Firewalls have become largely irrelevant because they stop people from doing things, so people specifically design applications to easily pierce a firewall!
Thus, the firewall becomes less and less relevant with time.
Originally, the great designers of IP gave us any number of protocols, and 65,534 ports in each protocol. Different applications could use different ports, and these ports would identify what application you wanted to connect to. Port 80 was used for web traffic, Email uses port 25. This gives incredible room for growth and expansion, and was "a good design". (TM)
Firewalls block all but ports 80, 25, 443, and maybe a few others. Thus, many applications are now built using ONLY one of these ports!
So now, we have the dog, the kitchen sink, Instant Messaging, RSS, XML/RPC, and god knows what else tunnelled over port 80. Dude, Like where's my firewall?
So, push comes to shove, there are no real shortcuts without a long term price.
I have some extended family that's not well off. (Think: low-income housing) They want to "have it all" but don't at all have the resources to do it well. (Think: Pentium-100, Win95)
Using the cheapest ISP imaginable. It's amazing to me how much time they'll spend just trying to get online, and how much !@#!@# they'll put up with their painfully slow, virus-laden computer, just for the status and joy of "being online".
They put up with the unbelievable to save $40. (Cost of antivirus) They do not understand the fundamentals of computing, nor do they have the resources to pay somebody who does.
It's a Spammer's paradise, this "free" municipal Wifi. How do communities prevent this from happening?
Introverted people tend to seriously overanalize situations and have difficulty relaxing in social enviornments. The result is conversation that feels forced, somthing that most people don't find attractive.
There, in a nutshell, you've identified most of my youth. As an adult, I've spent alot of time and effort practicing interpsonal communication skills, so that I could "interface" with other people comfortably.
It's probably been one of the best things I've ever done. Although I've since concluded that the organization is mostly a crock of sh17, the Scientology "Training Routines" or "TRs" helped me out tremendously. It's basically practice on how to talk and listen in a relaxed, comfortable fashion, even when you're dealing with a tense or unpleasant situation. I've since read numerous books on salesmanship, small-talk, and the like, and practice them, too.
I will always tend to over-analyze everything. But, I've learned to come off naturally, and not to put too much weight into single events like I used to. I've even gotten to the point where, although still tiring, social events and parties are lots of fun, and I'm even remodeling my home so it's a better place to throw social events!
As a freelance software engineer, I routinely run into the same problem: I write software to address a niche need - but have no idea what the needs of the users actually are.
Towards this end, it's typical for me to spend 25% of my time on the phone to various people, asking loads of questions, just so I can understand what the expectations are of the end users. What do they think when they see a button titled "Expand"?
I never cease to be amazed at how much difference it can make to end users to change a button or link from "Reports" to "Export", or from "Course" to "Class". Putting a "Save" button at the right location can make the difference between happy customer and pissed off, irate enemy. .
Getting UI stuff rght is much tougher than you'd think. I remember reading about the intense amount of time and money spent making the iPod nano "perfect".
PS: I LOVE the iPod nano - why can't they get the software right? I hvae a rather large MP3 collection on a network drive, and trying to get the iPod to work with the MP3 collection has been very, very, very frustrating... I have a song on a network drive. I can play said song. I double-click, and I hear the song I like. It's in a playlist, and when I double-click the playlist, I still hear said song.
I synchronize the iPod, and I don't get the song. No message explaining why, no errors noted anywhere, I can't drag/drop the file, even though I get a flash when I drag said file over the iPod icon. WTF?!?!
I love the nano - but the software for it SUCKS REAL BAD.
For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is.
Uh, don't think so. If gas is $6/gallon, people won't commute anymore. Neighborhoods will become more dense, community size will shrink. Freeways will open up, and neighborhood grocery will reappear.
It's simple economics - if travelling becomes more expensive, then anything that requires regular travel will become more expensive. Thus, that $70,000 job 1 hour's drive away might not be as lucrative as a $55,000 job much closer. So, eventually, either the $70,000 job gets filled by somebody more local (preventing both you and that other guy from tying up the freeway driving the combined 240 miles/day) or the job gets moved closer to where the people are, with more or less the same effect.
Or, you get the job, and telecommute. (which is how my whole career works - as a freelance programmer, I work routinely with clients hundreds of miles away, armed with my cordless phone and my laptop)
But, there's an interesting twist to rising the price of gasoline, espcially if raised by a tax... it could actually IMPROVE the economy as a whole.
If less oil is going overseas because people buy less of it, than that means other commodities will get more money. The price of foreign oil goes up against other commodities, people will buy oil less and other commodities more. Presumably, more of those commodities would be produced locally than in the Middle East, resulting a greater disposable income for local folks and less for the shieks.
This is especially true when you consider that many alternative energy sources become price-competitive at approx 1.5x-2x the price of oil!
Do not fear the rising price of oil. The basic principles of economics will take care of it, as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.
