Well, the Mafia is certainly a business enterprise (or more accurately, several business enterprises) with a large personal army. A weaker government would lead to more of the same. How many weapons and goons could MS buy with their $30billion? Could the cashed-starved Libertarian-ideal federal government compete? How would they stop such private armies from existing?
Tail recursion (which is what most recursive calls are) is trivial to optimize out and turn into a loop behind the scenes. That's what most LISP environments do.
Same actions performed by an Israeli state would of course not be considered terrorist, due to their political alignment to the US, and are in fact, supported.
Oh, you're full of shit.
Are you familiar with Kach and Kahane Chai? They are radical Jewish groups who preach that Israel needs to throw every Arab out of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Israel has banned them as illegal terrorist groups and the US government considers them to be terrorist groups. There have been arrests and the FBI gathering evidence from JDL servers as evidence that the JDL is providing funds to Kach and Kahane Chai. Once again, not news on Slashdot. It's the JDL which is partnering with HinduUnity, BTW.
If the major Arab news source is so poorly set-up that they only have a single hosting point, then gee, this sort of thing is going to happen. What's the next Slashdot/iViews headline: "Zionist Racist Backhoe Takes Out Islamic Voice on Internet"?
So, yes, sites like HinduUnity.org should be forced off their ISPs. They have a constitutional right to say what they want, but no one is required to provide them a forum to spread their hatred.
Legally, you are absolutely correct. I'm talking morally, though.
HinduUnity's words condemn them. Muslim groups that want to shut them down, and force them off of their servers provide evidence for their paranoia. It also drew a lot more attention to them.
Leaving them alone would have been best, but these idjits just couldn't _stand_ to have something somewhere that they found offensive. Substitute "porn" or "Howard Stern" or "neo-Nazi" or whatever for "Hindu Unity" and you'll get the idea.
Like I said, people piss and moan when something happens to a site they agree with but shrug their shoulders when it is something they don't agree with. Well I'm pissing and moaning even when I don't agree with it. And I don't think taking a bunch of sites down for a few hours while the FBI collects evidence is nearly as big of a deal as mob action against unpopular opinions. But that's just me.
People get up in arms about controversial websites, like porn sites, hate sites, spammer sites, radical anti-abortion sites, etc, all the time. And sometimes, complaints to the ISP are effective in forcing the site to move to an ISP that is less concerned about complaints from the public. That isn't really news.
Now, I haven't checked to see exactly which sites were taken down temporarily, but there are several Muslim organizations in the US who raise money for groups that US government considers terrorist groups. That's illegal.
My guess is that at least one of the web sites falls into this category. We're not talking about sites that preach hate and violence, we're talking about sites that finance it. I'm not saying that every Muslim web site or organization is hateful or violent or whatever, but they do exist.
As others have pointed out, the name of the site is HinduUnity.org. Visit their web site if you want details. If you want to read the whole article, you can do a search for HinduUnity on the New York Times web site. It'll cost you to read it, though, as it was published over a month ago. Like I said, no outcry from the Slashdot free speech squad.
I'm not a Hindu and some what HinduUnity.org preaches scares the heck out of me. But it shouldn't be forced off its ISP by crybabies. I just can't stand the hypocritical posturing.
A radical Hindu web site had its access taken away for good due to complaints by Muslim groups, and nary a Slashdot story on it, or any gnashing of teeth by those defenders of free speech at iViews.
I guess it's OK for Muslim complaints to take out a Hindu web site, but it's not OK for federal investigation to shut down some Muslim web sites for a few hours.
BTW, the Hindu web site found hosting again on a server run by a militant Jewish group. The New York Times ran a story on it a few months ago; it's funny what strange bedfellows these sorts of things can make.
I expect this will be modded down to about -200 in a few minutes...interesting how the truth can do that.
MS should have included an HTML renderer that could be used by many apps to display help, errors, whatever (Apple has just this as part of their OS, used for Apple Help). MS should even have written their own browser which takes advantage of the HTML renderer.
However, you'd have to be daft to think that a browser is anything more than an application. It should be trivial to remove a browser, just as it is trivial to remove other "essentials", like a word processor, spreadsheet, or compiler.
