The reason VB came out on top is because of all of the legacy crap they cranked out before the notion of Internet development and thin client started to become a viable option. They need a certain amount of people around to just maintain that code, so I'm sure many of them are just using the skills of the people they happen to have.
C++ is a language I have very rarely seen used in the realm of internal business applications. It might be used to interface with some component that only has C API's but other than that its complexity makes it too expensive to work with.
Java finished 3rd only because it is new and because a lot of people still don't realize that you can write wonderful thin client applications with it on the back end. I have yet to see an applet or client application that is actually useful and performs reasonably. I've worked in both Perl and Java, and to be honest, I prefer working with Java (sorry folks!).
One thing I do find amusing though is why didn't COBOL show up on the list? Most big companies pretty much live on mounds of legacy cobol code.
I think the only thing wrong with Java is that Sun tried to make everybody think that it was a wonderful architecture for writing client side software. In my few experiences with that I've found it to be bloated and inefficient.
Now, having said that, I use Java constantly to develop the server side of thin client apps (Servlets, JSP's and slowly gettting into Enterprise Java Beans). They are flexible, robust, and there are far fewer concerns about quirks between different JVM's because it need only run in one place.
It is the nature of technology in any form to give power to those without the knowledge and/or wisdom to use it properly. It could be a computer program for psychological analysis, could be a nuclear weapon or a dangerous virus. It's all the same, just a matter of scale.
My hope is that perhaps as more and more people get online and consider it a medium for unveiling there most personal thoughts, that the existence of those thoughts will be more publicly accepted. Let's face it, we all have thoughts we don't want others to know anything about because we're afraid of how they'll react. But if everybody knew everybody else's dirty little secrets what would it matter?
I envision this press conference in the future where a press guy would dig up something about some politician's occasional visit to a dominatrix. They bring up the question at a press conference. The politician responds, "Yeah, she's a great dominatrix, if you want her phone number, talk to me after the conference.":)
Perhaps Jesse Ventura is one of the first people to start the trend that direction. He said a whole lot of offensive things in that Playboy article, but his reaction was simply to ask people to judge him by his politics not his personal beliefs. Of course he'll probably be politically burned at the stake for it, but oh well.
In a world where everybody accepts eachother's humanity and their falibility there's no need for secrecy and anonymity. That day's not now, but I can dream can't I?:)
A default installation of almost any OS out of the box is a security problem waiting to happen. Redhat 6.0 has many patches within it, but there are always new bugs, and new fixes. If you don't make an active effort to secure machine by patching, you take your chances.
I'm sure that an unpatched NT, or other Unix flavor is just as susceptible to problems, but there is less likelyhood that you'll know about it and be able to fix it. Of course it means that others are more likely to know about it and exploit you, but that's the trade off. You have a greater opportunity for security if you maintain your system, but a greater opportunity for problems if you don't.
Lessons learned:
1) Make sure you've got good secure CGI's on your system.
By accident I have managed to find a way to prevent this webmail problem. If you set up your DNS so that that you have a server named like mail.domainname.tld the webmail thing does not work.
When I tried to access my dot.com webmail (what a dorky name), I was told to go to mail.domainname.tld, which redirected me to my mailserver since I already register that machine name in my DNS settings.
The open source community that is giving away its hard work is not an indication of some internet based marxist revolution. Essentially it is an extension of the basic notions of charity which exist in current culture.
Why do we give to charity? Because it makes us feel good. Because it makes us look cooler amongst our peers. Because it makes our company look like it cares (although usually a marketing gimic). It is the same thing here. Some people decide that they will use their hacker talents to create software only for the satisfaction of doing so.
Overall this in not changing the fundamental economic model, it is just shifting it slightly. Now companies are looking to give away code and sell the support, or are selling proprietary closed solutions that make use of the underlying open software.
Big companies care about money. Labelling will impose some cost on them, but unless they see it as dramatically affecting their market or sales, it's easier to play along.