Looks like (for me) that my use of Fedora Core is falling into the same pattern that I always had with the earlier RedHat releases - every other one.
I started on RH 5.1. Briefly hit 6.2 on the way to 7.x. Still have a number of servers running 7.x.
Never touched 8.x, and was moving into 9 when RedHat EOL'd their "RedHat Linux" product.
Now, I'm using CentOS for most of my (smaller) servers, and Fedora for personal use. I used Fedora Core 1, never touched Core 2, now happy on Core 3. Haven't touched 4, but am considering 5.
Why upgrade on each one, unless there's some OMFG Do0d feature you just gotta have...
Take a reliable, stateful transport protocol (TCP) and lobotomize it so that connection state gets thrown away. This is http.
Hm. A system that reliably transfers files from server X, Y, and Z simultaneously to your computer. Three at once. Reliably. Sounds kinda cool, no?
Take a platform-independent object technology (Java) and lobotomize it so that dumb xml data structures get passed to "stateless" objects (in other words, procedures), and all processing must happen at one end of the connection. This is Web applications.
Perhaps you're confusing Java and Javascript?
Take gui technology and lobotomize it so that screens must refresh one page at a time. This is a browser.
So, before the browser, what technology was available that:
1) was cross-platform, 2) allowed bits of information from all over the world to be rendered togeter, 3) Included pictures and sound as well as text, 4) Did all the above cheaply and reliably.
I don't remember it, either.
So: having gone from a world of functional, stateful, distributed applications engineered to a true software model, we are now back (despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about "objects") to procedural programming and dumb terminals (meaning Web browsers).
What world are you thinking we came from? I remember when Kermit file transfer was a big advance...
In other words, 1970s technology with pictures.
Your car uses a technology that's now provably thousands of years old - the wheel. Do you complain about the age of this technology, or do you simply accept that it works?
Any half-wit can see that this situation is broken.
Perhaps only half-wits see it this way. How did you post this article again? Oh, yeah, using 70s technology! But you did it, didn't you? I read it, I responded. Neat, huh?
How do we fix it? The Ajax answer is to keep all of the lobotomized bits and build increasingly Byzantine layers on top of the existing mess in order to re-introduce the capabilities that were hacked off in the first place. Brilliant.
I'm glad you agree. It's not everyday that you end up with an application that:
1) Works no matter where you are,
2) Requires no additional install to work,
3) works with data from servers around the world,
4) Delivered in real time, on request,
5) Using stock, commodity hardware and communications technology.
Does this mean that we can find out if the cat is dead without opening the box? Sure sounds like it.
IANASPP (I Am Not A Sub-atomic Particle Physicist) but this seems to be quite a breakthrough that might save millions of subatomic cats from untimely deaths...
Anybody with some actual knowledge care to elucidate?
This statement is incorrect - Windows 9x Filesystem (for starters) makes your program's config files (or hell binary) overwriteable by anyone in the system.
Wanna be a real man? Encrypt your config files, and include, in the decrypted text, an MD5 hash of the memory variable prior to encryption.
What's that you say? Oh. Well, are you a pansy, or just lazy? Come on, man!
Let's say you "split" photon A into photons X and Y.
The, you ram photon X into something, like a brick, turning it into heat.
What happens to Y? If they're actually entangled and communicating with each other in some form, something should happen to photon Y. If not, it's just a matter of finding out Y by looking at X.
So, what happens to Y in this scenario? Anyone care to enlighten us?
IMHO, the Apache group has gotten a little too comfy with their market dominance and years of blind faith from unix users. Sounds like it's time to remind them that especially if you're already on an open-source platform, you have a lot of choices.
Yeah, they need a message. Look at that beautiful graph now - Apache's hit 70% this month!
Obviously, they're hitting that percentage because, like, people don't have a choice in the matter. It must be dirty pool playing on the part of the ASF... right?
I find the Apache config file fairly easy to set up. It works reliably and without complaint every day, with now just shy of 5 years of perfect uptime...
If we want to get through to the people, one thing we need to do is banish "consumer" from the public vocabulary. I, for one, am not a "consumer!" No, I am a customer, and more importantly, a citizen! I WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH!
Big words. Too bad they don't mean anything.
For starters, if they did, you wouldn't feel the need to pepper your statements with profanity.
Then, there's your tacit request for support, ("Now, who's with me") and the utter lack of any specificity. If they don't treat you as a "customer", what are you going to do, except maybe yell profanity?
If you really want to do something, then I suggest you do so. Start an organization, keep a membership, ask for dues, put up a website, print up some business cards, the whole shebang.
Doing so would really help you grow, help you become a bigger person, and help you see your true role in society. (hint: It's bigger than you think) But, if you don't do the above, if instead you sit in your mother's basement typing profanity, you'll get nowhere.
PS: If your mother pays the bill, you are a consumer, she is the customer.