MS went out of its way, making its systems less stable and slower, just to make sure that removing the browser would be impossible. Furthermore, it then threatened anyone who wanted to include an alternate browser. This is anti-consumer behavior (shipping a worse product just to screw a competitor) and anti-competitive behavior.
The first isn't a crime, just stupid if you aren't selling to a captive audience. The fact that MS can do these sorts of stupid things proves that it has a captive audience, which makes MS and also makes anti-competitive behavior illegal.
With MS now including a media player as a "core" part of its operating system while "accidently" breaking QuickTime plugin support, I'm more and more convinced that separating MS into OS and applications (as well as a third company for languages and compilers) needs to be done. Not going to happen, though.
The Mac port has been cancelled. Basically, if anyone wants to do a Mac OS X port (OS 9 wasn't even considered), they can have at the source code. I put the chances of StarOffice ever being a viable competitor to MS Office on the Mac at about nil.
. But DS9 never did, that I recall, put the whole damn station in danger because of some rogue holodeck.
There was one "James Bond" episode where different cast members were parts of the Holodeck program (good guys and bad guys), and if they died in the program, they'd be dead for real.
But that was mostly played for laughs. Avery Brooks in the Neru jacket as the Bond villian was awesome;-)
-jon
No financial incentive for good software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
Software quality will not improve until there is a financial reason for it to do so. Build something physical which is of poor quality and you're likely to be sued and/or imprisoned when it fails.
Build software poorly, and you not only lock a client into a system that's so bad no one else can replace you, but you get lots of billable hours trying to fix bugs and upgrade the software.
When lemon laws apply to software (and they should!), hiring people to write software who are actually competent will follow.
I believe it was William Jennings Bryant who stated something like "You shall not hang the nation on a cross of gold", or something like that...
If I remember my early 20th century history correctly (and I might not), Bryant wanted free and unlimited minting of money. This would have made it easier for farmers (his chief supporters) to pay off their debts (small farmers then had the same problems as small farmers now), but would have made inflation rampant.
Bryant would have wanted these microbes because his understanding of economics sucked. His understanding of evolution sucked, too (he was part of the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial). Hell of a public speaker, though
Heck, I'm willing to sell my underpowered, used PowerBook 1400 to someone who wants a web browsing computer. It's been upgraded to 40MB of RAM, a 250MHz G3, a 3GB hard drive, and 10Base-T and 802.11b PC Cards. These aren't exactly killer specs, but they were state of the art in 1997;-)
I want to buy an iBook, but can't justify having two laptops, and the damn PowerBook just won't die, despite being knocked off the coffee table twice in the last six months (the antenna part of the case on the wireless PC card is getting beat all to hell, though). I use the PowerBook as a web pad all the time. The only problems it has are 20 minute battery life (because the battery is 3 years old and it's trying to power a ton more hardware than it was originally designed to power) and it usually crashes when it tries to wake up from sleep (I think this is due to the power drawn by the wireless card, upgraded CPU, upgraded hard drive, and upgraded RAM. If I pull the wireless card, the problem goes away, but the laptop is virtually useless to me).
As a side note in the net appliance category, I use the PowerBook as an MP3 player for my stereo, too. I've got about 100 of my CDs ripped on my iMac. The iMac's hard drive is shared via 802.11b, and iTunes running on the PowerBook is able to play MP3s with nary a skip. Just plug the audio out of the PowerBook into the stereo, and I've got a nice stereo component.
one's current ISP is always a good recipient of distrust.
Maybe not trusting your ISP is a side-effect of using one of the large, faceless companies as an ISP. I use sonic.net (www.sonic.net), which is relatively small, has great tech support, provides equipment status (and failure) notices on its home page, and is currently fighting SBC to overturn its new, restrictive DSL contract.
I pay about $5/month more for my DSL with Sonic than I would with SBC, but I get a static IP address, no limitations on running a server, a shell account, 50MB of web space on their server, and I get a nice warm feeling from supporting a mom-and-pop company.
If you don't trust your ISP, you've got to wonder why you're giving them money in the first place.
