This is hardly new. Other people have already pointed out how your criticism applies equally well to services such as gmail, so I'll just point out that the system account has always existed in NT-based systems, and has never been available for interactive log on. It's never been a problem, however, as there's nothing that you need that level of access for - you can maintain the system, install and uninstall applications and even - if you wish - delete critical system files without it; Administrator is perfectly sufficient for that.
If you prefer to own your own copy of an OS, you will have to choose free software over Vista.
Nice FUD, but not being able to log in with a machine account is hardly a basis for claiming that you don't own the OS; it will still do exactly what I wish it to.
Well, geeks and people who have to design two or three different implementations of a web page so it will show up correctly for all visitors.
Those people are geeks. They may not care about software, hardware, technology, etc, but they're geeks all the same.
Oh, and the people who have to pay those developers who are now putting in overtime
You clearly don't work in the web business. Paid overtime for cross-browser compatibility fixes that should've been included in the original estimates? You wish.
the content authors whose work is framed by the pages that the developers make (and want to appear equally professional to all visitors)...don't care about the browser wars, care only that the stupid devs have fucked their stuff up *again*. They neither know nor care why. (And why should they? It's not their problem.)
and maybe the investors in the company that hired the developers who want to get to IPO and get their money out as soon as possible
Those investors most likely won't even really understand what it is the company does, beyond "makes websites". All they care about is the quarterly figures; how those figures come to be is none of their concern, that's what the board is there for. The board don't know or care about the details either, they come up with the strategic direction; the details are what the middle-management is for. The middle-management don't know or care about browser incompatibilities, development methodologies, technology choice, etc, that's what their direct reports (generally project managers and team leads) are for. The project managers and team leads do care, but only in so far as it makes things take longer (or occasionally impossible) and they're the ones that have to sort out budgeting and resourcing, and explain to the management and the client why things are taking longer and costing more.
The only ones that really understand or care about cross-browser compatibility issues are those of us that have to deal with them (and as a programmer rather than a designer/interface developer, even I don't have to deal with them very often). No-one else cares in the least bit as long as stuff works and looks good. Hell, there was a time when even the designers I had to work with neither knew nor cared about that sort of stuff; thankfully those days are long gone.
At least, that's my impression based on 7.5 years of working in the web, building bespoke websites. YMMV.
Learning Java as a C# programmer is a joke, the basics are 95% the same
I'll second that having come from the other direction - I'm a professional Java programmer and sometime hobbiest C# programmer. While I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert and I've not done anything I'd consider particularly complicated (a couple of fairly noddy webapps and a couple of basic D3D things), C# was incredibly easy to pick up.
How convenient that the country that first got to the Moon also got to define that as the finishing post. Russia put the first satellite, the first living creature, the first man and the first woman in space, and I think it was a Russian cosmonaut that performed the first EVA, although I could be wrong on that one (and don't have time to google it). They were also the first to put an object on the Moon.
I don't mean to belittle NASA's achievements, but to simply say "The US won the space race" is disingenuous.
Neither is it C# - you'll be wanting Integer, not Int, except that for large amounts of number crunching that's a truly horrible idea. Mind you, for large amounts of number crunching Java isn't a particularly good idea in the first place if performance is key.
The network admins. Won't apply patches? You don't get network access. Won't run AV software? You don't get network access. Infected with known malware? You lose network access until it's cleaned up.
Or you could go with the paranoid conspiracy theory and assume that MS will shoot themselves in the foot by trying to close out competing OSes at the network level; that would be the slashdot way, after all.
However the OSS community did not make the decision to make Win9x obsolete and change the existing versions of windows in such a way that they are incompatible (from a development perspective), Microsoft did.
No, but the OSS community (or at least the Mozilla devs) did choose to use the features that make them incompatible. FF2 runs just fine on all the currently available versions of Windows, so it's not as though it's not possible to make a Gecko-based browser do so.
That's not a criticism, mind - I happen to believe that in the end, you have to sacrifice backwards compatibility; the trick is to do it at the appropriate time. Your comment, however, makes it sound as though it's MS's fault, which it isn't. They've merely made it possible, they've not made it mandatory.
Which differs from the scope of changes in Firefox 2 how, exactly? While you're at it, what bearing does it have on whether or not it's technically correct to call this a Firefox alpha?
