As a Java developer this is no problem. Should be the same for the C# crowd. If you are using C or C++ then maybe its time to modernize rather than drag the fetid body of your application to 64-bit (Windows). Even 64-bit Windows platforms won't last forever.
Unix has been 64-bit for a long time. It's only the Windows crew who are now starting to move.
I hope the reviewer is suitably chastened by this experience. Understanding your likely reader is an very important skill in (technical) writing.
Realizing that people come from all sorts of backgrounds should not be a surprise. Each of those people may be very intelligent, they just have a specialty that is not in the same field as the writer. Therefore it is the mark of a competent writer that they'll at least try to expand an acronym the first time they use it. An even better writer might even find a single sentence that explains the concept well.
Poor writers (eg. many soft-science academics and marketers) often obfuscate simple concepts behind jargon and convoluted sentence construction. Their pronouncements can often be written in a much more straightforward way, although that would often reveal that the "Emperor has no clothes".
The best writers write simply, use the least complicated word that fits the purpose, and consider possible conceptual pitfalls of readers so try to write unambiguously.
What is surprising (to me at least) is that the unsecured WiFi was illegal in the first place. I find that disturbing that Finnish laws are so intrusive in the first place. Maybe tolerance of such things is why they have one of the most peaceful and least corrupt countries in the World. However, the original law shows the Government has no problem reaching into individual freedoms (yes, I know that Finland is not alone in this).
It is interesting that many decision makers choose solutions that become obsolescent by design. By this, I mean that some products are deliberately deprecated and made incompatible with later versions by their developer in order to force the purchaser is made to re-buy what is essentially the same functionality over and over again. This behavior makes less sense when there are often usable alternatives that don't suffer the same vendor deprecation. This applies to software/development stacks, operating systems, document formats etc.
Ooops. Forgot to mention that I have another relevant data point. My nephews spend more time playing Counterstrike rather than PS3. The reason, all the mods for Counterstrike made by the community piques their interest. Even better, this costs them nothing. Sony loses from misses sales ('opportunity cost') since the 'network effect' is weakened for their platform.
Thanks for your reply. Incidentally I'm in New Zealand not the USA - and we have a slightly different culture (although increasing convergent over time).
I wasn't trying to say I have inifite resources, far from it - sorry if it sounded like that - rather that Sony peeved me as an indie game developer that I'm not interested in their platform or their future platforms unless they demonstrably change their ways.
In the end it comes to which platform wins the development effort of relatively small number (thousands) of people who actually *create* the games. Whoever wins the developers, for whatever reason, wins the console wars. Having a more closed platform than your competitors is not a competitive advantage.
I bought a PS3 with the intent to learn to program it. Even put on the version of Ubuntu for it. Then I found not only did the graphics access perform terribly (software framebuffer with no hardware acclerated rendering) but that was never going to change unless you paid US$10,000 and accepted their conditions of distribution. Double suck when despite Sony crowing about supporting Linux they actually never intended to make it truly open. Looked at XNA for Xbox360 but they had control over how you distributed your own work as well - so that was a non-starter.
After buying a MacBook Pro I also found that more open but Java updates were slow in coming (I mostly use JoGL OpenGL and Java2D since they're both portable between Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris and I use all of these). So I gave my PS3 to my nephews - which means Sony loses money since they subsidized the cost of the PS3 but I bought only a few games for it (so they didn't recoup their subsidy). My main graphics development work is now being done on a PC running Ubuntu/Windows7. I not going to buy a PS4 when that comes out and probably won't buy another Mac.
Incidentally a "theory" is more than a hypothesis that has "stood the test of time for a while". In general a hypothesis is a testable prediction, while a theory is a conceptual framework that allows you to make testable predictions. Subtle difference but I understand what you were trying to say (you were modded +5 too, well done).
