Among other things I do security audits of businesses. So in this case the government is hurting my business. Rather than being paid to do this work I'm paying someone else to do what I could do for a business that isn't even mine. Any business that can't afford to have a computing security officer or an occassional consultant come in probably hasn't got the money to tip the wireless scale that much anyway. IF they can afford it then let them pay for it and not the taxpayer. Would you also suggest the taxpayer pay for all businesses janitors because if not the cost of mops might go up?
If companies want security let them hire someone to secure them and audit their security. How is this something that should come from taxes? It makes great sense to audit themselves or anything of key importance but just random wardriving sounds like a waste of $$$.
Make it a real-world assignment for your upper-level CS students. It really isn't hard. You can write a decent P2P program in a day or two in Python and give it a web-based UI so that the handfull of geeks who want to install it can do so and their friends can access it via their web browsers. It could even include the ability to work with nutella or some such network as a bonus but cache all downloads in it's own LAN-wide system so that things only have to be downloaded once and there is nothing much to upload.
Also what damage could we do to the system by trying to stop it's natural changes? If we adjust the system to hold things at our comfort level we could possibly break it for all time. What if the changes are needed to keep the system from just coming to a stop and sending us Red Planet. If it's a balancing act I certainly don't want to play god.
We're human, we can live in space, on the Moon, in Antartica, in extreme desert wastelands, etc. We should adapt and not try to adapt nature to us. Might be a good time to start thinking of those futuristic domed cities from movies and indoor hydroponic gardens and so forth.
I always thought after 2.8 the next stable release was 2.10 with the development branch being 2.9.. why do they act like that is confussing? Nothing new with that.. lots of projects do version numbering just that way. You only bump the major version number for changes that are extreme or break compatibility or change the goal of the project or something large like that. The changes in the 2.5 branch would seem enough to jump to a 3.0 version but I'm confussed why they talked as if after 2.8 you HAD to jump to 3.0 as the next version.
Seriously I would buy a processor from them if they didn't include that DRM bullshit while AMD, Intel, and other American companies are including it. Even if they aren't quite as fast for the buck or aren't x86 compatible (is fine as long as they can run Linux). I'd even switch to their CPU as my default development platform.
Wouldn't it be ironic for Americans to have to use Chinese products to remain free?
No, because there will always be a need to write scripts that do new things that aren't handled by their magic program. More experienced people can always learn to do the GUI stuff, the GUI-only people have a lot more to learn to learn to do coding. Of course their would probably be a realignment of the job positions so that people may get shuffled to new departments or even new companies but overall the people who know more will be more likely to stay employed. At least if they don't cost to much more than the GUI monkeys.:)
This sounds pretty silly to me. As you said I automate just about everything with scripts and programs I've written. It sounds as they have just bundled up these common scripts and made them all into a master program that can manage groups of machines. Nothing new there.
As most admins are way overworked in my experience I think the most this will do is trim out the lame ass monkeys that can only work through GUI tools and maybe slow new job growth. Still as new job growth has already been slowed down beyond reason by the economy I doubt this could hurt the growth any further. Maybe these tools will let the admins work 60 hours a week instead of 80.
The rest is all pipe dreams. It's easy to promise human-like abilities but hard to deliver.. as anyone who has ever tried there hand at programming AI has found. Some things might get easier but as the overall systems grow more complex there will be just as many admins.
This Playstation junkie can hack code around the dumb ass of any automation tools any day of the week.;)
A year and a half ago I started a project to do something pretty close to this. The goal is to use all opensourced hardware and software to make PDA/phone devices and a wireless grid. All the technology already exists and is even available in opensource versions. When you want to make a call you select the user from your address book or enter their address and they are tracked using Jabber to gain their presence info, then a VoIP connection is initiated between the two users. Of course this also makes implementing instant messaging, web browsing, etc rather easy. It's not a problem to encrypt the entire connection either of course and to handle roaming issues you can use a virtual network so as you real connection breaks and is reconencted (sometimes through a different route) everything stays stable because the virtual network hides all the little flaws from the end protocols. You don't need to select just one wireless protocol either. Put PCMCIA slots in the back of the PDA/phone and then as technology changes you can change with it without having to get a whole new phone. Put more than one slot and you have a multiband phone or can even connect over dial-up or normal ethernet.