Ah, but you forget something. The companies we are talking about are also in the content production business. It is to their advantage to be able to maintain some control over the market and limit the information out there. If there is a government "encouraged" ratings system, enforced by the network providers, they will be more than happy to use it to keep the more alternative information from competing with them.
Besides, if it was really going to cost them, I'm sure the government would legislate tax breaks for them to offset the cost for complying with this request.
It is okay, if the way it works is that through this labelling, you are given information about possible choices without the elimination of those choices. But time and time again this has proven not to be the case.
A good example is Eyes Wide Shut. Sure, it would be nice to know that it contains sex and what not, but because it got the NC-17 in an uncut version, it could not be shown. I didn't get to choose to see the uncut version if I wanted too. They censored it and then released only the tampered version to theatres.
I think that labeling things is wonderful, assuming that my choices are not eliminated because of that labelling.
Sure, you'll still be able to send messages to people privately (assuming the FBI doesn't get a warrant to break into your computer). But the problem is that if things continue the direction they are going, you will no longer be able to post objectionable material in public view and expect that anybody will actually see it.
The following post contains commentary that is anti-estalishment and makes derrogatory comments about the US government. Viewer discretion is advised...
The government has finally figured out the way to circumvent the constitution. The constitution strictly regulates what the government is allowed to do, but it says nothing about what corporations are allowed to do. It has long been established that corporations are allowed to regulate speech, or anything else. It is their right and freedom to do so.
So, the government doesn't pass any sort of regulation. Instead, beacuse each of the corporations is dependent on a favorable attitude within the government, the government uses its position to pressure the corporations. The corporations have too much to lose in standing up to the government and so much to gain by giving in that invariably they do.
So, the government asks the telecom carriers to implement a "voluntary" policy of requiring their users to rate publicly viewable content. The telecom carriers comply, and this isn't illegal because the government hasn't made any laws or policies. They just made a suggestion (read threat), and the corporations caved. If an individual doesn't comply they've breached terms of service with the provider and are removed.
If you try to find another provider that doesn't have these draconian regulations, you can't. Since ATT, MCI, Sprint, etc, will give in, then they will extend their regulations to the piering agreements with smaller independent carriers. Before you know it, there's no place that will allow you to interface with the Internet and not rate your content.
The country's founders didn't see this coming. How could they? The constitution isn't meant for such things, which roughly means...
Personally, I'd much rather be an employee than a contractor in most circumstances. Here's why:
1) As an employee I have some reasonable guarantee of stability. I can plan to be someplace for at least a few years and be confident that I can remain there. And if I'm not happy there, I can leave just as easily whether I'm a contractor or not.
2) My skills become a valuable long term investment to the company. If I'm a contractor, I'm pretty much considered a disposable resource to be used up and thrown away. If I'm an employee I can reasonably expect that my employer will pay for training, etc.
3) It sucks to pay taxes on contact work.
4) If I'm an employee I get to express my creativity a lot more. I can start projects from the beginning and put some personal investment in them. If I'm a contractor, I'm picked up to perform a specific task and then I'm gone.
etc, etc.
My feeling is this. If you are going to be developing a project over the long term, look to hire employees. Invest something in them and they will pay you back far more than a contractor would. Reserve the contractors for limited tasks where you lack the necessary skill set and the speed of the solution is most important.
Says who? The Constitution? If you look in the Constitution it is about protecting the Church from the Government governing what the church can do/say... Not "Seporation from Church and State." Sorry, not in there.
Although the constitution does not use the specific phrasing "seperation of church and state," it does specifically address the notion of state sponsored religion. And I quote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
The first part of this is the key. It means that Congress will make no law either promoting or prohibiting the establishment of any religion. It will not support christianity, or buddhism, or hinduism. Because publich schools are state sponsored, if they promote a particular religion, or prohibit expression of a particular religion, they are violating the first amendment. Posting of the 10 commandments is sponsorship of a particular religion over others and is thus a violation of the first amendment.
To continue, you said:
The schools are now favoring the religion of atheism. It's a belief, it's a religion...