Besides, users don't care (or even know, for the most part) *where* changes are made, they just care that their experience is better or at least no worse. In that respect, this is a Firefox alpha as much as it is a Gecko one, and your comment is simply incorrect, as IE7 introduced a large number of very visible changes (ie the sort the user actually notices).
Here in the UK, I was notified of it being available by Automatic Update at work on Monday. As I work in the web and we currently have no strategy for dealing with IE7*, I refused and set it not to remind me about it. I have heard of friends who have autoupdate set to download and install automatically who were surprised to find that they'd been upgraded, but that was recently, certainly not "last month".
Still, assuming that everyone is in the same situation as you is hardly a uniquely American trait (although at times, it does seem to be more prevalent amongst our Yankie cousins)
(* Don't shoot me, I'm just a lowly programmer and can't force the issue)
I can put an unpatched RedHat Linux system on the public Internet and download patches without worrying about it.
Friend of mine did that until he realised that it'd been rooted a few weeks ago. Fortunately he didn't lose anything important, but it cost him an evening to work out what had happened then reformat and reinstall.
Don't assume that Linux is impervious to attack, as it most certainly isn't.
The fact that you can't even imagine a server without a dedicated firewall in front of it speaks volumes.
Yes - it says that I work at a company with a dedicated systems department who are paid (in part) not to leave things to chance. It says that I work with clients who mandate multiple firewalls on their networks, with fully separated subnets and as little as possible in the DMZ. It says that I'm willing to spend less than I spend on a night out to be that much more confident that my PC is safe from unwanted attack.
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." [or popularly, "The dose makes the poison."] - Paracelsus.
Sounds like a great idea, given the danger of putting an unpatched PC on the Internet to download security updates.
Or you could just buy the firewall you really should have anyway and be done with it. Seriously, I can't imagine anyone would try to argue that it's acceptable to put a server out on the net without a firewall in front of it, so why should a desktop PC be any different? That way you get to protect your unpatched Linux box too.
I get the feeling that most people commenting on this article have no idea how laws and the criminal justice system work.
No, you cannot realistically ensure that all registered sex offenders have a single email address/IM address/etc and that they register them. What you do do, however, is make it a legal requirement to register all your electronic contact details if you're a registered sex offender, then if you catch someone violating the law, you've something else to charge them with.
This sort of thing is done all the time; to drag out an old example, it's legal to own a crowbar, it's legal to transport that crowbar from one place to another, but if you're caught in the act of burglary with a crowbar on you you'll most likely be charged with going equipped (or equivalent) because of it, as well as with burglary and anything else they can make stick.
By your logic, registering your vehicle is stupid, as you can just change the plates. Do that though and get pulled over for something else, and you're in a whole heap more trouble. Same thing here - if a registered sex offender is found to have an address that they've not registered, they're for it.
Now I don't happen to think that it's a good idea, but not because you can easily sign up for another account.
Re:New features with specification references
on
Java SE 6 Released
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· Score: 1
BTW, why isn't this on the front page? All the fussing about the possible new license was there but not the product publishment itself.
One could almost conclude that slashdot (or at least its editors) care more about the licence that a piece of software is released under, than the software itself.
They're coming out with the new versions awfully fast lately.
Are they? Java 5 was released a little over 2 years ago; my mail about it to one of our internal talk groups at work was sent on 30th September 2004 (I found it while sending a similar one about Java 6 a little while ago).
For what it's worth, my company is still using 1.4 for all new work; hopefully this will inspire a move to at least 1.5...
Going from just booted to back where I was and working again takes a hell of a lot longer than just booting the machine for some people. I have a lot of stuff running that I actually need for my job - Eclipse, a couple of PuTTY sessions and 3 instances of WebLogic, plus Outlook, maybe Word or Excel, FireFox (for documentation as well as general stuff), a couple of IEs (testing the site I'm working on), etc.
Switch my machine off over lunch? I already try to take as little time over lunch as possible most days, grabbing a sandwich and eating it at my desk. Switch it off over breaks? A break is going to the toilet or making a cup of coffee.
That said, I do turn my monitor off overnight, and my home PC is switched off every night, but my work PC stays on. I guess I could hibernate it each night, but that's not something I've thought to do (and resuming from hibernation generally takes longer than booting anyway, especially as I actually use most of its 2GB of RAM).