My dream is to some day see it how the phones worked in Bruce Sterling's book Distraction. We're not quite that far yet but we certainly have all the technology to make a working opensourced phone network and phones.
It wouldn't surprise me if 10 years from now the correct spelling of 'you' is 'u'. Rapid text communicating isn't exactly new. It's been around since at least the day of teletypes. A lot of the shortcuts I see originated in that day. Being some 30-40 years ago. That the teenagers today are taking them up as their default form of reading and writing isn't really a surprise as it makes written language more effecient and allows them to express things that are difficult in formal English. Evolution effects written language as much as spoken and with the return of written language as being important in daily life for many people it will evolve much faster than it has before. There is nothing wrong with that at all and really it only makes sense. As you said it's been with us all along and now the process is just running faster.
Along with selling the ads make the users pay to see the ads. Make them useful to the users. Say if they are on the corner of 5th and Main have the system feed them ads from surrounding businesses and let them easily browse for the types of places they want. Make it an instant yellow pages and list specials, have walk-in coupons, etc.
DRM is one of those stupid ideas that big companies love, individuals hate, and most people never notice. It essentially is just a waste of effort as it won't, and can't work, well but the pointy headed dollar counters don't understand the technology enough to understand why it won't work so they keep throwing money at it. Like any lock it only works as long as the person with the key wants it to work. In this case by necessity you give the user the key but the whole idea is to keep the user from using the key. It mostly involves smoke and mirrors to keep the user from realizing they have the key, not knowing how to use the key, or being afraid of using the key (legal liability). Sure this kind of thing works at first but over time you have to keep changing your keys and your methods of keeping the users from using the key or else the system stops working. This frustrates the users and they'll eventually just stop switching. Grandma for example isn't likely to buy a new DVD player ever 2 years to keep up to date and then new DVD's won't work on her old player so she'll just content herself to watching old movies and the ripped movies her clever grandchildren bring her. Of course there will always be just enough of us that will crack the security way faster than new security can be implemented and thus the systems will always crumble. So in the end businesses are throwing away gobs of money and alienating their customers. Not a very sound business plan in the long run.
If you design your code in the right ways testing is a straight forward process. I design my web applications using an object for each task the site needs to do. Then I can just write a test function that will run that object through a typical scenario to make sure everything works that should work and nothing works that shouldn't work (security tests). This is a fairly reasonable way to check for obvious problems with your site and is good to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot but you still need to test everything by hand now and then too. Just don't treat your web applications any different than any other application and you can test using the same methods any programmer uses.
Voting is a very simple application. You could write a program like this to be very simple. The code would be available to everyone to examine if they wanted to. Just because most people wouldn't doesn't mean that electronic voting systems are any more complex than manual systems. How many people do you know that have examined the manual systems to make sure they are bug free and how many people watch every single vote being tallied? People are expecting things of the electronic systems that they don't expect of the manual systems and that seems odd to me. By nature machines are more precise so as long as your reasonably careful of making sure nobody has a chance to alter the live systems (as careful as you are of talling votes in the manual systems) then it'll be more secure and precise.
BattleBots was cool but Junkyard Wars was better. I'd love to see a weekly show that combined the two. You have to compete your teams robot.. but you have to build it in one day from parts on hand. That'd be more challenging and would even things up a little as you wouldn't need to invest a lot of your own money.
I use XML output from PHP ran through my XSL stylesheets to produce the final output. The stylesheets get fed the users language and user-agent along with the output and easily produce custom output for all devices without any significant coding. I will be glad when (if?) HTML is finally replaced by good XHTML support but overall keeping up with these things is not difficult if you design your site well. Also since XSL checks the HTML output it produces it eliminates many of the problems commonly found in output code. The biggest problem is trying to deal with user inputted data and that is more of a language problem than a formatting problem.