The schools don't favor ANY religon! They don't say God doesn't exist, they don't say he does exist. They don't bother to even ask or answer this question. That's what church is for! If a teacher told you that God did not exist (the Aetheist perspective), they would be in just as much trouble as somebody who said that God did exist and he's the one from the Christian bible.
Actually, I'm really hoping that Warren Beatty runs. He has been talking about it, and I think it would really make things interesting. From what I've seen so far, he seems far better qualified than any of the candidates put before us so far.
Now, I would never elect somebody from hollywood with name recognition if he didn't have a good political platform. But my impression is that he's got a lot of things figured out that the others don't. Have you ever seen the movie Bullworth? It is noteworthy that he wrote and directed it. This implies, that to some extent, the political statements made there are probably on par with his beliefs.
When interviewed on the possibility of running for office, he said that he didn't think he was the best candidate for the job, but that he was better than a lot of the other choices available. It's nice to see a candidate who thinks somebody else could do the job better!
Religious people have killed many in the name of religion. Non-religious people have killed many for numerous other reasons. So can we drop that one?:)
As for the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments are descended from Jewish religion, which is the root of Christianity and Islam. But because it represents these religions and thus a majority of people, it does not make it reasonable to post it in a public school.
The whole notion of seperation of church and state is to protect smaller religions from persecution by bigger ones. If the public schools (which are an extension of the state), support one particular religious view, then this seperation is lost. Basically, it is saying that the Ten Commandments are considered the beliefs of the State, and are considered superior to other religions as they are willing to post them in public.
What if I'm buddhist, or hindu? What if I'm Wiccan? Does my lack of belief in the ten commandments make me a lesser person? Why aren't my fundamental rules of morality posted in the high school halls? Don't I have just as much right under our constitutionally protected speech rights to publicly post my version of the truth if the ten commandments can be posted?
First thing is that this isn't a first amendment/fredom of speech issue. This is a seperation of church and state issue. Personally, I think it is fine if they can post the 10 commandments, as long as they will allow anybody else to post any other religious doctrines in the same place. I'm sure that the religious right will get irritated very quickly when we start getting posts from Wiccans and the Church of the Subgenius.
Since they aren't willing to have everybody's religion represented then they shouldn't represent any. And about the ten commandments effect on this situation. Do they honestly think that these children didn't know the ten commandments? Even if they didn't, they don't mean anything if the kids don't believe in them. What a bunch of self-righteous ignorant bastards we have in congress!!
Is it just me or do the numbers they list on there key processing rates for RC5 seem a little suspect. For example:
3,093 Kkeys/sec- 4 CPU's 6,177 Kkeys/sec- 8 CPU's
Now, if you do the math, that's 99.9% efficiency at scaling from 4 to 8 processors. My understanding is that getting multi-processor systems to scale linearly is not a simple task. Especially considering that they seem to be using a hack of a way to do it (transmitting though the PCI bus). Anybody here with more technical expertise care to comment on this?
That's the whole point. The government has managed to throw responsibility on the individual user to decide what they do and do not want to do. You don't really have to own filtering software, you just have to claim that you do.
Now, if they turned around and started trying to do something to people who weren't using filtering software, that'd be a different story.
Then you simply tell them that you are running windows. All the law says is that your ISP has to ask what you are running. There are no provisions for forcing the ISP to get accurate information, or forcing you to tell the truth.
This seems to be a well thought out solution. It means that people who want to "protect the children" get their way, but people who give a hoot about freedom to do what they want can just lie to their ISP and be done with it.
Actually, this is not true. Established legal precendents have shown that company e-mail, file servers, bandwidth are company property and can be done with as they see fit. There is no guarantee of privacy whatsoever and they are not required to state any policy on the issue.
My feeling is that persecuting people who browse porn is ridiculous. There are a few reasonable related concerns:
1) That people will be browsing porn instead of doing work. 2) That people will suck up network/system resources to browse porn.
