How is this different than every other programming language I've ever encountered? And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?
That depends on whether it'll be 99% read by Arabs or not. There's several older code bases I've heard of here in Norway that's been written in Norwegian, simply because it was easier since it's our native language and you can use native terms the business side use in dealing with customers and they had no international ambition or plans to outsource. Well not the programming language, but the functions, the variables, the comments and so on. Changing the language itself would probably seem more natural, not less. That said I'd say the trend has been strongly the opposite, everybody wants their code base in English because otherwise it's impossible to use that code in an international setting. It's actually a much stronger pull towards using English as your code language than as your business language - and even that is pretty rampant in larger companies.
I think the tl;dr summary of your post is: IPv4 was designed around the same time frame as storing 2-digit years. Enough said really.
The only thing that differentiates IPv4 from pretty much every other limit or system we've had to expand is that it was actually very forward thinking with room for billions of devices, so instead of having to do it "right" in the 90s when it actually hit mass market it survived the dotcom era without running out. It's only now with 7+ billion people and people using many devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet/etc.) that 32 bit is just not enough. Also if you look at the RIRs we're not really out yet, only Asia is out. Get an IP block anywhere else and you're still good for a little while though Europe is also empty in a few months.
Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.
Dude, we used those features when we wrote our master's thesis back in 2003 in MS Office and they work just fine. If the problem is that people don't know to use their tools, handing them a new one isn't going to solve anything. If I'd been writing it alone I'd probably have used LaTeX, so I'd say it's more like the people who know how use it in any tool and those who don't never will.
Yeah this supposes that everyone in the world puts money above all other values. In reality, that only describes a subset of humanity. If it described everyone then every opportunity to commit a financially advantageous criminal act would be taken by everyone every chance they got.
But it describes pretty much 100% of all for-profit companies, they're not a person and they don't as such have a conscience. Whatever things they claim to do for charity and the environment and whatnot is usually a PR exercise that's ultimately designed to bring them even more money. No matter what those executives want they have shareholders who want profit. They have employees that want to make profits to get their bonuses. Any corporation rewards those that make money for it, it's the essence of capitalism which means that's what you get from top to bottom and the sociopaths that care about nothing else floats to the top. It might not be how people act, but it's how corporations act and Google definitively is one of them. Don't expect those executives to keep it from turning into just like every other big company.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but if they're bundling a $250B company with each XPS laptop purchased, even *I* want to get in on this promotion!
And Staples saved themselves having any support for Linux, testing for Linux, returns because the buyer didn't really want Linux or it didn't work out for them. And if you say geeks support themselves I think you'll find that switches quickly when they've paid for a Linux laptop, they'll be expecting that it works far more smoothly than a DIY install that may or may not run well on that model. If it did, great for you. Linux is niche. Niche usually means expensive to stock, expensive to test, expensive to support. If Windows has an issue maybe you fix it for a million users, if Linux has a similar issue you fix it for ten thousand. That means a lot fewer people to spread the cost on. So the license is free, big whoop. With all the trialware they get paid to install on Windows I doubt it costs them much at all. So why exactly should it be cheaper?
History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
The attack on Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, D-day was in June 1944. The turning point in the war was probably in late 1942 so by the time the US got seriously involved in ground combat it was pretty obvious Hitler was going to lose. The invasion was to stop the Soviet Union from taking all of Europe, it was to stop communism not fascism. Ironically that was one of the reasons Hitler got to do all he did, the other European leaders thought he'd stop the commies. You might say that backfired a little when he made a peace treaty with Stalin and invaded westwards instead, if you're going to let a rabid dog loose you'd better make sure he'll bite in the right direction.
It is even worse than that - if it is wont be possible to change the certificate on a machine and that certificate get compromized, then it means there is no security anymore neither... The device is now junk after maybe one month of owning it. You need a new device regardless. And dont tell me you have not heard of the certificates for BlueRay and so on being compromised...
BluRay players have a private key to decrypt that can be compromised. Secure Boot only has a public key to verify so it can't be compromised, there's no secret.