But if all your applications are Mozilla-based then they all will share common UI traits in the way applications share UI traits in an OS. If Mozilla is shared between the majority of the OS's then applications are easier for users to use regardless of the used OS. So initially your statement is true but as more applications are created for the Mozilla platform eventually it'll flip-flop to the other extreme. As Mozilla makes these applications easier to write than the native OS does then applications should appear quickly allowing Mozilla to catch up with the native OS and as programs that are easy to write and develop are cheaper to produce more companies will consider switching their already existing apps to the Mozilla platform especially at key points where major rewrites are required anyway.. for example from Win98 to WinXP.
PayPal is NOT a bank. They are more like the digital coffee can in your backyard that you bury money in until you decide to do something with it. If you want to use a bank go use a bank, if you don't then stop bitching and enjoy the benefits of not having to use a bank. You know when you sign up that they aren't a bank and are not federally insured and so forth so if you don't like what you get then stop complaining.
For my part I love PayPal. They've never screwed me over in the slightest. They've answered questions when I've asked. They give relevant information for tracking my money. All things I've never had any bank do better for.
Me also, I tried switching a while back but it just wouldn't work properly so I temporarily switched back to the old Apache. I'm very excited about some of the new possibilities and will be using them in the future. If they really want to speed adoption of Apache 2 I'd suggest they get involved, if they aren't already involved, with helping get those popular add-on's 100% compatible with Apache 2. Apache is a great piece of software and a great project so I hope they don't decide they're unwanted. Just give things time to adapt.
Why bother? If you just want to hack and carry a gun you can do that at home. If you really want to you could form some sort of militia that hunts down bad guys. Get enough kick ass hackers with automatic weapons and maybe we can start our own government. Finally be able to hunt down those RIAA bastards.;) If you just want a paycheck then go work at Pizza Hut.
I find I write the best code when working long hours (so my brain stays on subject) but easy hours (so I don't get tired). Basiclly I keep working but I get up and do other things as I feel the need including going places, watching tv, etc. The little touches of relaxation make it easier to think about the problem instead of thinking about thinking about the problem as is often the problem as you get tired.
Actually there are many good educational sites on the Internet. It's just that there is so much more crud that it's gotten hard to find many of the good sites. If you remember the web from before the.COM boom it was almost all educational sites and many of those sites still exist. Just throwing a child at Yahoo won't help them learn but finding a list of useful resources before starting a project and then helping them to use those resources and to find their own good resources will help. Like a library not every book is going to be useful for every single project. The trick is learning how to find the right book for the right project. The web is like that.
I'd really like to see a magazine that covers all of opensource programming. Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GCC, bash scripting, opensource libraries, opensource tools, free codecs, etc. Everything a programmer that develops opensource software or with opensource software could want and no commercial crap we don't want. Something like Dr. Dobbs but covering only opensource.
If it covers more topics it'll have a wider audience which in turn will give it more advertisers. SysAdmin is a good magazine but it really isn't programmer-centric or 100% opensource so there probably is room for another magazine out there.
To some extent what you say is true but you don't seem to take into account significance. Right now data havens such as this have very little significance meaning that nobody cares enough to really challenge them. I think sovereign status is a combination of significance and a show of power. If you're significant enough to declare war on that is a big sign of a sovereign power. If you can at least put up a fight that is another sign. You can be a government in exile and still to some extent be soverign and in the case of a data haven you don't really even need land. As long as you keep serving your data you are never in exile.
One of the first graphical toys I programmed was a clock that'd take the system time in base 60 and use it to point clock arms for seconds, minutes, 60-hours, 60-days, 60-months, and 60-years. It wasn't very useful but it seemed to work quite well and seemed a reasonable system for a universal time standard when you no longer based it off a single planets light cycles. I went on to base some RPG MUDs I did off the 60-base system and nobody seemed to find it an unreasonable system other than obvious comments about needing to go to work more than once a day and other issues with time not being in sync with light cycles and seasons. The solution of course was to have both universal time and planetary time with scientific documents, time clocks, etc using universal time but farming, work schedules, etc remaining on planatary time. I don't know how it'd work in real life but it did well in a game.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Among other things I do security audits of businesses. So in this case the government is hurting my business. Rather than being paid to do this work I'm paying someone else to do what I could do for a business that isn't even mine. Any business that can't afford to have a computing security officer or an occassional consultant come in probably hasn't got the money to tip the wireless scale that much anyway. IF they can afford it then let them pay for it and not the taxpayer. Would you also suggest the taxpayer pay for all businesses janitors because if not the cost of mops might go up?