I think part of the Mac fascination with file type is due to the monolithic program structure; you find the file, and then you open a single program that does to it anything that you will ever do to it. In this model, there is a right program, and which program is right is based on file type. Windows clearly suffers greatly from having this model but not having a more reliable fashion of determining file type than Linux.
You clearly don't understand the type and creator fields.
There are TWO separate fields for each file in the classic Mac OS. One (TYPE) indicates what kind of file it is. The other (CREATOR) indicates what program will open the file by default. Each is four bytes long.
The nice thing about this system is that you get a clean separation between file typing AND default launching application. It's other OSes which have the "monolithic" structure you're talking about.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?
First of all, it'd be an 8 character extension. Secondly, List view on a Mac shows file type by default; an application is listed as "application program". Granted icon view won't discriminate unless you do a get info or sort by kind. Finally, if you don't trust the source of a file, don't open the file. This is common sense, no matter what extensions you are showing or whatever file system you are using.
The last time I used CGI (which was many years ago), each CGI request required a new heavyweight process to be spawned. I don't think this has changed, but I could be wrong.
Servlets don't work that way. They are part of the same heavyweight process, and you don't need to keep re-instantiating them anyway. Session state is kept per connection, but you can have far fewer than N threads to manage N users.
A CGI written in C is almost certainly vastly slower than simiar code writen as a Java servlet. Deal with it.
* Belgium has a law that anyone who commited a (Belgian law) crime, independent of *where* it was commited, you can start a legal process. Currently being sued: Arafat and Saddam
As far as I know, Arafat and Saddam aren't being sued under Belgian law; however, the prime minister of Israel is being sued for an atrocity committed by Lebanese Christians. No one is charging any Lebanese, though.
The Belgians have already locked up a couple of Rwandans, because some people walking down the street identified them as being involved in the Rwandan genocide. Imagine, no forensic evidence, the crime occurs in another jurisdiction, and there are people in jail for life. Since Rwanda can't bomb the shit out of Belgium, there's no worries about doing this. But you better believe that if anyone tried to do this to a Russian (Chechnya) or Chinese (Tibet) official, Belgium would be a smoking crater.
I wish I could pass laws to lock up random people, too.
-jon
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 2
Darwinism does not apply to Capitalism.
I don't think you understand either Darwinism or Capitalism.
Dawinism states that the organisms that are best adapted for their environment will be the ones that pass on their genes.
Geeks love the BEST solution to a problem, where best == technically elegant or technically advanced.
The real world like the GOOD ENOUGH solution, which wins because there are more parameters than "technical elegance" in the real world. In the real world, MS wins most of the time because they are "best adapted" to the environment they work in.
You believe that torture is an ethically justified response to vandalism?
How about you let me vandalize your stuff, and then let me know what you'd like to do to me. I'm sure that some defintion of "torture" would be met by your words.
The fact that some children do not value other people's stuff means the children's parents have failed. The real solution is to punish the PARENTS. Once a few parents are punished, we'll see parents in general start to teach children a bit of respect for other people's stuff. Of course, if it's an adult who is the vandal/thief/whatever, then the adult should get the punishment.
A better punishment than caning would be to work at hard manual labor until you've earned back an amount equal to the cost of damaged goods. All in favor of having teenage vandals cleaning cesspools, raise their hands...
Was there no facility to output ebooks to a braille-friendly output? Strange omission on the part of the writers...
The problem is that eBook technology includes flags to indicate how the book can be used. One of those flags is "read aloud." This is supposed to tell Text-to-Speech software for eBooks to not read these books.
It's all sick, really. The idea that you can't use something you bought any way you want is nuts, but that's what we get for turning it all over to the lawyers and the suits.
Maintaining code is a pretty thankless job, but at least with MI the changes only have to be made in one place. Java's interface based MI either forces similar code to be included in each class that implements an interface or the inclusion of lots of little stub routines that to call the smae named routine on a different class.
Clearly you aren't a Java programmer. If you want to do multiple inheritance, what you most likely really want to do is share some utilities across several class hierarchies. This means you want a utility class, if you want things to be clean.