So, if these are truely their concerns they should be scanning for excessive use of system resources, not porn specifically.
I think corporations who establish policies like this are just creating a totally pointless conflict between them and their employees.
you'll find something to be addicted too. Internet, gambling, drugs, sex, you name it. Because you use the Internet four or more hours a day does not mean you are an addict. But if you are addicted, you will likely use it for at least four hours a day.
Personally I work on the Internet and a fair number of hobbies revolve around it, but I get bored with it sometimes. I don't have the attention span to become addicted to things:)
If the film studios are smart, they will take a new approach to film making. Basically what they should do is go out, find a bunch of semi-promising film students, and give them each a good digital video camera and a $50,000 budget. Then they set aside say $30 million for conventional advertising and hype purposes.
You figure if they gave this opportunity to say 200 film students, they are bound to find at least one movie in the bunch that will return 100 million. So for a $31 million investment, by shear force of odds, they'll make a lot of money. And of those other movies, they will almost definitely find a few gems that will roll in more cash in smaller niche markets.
No longer could a director come up and say, "I've got a film with lots of explosions and Keanu Reeves, can you spot me $100 million?" They'd laugh in his face! They'd be out of their minds to take chances like that! (not that they aren't now). Basically this would encourage the hollywood studios to give anybody with an idea a chance, and make sure that they only release big budget movies that are actually going to be good.
They offered up the challenge of cracking into their box, not anybody else's. Granted it is an obvious approach to attack another system first, but it is neither legal nor the point of the contest. The contest was to find an inherent weakness in their configuration of a specific box, not find a weakness in their network as a whole or in other boxes on that network.
GPL's got a very nice built in safety to keep that from happening. If you are a company that bases your business model on closed-source software, you take a very very big risk by including GPL'd code. If you are caught, then all of your source code will be exposed to the world because it was based on GPL code.
So if MS decided that XFS was better than NTFS and decided to coopt it and make a new filesystem, they would risk the entire source code of NT in doing so. It's not so much the likelyhood of being caught that keeps them in line, but the severity of the consequences if they are caught.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Bug or a conspiracy by government agencies to suppress the truth that is out there??
You decide!
---
C++ is a language I have very rarely seen used in the realm of internal business applications. It might be used to interface with some component that only has C API's but other than that its complexity makes it too expensive to work with.
Java finished 3rd only because it is new and because a lot of people still don't realize that you can write wonderful thin client applications with it on the back end. I have yet to see an applet or client application that is actually useful and performs reasonably. I've worked in both Perl and Java, and to be honest, I prefer working with Java (sorry folks!).
One thing I do find amusing though is why didn't COBOL show up on the list? Most big companies pretty much live on mounds of legacy cobol code.
---
Now, having said that, I use Java constantly to develop the server side of thin client apps (Servlets, JSP's and slowly gettting into Enterprise Java Beans). They are flexible, robust, and there are far fewer concerns about quirks between different JVM's because it need only run in one place.
---
---
I envision this press conference in the future where a press guy would dig up something about some politician's occasional visit to a dominatrix. They bring up the question at a press conference. The politician responds, "Yeah, she's a great dominatrix, if you want her phone number, talk to me after the conference."
Perhaps Jesse Ventura is one of the first people to start the trend that direction. He said a whole lot of offensive things in that Playboy article, but his reaction was simply to ask people to judge him by his politics not his personal beliefs. Of course he'll probably be politically burned at the stake for it, but oh well.
In a world where everybody accepts eachother's humanity and their falibility there's no need for secrecy and anonymity. That day's not now, but I can dream can't I?
---
I'm sure that an unpatched NT, or other Unix flavor is just as susceptible to problems, but there is less likelyhood that you'll know about it and be able to fix it. Of course it means that others are more likely to know about it and exploit you, but that's the trade off. You have a greater opportunity for security if you maintain your system, but a greater opportunity for problems if you don't.
Lessons learned:
1) Make sure you've got good secure CGI's on your system.