The alternative - Microsoft can remotely update the certificate, but that also mean any remote attacker who break the key can change it...
No. If Microsoft was to be hacked and their signing key compromised - a pretty heavy feat of hacking in itself, they'd pull out their root key and revoke that key then create and sign a new signing key. This is PKI 101, you always have a root key for situations like this. Of course if their root key was compromised they're fucked, but that one is deep in a vault deep in the bowels of Microsoft and the only place it'd come out would be in a secure facility to sign a new signing key.
AND the worst part is, secure boot doesn't actually fix the problem it pretends it solves. It can't. This is the whole DRM of DVD's and BluRay all over again. Look at how well that is working out. DRM is broken by design.
That depends on what problem it is you think it pretends to solve. A computer made to only run signed code doesn't have the same fundamental weakness as DRM has where the private key has to be somewhere to decrypt it, nobody but Microsoft is going to have Microsoft's private signing key and unless they give you that option disabling the signature check is going to be extremely hard. Getting any other code to run - except user space code in Win8's application sandbox - will be as hard as cracking the Xbox360 or the PS3. I suspect that with a "boiling the frog" strategy the current document said people MUST be able to disable it on x86, the next one will say MAY and with a nudge and a wink to the OEMs it's going to end up at MAY NOT.
1. Financing is one thing, but your rant about the FDA is way off the mark. You think unregulated greed is going to give you better results? That they're not going to lie about their efficiency, downplay side effects and sacrifice lives for the sake of profit - all actual medical effects of course not guaranteed and no liability for harm in the small print. How's that strategy been working out for your banking sector? 2. Have you any idea how many fucked up doctors there are out there who shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine, even with the system that's in place? You think any clown should be able to start calling themselves doctor and cutting people open or feeding them prescription drugs? At the same time as you're doing away with malpractice insurance so now they'll be economically screwed as well as medically screwed? 3. No doubt you Americans have a rather fucked up system, but what does that have to do with medical patents? We also have to deal with patents here in Europe and we don't have these issues, that should be a pretty good clue you're barking up the wrong tree. Try a lawsuit-happy country that loves to award $millions and you're off to a good start.
Do you think a tractor company should get "license" and charge royalties (however the amount) on the the food the tractor produces?
Well, do you think it should be illegal for me to buy some tractors and lease/rent them out to farmers, charging either for time or miles driven or both? Maybe I want to run some kind of Tractors as a Service (TaaS) system providing tractor capacity on demand the way I find best and charging by the food produced. Maybe that's the only kind of service the tractor company wants to offer. You make it sound like you have to sell your work and I disagree, you just shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Today you have licenses that look and act like a sale except the consumer gets less rights and the corporation selling it more rights. Why should we move away from an age-old, balanced, simple and understandable form of commerce towards one where we're constantly forced to agree to 100-page EULAs full of incomprehensible legalese?
The courts actually beat down the "this book is licensed, not sold" bullshit and they ought to do the same for CDs, DVDs, software, ebooks and whatnot else too. If it has the characteristics of a sale then it's a sale and the laws governing sales apply and nothing else. It's not going to happen but it's one of the things that makes me want IP reform and a return to when you owned your own stuff. Or if you didn't, well then it was at least blindingly obvious that it was someone else's. They've sold people on a false sense of ownership which there is no longer any legal reason to say they have and it's probably the biggest ripoff of the digital age.
I wouldn't get your hopes up too much, they're not really doing anything to map out the neurons in the eye. They're just punching through and stimulating whatever neurons are behind that spot of the retina, which will be "close enough" to give you a low-resolution grayscale image but they haven't got a clue on how to stimulate only one type of receptors so you can have color or to map it accurately so you can have high resolution. A working eye is a helluva sensor and I suspect we'll be using night vision goggles and such to translate invisible light to visible light for many decades to come.