Corporate welfare is killing America.
If companies want security let them hire someone to secure them and audit their security. How is this something that should come from taxes? It makes great sense to audit themselves or anything of key importance but just random wardriving sounds like a waste of $$$.
Make it a real-world assignment for your upper-level CS students. It really isn't hard. You can write a decent P2P program in a day or two in Python and give it a web-based UI so that the handfull of geeks who want to install it can do so and their friends can access it via their web browsers. It could even include the ability to work with nutella or some such network as a bonus but cache all downloads in it's own LAN-wide system so that things only have to be downloaded once and there is nothing much to upload.
Also what damage could we do to the system by trying to stop it's natural changes? If we adjust the system to hold things at our comfort level we could possibly break it for all time. What if the changes are needed to keep the system from just coming to a stop and sending us Red Planet. If it's a balancing act I certainly don't want to play god.
We're human, we can live in space, on the Moon, in Antartica, in extreme desert wastelands, etc. We should adapt and not try to adapt nature to us. Might be a good time to start thinking of those futuristic domed cities from movies and indoor hydroponic gardens and so forth.
I always thought after 2.8 the next stable release was 2.10 with the development branch being 2.9.. why do they act like that is confussing? Nothing new with that.. lots of projects do version numbering just that way. You only bump the major version number for changes that are extreme or break compatibility or change the goal of the project or something large like that. The changes in the 2.5 branch would seem enough to jump to a 3.0 version but I'm confussed why they talked as if after 2.8 you HAD to jump to 3.0 as the next version.
Seriously I would buy a processor from them if they didn't include that DRM bullshit while AMD, Intel, and other American companies are including it. Even if they aren't quite as fast for the buck or aren't x86 compatible (is fine as long as they can run Linux). I'd even switch to their CPU as my default development platform.
Wouldn't it be ironic for Americans to have to use Chinese products to remain free?
No, because there will always be a need to write scripts that do new things that aren't handled by their magic program. More experienced people can always learn to do the GUI stuff, the GUI-only people have a lot more to learn to learn to do coding. Of course their would probably be a realignment of the job positions so that people may get shuffled to new departments or even new companies but overall the people who know more will be more likely to stay employed. At least if they don't cost to much more than the GUI monkeys. :)
This sounds pretty silly to me. As you said I automate just about everything with scripts and programs I've written. It sounds as they have just bundled up these common scripts and made them all into a master program that can manage groups of machines. Nothing new there.
;)
As most admins are way overworked in my experience I think the most this will do is trim out the lame ass monkeys that can only work through GUI tools and maybe slow new job growth. Still as new job growth has already been slowed down beyond reason by the economy I doubt this could hurt the growth any further. Maybe these tools will let the admins work 60 hours a week instead of 80.
The rest is all pipe dreams. It's easy to promise human-like abilities but hard to deliver.. as anyone who has ever tried there hand at programming AI has found. Some things might get easier but as the overall systems grow more complex there will be just as many admins.
This Playstation junkie can hack code around the dumb ass of any automation tools any day of the week.
A year and a half ago I started a project to do something pretty close to this. The goal is to use all opensourced hardware and software to make PDA/phone devices and a wireless grid. All the technology already exists and is even available in opensource versions. When you want to make a call you select the user from your address book or enter their address and they are tracked using Jabber to gain their presence info, then a VoIP connection is initiated between the two users. Of course this also makes implementing instant messaging, web browsing, etc rather easy. It's not a problem to encrypt the entire connection either of course and to handle roaming issues you can use a virtual network so as you real connection breaks and is reconencted (sometimes through a different route) everything stays stable because the virtual network hides all the little flaws from the end protocols. You don't need to select just one wireless protocol either. Put PCMCIA slots in the back of the PDA/phone and then as technology changes you can change with it without having to get a whole new phone. Put more than one slot and you have a multiband phone or can even connect over dial-up or normal ethernet.