The media and anti-gun zealots have tempered the fears of generations of people that think that guns are inherently dangerous.
Guns *are* inherently dangerous - but so is gas, electricity, and many other things we have in our homes. The only question is whether the benefits outweigh the dangers.
Certainly all the UK galleries etc claim that they own a normal copyright on the reproductions they make. If this is true
Why wouldn't it be true? If you record yourself performing Beethoven's Fifth, you own the copyright on that recording regardless of the fact that the music itself is public domain. Similarly if you reprint a work by Shakespeare, etc.
I can't imagine that the reproductions that galleries sell are any different in that respect.
Also, as far as photographing the paintings goes, the people running museum/gallery is within their rights to disallow photography on their premises - or blowing your nose, speaking too loudly or too quietly, eating milk chocolate (but not dark), or anything else that doesn't fall foul of anti-discrimination laws (eg banning the use of a wheelchair will likely be illegal). You have no inherent right to be in the building, and they can ask you to leave if they want.
So, when I (a programmer) leave my current company, I get to demand all of my code back? I can't permanently transfer copyright on code I write to the people who commission me to write it? I can't permanently transfer copyright to the FSF on GPLed code that I write?
I appreciate where you're coming from, but the idea isn't going to fly. Copyright doesn't just pertain to music and films, and I don't see anything special about them that would warrant treating them differently to other forms of copyrightable works.
The classic British furniture designers made and sold design books. These were protected by the copyright of the era.
What were protected by copyright, the designs or the books? You certainly couldn't reproduce the book full of designs, but to be of any use at all as a book, you'd need to be able to make objects following the designs within it.
I appreciate that you can protect a design, I'm just not sure that that's an example of a design being protected in the way you mean. (I'm also not entirely sure what you actually mean, as your sentence structure is ambiguous)
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly new. Other people have already pointed out how your criticism applies equally well to services such as gmail, so I'll just point out that the system account has always existed in NT-based systems, and has never been available for interactive log on. It's never been a problem, however, as there's nothing that you need that level of access for - you can maintain the system, install and uninstall applications and even - if you wish - delete critical system files without it; Administrator is perfectly sufficient for that.
If you prefer to own your own copy of an OS, you will have to choose free software over Vista.
Nice FUD, but not being able to log in with a machine account is hardly a basis for claiming that you don't own the OS; it will still do exactly what I wish it to.
Well, geeks and people who have to design two or three different implementations of a web page so it will show up correctly for all visitors.
...don't care about the browser wars, care only that the stupid devs have fucked their stuff up *again*. They neither know nor care why. (And why should they? It's not their problem.)
Those people are geeks. They may not care about software, hardware, technology, etc, but they're geeks all the same.
Oh, and the people who have to pay those developers who are now putting in overtime
You clearly don't work in the web business. Paid overtime for cross-browser compatibility fixes that should've been included in the original estimates? You wish.
the content authors whose work is framed by the pages that the developers make (and want to appear equally professional to all visitors)
and maybe the investors in the company that hired the developers who want to get to IPO and get their money out as soon as possible
Those investors most likely won't even really understand what it is the company does, beyond "makes websites". All they care about is the quarterly figures; how those figures come to be is none of their concern, that's what the board is there for. The board don't know or care about the details either, they come up with the strategic direction; the details are what the middle-management is for. The middle-management don't know or care about browser incompatibilities, development methodologies, technology choice, etc, that's what their direct reports (generally project managers and team leads) are for. The project managers and team leads do care, but only in so far as it makes things take longer (or occasionally impossible) and they're the ones that have to sort out budgeting and resourcing, and explain to the management and the client why things are taking longer and costing more.
The only ones that really understand or care about cross-browser compatibility issues are those of us that have to deal with them (and as a programmer rather than a designer/interface developer, even I don't have to deal with them very often). No-one else cares in the least bit as long as stuff works and looks good. Hell, there was a time when even the designers I had to work with neither knew nor cared about that sort of stuff; thankfully those days are long gone.
At least, that's my impression based on 7.5 years of working in the web, building bespoke websites. YMMV.
More to the point, 9 women can't have a baby in 1 month; throwing more people at a task doesn't necessarily make it go any faster.