2) Make sure you have all the latest patches.
---
When I tried to access my dot.com webmail (what a dorky name), I was told to go to mail.domainname.tld, which redirected me to my mailserver since I already register that machine name in my DNS settings.
---
Why do we give to charity? Because it makes us feel good. Because it makes us look cooler amongst our peers. Because it makes our company look like it cares (although usually a marketing gimic). It is the same thing here. Some people decide that they will use their hacker talents to create software only for the satisfaction of doing so.
Overall this in not changing the fundamental economic model, it is just shifting it slightly. Now companies are looking to give away code and sell the support, or are selling proprietary closed solutions that make use of the underlying open software.
This is not the revolution, just the evolution...
---
Ah, but you forget something. The companies we are talking about are also in the content production business. It is to their advantage to be able to maintain some control over the market and limit the information out there. If there is a government "encouraged" ratings system, enforced by the network providers, they will be more than happy to use it to keep the more alternative information from competing with them.
Besides, if it was really going to cost them, I'm sure the government would legislate tax breaks for them to offset the cost for complying with this request.
---
A good example is Eyes Wide Shut. Sure, it would be nice to know that it contains sex and what not, but because it got the NC-17 in an uncut version, it could not be shown. I didn't get to choose to see the uncut version if I wanted too. They censored it and then released only the tampered version to theatres.
I think that labeling things is wonderful, assuming that my choices are not eliminated because of that labelling.
---
---
The government has finally figured out the way to circumvent the constitution. The constitution strictly regulates what the government is allowed to do, but it says nothing about what corporations are allowed to do. It has long been established that corporations are allowed to regulate speech, or anything else. It is their right and freedom to do so.
So, the government doesn't pass any sort of regulation. Instead, beacuse each of the corporations is dependent on a favorable attitude within the government, the government uses its position to pressure the corporations. The corporations have too much to lose in standing up to the government and so much to gain by giving in that invariably they do.
So, the government asks the telecom carriers to implement a "voluntary" policy of requiring their users to rate publicly viewable content. The telecom carriers comply, and this isn't illegal because the government hasn't made any laws or policies. They just made a suggestion (read threat), and the corporations caved. If an individual doesn't comply they've breached terms of service with the provider and are removed.
If you try to find another provider that doesn't have these draconian regulations, you can't. Since ATT, MCI, Sprint, etc, will give in, then they will extend their regulations to the piering agreements with smaller independent carriers. Before you know it, there's no place that will allow you to interface with the Internet and not rate your content.
The country's founders didn't see this coming. How could they? The constitution isn't meant for such things, which roughly means...
WE ARE SCREWED!
---
1) As an employee I have some reasonable guarantee of stability. I can plan to be someplace for at least a few years and be confident that I can remain there. And if I'm not happy there, I can leave just as easily whether I'm a contractor or not.
2) My skills become a valuable long term investment to the company. If I'm a contractor, I'm pretty much considered a disposable resource to be used up and thrown away. If I'm an employee I can reasonably expect that my employer will pay for training, etc.
3) It sucks to pay taxes on contact work.
4) If I'm an employee I get to express my creativity a lot more. I can start projects from the beginning and put some personal investment in them. If I'm a contractor, I'm picked up to perform a specific task and then I'm gone.
etc, etc.
My feeling is this. If you are going to be developing a project over the long term, look to hire employees. Invest something in them and they will pay you back far more than a contractor would. Reserve the contractors for limited tasks where you lack the necessary skill set and the speed of the solution is most important.
---
Although the constitution does not use the specific phrasing "seperation of church and state," it does specifically address the notion of state sponsored religion. And I quote:
The first part of this is the key. It means that Congress will make no law either promoting or prohibiting the establishment of any religion. It will not support christianity, or buddhism, or hinduism. Because publich schools are state sponsored, if they promote a particular religion, or prohibit expression of a particular religion, they are violating the first amendment. Posting of the 10 commandments is sponsorship of a particular religion over others and is thus a violation of the first amendment.