My dream is to some day see it how the phones worked in Bruce Sterling's book Distraction. We're not quite that far yet but we certainly have all the technology to make a working opensourced phone network and phones.
It wouldn't surprise me if 10 years from now the correct spelling of 'you' is 'u'. Rapid text communicating isn't exactly new. It's been around since at least the day of teletypes. A lot of the shortcuts I see originated in that day. Being some 30-40 years ago. That the teenagers today are taking them up as their default form of reading and writing isn't really a surprise as it makes written language more effecient and allows them to express things that are difficult in formal English. Evolution effects written language as much as spoken and with the return of written language as being important in daily life for many people it will evolve much faster than it has before. There is nothing wrong with that at all and really it only makes sense. As you said it's been with us all along and now the process is just running faster.
Along with selling the ads make the users pay to see the ads. Make them useful to the users. Say if they are on the corner of 5th and Main have the system feed them ads from surrounding businesses and let them easily browse for the types of places they want. Make it an instant yellow pages and list specials, have walk-in coupons, etc.
DRM is one of those stupid ideas that big companies love, individuals hate, and most people never notice. It essentially is just a waste of effort as it won't, and can't work, well but the pointy headed dollar counters don't understand the technology enough to understand why it won't work so they keep throwing money at it. Like any lock it only works as long as the person with the key wants it to work. In this case by necessity you give the user the key but the whole idea is to keep the user from using the key. It mostly involves smoke and mirrors to keep the user from realizing they have the key, not knowing how to use the key, or being afraid of using the key (legal liability). Sure this kind of thing works at first but over time you have to keep changing your keys and your methods of keeping the users from using the key or else the system stops working. This frustrates the users and they'll eventually just stop switching. Grandma for example isn't likely to buy a new DVD player ever 2 years to keep up to date and then new DVD's won't work on her old player so she'll just content herself to watching old movies and the ripped movies her clever grandchildren bring her. Of course there will always be just enough of us that will crack the security way faster than new security can be implemented and thus the systems will always crumble. So in the end businesses are throwing away gobs of money and alienating their customers. Not a very sound business plan in the long run.
If you design your code in the right ways testing is a straight forward process. I design my web applications using an object for each task the site needs to do. Then I can just write a test function that will run that object through a typical scenario to make sure everything works that should work and nothing works that shouldn't work (security tests). This is a fairly reasonable way to check for obvious problems with your site and is good to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot but you still need to test everything by hand now and then too. Just don't treat your web applications any different than any other application and you can test using the same methods any programmer uses.
Voting is a very simple application. You could write a program like this to be very simple. The code would be available to everyone to examine if they wanted to. Just because most people wouldn't doesn't mean that electronic voting systems are any more complex than manual systems. How many people do you know that have examined the manual systems to make sure they are bug free and how many people watch every single vote being tallied? People are expecting things of the electronic systems that they don't expect of the manual systems and that seems odd to me. By nature machines are more precise so as long as your reasonably careful of making sure nobody has a chance to alter the live systems (as careful as you are of talling votes in the manual systems) then it'll be more secure and precise.
BattleBots was cool but Junkyard Wars was better. I'd love to see a weekly show that combined the two. You have to compete your teams robot.. but you have to build it in one day from parts on hand. That'd be more challenging and would even things up a little as you wouldn't need to invest a lot of your own money.
I use XML output from PHP ran through my XSL stylesheets to produce the final output. The stylesheets get fed the users language and user-agent along with the output and easily produce custom output for all devices without any significant coding. I will be glad when (if?) HTML is finally replaced by good XHTML support but overall keeping up with these things is not difficult if you design your site well. Also since XSL checks the HTML output it produces it eliminates many of the problems commonly found in output code. The biggest problem is trying to deal with user inputted data and that is more of a language problem than a formatting problem.
