything they want!" as if it answers in any way the point being made, that normal people can't bloody afford the care in question.
It's clunky, it's bureaucratic and it still shits on what America offers.