Last time I checked you were not allowed to burn the US Flag, though.
Check again; I can burn any flag I like - it's protected by the US "free speech" ammendments.
A few years ago, I protested the war in Iraq here downtown. We held up signs to the cars going by, we chanted. Across the street, a "support our troops" group rallied, chanting their own mantras.
It got pretty ugly, insults flew, tensions rose. And, there were both city and county police there. I gained a incredible respect for my country when it was clear and apparent that the police weren't there to take sides, they were there to protect my protesting the actions of my own govornment. In short, my own govornment was helping me to make my case against my govornment.
I don't agree that the US record is perfect, since it clearly isn't. I disagree with the Iraq war; I think "King George" missed the boat so often I'm not sure he's aware one exists.
But ask yourself: in history, how many times has a country occupied another, at tremendous expense and cost of lives, only to liberate said country under a government that guarantees freedoms to its people, and then leaves? Yet, even with Iraq, we ASSUME that's what's going to happen, that when it's done, Iraq will stand on its own as a soveriegn nation. Just like we did in Vietnam, and in Korea, and in central Europe after World Wars I and II.
The US has done this repeatedly throughout its history - say what you want to, but even though the motives of the US haven't always been pristine, the actions taken have certainly been pretty generous.
And even if MS were so compelled, what really is in it for Redmond? It's probably the smallest market in the world, with a customer base measured in the thousands, and one that already has access to either operating systems with a long multicomputing heritage or to clustered Linux systems that, for the kinds of guys that set up and maintain supercomputer clusters, offers no unreasonable difficulties as far as usability.
Ever watch NASCAR? Cars going around in circles with signs plastered all over them: "PENZOIL", "SHELL", "BP", etc. It's all about getting your name out.
For Microsoft, the Supercomputer 500 is a big pissing ground. They've always been about the little potatoes of the personal computer - can they compete with the "big boys" in the top 500? And, can they do so publicly so they can say: "use the same O/S used by NNN to make a top 10 supercomputer!"
Where, by the way, they're getting dusted by the same O/S dusting them in commodity servers, and giving them a good run for their money in the embedded/cell-phone space.
So, they face a competitor that operates smoothly in the very large space, the very small space, and in the very profitable midrange, too. Can they take this lying down?
Software Engineering is making leaps and bounds, so there are many tools available for writing good software. The people who really know what they are doing have more at their disposal. However, more than ever, there are a very large number of incompetent developers out there. It's much easier to get into programming now than it was in the machine language/assembly/C days because things are much easier to use, and the tools are much more accessible. Combine that with the.com influx of bozos and you have alot of people spewing out crap code.
Reminds me of a study done on Taxi cabs in San Fransisco shortly after ABS (Antilock Braking Systems) came out. As expected, the accident rate for those with ABS was quite a bit lower than those without ABS. But the surprise was that the death toll was about the same either way!
Seems that those with ABS tended to offset the benefits of ABS simply by driving harder, pushing themselves closer to the line for safety as a result of the certainty that they achieved with ABS.
In other words, people tend to identify "acceptable risk" and when the level of risk reduces, people then engage in riskier behavior in order to gain an advantage. This is not a bad thing - utilizing an advantage is an important part of survival in a "survival of the fittest" universe.
This guy isn't seeing the opportunity battering ram that's beating down his door. He could be SET FOR LIFE if he played his cards right. He's already NOT going to die a slow horrible from AIDS as was originally predicted. That should be good enough, but now he has the chance to also be a multi-gazillionaire and save thousands of people from dying in the process. How in the hell could you turn down an opportunity like that?!?!?
Law of supply and demand - first you need a demand for something, and then that something needs to be sufficiently scarce so as to justify spending valuable resources on it.
It may be that he's just working on the "scarcity" part.
Just musing about the name. Think of your kitchen sink faucet. Now think of all the faucets in your house turned on at once. Now think of all the faucets on your street turned on too. Add all the faucets in your community. Keep on thinking of how many faucets in how many communities it would take to equal the raw power behind something so large as Niagra falls.
Dude. The water in my house all comes thru a 3/4" pipe. Turning all the faucets on would mean that they all dribble. Turn on the whole neighborhood, and I doubt a sprinkler would even sprinkle.
Coorporations aren't moral, nor are they immoral. (which is to say, NOT moral)
Coorpoations are amoral where the moral situation is irrelevant to the financial one. A company exists to make money. The shareholders invested money so that the company would make a return. If the company fails, the shareholders get pissed, and that often spells disaster for the company.
Many people say it's immoral to eat meat, and yet many people do. To a person, animal flesh is food. To a corporation, money is food, and like people, a corporation will do just about anything to ensure a consisten supply of food (money).
I bought a Rave MP 5 GB MP3 player at costco. It came with nice headphones, accessories, cables, power brick, etc, stored 5 GB, and cost just $129 at Costco.