What you should do is declare an interface which exposes various properties which are needed to perform the utility operation. Then create a singleton which you pass in object of the interface type.
Presto! Code in one place can be modified to support multiple classes. Inheritance is used for what it is supposed to be used, and maintanence is easy.
Because if one of them has an exploitable security hole, the whole network is compromised.
How would the whole network be compromised? We're not trying to keep people OUT of the network, just trying to keep people from reading each other's data.
If everyone has their own encrypted connection to the proxy server, and some new dumb ass comes along who doesn't have an encrypted connection, then dumb ass' traffic can be seen, but everyone else's is still encrypted. No one else's keys have been exposed.
You are absolutely right; I was having a brain cramp. For some reason, I managed to convince myself that the SSL connection was between the base station and the SSL server and the data between the laptop with the wireless card and the base station would be in the clear.
On further reflection, this doesn't make any sense. The base station is just forwarding on any packets you have sent from the laptop to the remote server (as well as packets sent in the reverse direction); any SSL encoding would have been done on the laptop.
So yeah, SSL is safe. But a proxy server with ssh would be nice for the non-protected protocols.
Agreed, but what needs to be done to make an 802.11b connection secure is combining a base station with a proxy server running SSH, tunneling the most common protocols (HTTP, SSL, FTP, NNTP, NTP, Telnet for the masochists). If there's no proxy tunneling my SSL connection to www.buystuff.com, then my credit card number will go through the air, completely insecure.
A Unix box with an 802.11 card running sshd and natd/ipfw could solve this problem; thing is that it'll cost about 4x more than just the base station, and most people don't understand why it's so necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
-jon
-jon
Oh, you're full of shit.
Are you familiar with Kach and Kahane Chai? They are radical Jewish groups who preach that Israel needs to throw every Arab out of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Israel has banned them as illegal terrorist groups and the US government considers them to be terrorist groups. There have been arrests and the FBI gathering evidence from JDL servers as evidence that the JDL is providing funds to Kach and Kahane Chai. Once again, not news on Slashdot. It's the JDL which is partnering with HinduUnity, BTW.
If the major Arab news source is so poorly set-up that they only have a single hosting point, then gee, this sort of thing is going to happen. What's the next Slashdot/iViews headline: "Zionist Racist Backhoe Takes Out Islamic Voice on Internet"?
-jon
Legally, you are absolutely correct. I'm talking morally, though.
HinduUnity's words condemn them. Muslim groups that want to shut them down, and force them off of their servers provide evidence for their paranoia. It also drew a lot more attention to them.
Leaving them alone would have been best, but these idjits just couldn't _stand_ to have something somewhere that they found offensive. Substitute "porn" or "Howard Stern" or "neo-Nazi" or whatever for "Hindu Unity" and you'll get the idea.
Like I said, people piss and moan when something happens to a site they agree with but shrug their shoulders when it is something they don't agree with. Well I'm pissing and moaning even when I don't agree with it. And I don't think taking a bunch of sites down for a few hours while the FBI collects evidence is nearly as big of a deal as mob action against unpopular opinions. But that's just me.
-jon
Now, I haven't checked to see exactly which sites were taken down temporarily, but there are several Muslim organizations in the US who raise money for groups that US government considers terrorist groups. That's illegal.
My guess is that at least one of the web sites falls into this category. We're not talking about sites that preach hate and violence, we're talking about sites that finance it. I'm not saying that every Muslim web site or organization is hateful or violent or whatever, but they do exist.
By your standards, this shouldn't be news, then.
-jon
I'm not a Hindu and some what HinduUnity.org preaches scares the heck out of me. But it shouldn't be forced off its ISP by crybabies. I just can't stand the hypocritical posturing.
-jon
I guess it's OK for Muslim complaints to take out a Hindu web site, but it's not OK for federal investigation to shut down some Muslim web sites for a few hours.
BTW, the Hindu web site found hosting again on a server run by a militant Jewish group. The New York Times ran a story on it a few months ago; it's funny what strange bedfellows these sorts of things can make.
I expect this will be modded down to about -200 in a few minutes...interesting how the truth can do that.
