The whole point of computers for users is to only present an interface to what the user needs to know to do their job. You could maybe even apply this towards a (low-level) IT worker who just plugs together the network the way that Microsoft says to.
But a real programmer/software engineer needs to understand how things work under the hood, and part of that is really getting down to the bare metal. All I learned (programming-wise) in school was C, a little C++, assembly, shell scripting, and LISP. But any of the whiz-bang stuff that comes up now is completely within my grasp, due to a strong grounding in the fundamentals. So, I can learn faster, I can debug better, and I can plan and architect a solution that will have fewer long-term problems.
So, if you just want a guy to plug together XML like some sort of flashy Legos, then don't hire me. But if you want something designed and built to last, quickly and efficiently, hire somebody that knows that there's more to life than Visual whatever, but can also pick up Visual whatever if necessary.
Exactly - I wouldn't want to hire someone who could slap together the latest whiz-bang XML whatzit but never had to think through sorting and searching algorithms. It's great that they can work together and all, but it's a rare group of students who work together and really do share all of the load evenly.
If your XSLT processor uses VBscript, then I imagine some guy in the Philippines is figuring out right now how to format your hard drive for you via Outlook:)
Can it transform Visual Basic code into something taken seriously?
No, but if you wrote XML first and then used that to generate Visual Basic, then you could at least slap on a different code generator and spit out your business logic in Perl or Java the next time around:)
I'm not saying it's a great name; just that it's a not-entirely-implausible name.
The clones were grown with some sort of accelerated growth; I imagine that it will end up that they will end up being a significant number of participants, maybe even the most of them.
They might have referred to it as "The Hessian Wars" if the use of Hessians had been what made the war remarkable, but that was standard practice by then. If this is the first war with a major clone army going at it, then it's not surprising that many people would seize upon that salient aspect.
Heck, it's fantasy anyway, might as well let them pick sorta-fantastic names for things:)
ClearCASE multisite is still client-server, not distributed. If it were really distributed right, I wouldn't have to wait on the daily export/import from overseas.
ClearCASE has a nice *nix API, great security and triggers, and possibly their ClearQuest/unified change management/whatever it is are great (haven't used them yet myself), but right now they stink at being distributed. Even CVS or bonsai would provide better distributed access to source than ClearCASE does at the moment. ClearCASE multisite is still optimized for UUCP-style replication of version-controlled data; it hasn't reached the Internet age yet.
And I'm speaking as a ClearCASE user and admin (including multisite) since v2.1. BitKeeper doesn't sound like it would work 100% for what we do either, but on the other hand I'm not sure how many more releases of ClearCASE (the Unix GUI becomes more unusable every time) we can take:)
It's kind of like the French and Indian war - they weren't fighting each other; they were both fighting the British and their colonists. The whole war was misnamed. In this case, maybe because it was the first large-scale war fought with a clone army?
I could see some point to fabricating a brand-new army out of whole cloth, so to speak, in preference to assembling umpteen thousand dissimilar planetary armies with different styles of fighting, different levels of armament, perhaps feuds between them, etc. By going with the clone approach you get standardized weapons, tactics, command, and even standardized soldiers. Just the thing for fighting an army of similarly interchangeable droids. (Hmmm. It's a pretty wealthy galaxy when it's cheaper to build droids to fight for you than to just conscript the poor or pay an army of sentients).
It didn't seem like they were still all clones by Ep. IV time, though - at least the commanders looked dissimilar. Were the troopers at that point still mini-Fetts?
But then you have to muck with DNS every time somebody makes a new popular font, in any language in the world. Seems a little extreme to me, although I agree that it would really get to the root of the problem.
Is this like "holy penguin pee" in reverse? Once open source code has passed through the hallowed hands of closed-source AOL/TW developers, it's suddenly OK to use?
After you're used to one-click middle-mouse-button opening new windows, it's incredibly painful to have to right click and select "open link in new window". But that's what you get if you're missing some mouse buttons, I guess:)
There's a pref in NS4 that would pop up a dialog before it would let you exit; it saved me on the whole ctrl-Q thing a few times. Does that still exist in NS6/7?
Maybe more esoteric config options should be progressively harder to alter, so that you have to prove your admin-fu before altering them. Easy ones are in the GUI, more difficult ones are in the config file, even more difficult ones are X resource settings, etc.