I think he meant "on the web" as in "accessible from the web", since there's a ton of protocols that have never ever been part of any web browser. Yes, a web page may link to a mailto: URI, but at least traditionally that would always launch an e-mail client that speaks other protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. It's just a way to hand you off to a specific spot outside the web by passing parameters, not part of the web. Just like me launching a web page from my application doesn't make it a web browser, I just handed you off to a specific location on the web. Those non-HTTP links are a great boon to the web to be sure, but only the links are on the web. Whatever they point to are outside it.
I'm generally not anal about it though, I usually sneak in a "it's not web-based but..." continuing the conversation rather than stop and outright contradict them. If they're curious about it I'll explain that there are different protocols just like us humans have different languages, the web uses a very popular one but it's not the only one. Webmail is a good example, why is it called that and not just email? Because email wasn't originally on the web - in fact it's older than the web, so if you use an email client like Outlook you're not using the web. Webmail was created so you could talk to the email system from your web browser. The smart people will understand that there's a whole system back there talking in other ways, the rest well you hopefully haven't confused them too much.
The Linux game market is really those gamers who refuse to dual boot or run WINE. That is a group far smaller than you suggest. The current Steam customers don't really count since the Linux version would simply cannibalize sales of the Windows version and generate no new revenue for the developer.
It's not that binary. For "important" games that I wanted badly and was willing to dual boot or deal with WINE for, yes I was a Steam customer. But I'd probably make more casual or impulse purchases if I knew okay this is tested and supported and will work with no hassle under Linux, like say their deal of the day or weekend sales. But sure yes, quite a few purchases would be pure cannibalization.
The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.
He does. All the time. And people try bending the rules and stretching the definitions. All the time. You make it sound like Linus only had to tell them once and everybody'd go "well alright then" but it's more like a horny teenager with a girl on the back row of the cinema. No matter how many times those hands are pushed back they'll be back in a slightly different way or after another round of sweet talk. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about or what this "girl" thing is, you can imagine it's like the lobbyists in politics. No matter how many times a bill is defeated they'll keep pushing for new laws that amount to the same. In all three cases they just don't quit until they succeed.
Secondly: How does the system react to imminent crashes? If this performs worse than what the driver was already doing, it can cause a crash.
And the related question, even if the computer did everything as "right" as possible how would you prove it did? All it takes is for a person to get up on the stand and say "No sir, I did not run over and kill that man. I was going to swerve around him into the ditch but the car took over control and ran straight over him. My driving may have been reckless but it was the car that killed him." No matter if it's true or not, would be possible or not, the makers of this system would have to get up there on the stand and defend their interference and try proving they did not in any possible way made things worse.
I agree with your analysis, if the computer can handle near-crash situations well then surely it can handle the more mundane driving of making turns, following lanes and signs and traffic lights. Near crashes have all the hard parts with pedestrians, bikers and other cars, huge set of possible actions, hard to predict outcomes and is the hard part of AI driving. If you had this system you could install it on Google's car and together you'd have your fully self-driving car already, I don't see how you could create one without the other. Not to mention then the systems could actually talk to each other rather than trying to guess the thoughts of the driver.
No, you won't, because the waterfall model requires you to put everyone in a room and not let them leave until they have agreed to a set of requirements that they can live with.
That only works on the absolutely tiniest of projects. My usual impression that the big wig with the sign-off power is far too busy and important to be on your project. You get appointed some kind of representative, who is supposed to gather requirements from the users - or usually just a representative subset of them, compile it, hopefully do some kind of QA and present it for the big wig to sign. At best possibly the one person on your team has some grasp of the total solution to be delivered, but the coverage is spotty and the requirements are ambiguous, conflicting, don't contain things they think are implicit or obvious or just not detailed enough.
That you could in theory hammer out into a very detailed and implementable spec, but what you also get is feature bloat because if it's not in the spec it's out so you try to include every feature that might be nice to have or that you might possibly need. But I suppose all of that would be fine if eventually it delivered well, the problem is most IT projects fail. And they fail not because of these bells and whistles but because they fail to deliver the core functionality and value. To use a car analogy, it's like spending a ton of money on interior decoration only to find the engine design is a bust and the car will never roll off the production line or the world changed between when your SUV design started and it was delivered.