Learning Java as a C# programmer is a joke, the basics are 95% the same
I'll second that having come from the other direction - I'm a professional Java programmer and sometime hobbiest C# programmer. While I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert and I've not done anything I'd consider particularly complicated (a couple of fairly noddy webapps and a couple of basic D3D things), C# was incredibly easy to pick up.
How convenient that the country that first got to the Moon also got to define that as the finishing post. Russia put the first satellite, the first living creature, the first man and the first woman in space, and I think it was a Russian cosmonaut that performed the first EVA, although I could be wrong on that one (and don't have time to google it). They were also the first to put an object on the Moon.
I don't mean to belittle NASA's achievements, but to simply say "The US won the space race" is disingenuous.
Java is not C++.
Neither is it C# - you'll be wanting Integer, not Int, except that for large amounts of number crunching that's a truly horrible idea. Mind you, for large amounts of number crunching Java isn't a particularly good idea in the first place if performance is key.
Please see this post for refutations of your first few points (the rest I'll let stand as being pure speculation at this point).
The network admins. Won't apply patches? You don't get network access. Won't run AV software? You don't get network access. Infected with known malware? You lose network access until it's cleaned up.
Or you could go with the paranoid conspiracy theory and assume that MS will shoot themselves in the foot by trying to close out competing OSes at the network level; that would be the slashdot way, after all.
However the OSS community did not make the decision to make Win9x obsolete and change the existing versions of windows in such a way that they are incompatible (from a development perspective), Microsoft did.
No, but the OSS community (or at least the Mozilla devs) did choose to use the features that make them incompatible. FF2 runs just fine on all the currently available versions of Windows, so it's not as though it's not possible to make a Gecko-based browser do so.
That's not a criticism, mind - I happen to believe that in the end, you have to sacrifice backwards compatibility; the trick is to do it at the appropriate time. Your comment, however, makes it sound as though it's MS's fault, which it isn't. They've merely made it possible, they've not made it mandatory.
Which differs from the scope of changes in Firefox 2 how, exactly? While you're at it, what bearing does it have on whether or not it's technically correct to call this a Firefox alpha?
Besides, users don't care (or even know, for the most part) *where* changes are made, they just care that their experience is better or at least no worse. In that respect, this is a Firefox alpha as much as it is a Gecko one, and your comment is simply incorrect, as IE7 introduced a large number of very visible changes (ie the sort the user actually notices).
Your English appears to be excellent, but "English" and "German" are proper nouns and so deserve initial capital letters.
Here in the UK, I was notified of it being available by Automatic Update at work on Monday. As I work in the web and we currently have no strategy for dealing with IE7*, I refused and set it not to remind me about it. I have heard of friends who have autoupdate set to download and install automatically who were surprised to find that they'd been upgraded, but that was recently, certainly not "last month".
Still, assuming that everyone is in the same situation as you is hardly a uniquely American trait (although at times, it does seem to be more prevalent amongst our Yankie cousins)
(* Don't shoot me, I'm just a lowly programmer and can't force the issue)
I can put an unpatched RedHat Linux system on the public Internet and download patches without worrying about it.
Friend of mine did that until he realised that it'd been rooted a few weeks ago. Fortunately he didn't lose anything important, but it cost him an evening to work out what had happened then reformat and reinstall.
Don't assume that Linux is impervious to attack, as it most certainly isn't.
The fact that you can't even imagine a server without a dedicated firewall in front of it speaks volumes.
Yes - it says that I work at a company with a dedicated systems department who are paid (in part) not to leave things to chance. It says that I work with clients who mandate multiple firewalls on their networks, with fully separated subnets and as little as possible in the DMZ. It says that I'm willing to spend less than I spend on a night out to be that much more confident that my PC is safe from unwanted attack.
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." [or popularly, "The dose makes the poison."] - Paracelsus.
Sounds like a great idea, given the danger of putting an unpatched PC on the Internet to download security updates.
Or you could just buy the firewall you really should have anyway and be done with it. Seriously, I can't imagine anyone would try to argue that it's acceptable to put a server out on the net without a firewall in front of it, so why should a desktop PC be any different? That way you get to protect your unpatched Linux box too.
