Why not? Everybody has the basic right to own the information stored in their own brain. If you don't have that then how can you have any freedom at all? This isn't Snow Crash where an evil company can just use DRM to control information even as it goes in and out of peoples brains and I for one am very thankful for it.
If you allow someone to learn your information then you shouldn't expect to have exclusive right to it anymore. The sad thing is that this sort of thing most likely will become a serious issue in the near future. The file trading battle will move into ownership of data in people's heads. Scary. Oops charged with listening to a song in my head without first paying a per-play fee! Who gave me the right to remember?!
A solution I like is to write a Python backend that is exposed to the frontend as XML-RPC. Then use the language your designers find easiest to work in for front-end coding.. usually PHP.
Python is great for the backend because it has good namespace support which helps a lot for big complex programs. PHP on the other hand is well known and extremely easy for doing various web-scripting type tasks. I have a little PHP function that gets called by the PHP server for every page (without needing to be in the code exposed to the PHP coders) that simply passes the page inputs to Python over XML-RPC and puts the response into a global variable. Then the PHP coders jut display the results however needs to be done based on the inputs and outputs.
Some nice benefits of such a split system is that it's easy to keep UI logic sepperate from application logic and it's easy to split your application up over multiple servers so that it can scale to any load. For example you might have two PHP servers, three Python servers, and a DB server dividing the load. Normal load balancing techniques work just fine for deciding how the machines talk to each other. Pretty nice to be able to just throw another server in where it's needed if you suddenly find a 9/11-type day where your site is getting unexpectedly high loads.
Of course you can split your processing up in more levels if you need to. I like to abstract out all my queries into their own XML-RPC interface that sits in front of the DB so as to not allow direct access to the DB for security reasons. Anyone trying to hack the DB would have to use my stored queries and work through my XML-RPC interface rather than being able to access the DB directly. If your dealing with sensitive information it's just another layer of protection. If you have to access third-party systems that use some unstandardized method of communicating then it can help to keep your code clean if you create a proxy interface between those systems and your own that speaks XML-RPC. This way the code for speaking to that other system is a completely sepperate code base and your main code base is kept clean.
If you don't have the right to switch jobs then you are a slave to your employer's whims. But then companies like Microsoft are used to abusing foreign workers so why not abuse domestic workers too. Although this guy was Chinese (country) wasn't he?
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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I'll give the minor UI issues some grace as this is just a beta but the iffy PNG and CSS support annoys me. Maybe they'll finish fixing PNG support or maybe it'll remain buggy for another couple browser versions. Lack of CSS2 makes me wonder why they even bothered with an upgrade.. but then I remember.. they just like to appear to be offering improvements so clueless users won't switch to Firefox.
Now I'll ask a simple and possibly stupid question. IE is free anyway so why don't they just use the gecko-engine for rendering and add their own UI and features on top of that? They'd please developers and could continue to do their own thing. They didn't write the original IE code either.. why no embrace and extend of a new browser engine? And they could lower their development costs at the same time. They've used other opensource code in their products before afterall.. (TCP/IP stack?)
A NDA should be enough. If the employee discloses to anyone, including a new employer, then sue. A lawsuit just for changing jobs doesn't seem fair.
If the employee jumps ship, spills their beans, and then gets dropped then it serves them right. If it can be proven then both parties should be liable for damages from the original employer. Just as easily though the employee could just tell the new company trade secrets for money without switching jobs.. how does a NCA help that?
The problem with that is that for many types of jobs it's nearly impossible to find ANY job without signing this kind of crap. What's the alternative? Be unemployed? Be part of the working poor? YEAH both those are great ideas. So I guess we're expected to sign and keep our job even if it pays poorly and has bad working conditions.. because we're contracted and if we try to move up we'll be thrown out to be just another welfare case.
I'm sure this guy didn't have that kind of choice but the same laws that apply to him apply to all of us. For the above reasons nobody should be bound by such an employment contract. A simple NDA for trade secrets should be enough.