Of course those that profess the waterfall method tend to say that with enough planning you should never have a failure, if you just do the paper exercise well enough you should know up front whether it'll be a success or not. Agile is saying the only true proof is to deliver, so you start with what is supposed to give most business value and you either succeed and expand or fail and fail early. If I'm going for a drive I haven't planned every turn of the wheel, acceleration and breaking up front. I know the direction I'm going, probably the route unless there's a detour but the details are worked out as I go.
The only perfectly safe rocket is the one on the ground. As an astronaut you sit on top of what's practically a controlled explosion travelling thousands of miles per hour and where being slightly off course means you'll either crash and disintegrate or disappear into deep space with no hope of return. That said, I think the way SpaceX is going about it is the right way - build reliable rockets that are used for satellites and cargo, then put a human capsule in it. The #1 criteria for any human launch vehicle should be a proven track record, tighten all the tolerances a notch and increase the inspections so your manned flight isn't the one out of spec and let it fly. How should we land on other planets? The same way we've landed probes and if humans can't survive that then make a probe that lands like a human mission would.
That said, a better question is if astronauts are cost effective anymore. Yes, people are quick to point out all the things humans could do that our current robots can not but with the budget of a human mission we could build more robots and make them more complex too. I don't think many people understand exactly the constraints probes and rovers operate under, for example Spirit and Opportunity has a power budget of about 0.6 kWh/day and has been down to under 0.1 kWh/day in winter. You'd need massive insulation which means a large, unmovable structure you can't leave and a power budget orders of magnitude higher just not to freeze to death. I doubt life on Mars would be very glamorous.
Maybe, maybe not. If the requirements really are constantly changing, Agile poses a very real risk of never producing a working product. At some point, you have to step back and say, "Okay, we're never going to have a working building if we can't decide whether we're building a house or an office building." At some point, you simply must stop doing the agile stuff to just beat on the project for an arbitrarily long period of time until you have something that is functional for some fixed set of goals, and worry about dealing with the fallout later.
Well if your requirements are that chaotic, you'll have at least as many problems in waterfall. Agile is a bit more "what do you need the most", so maybe say dry walls, electricity and plumbing. Agile is the "we can retrofit this" concept, if you want downlights we can add that circuit later. If the bathroom needs to be handicap friendly, we can redo the floor plan later. If you want to put in a jacuzzi, we can fit that later. Waterfall is the "let's think this through" concept, maybe we can do all this electricity, plumbing and floor plan once and do it right. Particularly if you have to redo a perfectly good paint job because you had to redo the floor plan or tear up the foundation to lay new pipes. Neither is a miracle cure, if you can get it mostly right the first time do that but if not then you just have to start somewhere rather than wait every detail to be done.
The worst thing I find about Agile is scope creep. We were told we need to manage client expectations, which wouldn't be a problem except we're not allowed to say no, or that we can't do something, and we're not allowed to discuss cost. What I've ended up doing is putting all the request I get in a database then I let the client pick the most important features at the beginning of each cycle. After two or three cycles the clients usually forget about the, "oh, you know what would be really neat!!" features, or they confront me with, "Why hasn't such'n'such been done yet I asked for it two months ago", in which case I tell them it's in the queue. When projects go over budget we leave it to the managers to deal with. After all we're not allowed to discuss cost.
Well, part of agile is that managers have the permission to change priorities (but only between sprints, not during sprints), but they can't put infinite work into a sprint - if something gets prioritized up everything else is prioritized down. And strictly speaking you shouldn't speak costs but you should speak hours - estimated with planning poker or something like that. Here's roughly how I've understood it should happen:
1. The product backlog should contain all the tasks the project should do. Tasks that are far out are coarser and have less secure estimates, but that list is the best estimate on the total scope. 2. Any pet features the manager has wanted should go in the product backlog, that's the only place where he's allowed to add items. 3. Before each sprint, the team detail and estimate sprint tasks from the product backlog that might go into the next sprint, for a small feature this may be a 1:1 but for a large feature there's typically many sprint tasks to one product task. 4. The manager and the scrum master go over the product/sprint items and decide which should go into the next sprint, the sprint is timeboxed and the estimates are given so it's almost like ordering a la carte, you can only get X items from the menu. 5. You can at any time see the scope creep from hours spent + product backlog. Typically you create a burndown chart which shows how many sprints it would take to complete the project given the current backlog and the current velocity (hours delivered/sprint).