He was moaning that it was *too* obvious, not that it wasn't obvious enough. Perversely, he seems to want to be taken in when people lie to him...
I get the feeling that most people commenting on this article have no idea how laws and the criminal justice system work.
No, you cannot realistically ensure that all registered sex offenders have a single email address/IM address/etc and that they register them. What you do do, however, is make it a legal requirement to register all your electronic contact details if you're a registered sex offender, then if you catch someone violating the law, you've something else to charge them with.
This sort of thing is done all the time; to drag out an old example, it's legal to own a crowbar, it's legal to transport that crowbar from one place to another, but if you're caught in the act of burglary with a crowbar on you you'll most likely be charged with going equipped (or equivalent) because of it, as well as with burglary and anything else they can make stick.
By your logic, registering your vehicle is stupid, as you can just change the plates. Do that though and get pulled over for something else, and you're in a whole heap more trouble. Same thing here - if a registered sex offender is found to have an address that they've not registered, they're for it.
Now I don't happen to think that it's a good idea, but not because you can easily sign up for another account.
BTW, why isn't this on the front page? All the fussing about the possible new license was there but not the product publishment itself.
One could almost conclude that slashdot (or at least its editors) care more about the licence that a piece of software is released under, than the software itself.
They're coming out with the new versions awfully fast lately.
Are they? Java 5 was released a little over 2 years ago; my mail about it to one of our internal talk groups at work was sent on 30th September 2004 (I found it while sending a similar one about Java 6 a little while ago).
For what it's worth, my company is still using 1.4 for all new work; hopefully this will inspire a move to at least 1.5...
Going from just booted to back where I was and working again takes a hell of a lot longer than just booting the machine for some people. I have a lot of stuff running that I actually need for my job - Eclipse, a couple of PuTTY sessions and 3 instances of WebLogic, plus Outlook, maybe Word or Excel, FireFox (for documentation as well as general stuff), a couple of IEs (testing the site I'm working on), etc.
Switch my machine off over lunch? I already try to take as little time over lunch as possible most days, grabbing a sandwich and eating it at my desk. Switch it off over breaks? A break is going to the toilet or making a cup of coffee.
That said, I do turn my monitor off overnight, and my home PC is switched off every night, but my work PC stays on. I guess I could hibernate it each night, but that's not something I've thought to do (and resuming from hibernation generally takes longer than booting anyway, especially as I actually use most of its 2GB of RAM).
I rather enjoy playing online FPSs - in fact, I do it for free in my spare time. I still routinely get my butt kicked.
The media and anti-gun zealots have tempered the fears of generations of people that think that guns are inherently dangerous.
Guns *are* inherently dangerous - but so is gas, electricity, and many other things we have in our homes. The only question is whether the benefits outweigh the dangers.
Certainly all the UK galleries etc claim that they own a normal copyright on the reproductions they make. If this is true
Why wouldn't it be true? If you record yourself performing Beethoven's Fifth, you own the copyright on that recording regardless of the fact that the music itself is public domain. Similarly if you reprint a work by Shakespeare, etc.
I can't imagine that the reproductions that galleries sell are any different in that respect.
Also, as far as photographing the paintings goes, the people running museum/gallery is within their rights to disallow photography on their premises - or blowing your nose, speaking too loudly or too quietly, eating milk chocolate (but not dark), or anything else that doesn't fall foul of anti-discrimination laws (eg banning the use of a wheelchair will likely be illegal). You have no inherent right to be in the building, and they can ask you to leave if they want.
So, when I (a programmer) leave my current company, I get to demand all of my code back? I can't permanently transfer copyright on code I write to the people who commission me to write it? I can't permanently transfer copyright to the FSF on GPLed code that I write?
I appreciate where you're coming from, but the idea isn't going to fly. Copyright doesn't just pertain to music and films, and I don't see anything special about them that would warrant treating them differently to other forms of copyrightable works.
The classic British furniture designers made and sold design books. These were protected by the copyright of the era.
What were protected by copyright, the designs or the books? You certainly couldn't reproduce the book full of designs, but to be of any use at all as a book, you'd need to be able to make objects following the designs within it.
I appreciate that you can protect a design, I'm just not sure that that's an example of a design being protected in the way you mean. (I'm also not entirely sure what you actually mean, as your sentence structure is ambiguous)