IMO everyone has the right to earn their living (even if already rich) and obviously that means using what you know and what you have learned from past job experience. It's one thing not to use information such as customer lists from a past employer and it's something else entirely to be told that you cannot perform the same job function. Let market pressure work since this is a capitalist country. If companies want to retain their employees then let them make their employees the ebst offer.
All laws, contracts, etc that would bar an employee from seeking or accepting alternate emloyment should be unacceptable. Employers have no right to force such provisions and doing so shows that the contract is not between equals and therefore should not be legal.
My predictions are always right but nobody bothers listening to me. Just cus idiots make bad predicitons doesn't mean all predictions are bad. This guys predicition is mostly right which is evident because most of it's already happened.
The biggest wrong point in this prediction is that we're building an AI. WRONG! The Internet isn't a network of machines. It's a network of people. The machines just accelerate the existing network that already existes among humans. We're forming a super species out of ourselves. As neurons are to brains so are we to the Internet. We've learned to grow faster more far reaching connections so now our global brain can think faster and better.
As such the thing to watch for is to greater intergration of portal network access devices into our daily lifes. Cell phones and PDAs are kids toys compared to the devices we will be seeing. Expect to have free, and fast, net access everywhere and to see everyone using it. THAT is what is going to happen. Our links will be always on every where we go and the flow will be two way rather than downstream-mostly as it is now.
No, the web is not tied to the browser. In the future we will have many different programs that interface to the web in different ways. I do think that many of these programs will be specific to certain devices though so that each device in itself only has a single web program.
Multiple apps and even the generic web browserish interface will be more on the fringe as the PC as we know it has most of it's functions intergrated into our lives instead of stuck in a box in the den.
Concepts don't come and go.. they flow back and forth in waves.. collecting new ideas and merging together. Centralized, decentralized.. and now distributed which is sort of a mix of centralized and decentralized.
Yeah, if your users are satisfied with a plain-text interface. Making standard compliant CSS and Javascript work on IE is a nightmare sometimes. Personally I'd say the hell with IE but suits aren't so easy.
Never tried DDR I see? I'm waiting for an active version of GTA that requires I actually run on the pad and wave my hands around in front of my tv to punch hookers. Damn yeah I'd play that shit.
Not sure if I should be disappointed or not. I've been working on some free tools that provide a similar interface. I think I'll not stop though as I'm not sure if they offer a free version and I think my tools are more easily extendible. My interface for single systems is browser based (Gecko-based browsers only.. There is only XUL.) but my fancier interface for managing multiple systems is Python/wxWindows based.
Oh well.. darn.. I was trying to make Linux easier to manage but it looks like they beat me to it.:)
Funny to see them using CSS extensions that only work in Gecko based browsers like Firefox.
I would love to figure out how to make opacity work for IE. I see them doing it and use code identical to theirs but mine doesn't work. Is there some trick to using the IE-only filter attribute in CSS?
Of course if they'd just support the CSS3 opacity attribute in IE like Firefox does that'd work just fine too.. I'd be happy with decent CSS2, Javascript, and DOM support though.
How much does IE alone cost in extra web dev expense? It seems to add about 20% to dev time in my experience to deal with IE bugs and inabilities. And it keeps us from using some features that'd make life much easier or make our products more useful.
Exactly why I find those such a bore. I had some pretty cool MUDs of my own and I certainly had one of the first graphical MUDs (used RIP graphics). It's a shame we don't have funding to try somethinf new. I especially liked systems that allowed users more freedom to create and change items.
I've done this on games I've written.. notably in the days of text-based MUDs I had an oracle that'd track user behavior and predict what they'd do in the future both as individuals and as a group. It was kind of fun and reasonably accurate. I'm still waiting to see this feature in EverQuest or some other big MMORPG.
I buy a lot of big drives (of all brands).. Whatever the biggest on the market is when I need to add space (several times a year). I'm finding that drive reliability has gotten really shitty with most of these drives lasting less than a year. I'd like them to stop working on making drives hold more and concentrate on making drives more reliable. A drive should last at least three years under heavy but reasonable usage.