Later, I bought a 2 GB iPod nano. Comparing the two, I find:
Rave: 1) Easy to load songs, but very slow to process them when done. I copied in about 1 GB of music, and it took some 15 minutes processing the songs before I could play music.
2) Lots of space.
3) Lots of accessories.
4) Ugly as the back end of a dog. Nobody would look at me carrying one and think: "Oh, how cool!"
5) No idea what the included software needs, I never needed it. I just plugged in the Rave into my LINUX laptop, copied the MP3s over, and then waited for it it to process the songs.
1) The iPod is slick. I don't notice it, I just notice that I'm listening to the song or music I want.
2) Freaking tiny!
3) Decent (but not large) disk space.
4) Sexy as a spouse in heat. Reaow!
5) iTunes software is about as intuitive as a window that says "Check Please to format (erase) ALL DATA ON DISK?" with one button that says "OK". It sucks. No way around it. How could an iPod so slick have software to run it that sucks so bad?
To match the accessories that came with the Rave, I had to spend almost twice as much. And, I think I probably would recommend to do so. The iPod works with my large MP3 collection, it lets you go right to the song you want, and it's FAST. I spent too much time settling for the Rave to recommend it at the lower pricepoint, unless cost is a very large concern.
What does this have to do with the Neruos? Well, the iPod nano has the interface DOWN. It's what you want, it generally works well (once you decipher the software), and has the style to pull it off for just about anybody.
Why waste your time on something else?
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
The same kind of sensationalist journalism not to long ago likened mad cow disease to a new sort of plague with predictions of obscene death rates when in reality it was statistically low.
I won't argue that Mad Cow Disease was overhyped. However, you make it sound as though no media attention at all should have been given to it. Y2K was mostly a non-issue because the media hyped it, everybody got ready for it, and were ready when it came, so it passed quietly.
From what I've read, avian flu has killed millions, we don't necesarily have a vaccine against it, and known strains with a high mortality rate now exist. Having avian flu breakout is definite and real, such as the very real threat to the modern banana. It's real, and if we ignored it, bananas as we know them (the cavendish) would cease to exist.
But, those that need to be, are hypersensitive to the problem, and work feverishly to find a solution to the problem - usually found.
Hypersensitivy to potential threats is part of millions of years of evolution. We pay no attention to the trees unless there might be a snake in one. Then, we pay very close attention. This is no different. I'm not particularly worried about avian flu simply because of all the media hype and attention placed on it.
I'm not sure I care whether or not this software can predict the next pop craze... but I wouldn't mind a more personalized version. Maybe something that analyzes my mp3 collection, and then automatically checks new releases and looks for tracks that correlate well with my preferences? It would be nice to have a system that pulls out the things I'm most interested in. And a piece of software would be more impartial than the media executives and promoters who want to sell me the "next big sound."
Uh, you're kidding, right?
My MP3 collection contains everything from Michael Buble to Depeche Mode to the Cranberries to Dr. Demento to quite a selection of classical music. (EG: Taichovsky, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Star Wars soundtrack)
Take a mix like that, and predict much of anything at all. I dare you.
As we embed more and more intelligence into the machines around us, Ray Kurzweil's singularity seems more and more real.
In fact, although we haven't yet achieve immortality, I'd argue that we've already crossed the threshold between biology and machines in many cases. Modern man is already inseparable from his technology. My son's insulin pump that calculates his insulin and automatically injects it, my mother-in-laws replacement hip, my software containing the combined wisdom of my business workday the past 2 years, the list goes on, and is getting longer every day.
At what point would we look back and say that we crossed the line, the point where the singularity as Ray forsees it, has been passed?
Remember Windows 95's marketing? "32-bit memory protection makes it uncrashable!" Remember Windows 98's marketing? "Even more stable than 95!" Remember Windows 2000's marketing? "Based on an NT core, it's more stable than the crash-prone Windows 9x!"
Heh - I remember when Win95 first came out. I went to the local Circuit City and asked why I'd want to buy a computer with Win95. His first response was that it was so much more stable than previous versions of Windows. He turned to the nearest computer and jiggered the mouse - it was frozen.
Mumbling something he went on to the net computer, to find it in a similar position. Finally, on the 3rd computer, he got it to respond, and then proceeded to show me the cool Start Menu.
Slashdot Mirror
Firewalls have become largely irrelevant because they stop people from doing things, so people specifically design applications to easily pierce a firewall!
Thus, the firewall becomes less and less relevant with time.
Originally, the great designers of IP gave us any number of protocols, and 65,534 ports in each protocol. Different applications could use different ports, and these ports would identify what application you wanted to connect to. Port 80 was used for web traffic, Email uses port 25. This gives incredible room for growth and expansion, and was "a good design". (TM)
Firewalls block all but ports 80, 25, 443, and maybe a few others. Thus, many applications are now built using ONLY one of these ports!