Fine structure constant is defined by other quantities but is not yet determined ab-initio by any theory. It still relies on measurement to define it (eg. depends on an empirical constant). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on worrying about d(alpha)/dt yet alpha still isn't understood fully.
Same with cosmology (among other fields), all these wild theories/hypotheses yet if you look even at measurements on the galactic scale (as I did during my PhD in astrophysics) you see how poor they are (which is why estimates of the total mass and distances in our galaxy vary by up to an order of magnitude).
All I was trying to say is that there are so many theories out there that there isn't much point in getting wound up about one over the other. Better to keep an open mind and try and understand the limits of the actual measurements.
Anyone can propose a theory. There is no shortage of speculative theories out there. Creating a theory is easy, even philosophers can do that. 'Proving' that the theory is not false the hard bit - something that sets the physicists apart from the philosophers. I'm not trying to bash philosophers here, since they have their place, merely trying to say that theories are pretty much 'dime a dozen' these days - but experimental verification of them is a much more rare and precious thing. That's why I stopped reading about all the whacky things the Universe could be doing - and concentrated on what is and isn't known about what it actually does do.
Yes, the the employer has no rights to the code written *before* you were hired. That is copyright to you. All the stuff you wrote while working for them is theirs.
Thanks for your information Shava. Yes, I have looked at how Tor works, although clearly you are the expert on this. Encryption doesn't help you against Lawful Interception since tracking the packets is done simultaneously and globally. I was trying to point out that with LI it breaks the fundamental model of Tor, no matter how many hops are made, since LI looks at all nodes all the time (unlike conventional tracing). Perhaps you and your colleagues are aware of LI technology that is already out there, secreted in all the major ISPs of the World. If not, I would hope that you take a look at the threat it poses to liberty. Thanks for devoting your time to the excellent project that is Tor.
US government agencies have been forcing friendly nations into installing "Lawful Interception" (LI) devices in their ISPs for years. These devices mean that those US agencies can remotely trace a packet across the globe no matter how many bounces it takes. If your country wants to trade with the US then installing these LI devices usually becomes part of conditions for trade agreements. Such capabilities may be necessary for tracking down drugs, organised crime child porn/abuse and terrorism. However, how often does such tracking it stop there? Furthermore, whatever protections there are in US law for US citizens doesn't apply to these agencies when looking at foreign traffic (same loophole that Guantanamo solves/exploits, depending on your point of view).
Since Tor relies on anonymizing by bouncing packets around but Lawful Interception can see the packets no matter where they end up. Only rational conclusions from this are: Tor is broken, don't use it; don't break the law; and, don't oppose your government (no matter how corrupt or bad they might be) - since Tor can't help you. Encryption is the best solution. But since encryption can be broken if resources are applied to it this only works if everyone uses encryption (just as everyone uses envelopes for physical correspondence rather than postcards.)
One large problem is the bright folks at Microsoft can't innovate on anything that could possibly lead to a loss of revenue of Windows products. That is, anything out on the interweb that doesn't run on Windows. From this standpoint they are hamstrung a bit competing with others that have a complete clean slate to start with. Do you think anything that reduced sales of Office or Windows would make it past the product managers? Unlikely. Windows and Office are just too profitable at the moment to risk doing anything really innovative. For example,.NET and all the applications made with it will never run in all the places Java can so no matter what cleverness they come up with their underlying technology is almost always restricted to Windows and all its legacy assumptions about the underlying platform.
Yeah. The computer hardware is mostly fine. Mostly it's the software that sucks - and I say this speaking as a software developer. Some software sucks less than others though (we're sick of O/S and tools flamewars so please don't start). Some software still has crappy short-sighted design after twenty years, while in some is improving to the point its a joy to use and you don't have to think about it as much as you used to - mostly you get on with doing what you need to do instead of wrestling with drivers and patches etc. Which is the point of the exercise after all.
Sounds like he doesn't hate computers nearly as much as the bad design of the software that runs on them.