Umm you don't need a telco for Internet. Duh. Cable modem, sat, wireless, etc. Life isn't all dial-up and DSL. It's quite possible that your telco could have last-mile issues that your Internet doesn't have.
Go by stats if you'd like but it doesn't deny the obvious truth of picking up the phone and not even getting a dial tone where as you're Internet is still going. Anyway, I'm not so much claiming that the network is more reliable than the phone as that I'm pointing out that the phone isn't any more reliable than the network. As you said they often use the same transmission medium. The major difference being that it's cheap and easy to get redundant network access while it's not for phone service. For phone the best you can do is to get a completely sepperate cell phone which isn't quite the same as a system that automaticlly works around outages.
Give me a break. If you buy or play GTA you know what kind of content to expect from it. It is rated M and they make no effort to hide what their game is all about. If anything I'd be more likely to buy their games if they just went full-on adult content. I love the sex and violence. Such a good change from the crap most games give us.
He's going to invent an Undo button for real life? Cool! I could certainly use that little baby. Here I am going to undo.google.com and all my recent mistakes are undone. It'd save many a marriage.:)
I've lived in Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and Nevada and had most major phone companies at one time or another. I've never had what I'd call reliable phone service. Pick it up and there is major line noise or no connection at all. Various locations, phones, and setups too.
Can you not use a modem over VoIP? I've used fax over VoIP so why not a modem? I thought about setting up an old fashioned dial-up BBS over VoIP just for fun. Put some access lines in various big cities.
Umm.. I haven't had a telco that did that in my entire lifetime and I've lived through several states and in both major cities and rural areas. Where are they checking the lines at?
Not really. Last time I dealt with being hacked they simply cut our physical phone lines to the building.. meanwhile the network, which was wireless, kept going and no hacking attempts were very successful.
If you rely on your wired phone always being there then you're kidding yourself as to it's reliability. I experience a lot more downtime from my regular phone lines than from my Internet.
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Why not? Everybody has the basic right to own the information stored in their own brain. If you don't have that then how can you have any freedom at all? This isn't Snow Crash where an evil company can just use DRM to control information even as it goes in and out of peoples brains and I for one am very thankful for it.
If you allow someone to learn your information then you shouldn't expect to have exclusive right to it anymore. The sad thing is that this sort of thing most likely will become a serious issue in the near future. The file trading battle will move into ownership of data in people's heads. Scary. Oops charged with listening to a song in my head without first paying a per-play fee! Who gave me the right to remember?!
A solution I like is to write a Python backend that is exposed to the frontend as XML-RPC. Then use the language your designers find easiest to work in for front-end coding.. usually PHP.
Python is great for the backend because it has good namespace support which helps a lot for big complex programs. PHP on the other hand is well known and extremely easy for doing various web-scripting type tasks. I have a little PHP function that gets called by the PHP server for every page (without needing to be in the code exposed to the PHP coders) that simply passes the page inputs to Python over XML-RPC and puts the response into a global variable. Then the PHP coders jut display the results however needs to be done based on the inputs and outputs.
Some nice benefits of such a split system is that it's easy to keep UI logic sepperate from application logic and it's easy to split your application up over multiple servers so that it can scale to any load. For example you might have two PHP servers, three Python servers, and a DB server dividing the load. Normal load balancing techniques work just fine for deciding how the machines talk to each other. Pretty nice to be able to just throw another server in where it's needed if you suddenly find a 9/11-type day where your site is getting unexpectedly high loads.
Of course you can split your processing up in more levels if you need to. I like to abstract out all my queries into their own XML-RPC interface that sits in front of the DB so as to not allow direct access to the DB for security reasons. Anyone trying to hack the DB would have to use my stored queries and work through my XML-RPC interface rather than being able to access the DB directly. If your dealing with sensitive information it's just another layer of protection. If you have to access third-party systems that use some unstandardized method of communicating then it can help to keep your code clean if you create a proxy interface between those systems and your own that speaks XML-RPC. This way the code for speaking to that other system is a completely sepperate code base and your main code base is kept clean.