So now, we have the dog, the kitchen sink, Instant Messaging, RSS, XML/RPC, and god knows what else tunnelled over port 80. Dude, Like where's my firewall?
So, push comes to shove, there are no real shortcuts without a long term price.
I have some extended family that's not well off. (Think: low-income housing) They want to "have it all" but don't at all have the resources to do it well. (Think: Pentium-100, Win95)
Using the cheapest ISP imaginable. It's amazing to me how much time they'll spend just trying to get online, and how much !@#!@# they'll put up with their painfully slow, virus-laden computer, just for the status and joy of "being online".
They put up with the unbelievable to save $40. (Cost of antivirus) They do not understand the fundamentals of computing, nor do they have the resources to pay somebody who does.
It's a Spammer's paradise, this "free" municipal Wifi. How do communities prevent this from happening?
Introverted people tend to seriously overanalize situations and have difficulty relaxing in social enviornments. The result is conversation that feels forced, somthing that most people don't find attractive.
There, in a nutshell, you've identified most of my youth. As an adult, I've spent alot of time and effort practicing interpsonal communication skills, so that I could "interface" with other people comfortably.
It's probably been one of the best things I've ever done. Although I've since concluded that the organization is mostly a crock of sh17, the Scientology "Training Routines" or "TRs" helped me out tremendously. It's basically practice on how to talk and listen in a relaxed, comfortable fashion, even when you're dealing with a tense or unpleasant situation. I've since read numerous books on salesmanship, small-talk, and the like, and practice them, too.
I will always tend to over-analyze everything. But, I've learned to come off naturally, and not to put too much weight into single events like I used to. I've even gotten to the point where, although still tiring, social events and parties are lots of fun, and I'm even remodeling my home so it's a better place to throw social events!
As a freelance software engineer, I routinely run into the same problem: I write software to address a niche need - but have no idea what the needs of the users actually are.
Towards this end, it's typical for me to spend 25% of my time on the phone to various people, asking loads of questions, just so I can understand what the expectations are of the end users. What do they think when they see a button titled "Expand"?
I never cease to be amazed at how much difference it can make to end users to change a button or link from "Reports" to "Export", or from "Course" to "Class". Putting a "Save" button at the right location can make the difference between happy customer and pissed off, irate enemy. .
Getting UI stuff rght is much tougher than you'd think. I remember reading about the intense amount of time and money spent making the iPod nano "perfect".
PS: I LOVE the iPod nano - why can't they get the software right? I hvae a rather large MP3 collection on a network drive, and trying to get the iPod to work with the MP3 collection has been very, very, very frustrating... I have a song on a network drive. I can play said song. I double-click, and I hear the song I like. It's in a playlist, and when I double-click the playlist, I still hear said song.
I synchronize the iPod, and I don't get the song. No message explaining why, no errors noted anywhere, I can't drag/drop the file, even though I get a flash when I drag said file over the iPod icon. WTF?!?!
I love the nano - but the software for it SUCKS REAL BAD.
For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is.
Uh, don't think so. If gas is $6/gallon, people won't commute anymore. Neighborhoods will become more dense, community size will shrink. Freeways will open up, and neighborhood grocery will reappear.
It's simple economics - if travelling becomes more expensive, then anything that requires regular travel will become more expensive. Thus, that $70,000 job 1 hour's drive away might not be as lucrative as a $55,000 job much closer. So, eventually, either the $70,000 job gets filled by somebody more local (preventing both you and that other guy from tying up the freeway driving the combined 240 miles/day) or the job gets moved closer to where the people are, with more or less the same effect.
Or, you get the job, and telecommute. (which is how my whole career works - as a freelance programmer, I work routinely with clients hundreds of miles away, armed with my cordless phone and my laptop)
But, there's an interesting twist to rising the price of gasoline, espcially if raised by a tax... it could actually IMPROVE the economy as a whole.
If less oil is going overseas because people buy less of it, than that means other commodities will get more money. The price of foreign oil goes up against other commodities, people will buy oil less and other commodities more. Presumably, more of those commodities would be produced locally than in the Middle East, resulting a greater disposable income for local folks and less for the shieks.
This is especially true when you consider that many alternative energy sources become price-competitive at approx 1.5x-2x the price of oil!
Do not fear the rising price of oil. The basic principles of economics will take care of it, as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.
Looks like (for me) that my use of Fedora Core is falling into the same pattern that I always had with the earlier RedHat releases - every other one.
I started on RH 5.1. Briefly hit 6.2 on the way to 7.x. Still have a number of servers running 7.x.
Never touched 8.x, and was moving into 9 when RedHat EOL'd their "RedHat Linux" product.
Now, I'm using CentOS for most of my (smaller) servers, and Fedora for personal use. I used Fedora Core 1, never touched Core 2, now happy on Core 3. Haven't touched 4, but am considering 5.