-jon
MS should have included an HTML renderer that could be used by many apps to display help, errors, whatever (Apple has just this as part of their OS, used for Apple Help). MS should even have written their own browser which takes advantage of the HTML renderer.
However, you'd have to be daft to think that a browser is anything more than an application. It should be trivial to remove a browser, just as it is trivial to remove other "essentials", like a word processor, spreadsheet, or compiler.
MS went out of its way, making its systems less stable and slower, just to make sure that removing the browser would be impossible. Furthermore, it then threatened anyone who wanted to include an alternate browser. This is anti-consumer behavior (shipping a worse product just to screw a competitor) and anti-competitive behavior.
The first isn't a crime, just stupid if you aren't selling to a captive audience. The fact that MS can do these sorts of stupid things proves that it has a captive audience, which makes MS and also makes anti-competitive behavior illegal.
With MS now including a media player as a "core" part of its operating system while "accidently" breaking QuickTime plugin support, I'm more and more convinced that separating MS into OS and applications (as well as a third company for languages and compilers) needs to be done. Not going to happen, though.
-jon
-jon
There was one "James Bond" episode where different cast members were parts of the Holodeck program (good guys and bad guys), and if they died in the program, they'd be dead for real.
But that was mostly played for laughs. Avery Brooks in the Neru jacket as the Bond villian was awesome
-jon
Build software poorly, and you not only lock a client into a system that's so bad no one else can replace you, but you get lots of billable hours trying to fix bugs and upgrade the software.
When lemon laws apply to software (and they should!), hiring people to write software who are actually competent will follow.
-jon
If I remember my early 20th century history correctly (and I might not), Bryant wanted free and unlimited minting of money. This would have made it easier for farmers (his chief supporters) to pay off their debts (small farmers then had the same problems as small farmers now), but would have made inflation rampant.
Bryant would have wanted these microbes because his understanding of economics sucked. His understanding of evolution sucked, too (he was part of the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial). Hell of a public speaker, though
-jon
-jon
I want to buy an iBook, but can't justify having two laptops, and the damn PowerBook just won't die, despite being knocked off the coffee table twice in the last six months (the antenna part of the case on the wireless PC card is getting beat all to hell, though). I use the PowerBook as a web pad all the time. The only problems it has are 20 minute battery life (because the battery is 3 years old and it's trying to power a ton more hardware than it was originally designed to power) and it usually crashes when it tries to wake up from sleep (I think this is due to the power drawn by the wireless card, upgraded CPU, upgraded hard drive, and upgraded RAM. If I pull the wireless card, the problem goes away, but the laptop is virtually useless to me).
As a side note in the net appliance category, I use the PowerBook as an MP3 player for my stereo, too. I've got about 100 of my CDs ripped on my iMac. The iMac's hard drive is shared via 802.11b, and iTunes running on the PowerBook is able to play MP3s with nary a skip. Just plug the audio out of the PowerBook into the stereo, and I've got a nice stereo component.
-jon
Maybe not trusting your ISP is a side-effect of using one of the large, faceless companies as an ISP. I use sonic.net (www.sonic.net), which is relatively small, has great tech support, provides equipment status (and failure) notices on its home page, and is currently fighting SBC to overturn its new, restrictive DSL contract.
I pay about $5/month more for my DSL with Sonic than I would with SBC, but I get a static IP address, no limitations on running a server, a shell account, 50MB of web space on their server, and I get a nice warm feeling from supporting a mom-and-pop company.
If you don't trust your ISP, you've got to wonder why you're giving them money in the first place.
-jon
You clearly don't understand the type and creator fields.
There are TWO separate fields for each file in the classic Mac OS. One (TYPE) indicates what kind of file it is. The other (CREATOR) indicates what program will open the file by default. Each is four bytes long.
The nice thing about this system is that you get a clean separation between file typing AND default launching application. It's other OSes which have the "monolithic" structure you're talking about.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?
First of all, it'd be an 8 character extension. Secondly, List view on a Mac shows file type by default; an application is listed as "application program". Granted icon view won't discriminate unless you do a get info or sort by kind. Finally, if you don't trust the source of a file, don't open the file. This is common sense, no matter what extensions you are showing or whatever file system you are using.