If you don't have the right to switch jobs then you are a slave to your employer's whims. But then companies like Microsoft are used to abusing foreign workers so why not abuse domestic workers too. Although this guy was Chinese (country) wasn't he?
I'll give the minor UI issues some grace as this is just a beta but the iffy PNG and CSS support annoys me. Maybe they'll finish fixing PNG support or maybe it'll remain buggy for another couple browser versions. Lack of CSS2 makes me wonder why they even bothered with an upgrade.. but then I remember.. they just like to appear to be offering improvements so clueless users won't switch to Firefox.
Now I'll ask a simple and possibly stupid question. IE is free anyway so why don't they just use the gecko-engine for rendering and add their own UI and features on top of that? They'd please developers and could continue to do their own thing. They didn't write the original IE code either.. why no embrace and extend of a new browser engine? And they could lower their development costs at the same time. They've used other opensource code in their products before afterall.. (TCP/IP stack?)
A NDA should be enough. If the employee discloses to anyone, including a new employer, then sue. A lawsuit just for changing jobs doesn't seem fair.
If the employee jumps ship, spills their beans, and then gets dropped then it serves them right. If it can be proven then both parties should be liable for damages from the original employer. Just as easily though the employee could just tell the new company trade secrets for money without switching jobs.. how does a NCA help that?
The problem with that is that for many types of jobs it's nearly impossible to find ANY job without signing this kind of crap. What's the alternative? Be unemployed? Be part of the working poor? YEAH both those are great ideas. So I guess we're expected to sign and keep our job even if it pays poorly and has bad working conditions.. because we're contracted and if we try to move up we'll be thrown out to be just another welfare case.
I'm sure this guy didn't have that kind of choice but the same laws that apply to him apply to all of us. For the above reasons nobody should be bound by such an employment contract. A simple NDA for trade secrets should be enough.
IMO everyone has the right to earn their living (even if already rich) and obviously that means using what you know and what you have learned from past job experience. It's one thing not to use information such as customer lists from a past employer and it's something else entirely to be told that you cannot perform the same job function. Let market pressure work since this is a capitalist country. If companies want to retain their employees then let them make their employees the ebst offer.
All laws, contracts, etc that would bar an employee from seeking or accepting alternate emloyment should be unacceptable. Employers have no right to force such provisions and doing so shows that the contract is not between equals and therefore should not be legal.
My predictions are always right but nobody bothers listening to me. Just cus idiots make bad predicitons doesn't mean all predictions are bad. This guys predicition is mostly right which is evident because most of it's already happened.
The biggest wrong point in this prediction is that we're building an AI. WRONG! The Internet isn't a network of machines. It's a network of people. The machines just accelerate the existing network that already existes among humans. We're forming a super species out of ourselves. As neurons are to brains so are we to the Internet. We've learned to grow faster more far reaching connections so now our global brain can think faster and better.
As such the thing to watch for is to greater intergration of portal network access devices into our daily lifes. Cell phones and PDAs are kids toys compared to the devices we will be seeing. Expect to have free, and fast, net access everywhere and to see everyone using it. THAT is what is going to happen. Our links will be always on every where we go and the flow will be two way rather than downstream-mostly as it is now.
No, the web is not tied to the browser. In the future we will have many different programs that interface to the web in different ways. I do think that many of these programs will be specific to certain devices though so that each device in itself only has a single web program.
Multiple apps and even the generic web browserish interface will be more on the fringe as the PC as we know it has most of it's functions intergrated into our lives instead of stuck in a box in the den.
Concepts don't come and go.. they flow back and forth in waves.. collecting new ideas and merging together. Centralized, decentralized.. and now distributed which is sort of a mix of centralized and decentralized.
Yeah, if your users are satisfied with a plain-text interface. Making standard compliant CSS and Javascript work on IE is a nightmare sometimes. Personally I'd say the hell with IE but suits aren't so easy.