Plus, Java has NetBeans, IntelliJ and others. NetBeans in particular has been coming on in leaps and bounds, and is much easier (and reliable) to use than either Eclipse or VisualStudio. Microsoft systematically crushed alternative provides (Borland etc) leaving the.NET ecology relatively barren and arguably infertile as a result.
The US does have supersonic air-to-surface missiles. Rather than make their missiles fast the US appears to be relying on three factors to give them the edge. Firstly, the Harpoon is subsonic but it flies slightly lower than the BrahMos. It's only 10 meters lower but that makes a big difference to the radar horizon and hence detection range. The second factor coming in US missiles is the stealth missiles fired from air platforms (AGM-158 JASSM). The final factor is the fact that US missiles are generally more reliable on launch than missiles used by other countries.
On the defensive side. The US has recently been testing Aegis against supersonic targets (purchased recently). It's not like the USN are asleep at the switch to this. Phalanx, Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM), ECM and decoys and the right software give a fighting chance against BrahMos - assuming a launching vessel can get within combat radius of the wing of F/A-18s on the carrier and their Harpoons (several times the range of the BrahMos).
The whole article sounds like a marketing ploy by the manufacturers, trying to re-coup their costs. Remember the breathless reporting of the MiG-25 back in it's day? In truth it turned out to be less effective than first feared (although not entirely in-effective, it did run down and kill one F/A-18 in the Gulf War, but one example doesn't win you an entire war).
Yes. Part of what makes the internet so useful is the 'network effect'. If China loses access to Google's indexes of all the European and US produced information (arguably superior to Baidu's now, and probably will remain so in the future) then they do actually lose the full benefits of the network effect. Now there is an interesting philosophical bit here. Google knows while it is in China it must obey Chinese Law and sovereignty. Rather than break the law they are faced with a dilemma of what to do. They have decided it is not worth doing business is China and the bucketloads money they would make (even if behind Baidu) is not worth 'kowtowing' (now there's an awful word) and reinforcing a repressive censorship policy. Yes, Google will be heavily criticised by some, just as environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s were mocked at the time, yet the mainstream have accepted parts of that worldview as being necessary for human progress.
They neither want nor need us to save them. However, should we stand by and say nothing in the hope that the flaws in the system get worked out by the corrupt system itself? Of course not, we ought to be as free to point out the flaws in the Chinese government as they are to point out the flaws in our governments. The difference is we can use the Chinese criticsm to then focus on our own governments and improve things. The Chinese don't have the same luxury. What is the problem with pointing this out, if done tactfully?
The real problem with China is not the corrupt government, it is that not enough of the people are prepared to take a stand for the betterment of all. They think that having a colour TV and big car and all the trappings of status matter more than good clean government for their children. The economic development minister said as much a few years back, stating China's development aim was to have more cars per capita than the US. This shows quite a severe insecurity that misguides true development. It is shame that China hasn't learnt from the West that past a certain point of material wealth there's no point accumulating more - so trading good governance for even more prosperity won't benefit society more. Perhaps this does belie a little less social development.
You're missing the point. While Google care about censorship what they are really upset about is the Chinese government's attacks on Google servers. If they stayed they would still be subject to these.
I like C and C++ after having programmed for a decade with them. However, the real weight in development is in Java - although it's use has decayed to that of C in recent years due to the bifurcation of new languages in recent years. Just look at: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Incidentally, I use JoGL for a lot of OpenGL projects I used to use C++ for. I find I'm more productive and the OpenGL runs just as fast (since it's mainly on the GPU anyway).
We get your point. However I don't know about FSX being 'better' in much other than graphics and community size. FlightGear and X-Plane may not be as pretty as FSX when the latter has all the options turned up but at least they are playable on regular hardware. FSX is a *total dog* on anything less than ultra-expensive hardware and even then you still can't turn everything up to ultra.
Plus FSX doesn't work on anything other than Windows, unlike X-Plane or FlightGear.