Meaning that the "e" is pronounced as "a", or that the emphasis is on "ta" rather than "Me"? Are we talking mehTAcity, or MAHta CIty, or mahTAcity?
Changing the emphasis in order to run it all together like oPAcity is OK, but I refuse to pronounce "mehta" as "mata". No matter how the official guy says to do it:)
On the other hand, if our society was truly capitalist, maybe there wouldn't be copyright law in the first place. The existence of a law to provide (with varying degrees of success) a reward for the creation of new content is, when you think about it, more socialist than capitalist.
Right now they're crippled by kids watching DVDs on their C64s, right?
Re:maybe the problem is the business model?
on
Hacking Web Services
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· Score: 1
Actually, the relevant statute (31.05) is titled "Theft of Trade Secrets", and while it does mention copying a trade secret (although it doesn't cover copyright directly), it just refers to it as an "offense", not directly as "theft". It is an offense which is treated in some ways under the same statute as theft, but is not theft. Which is good, because otherwise we wouldn't have a word for taking all copies of a work away from the author, which really would be "theft" (and copyright infringement too, if you created your own copies and sold them too).
The law should really say "effective measures" for trade secret control, anyway, but that's another story. XOR encryption is good enough for us, apparently:)
Re: WHAT!!? Cyberspace will never be secure...EVER
on
Hacking Web Services
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· Score: 1
You left off the end:
...as opposed to sending it over 128-bit encryption to a site whose overworked webmaster left them vulnerable to the credit card hijack hack of the week?
The answer is that they're both more or less risky, depending on the merchant. You choose who to hand over the info to based on their track record.
Re:maybe the problem is the business model?
on
Hacking Web Services
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· Score: 1
It's not "theft", it's "copyright infringement". Theft is when you don't have it after I took it, copyright infringement is when the law says that you might not make as much money because I'm selling something that you created. At least you didn't call it "piracy":)
In fact, selling data w/o permission is not always even copyright infringement; for example, you can republish info from the phone book as long as you do your own formatting, etc. Pure information can't really be controlled by copyright, although the format and presentation of it can be. (There's still patent law, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm... Incumbent fatcat politician, or murderer of millions. What to choose, what to choose.
Yes, and yes. Thanks for asking :)
The whole point of computers for users is to only present an interface to what the user needs to know to do their job. You could maybe even apply this towards a (low-level) IT worker who just plugs together the network the way that Microsoft says to.
But a real programmer/software engineer needs to understand how things work under the hood, and part of that is really getting down to the bare metal. All I learned (programming-wise) in school was C, a little C++, assembly, shell scripting, and LISP. But any of the whiz-bang stuff that comes up now is completely within my grasp, due to a strong grounding in the fundamentals. So, I can learn faster, I can debug better, and I can plan and architect a solution that will have fewer long-term problems.
So, if you just want a guy to plug together XML like some sort of flashy Legos, then don't hire me. But if you want something designed and built to last, quickly and efficiently, hire somebody that knows that there's more to life than Visual whatever, but can also pick up Visual whatever if necessary.
Exactly - I wouldn't want to hire someone who could slap together the latest whiz-bang XML whatzit but never had to think through sorting and searching algorithms. It's great that they can work together and all, but it's a rare group of students who work together and really do share all of the load evenly.
If your XSLT processor uses VBscript, then I imagine some guy in the Philippines is figuring out right now how to format your hard drive for you via Outlook :)
I'm not sure that I believe you still have 86 karma - I had karma over 50 at cap time, and it was truncated to 50. How'd you manage to avoid that?
No, but if you wrote XML first and then used that to generate Visual Basic, then you could at least slap on a different code generator and spit out your business logic in Perl or Java the next time around :)
Perl. But that would have been the answer no matter what the question :)
You mean like the one on MSDN that he linked to?
I'm not saying it's a great name; just that it's a not-entirely-implausible name.
The clones were grown with some sort of accelerated growth; I imagine that it will end up that they will end up being a significant number of participants, maybe even the most of them.
They might have referred to it as "The Hessian Wars" if the use of Hessians had been what made the war remarkable, but that was standard practice by then. If this is the first war with a major clone army going at it, then it's not surprising that many people would seize upon that salient aspect.
Heck, it's fantasy anyway, might as well let them pick sorta-fantastic names for things :)
ClearCASE multisite is still client-server, not distributed. If it were really distributed right, I wouldn't have to wait on the daily export/import from overseas.