To continue, you said:
The schools don't favor ANY religon! They don't say God doesn't exist, they don't say he does exist. They don't bother to even ask or answer this question. That's what church is for! If a teacher told you that God did not exist (the Aetheist perspective), they would be in just as much trouble as somebody who said that God did exist and he's the one from the Christian bible.
---
Now, I would never elect somebody from hollywood with name recognition if he didn't have a good political platform. But my impression is that he's got a lot of things figured out that the others don't. Have you ever seen the movie Bullworth? It is noteworthy that he wrote and directed it. This implies, that to some extent, the political statements made there are probably on par with his beliefs.
When interviewed on the possibility of running for office, he said that he didn't think he was the best candidate for the job, but that he was better than a lot of the other choices available. It's nice to see a candidate who thinks somebody else could do the job better!
---
As for the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments are descended from Jewish religion, which is the root of Christianity and Islam. But because it represents these religions and thus a majority of people, it does not make it reasonable to post it in a public school.
The whole notion of seperation of church and state is to protect smaller religions from persecution by bigger ones. If the public schools (which are an extension of the state), support one particular religious view, then this seperation is lost. Basically, it is saying that the Ten Commandments are considered the beliefs of the State, and are considered superior to other religions as they are willing to post them in public.
What if I'm buddhist, or hindu? What if I'm Wiccan? Does my lack of belief in the ten commandments make me a lesser person? Why aren't my fundamental rules of morality posted in the high school halls? Don't I have just as much right under our constitutionally protected speech rights to publicly post my version of the truth if the ten commandments can be posted?
---
Since they aren't willing to have everybody's religion represented then they shouldn't represent any. And about the ten commandments effect on this situation. Do they honestly think that these children didn't know the ten commandments? Even if they didn't, they don't mean anything if the kids don't believe in them. What a bunch of self-righteous ignorant bastards we have in congress!!
---
3,093 Kkeys/sec- 4 CPU's
6,177 Kkeys/sec- 8 CPU's
Now, if you do the math, that's 99.9% efficiency at scaling from 4 to 8 processors. My understanding is that getting multi-processor systems to scale linearly is not a simple task. Especially considering that they seem to be using a hack of a way to do it (transmitting though the PCI bus). Anybody here with more technical expertise care to comment on this?
---
You don't really have to own filtering software, you just have to claim that you do.
Now, if they turned around and started trying to do something to people who weren't using filtering software, that'd be a different story.
---
This seems to be a well thought out solution. It means that people who want to "protect the children" get their way, but people who give a hoot about freedom to do what they want can just lie to their ISP and be done with it.
---
My feeling is that persecuting people who browse porn is ridiculous. There are a few reasonable related concerns:
1) That people will be browsing porn instead of doing work.
2) That people will suck up network/system resources to browse porn.
So, if these are truely their concerns they should be scanning for excessive use of system resources, not porn specifically.
I think corporations who establish policies like this are just creating a totally pointless conflict between them and their employees.
---
Personally I work on the Internet and a fair number of hobbies revolve around it, but I get bored with it sometimes. I don't have the attention span to become addicted to things
---
You figure if they gave this opportunity to say 200 film students, they are bound to find at least one movie in the bunch that will return 100 million. So for a $31 million investment, by shear force of odds, they'll make a lot of money. And of those other movies, they will almost definitely find a few gems that will roll in more cash in smaller niche markets.
No longer could a director come up and say, "I've got a film with lots of explosions and Keanu Reeves, can you spot me $100 million?" They'd laugh in his face! They'd be out of their minds to take chances like that! (not that they aren't now). Basically this would encourage the hollywood studios to give anybody with an idea a chance, and make sure that they only release big budget movies that are actually going to be good.
---
---
So if MS decided that XFS was better than NTFS and decided to coopt it and make a new filesystem, they would risk the entire source code of NT in doing so. It's not so much the likelyhood of being caught that keeps them in line, but the severity of the consequences if they are caught.
---