If I'm off on vacation and the electricity goes out for 3 days so all my food spoils, I could very well have £50 in losses even though £3 in electricity was all they failed to deliver. While companies in general disclaim actual damages - as well as every other kind of damage - it could still be money out of my pocket that I lost due to their poor service so I can understand people being angry and wanting compensation. Imaging if this was a SLA, would you pay 90% of the normal cost for servers with 90% uptime? Hell no, you'd have huge penalties for outages like that. Unfortunately most consumer SLAs says that you'll get as much service as they please and if they want to fuck you over you better lube up and bend over. Unfortunately reliability costs and if people aren't paying for it, they're not going to get it.
I agree. Every other roll out MS has done was a money grab. 98 should have been 98SE, ME should have been XP. Vista should have been 7.
I don't really mind as long as they release products that are better than the last one. 98 was better than 95 so fair enough IMO, even though SE came shortly after. Vista was a "had to ship" release, it was 5 years since XP and they couldn't wait another 3 years for it to be Win7. But WinME... yeah, that's what computers run in hell. Not the one Satan and the devils use of course, but all those for the (soon to be) tormented souls. And there's a full library with every flavor of Linux, but the USB ports are all glued shut and there's no optical drive. Oddly enough, the user support is still the same service outsourced to Hydrabad...
No, your ISP is not going to monitor anything. But you know all these IP addresses the MAFIAA has been collecting? Well now instead of threatening with harmless C&D letters or trying to sue 10,000 people at once through the courts those will now go as "strikes" directly from the MAFIAA to your ISP. Get enough strikes and you will be harassed and in worst case disconnected by your ISP. They haven't hired on the ISPs to spy on you, but as their private vigilante justice system. Instead of having to deal with courts and their rules and rights, it'll now go straight from the MAFIAA to the ISPs to punishing you without legal interference. Welcome to the corporate justice system, by the corporations, for the corporations so please get in line for your Internet Death Penalty right after your fair hearing.
I don't see how that's going to work at all. Wouldn't most modern browsers block popups, especially those not at all affiliated with the target site? Wouldn't most third-party DNS providers warn you of a redirection as some kind of hostile activity? Wouldn't a NoScript (or similar) browser also defeat some/all of these "notification" methods?
Worst case they could simply/dev/null everything but plain HTTP and redirect that to a "please contact us" page that you have to click through to get your connection back, not unlike how many wifi services makes you sign in / agree to a ToS before letting you proceed. I've never heard of anyone using that on a regular broadband connection before though, but should be fairly straightforward. Hmm, I wonder if this could be patentable - I'd love to throw a little monkey wrench in that system.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this different than every other programming language I've ever encountered? And doesn't writing javascript in, say, Arabic, just make it inaccessible to 99% of the people who like look at your code?
That depends on whether it'll be 99% read by Arabs or not. There's several older code bases I've heard of here in Norway that's been written in Norwegian, simply because it was easier since it's our native language and you can use native terms the business side use in dealing with customers and they had no international ambition or plans to outsource. Well not the programming language, but the functions, the variables, the comments and so on. Changing the language itself would probably seem more natural, not less. That said I'd say the trend has been strongly the opposite, everybody wants their code base in English because otherwise it's impossible to use that code in an international setting. It's actually a much stronger pull towards using English as your code language than as your business language - and even that is pretty rampant in larger companies.
I think the tl;dr summary of your post is: IPv4 was designed around the same time frame as storing 2-digit years. Enough said really.