ClearCASE has a nice *nix API, great security and triggers, and possibly their ClearQuest/unified change management/whatever it is are great (haven't used them yet myself), but right now they stink at being distributed. Even CVS or bonsai would provide better distributed access to source than ClearCASE does at the moment. ClearCASE multisite is still optimized for UUCP-style replication of version-controlled data; it hasn't reached the Internet age yet.
And I'm speaking as a ClearCASE user and admin (including multisite) since v2.1. BitKeeper doesn't sound like it would work 100% for what we do either, but on the other hand I'm not sure how many more releases of ClearCASE (the Unix GUI becomes more unusable every time) we can take :)
It's kind of like the French and Indian war - they weren't fighting each other; they were both fighting the British and their colonists. The whole war was misnamed. In this case, maybe because it was the first large-scale war fought with a clone army?
I could see some point to fabricating a brand-new army out of whole cloth, so to speak, in preference to assembling umpteen thousand dissimilar planetary armies with different styles of fighting, different levels of armament, perhaps feuds between them, etc. By going with the clone approach you get standardized weapons, tactics, command, and even standardized soldiers. Just the thing for fighting an army of similarly interchangeable droids. (Hmmm. It's a pretty wealthy galaxy when it's cheaper to build droids to fight for you than to just conscript the poor or pay an army of sentients).
It didn't seem like they were still all clones by Ep. IV time, though - at least the commanders looked dissimilar. Were the troopers at that point still mini-Fetts?
But then you have to muck with DNS every time somebody makes a new popular font, in any language in the world. Seems a little extreme to me, although I agree that it would really get to the root of the problem.
Is this like "holy penguin pee" in reverse? Once open source code has passed through the hallowed hands of closed-source AOL/TW developers, it's suddenly OK to use?
After you're used to one-click middle-mouse-button opening new windows, it's incredibly painful to have to right click and select "open link in new window". But that's what you get if you're missing some mouse buttons, I guess :)
There's a pref in NS4 that would pop up a dialog before it would let you exit; it saved me on the whole ctrl-Q thing a few times. Does that still exist in NS6/7?
Or, there is a distinct possibility that I over-analyze everything. Or so I've heard :)
Just ctrl-alt-backspace and login again; no rebooting required.
Maybe more esoteric config options should be progressively harder to alter, so that you have to prove your admin-fu before altering them. Easy ones are in the GUI, more difficult ones are in the config file, even more difficult ones are X resource settings, etc.
Meaning that the "e" is pronounced as "a", or that the emphasis is on "ta" rather than "Me"? Are we talking mehTAcity, or MAHta CIty, or mahTAcity?
Changing the emphasis in order to run it all together like oPAcity is OK, but I refuse to pronounce "mehta" as "mata". No matter how the official guy says to do it :)
Jains rock.
On the other hand, if our society was truly capitalist, maybe there wouldn't be copyright law in the first place. The existence of a law to provide (with varying degrees of success) a reward for the creation of new content is, when you think about it, more socialist than capitalist.
Right now they're crippled by kids watching DVDs on their C64s, right?
Actually, the relevant statute (31.05) is titled "Theft of Trade Secrets", and while it does mention copying a trade secret (although it doesn't cover copyright directly), it just refers to it as an "offense", not directly as "theft". It is an offense which is treated in some ways under the same statute as theft, but is not theft. Which is good, because otherwise we wouldn't have a word for taking all copies of a work away from the author, which really would be "theft" (and copyright infringement too, if you created your own copies and sold them too).
The law should really say "effective measures" for trade secret control, anyway, but that's another story. XOR encryption is good enough for us, apparently :)
You left off the end:
...as opposed to sending it over 128-bit encryption to a site whose overworked webmaster left them vulnerable to the credit card hijack hack of the week?
The answer is that they're both more or less risky, depending on the merchant. You choose who to hand over the info to based on their track record.
It's not "theft", it's "copyright infringement". Theft is when you don't have it after I took it, copyright infringement is when the law says that you might not make as much money because I'm selling something that you created. At least you didn't call it "piracy" :)
In fact, selling data w/o permission is not always even copyright infringement; for example, you can republish info from the phone book as long as you do your own formatting, etc. Pure information can't really be controlled by copyright, although the format and presentation of it can be. (There's still patent law, of course).