Never tried DDR I see? I'm waiting for an active version of GTA that requires I actually run on the pad and wave my hands around in front of my tv to punch hookers. Damn yeah I'd play that shit.
Not sure if I should be disappointed or not. I've been working on some free tools that provide a similar interface. I think I'll not stop though as I'm not sure if they offer a free version and I think my tools are more easily extendible. My interface for single systems is browser based (Gecko-based browsers only.. There is only XUL.) but my fancier interface for managing multiple systems is Python/wxWindows based.
:)
Oh well.. darn.. I was trying to make Linux easier to manage but it looks like they beat me to it.
Funny to see them using CSS extensions that only work in Gecko based browsers like Firefox.
I would love to figure out how to make opacity work for IE. I see them doing it and use code identical to theirs but mine doesn't work. Is there some trick to using the IE-only filter attribute in CSS?
Of course if they'd just support the CSS3 opacity attribute in IE like Firefox does that'd work just fine too.. I'd be happy with decent CSS2, Javascript, and DOM support though.
How much does IE alone cost in extra web dev expense? It seems to add about 20% to dev time in my experience to deal with IE bugs and inabilities. And it keeps us from using some features that'd make life much easier or make our products more useful.
Exactly why I find those such a bore. I had some pretty cool MUDs of my own and I certainly had one of the first graphical MUDs (used RIP graphics). It's a shame we don't have funding to try somethinf new. I especially liked systems that allowed users more freedom to create and change items.
I've done this on games I've written.. notably in the days of text-based MUDs I had an oracle that'd track user behavior and predict what they'd do in the future both as individuals and as a group. It was kind of fun and reasonably accurate. I'm still waiting to see this feature in EverQuest or some other big MMORPG.
I buy a lot of big drives (of all brands).. Whatever the biggest on the market is when I need to add space (several times a year). I'm finding that drive reliability has gotten really shitty with most of these drives lasting less than a year. I'd like them to stop working on making drives hold more and concentrate on making drives more reliable. A drive should last at least three years under heavy but reasonable usage.
Umm you don't need a telco for Internet. Duh. Cable modem, sat, wireless, etc. Life isn't all dial-up and DSL. It's quite possible that your telco could have last-mile issues that your Internet doesn't have.
Go by stats if you'd like but it doesn't deny the obvious truth of picking up the phone and not even getting a dial tone where as you're Internet is still going. Anyway, I'm not so much claiming that the network is more reliable than the phone as that I'm pointing out that the phone isn't any more reliable than the network. As you said they often use the same transmission medium. The major difference being that it's cheap and easy to get redundant network access while it's not for phone service. For phone the best you can do is to get a completely sepperate cell phone which isn't quite the same as a system that automaticlly works around outages.
Give me a break. If you buy or play GTA you know what kind of content to expect from it. It is rated M and they make no effort to hide what their game is all about. If anything I'd be more likely to buy their games if they just went full-on adult content. I love the sex and violence. Such a good change from the crap most games give us.
He's going to invent an Undo button for real life? Cool! I could certainly use that little baby. Here I am going to undo.google.com and all my recent mistakes are undone. It'd save many a marriage. :)
I've lived in Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and Nevada and had most major phone companies at one time or another. I've never had what I'd call reliable phone service. Pick it up and there is major line noise or no connection at all. Various locations, phones, and setups too.
Can you not use a modem over VoIP? I've used fax over VoIP so why not a modem? I thought about setting up an old fashioned dial-up BBS over VoIP just for fun. Put some access lines in various big cities.
Umm.. I haven't had a telco that did that in my entire lifetime and I've lived through several states and in both major cities and rural areas. Where are they checking the lines at?
Not really. Last time I dealt with being hacked they simply cut our physical phone lines to the building.. meanwhile the network, which was wireless, kept going and no hacking attempts were very successful.
If you rely on your wired phone always being there then you're kidding yourself as to it's reliability. I experience a lot more downtime from my regular phone lines than from my Internet.