I also personally found the flight model of FSX to feel wrong compared to my own real world flying - it feels 'hackily optimised' for the sake of performance (the usual MS story I guess). X-Plane has a much more realistic feel when you spin or stall-turn. For example the flight path marker on the Acceleration F-18 doesn't work right. I guess plenty of people have not flown in real life and so can't tell how crap FSX really is compared to the suposedly 'inferior' competitors.
Finally. Longevity does matter. The Tortoise wins the race, not the Hare. So far MS has been the tortoise, improving SubLogic FlightSim continually even when it was initially inferior to other sims at various stages. Now MS have growth woes and they've dropped the ball on FSX. The golden days of FlightSimulator are over and they're not coming back. I'm afraid you'll have to get used to it - I'd suggest trying X-Plane or FlightGear.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Java developer this is no problem. Should be the same for the C# crowd. If you are using C or C++ then maybe its time to modernize rather than drag the fetid body of your application to 64-bit (Windows). Even 64-bit Windows platforms won't last forever. Unix has been 64-bit for a long time. It's only the Windows crew who are now starting to move.
The NSA released the SE patches to the Linux kernel a few years back. Most distros allow you to use this. Refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
Ah, that's the sullen detection device. Changed just enough to beat the patent on the sarcasm detection device.
I hope the reviewer is suitably chastened by this experience. Understanding your likely reader is an very important skill in (technical) writing. Realizing that people come from all sorts of backgrounds should not be a surprise. Each of those people may be very intelligent, they just have a specialty that is not in the same field as the writer. Therefore it is the mark of a competent writer that they'll at least try to expand an acronym the first time they use it. An even better writer might even find a single sentence that explains the concept well. Poor writers (eg. many soft-science academics and marketers) often obfuscate simple concepts behind jargon and convoluted sentence construction. Their pronouncements can often be written in a much more straightforward way, although that would often reveal that the "Emperor has no clothes". The best writers write simply, use the least complicated word that fits the purpose, and consider possible conceptual pitfalls of readers so try to write unambiguously.
Thanks for the clarification - it did seem rather draconian, so the summary did seem at odds with the pragmatism of the Finns I know.
What is surprising (to me at least) is that the unsecured WiFi was illegal in the first place. I find that disturbing that Finnish laws are so intrusive in the first place. Maybe tolerance of such things is why they have one of the most peaceful and least corrupt countries in the World. However, the original law shows the Government has no problem reaching into individual freedoms (yes, I know that Finland is not alone in this).
It is interesting that many decision makers choose solutions that become obsolescent by design. By this, I mean that some products are deliberately deprecated and made incompatible with later versions by their developer in order to force the purchaser is made to re-buy what is essentially the same functionality over and over again. This behavior makes less sense when there are often usable alternatives that don't suffer the same vendor deprecation. This applies to software/development stacks, operating systems, document formats etc.
Ooops. Forgot to mention that I have another relevant data point. My nephews spend more time playing Counterstrike rather than PS3. The reason, all the mods for Counterstrike made by the community piques their interest. Even better, this costs them nothing. Sony loses from misses sales ('opportunity cost') since the 'network effect' is weakened for their platform.
In the end it comes to which platform wins the development effort of relatively small number (thousands) of people who actually *create* the games. Whoever wins the developers, for whatever reason, wins the console wars. Having a more closed platform than your competitors is not a competitive advantage.
After buying a MacBook Pro I also found that more open but Java updates were slow in coming (I mostly use JoGL OpenGL and Java2D since they're both portable between Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris and I use all of these). So I gave my PS3 to my nephews - which means Sony loses money since they subsidized the cost of the PS3 but I bought only a few games for it (so they didn't recoup their subsidy). My main graphics development work is now being done on a PC running Ubuntu/Windows7. I not going to buy a PS4 when that comes out and probably won't buy another Mac.