-jon
No they aren't.
The last time I used CGI (which was many years ago), each CGI request required a new heavyweight process to be spawned. I don't think this has changed, but I could be wrong.
Servlets don't work that way. They are part of the same heavyweight process, and you don't need to keep re-instantiating them anyway. Session state is kept per connection, but you can have far fewer than N threads to manage N users.
A CGI written in C is almost certainly vastly slower than simiar code writen as a Java servlet. Deal with it.
-jon -jon
As far as I know, Arafat and Saddam aren't being sued under Belgian law; however, the prime minister of Israel is being sued for an atrocity committed by Lebanese Christians. No one is charging any Lebanese, though.
The Belgians have already locked up a couple of Rwandans, because some people walking down the street identified them as being involved in the Rwandan genocide. Imagine, no forensic evidence, the crime occurs in another jurisdiction, and there are people in jail for life. Since Rwanda can't bomb the shit out of Belgium, there's no worries about doing this. But you better believe that if anyone tried to do this to a Russian (Chechnya) or Chinese (Tibet) official, Belgium would be a smoking crater.
I wish I could pass laws to lock up random people, too.
-jon
I don't think you understand either Darwinism or Capitalism.
Dawinism states that the organisms that are best adapted for their environment will be the ones that pass on their genes.
Geeks love the BEST solution to a problem, where best == technically elegant or technically advanced.
The real world like the GOOD ENOUGH solution, which wins because there are more parameters than "technical elegance" in the real world. In the real world, MS wins most of the time because they are "best adapted" to the environment they work in.
Sad, but true. The world is not an ideal place.
-jon
How about you let me vandalize your stuff, and then let me know what you'd like to do to me. I'm sure that some defintion of "torture" would be met by your words.
The fact that some children do not value other people's stuff means the children's parents have failed. The real solution is to punish the PARENTS. Once a few parents are punished, we'll see parents in general start to teach children a bit of respect for other people's stuff. Of course, if it's an adult who is the vandal/thief/whatever, then the adult should get the punishment.
A better punishment than caning would be to work at hard manual labor until you've earned back an amount equal to the cost of damaged goods. All in favor of having teenage vandals cleaning cesspools, raise their hands...
-jon
The problem is that eBook technology includes flags to indicate how the book can be used. One of those flags is "read aloud." This is supposed to tell Text-to-Speech software for eBooks to not read these books.
It's all sick, really. The idea that you can't use something you bought any way you want is nuts, but that's what we get for turning it all over to the lawyers and the suits.
-jon
Clearly you aren't a Java programmer. If you want to do multiple inheritance, what you most likely really want to do is share some utilities across several class hierarchies. This means you want a utility class, if you want things to be clean.
What you should do is declare an interface which exposes various properties which are needed to perform the utility operation. Then create a singleton which you pass in object of the interface type.
Presto! Code in one place can be modified to support multiple classes. Inheritance is used for what it is supposed to be used, and maintanence is easy.
-jon
How would the whole network be compromised? We're not trying to keep people OUT of the network, just trying to keep people from reading each other's data.
If everyone has their own encrypted connection to the proxy server, and some new dumb ass comes along who doesn't have an encrypted connection, then dumb ass' traffic can be seen, but everyone else's is still encrypted. No one else's keys have been exposed.
-jon
On further reflection, this doesn't make any sense. The base station is just forwarding on any packets you have sent from the laptop to the remote server (as well as packets sent in the reverse direction); any SSL encoding would have been done on the laptop.
So yeah, SSL is safe. But a proxy server with ssh would be nice for the non-protected protocols.
-jon
Agreed, but what needs to be done to make an 802.11b connection secure is combining a base station with a proxy server running SSH, tunneling the most common protocols (HTTP, SSL, FTP, NNTP, NTP, Telnet for the masochists). If there's no proxy tunneling my SSL connection to www.buystuff.com, then my credit card number will go through the air, completely insecure.
A Unix box with an 802.11 card running sshd and natd/ipfw could solve this problem; thing is that it'll cost about 4x more than just the base station, and most people don't understand why it's so necessary.
-jon