Why upgrade on each one, unless there's some OMFG Do0d feature you just gotta have...
Wow. Very sardonic. Point-by-point:
Take a reliable, stateful transport protocol (TCP) and lobotomize it so that connection state gets thrown away. This is http.
Hm. A system that reliably transfers files from server X, Y, and Z simultaneously to your computer. Three at once. Reliably. Sounds kinda cool, no?
Take a platform-independent object technology (Java) and lobotomize it so that dumb xml data structures get passed to "stateless" objects (in other words, procedures), and all processing must happen at one end of the connection. This is Web applications.
Perhaps you're confusing Java and Javascript?
Take gui technology and lobotomize it so that screens must refresh one page at a time. This is a browser.
So, before the browser, what technology was available that:
1) was cross-platform,
2) allowed bits of information from all over the world to be rendered togeter,
3) Included pictures and sound as well as text,
4) Did all the above cheaply and reliably.
I don't remember it, either.
So: having gone from a world of functional, stateful, distributed applications engineered to a true software model, we are now back (despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about "objects") to procedural programming and dumb terminals (meaning Web browsers).
What world are you thinking we came from? I remember when Kermit file transfer was a big advance...
In other words, 1970s technology with pictures.
Your car uses a technology that's now provably thousands of years old - the wheel. Do you complain about the age of this technology, or do you simply accept that it works?
Any half-wit can see that this situation is broken.
Perhaps only half-wits see it this way. How did you post this article again? Oh, yeah, using 70s technology! But you did it, didn't you? I read it, I responded. Neat, huh?
How do we fix it? The Ajax answer is to keep all of the lobotomized bits and build increasingly Byzantine layers on top of the existing mess in order to re-introduce the capabilities that were hacked off in the first place. Brilliant.
I'm glad you agree. It's not everyday that you end up with an application that:
1) Works no matter where you are,
2) Requires no additional install to work,
3) works with data from servers around the world,
4) Delivered in real time, on request,
5) Using stock, commodity hardware and communications technology.
I agree with your assessment: BRILLIANT!
Does this mean that we can find out if the cat is dead without opening the box? Sure sounds like it.
IANASPP (I Am Not A Sub-atomic Particle Physicist) but this seems to be quite a breakthrough that might save millions of subatomic cats from untimely deaths...
Anybody with some actual knowledge care to elucidate?
This statement is incorrect - Windows 9x Filesystem (for starters) makes your program's config files (or hell binary) overwriteable by anyone in the system.
Wanna be a real man? Encrypt your config files, and include, in the decrypted text, an MD5 hash of the memory variable prior to encryption.
What's that you say? Oh. Well, are you a pansy, or just lazy? Come on, man!
Let's say you "split" photon A into photons X and Y.
The, you ram photon X into something, like a brick, turning it into heat.
What happens to Y? If they're actually entangled and communicating with each other in some form, something should happen to photon Y. If not, it's just a matter of finding out Y by looking at X.
So, what happens to Y in this scenario? Anyone care to enlighten us?
IMHO, the Apache group has gotten a little too comfy with their market dominance and years of blind faith from unix users. Sounds like it's time to remind them that especially if you're already on an open-source platform, you have a lot of choices.
Yeah, they need a message. Look at that beautiful graph now - Apache's hit 70% this month!
Obviously, they're hitting that percentage because, like, people don't have a choice in the matter. It must be dirty pool playing on the part of the ASF... right?
I find the Apache config file fairly easy to set up. It works reliably and without complaint every day, with now just shy of 5 years of perfect uptime...
Of course, you might consider this option... Pick your poison.
Any coping mechanism can easily become addictive (which, iirc, is exactly what the study says).
Ok, one by one:
Nail biting. Check
Sex. Check
Reading slashdot at midnight listening to moxy fruvous and lou bega.
Slashdot - check. Midnight - check. Lou Bega - check. (wow!)
Dominoes Nope. Not me. Even Dominoes pizza sucks.
Correcting people's grammar. Well, I've been known... the one that bugs me most is "him and me went to the store"... Ask my kids.
Shopping. Oh Jesus, dear God no. I hate shopping! Maybe I'm not such an addict.
Auto-erotic asphyxiation. That does it - no interest here. I'm going back to pot!
Is it just me, or does this article make you feel like you're already overdosed on something?
Moz on Fedora, the lettering is just all goofed up and quite hard to read...
If we want to get through to the people, one thing we need to do is banish "consumer" from the public vocabulary. I, for one, am not a "consumer!" No, I am a customer, and more importantly, a citizen! I WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH!
Big words. Too bad they don't mean anything.
For starters, if they did, you wouldn't feel the need to pepper your statements with profanity.
Then, there's your tacit request for support, ("Now, who's with me") and the utter lack of any specificity. If they don't treat you as a "customer", what are you going to do, except maybe yell profanity?