But if all your applications are Mozilla-based then they all will share common UI traits in the way applications share UI traits in an OS. If Mozilla is shared between the majority of the OS's then applications are easier for users to use regardless of the used OS. So initially your statement is true but as more applications are created for the Mozilla platform eventually it'll flip-flop to the other extreme. As Mozilla makes these applications easier to write than the native OS does then applications should appear quickly allowing Mozilla to catch up with the native OS and as programs that are easy to write and develop are cheaper to produce more companies will consider switching their already existing apps to the Mozilla platform especially at key points where major rewrites are required anyway.. for example from Win98 to WinXP.
PayPal is NOT a bank. They are more like the digital coffee can in your backyard that you bury money in until you decide to do something with it. If you want to use a bank go use a bank, if you don't then stop bitching and enjoy the benefits of not having to use a bank. You know when you sign up that they aren't a bank and are not federally insured and so forth so if you don't like what you get then stop complaining.
For my part I love PayPal. They've never screwed me over in the slightest. They've answered questions when I've asked. They give relevant information for tracking my money. All things I've never had any bank do better for.
Me also, I tried switching a while back but it just wouldn't work properly so I temporarily switched back to the old Apache. I'm very excited about some of the new possibilities and will be using them in the future. If they really want to speed adoption of Apache 2 I'd suggest they get involved, if they aren't already involved, with helping get those popular add-on's 100% compatible with Apache 2. Apache is a great piece of software and a great project so I hope they don't decide they're unwanted. Just give things time to adapt.
Why bother? If you just want to hack and carry a gun you can do that at home. If you really want to you could form some sort of militia that hunts down bad guys. Get enough kick ass hackers with automatic weapons and maybe we can start our own government. Finally be able to hunt down those RIAA bastards. ;) If you just want a paycheck then go work at Pizza Hut.
I find I write the best code when working long hours (so my brain stays on subject) but easy hours (so I don't get tired). Basiclly I keep working but I get up and do other things as I feel the need including going places, watching tv, etc. The little touches of relaxation make it easier to think about the problem instead of thinking about thinking about the problem as is often the problem as you get tired.
Actually there are many good educational sites on the Internet. It's just that there is so much more crud that it's gotten hard to find many of the good sites. If you remember the web from before the .COM boom it was almost all educational sites and many of those sites still exist. Just throwing a child at Yahoo won't help them learn but finding a list of useful resources before starting a project and then helping them to use those resources and to find their own good resources will help. Like a library not every book is going to be useful for every single project. The trick is learning how to find the right book for the right project. The web is like that.
I'd really like to see a magazine that covers all of opensource programming. Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, GCC, bash scripting, opensource libraries, opensource tools, free codecs, etc. Everything a programmer that develops opensource software or with opensource software could want and no commercial crap we don't want. Something like Dr. Dobbs but covering only opensource.
If it covers more topics it'll have a wider audience which in turn will give it more advertisers. SysAdmin is a good magazine but it really isn't programmer-centric or 100% opensource so there probably is room for another magazine out there.
To some extent what you say is true but you don't seem to take into account significance. Right now data havens such as this have very little significance meaning that nobody cares enough to really challenge them. I think sovereign status is a combination of significance and a show of power. If you're significant enough to declare war on that is a big sign of a sovereign power. If you can at least put up a fight that is another sign. You can be a government in exile and still to some extent be soverign and in the case of a data haven you don't really even need land. As long as you keep serving your data you are never in exile.
One of the first graphical toys I programmed was a clock that'd take the system time in base 60 and use it to point clock arms for seconds, minutes, 60-hours, 60-days, 60-months, and 60-years. It wasn't very useful but it seemed to work quite well and seemed a reasonable system for a universal time standard when you no longer based it off a single planets light cycles. I went on to base some RPG MUDs I did off the 60-base system and nobody seemed to find it an unreasonable system other than obvious comments about needing to go to work more than once a day and other issues with time not being in sync with light cycles and seasons. The solution of course was to have both universal time and planetary time with scientific documents, time clocks, etc using universal time but farming, work schedules, etc remaining on planatary time. I don't know how it'd work in real life but it did well in a game. ;)