Incidentally a "theory" is more than a hypothesis that has "stood the test of time for a while". In general a hypothesis is a testable prediction, while a theory is a conceptual framework that allows you to make testable predictions. Subtle difference but I understand what you were trying to say (you were modded +5 too, well done).
Fine structure constant is defined by other quantities but is not yet determined ab-initio by any theory. It still relies on measurement to define it (eg. depends on an empirical constant). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on worrying about d(alpha)/dt yet alpha still isn't understood fully. Same with cosmology (among other fields), all these wild theories/hypotheses yet if you look even at measurements on the galactic scale (as I did during my PhD in astrophysics) you see how poor they are (which is why estimates of the total mass and distances in our galaxy vary by up to an order of magnitude). All I was trying to say is that there are so many theories out there that there isn't much point in getting wound up about one over the other. Better to keep an open mind and try and understand the limits of the actual measurements.
Anyone can propose a theory. There is no shortage of speculative theories out there. Creating a theory is easy, even philosophers can do that. 'Proving' that the theory is not false the hard bit - something that sets the physicists apart from the philosophers. I'm not trying to bash philosophers here, since they have their place, merely trying to say that theories are pretty much 'dime a dozen' these days - but experimental verification of them is a much more rare and precious thing. That's why I stopped reading about all the whacky things the Universe could be doing - and concentrated on what is and isn't known about what it actually does do.
Yes, the the employer has no rights to the code written *before* you were hired. That is copyright to you. All the stuff you wrote while working for them is theirs.
Thanks for your information Shava. Yes, I have looked at how Tor works, although clearly you are the expert on this. Encryption doesn't help you against Lawful Interception since tracking the packets is done simultaneously and globally. I was trying to point out that with LI it breaks the fundamental model of Tor, no matter how many hops are made, since LI looks at all nodes all the time (unlike conventional tracing). Perhaps you and your colleagues are aware of LI technology that is already out there, secreted in all the major ISPs of the World. If not, I would hope that you take a look at the threat it poses to liberty. Thanks for devoting your time to the excellent project that is Tor.
US government agencies have been forcing friendly nations into installing "Lawful Interception" (LI) devices in their ISPs for years. These devices mean that those US agencies can remotely trace a packet across the globe no matter how many bounces it takes. If your country wants to trade with the US then installing these LI devices usually becomes part of conditions for trade agreements. Such capabilities may be necessary for tracking down drugs, organised crime child porn/abuse and terrorism. However, how often does such tracking it stop there? Furthermore, whatever protections there are in US law for US citizens doesn't apply to these agencies when looking at foreign traffic (same loophole that Guantanamo solves/exploits, depending on your point of view). Since Tor relies on anonymizing by bouncing packets around but Lawful Interception can see the packets no matter where they end up. Only rational conclusions from this are: Tor is broken, don't use it; don't break the law; and, don't oppose your government (no matter how corrupt or bad they might be) - since Tor can't help you. Encryption is the best solution. But since encryption can be broken if resources are applied to it this only works if everyone uses encryption (just as everyone uses envelopes for physical correspondence rather than postcards.)
One large problem is the bright folks at Microsoft can't innovate on anything that could possibly lead to a loss of revenue of Windows products. That is, anything out on the interweb that doesn't run on Windows. From this standpoint they are hamstrung a bit competing with others that have a complete clean slate to start with. Do you think anything that reduced sales of Office or Windows would make it past the product managers? Unlikely. Windows and Office are just too profitable at the moment to risk doing anything really innovative. For example, .NET and all the applications made with it will never run in all the places Java can so no matter what cleverness they come up with their underlying technology is almost always restricted to Windows and all its legacy assumptions about the underlying platform.
Sounds like he doesn't hate computers nearly as much as the bad design of the software that runs on them.
Plus, Java has NetBeans, IntelliJ and others. NetBeans in particular has been coming on in leaps and bounds, and is much easier (and reliable) to use than either Eclipse or VisualStudio. Microsoft systematically crushed alternative provides (Borland etc) leaving the .NET ecology relatively barren and arguably infertile as a result.