If you really want to do something, then I suggest you do so. Start an organization, keep a membership, ask for dues, put up a website, print up some business cards, the whole shebang.
Doing so would really help you grow, help you become a bigger person, and help you see your true role in society. (hint: It's bigger than you think) But, if you don't do the above, if instead you sit in your mother's basement typing profanity, you'll get nowhere.
PS: If your mother pays the bill, you are a consumer, she is the customer.
Last time I checked you were not allowed to burn the US Flag, though.
Check again; I can burn any flag I like - it's protected by the US "free speech" ammendments.
A few years ago, I protested the war in Iraq here downtown. We held up signs to the cars going by, we chanted. Across the street, a "support our troops" group rallied, chanting their own mantras.
It got pretty ugly, insults flew, tensions rose. And, there were both city and county police there. I gained a incredible respect for my country when it was clear and apparent that the police weren't there to take sides, they were there to protect my protesting the actions of my own govornment. In short, my own govornment was helping me to make my case against my govornment.
I don't agree that the US record is perfect, since it clearly isn't. I disagree with the Iraq war; I think "King George" missed the boat so often I'm not sure he's aware one exists.
But ask yourself: in history, how many times has a country occupied another, at tremendous expense and cost of lives, only to liberate said country under a government that guarantees freedoms to its people, and then leaves? Yet, even with Iraq, we ASSUME that's what's going to happen, that when it's done, Iraq will stand on its own as a soveriegn nation. Just like we did in Vietnam, and in Korea, and in central Europe after World Wars I and II.
The US has done this repeatedly throughout its history - say what you want to, but even though the motives of the US haven't always been pristine, the actions taken have certainly been pretty generous.
And even if MS were so compelled, what really is in it for Redmond? It's probably the smallest market in the world, with a customer base measured in the thousands, and one that already has access to either operating systems with a long multicomputing heritage or to clustered Linux systems that, for the kinds of guys that set up and maintain supercomputer clusters, offers no unreasonable difficulties as far as usability.
Ever watch NASCAR? Cars going around in circles with signs plastered all over them: "PENZOIL", "SHELL", "BP", etc. It's all about getting your name out.
For Microsoft, the Supercomputer 500 is a big pissing ground. They've always been about the little potatoes of the personal computer - can they compete with the "big boys" in the top 500? And, can they do so publicly so they can say: "use the same O/S used by NNN to make a top 10 supercomputer!"
Where, by the way, they're getting dusted by the same O/S dusting them in commodity servers, and giving them a good run for their money in the embedded/cell-phone space.
So, they face a competitor that operates smoothly in the very large space, the very small space, and in the very profitable midrange, too. Can they take this lying down?
Software Engineering is making leaps and bounds, so there are many tools available for writing good software. The people who really know what they are doing have more at their disposal. However, more than ever, there are a very large number of incompetent developers out there. It's much easier to get into programming now than it was in the machine language/assembly/C days because things are much easier to use, and the tools are much more accessible. Combine that with the .com influx of bozos and you have alot of people spewing out crap code.
Reminds me of a study done on Taxi cabs in San Fransisco shortly after ABS (Antilock Braking Systems) came out. As expected, the accident rate for those with ABS was quite a bit lower than those without ABS. But the surprise was that the death toll was about the same either way!
Seems that those with ABS tended to offset the benefits of ABS simply by driving harder, pushing themselves closer to the line for safety as a result of the certainty that they achieved with ABS.
In other words, people tend to identify "acceptable risk" and when the level of risk reduces, people then engage in riskier behavior in order to gain an advantage. This is not a bad thing - utilizing an advantage is an important part of survival in a "survival of the fittest" universe.
This guy isn't seeing the opportunity battering ram that's beating down his door. He could be SET FOR LIFE if he played his cards right. He's already NOT going to die a slow horrible from AIDS as was originally predicted. That should be good enough, but now he has the chance to also be a multi-gazillionaire and save thousands of people from dying in the process. How in the hell could you turn down an opportunity like that?!?!?
Law of supply and demand - first you need a demand for something, and then that something needs to be sufficiently scarce so as to justify spending valuable resources on it.
It may be that he's just working on the "scarcity" part.
Just musing about the name. Think of your kitchen sink faucet.
Now think of all the faucets in your house turned on at once.
Now think of all the faucets on your street turned on too.
Add all the faucets in your community.
Keep on thinking of how many faucets in how many communities it would take to equal the raw power behind something so large as Niagra falls.
Dude. The water in my house all comes thru a 3/4" pipe. Turning all the faucets on would mean that they all dribble. Turn on the whole neighborhood, and I doubt a sprinkler would even sprinkle.
What kind of neighborhood are YOU from?
Coorporations aren't moral, nor are they immoral. (which is to say, NOT moral)
Coorpoations are amoral where the moral situation is irrelevant to the financial one. A company exists to make money. The shareholders invested money so that the company would make a return. If the company fails, the shareholders get pissed, and that often spells disaster for the company.
Many people say it's immoral to eat meat, and yet many people do. To a person, animal flesh is food. To a corporation, money is food, and like people, a corporation will do just about anything to ensure a consisten supply of food (money).
I bought a Rave MP 5 GB MP3 player at costco. It came with nice headphones, accessories, cables, power brick, etc, stored 5 GB, and cost just $129 at Costco.
Later, I bought a 2 GB iPod nano. Comparing the two, I find:
Rave:
1) Easy to load songs, but very slow to process them when done. I copied in about 1 GB of music, and it took some 15 minutes processing the songs before I could play music.
2) Lots of space.
3) Lots of accessories.
4) Ugly as the back end of a dog. Nobody would look at me carrying one and think: "Oh, how cool!"
5) No idea what the included software needs, I never needed it. I just plugged in the Rave into my LINUX laptop, copied the MP3s over, and then waited for it it to process the songs.
1) The iPod is slick. I don't notice it, I just notice that I'm listening to the song or music I want.
2) Freaking tiny!
3) Decent (but not large) disk space.
4) Sexy as a spouse in heat. Reaow!
5) iTunes software is about as intuitive as a window that says "Check Please to format (erase) ALL DATA ON DISK?" with one button that says "OK". It sucks. No way around it. How could an iPod so slick have software to run it that sucks so bad?
To match the accessories that came with the Rave, I had to spend almost twice as much. And, I think I probably would recommend to do so. The iPod works with my large MP3 collection, it lets you go right to the song you want, and it's FAST. I spent too much time settling for the Rave to recommend it at the lower pricepoint, unless cost is a very large concern.
What does this have to do with the Neruos? Well, the iPod nano has the interface DOWN. It's what you want, it generally works well (once you decipher the software), and has the style to pull it off for just about anybody.
Why waste your time on something else?
The same kind of sensationalist journalism not to long ago likened mad cow disease to a new sort of plague with predictions of obscene death rates when in reality it was statistically low.
I won't argue that Mad Cow Disease was overhyped. However, you make it sound as though no media attention at all should have been given to it. Y2K was mostly a non-issue because the media hyped it, everybody got ready for it, and were ready when it came, so it passed quietly.
From what I've read, avian flu has killed millions, we don't necesarily have a vaccine against it, and known strains with a high mortality rate now exist. Having avian flu breakout is definite and real, such as the very real threat to the modern banana. It's real, and if we ignored it, bananas as we know them (the cavendish) would cease to exist.
But, those that need to be, are hypersensitive to the problem, and work feverishly to find a solution to the problem - usually found.
Hypersensitivy to potential threats is part of millions of years of evolution. We pay no attention to the trees unless there might be a snake in one. Then, we pay very close attention. This is no different. I'm not particularly worried about avian flu simply because of all the media hype and attention placed on it.
More power to 'em - they're protecting ME.
I'm not sure I care whether or not this software can predict the next pop craze... but I wouldn't mind a more personalized version. Maybe something that analyzes my mp3 collection, and then automatically checks new releases and looks for tracks that correlate well with my preferences? It would be nice to have a system that pulls out the things I'm most interested in. And a piece of software would be more impartial than the media executives and promoters who want to sell me the "next big sound."
Uh, you're kidding, right?
My MP3 collection contains everything from Michael Buble to Depeche Mode to the Cranberries to Dr. Demento to quite a selection of classical music. (EG: Taichovsky, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Star Wars soundtrack)
Take a mix like that, and predict much of anything at all. I dare you.
As we embed more and more intelligence into the machines around us, Ray Kurzweil's singularity seems more and more real.
In fact, although we haven't yet achieve immortality, I'd argue that we've already crossed the threshold between biology and machines in many cases. Modern man is already inseparable from his technology. My son's insulin pump that calculates his insulin and automatically injects it, my mother-in-laws replacement hip, my software containing the combined wisdom of my business workday the past 2 years, the list goes on, and is getting longer every day.
At what point would we look back and say that we crossed the line, the point where the singularity as Ray forsees it, has been passed?
Remember Windows 95's marketing? "32-bit memory protection makes it uncrashable!" Remember Windows 98's marketing? "Even more stable than 95!" Remember Windows 2000's marketing? "Based on an NT core, it's more stable than the crash-prone Windows 9x!"
Heh - I remember when Win95 first came out. I went to the local Circuit City and asked why I'd want to buy a computer with Win95. His first response was that it was so much more stable than previous versions of Windows. He turned to the nearest computer and jiggered the mouse - it was frozen.
Mumbling something he went on to the net computer, to find it in a similar position. Finally, on the 3rd computer, he got it to respond, and then proceeded to show me the cool Start Menu.
I didn't buy it for over a year after that demo.