On the defensive side. The US has recently been testing Aegis against supersonic targets (purchased recently). It's not like the USN are asleep at the switch to this. Phalanx, Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM), ECM and decoys and the right software give a fighting chance against BrahMos - assuming a launching vessel can get within combat radius of the wing of F/A-18s on the carrier and their Harpoons (several times the range of the BrahMos).
The whole article sounds like a marketing ploy by the manufacturers, trying to re-coup their costs. Remember the breathless reporting of the MiG-25 back in it's day? In truth it turned out to be less effective than first feared (although not entirely in-effective, it did run down and kill one F/A-18 in the Gulf War, but one example doesn't win you an entire war).
Yes. Part of what makes the internet so useful is the 'network effect'. If China loses access to Google's indexes of all the European and US produced information (arguably superior to Baidu's now, and probably will remain so in the future) then they do actually lose the full benefits of the network effect. Now there is an interesting philosophical bit here. Google knows while it is in China it must obey Chinese Law and sovereignty. Rather than break the law they are faced with a dilemma of what to do. They have decided it is not worth doing business is China and the bucketloads money they would make (even if behind Baidu) is not worth 'kowtowing' (now there's an awful word) and reinforcing a repressive censorship policy. Yes, Google will be heavily criticised by some, just as environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s were mocked at the time, yet the mainstream have accepted parts of that worldview as being necessary for human progress.
They neither want nor need us to save them. However, should we stand by and say nothing in the hope that the flaws in the system get worked out by the corrupt system itself? Of course not, we ought to be as free to point out the flaws in the Chinese government as they are to point out the flaws in our governments. The difference is we can use the Chinese criticsm to then focus on our own governments and improve things. The Chinese don't have the same luxury. What is the problem with pointing this out, if done tactfully? The real problem with China is not the corrupt government, it is that not enough of the people are prepared to take a stand for the betterment of all. They think that having a colour TV and big car and all the trappings of status matter more than good clean government for their children. The economic development minister said as much a few years back, stating China's development aim was to have more cars per capita than the US. This shows quite a severe insecurity that misguides true development. It is shame that China hasn't learnt from the West that past a certain point of material wealth there's no point accumulating more - so trading good governance for even more prosperity won't benefit society more. Perhaps this does belie a little less social development.
You're missing the point. While Google care about censorship what they are really upset about is the Chinese government's attacks on Google servers. If they stayed they would still be subject to these.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Incidentally, I use JoGL for a lot of OpenGL projects I used to use C++ for. I find I'm more productive and the OpenGL runs just as fast (since it's mainly on the GPU anyway).
We get your point. However I don't know about FSX being 'better' in much other than graphics and community size. FlightGear and X-Plane may not be as pretty as FSX when the latter has all the options turned up but at least they are playable on regular hardware. FSX is a *total dog* on anything less than ultra-expensive hardware and even then you still can't turn everything up to ultra. Plus FSX doesn't work on anything other than Windows, unlike X-Plane or FlightGear. I also personally found the flight model of FSX to feel wrong compared to my own real world flying - it feels 'hackily optimised' for the sake of performance (the usual MS story I guess). X-Plane has a much more realistic feel when you spin or stall-turn. For example the flight path marker on the Acceleration F-18 doesn't work right. I guess plenty of people have not flown in real life and so can't tell how crap FSX really is compared to the suposedly 'inferior' competitors. Finally. Longevity does matter. The Tortoise wins the race, not the Hare. So far MS has been the tortoise, improving SubLogic FlightSim continually even when it was initially inferior to other sims at various stages. Now MS have growth woes and they've dropped the ball on FSX. The golden days of FlightSimulator are over and they're not coming back. I'm afraid you'll have to get used to it - I'd suggest trying X-Plane or FlightGear.