The only thing that differentiates IPv4 from pretty much every other limit or system we've had to expand is that it was actually very forward thinking with room for billions of devices, so instead of having to do it "right" in the 90s when it actually hit mass market it survived the dotcom era without running out. It's only now with 7+ billion people and people using many devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet/etc.) that 32 bit is just not enough. Also if you look at the RIRs we're not really out yet, only Asia is out. Get an IP block anywhere else and you're still good for a little while though Europe is also empty in a few months.
Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.
Dude, we used those features when we wrote our master's thesis back in 2003 in MS Office and they work just fine. If the problem is that people don't know to use their tools, handing them a new one isn't going to solve anything. If I'd been writing it alone I'd probably have used LaTeX, so I'd say it's more like the people who know how use it in any tool and those who don't never will.
Yeah this supposes that everyone in the world puts money above all other values. In reality, that only describes a subset of humanity. If it described everyone then every opportunity to commit a financially advantageous criminal act would be taken by everyone every chance they got.
But it describes pretty much 100% of all for-profit companies, they're not a person and they don't as such have a conscience. Whatever things they claim to do for charity and the environment and whatnot is usually a PR exercise that's ultimately designed to bring them even more money. No matter what those executives want they have shareholders who want profit. They have employees that want to make profits to get their bonuses. Any corporation rewards those that make money for it, it's the essence of capitalism which means that's what you get from top to bottom and the sociopaths that care about nothing else floats to the top. It might not be how people act, but it's how corporations act and Google definitively is one of them. Don't expect those executives to keep it from turning into just like every other big company.
Just in time for Ubuntu 12.10, eh?
Yeah... Metro vs Unity, fight! And Apple is on their way to iOS X as well. I'll go get the popcorn while I watch from by traditional desktop.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but if they're bundling a $250B company with each XPS laptop purchased, even *I* want to get in on this promotion!
I'll take two!
And Staples saved themselves having any support for Linux, testing for Linux, returns because the buyer didn't really want Linux or it didn't work out for them. And if you say geeks support themselves I think you'll find that switches quickly when they've paid for a Linux laptop, they'll be expecting that it works far more smoothly than a DIY install that may or may not run well on that model. If it did, great for you. Linux is niche. Niche usually means expensive to stock, expensive to test, expensive to support. If Windows has an issue maybe you fix it for a million users, if Linux has a similar issue you fix it for ten thousand. That means a lot fewer people to spread the cost on. So the license is free, big whoop. With all the trialware they get paid to install on Windows I doubt it costs them much at all. So why exactly should it be cheaper?
History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
The attack on Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, D-day was in June 1944. The turning point in the war was probably in late 1942 so by the time the US got seriously involved in ground combat it was pretty obvious Hitler was going to lose. The invasion was to stop the Soviet Union from taking all of Europe, it was to stop communism not fascism. Ironically that was one of the reasons Hitler got to do all he did, the other European leaders thought he'd stop the commies. You might say that backfired a little when he made a peace treaty with Stalin and invaded westwards instead, if you're going to let a rabid dog loose you'd better make sure he'll bite in the right direction.
It is even worse than that - if it is wont be possible to change the certificate on a machine and that certificate get compromized, then it means there is no security anymore neither... The device is now junk after maybe one month of owning it. You need a new device regardless. And dont tell me you have not heard of the certificates for BlueRay and so on being compromised...
BluRay players have a private key to decrypt that can be compromised. Secure Boot only has a public key to verify so it can't be compromised, there's no secret.
The alternative - Microsoft can remotely update the certificate, but that also mean any remote attacker who break the key can change it...
No. If Microsoft was to be hacked and their signing key compromised - a pretty heavy feat of hacking in itself, they'd pull out their root key and revoke that key then create and sign a new signing key. This is PKI 101, you always have a root key for situations like this. Of course if their root key was compromised they're fucked, but that one is deep in a vault deep in the bowels of Microsoft and the only place it'd come out would be in a secure facility to sign a new signing key.
AND the worst part is, secure boot doesn't actually fix the problem it pretends it solves. It can't. This is the whole DRM of DVD's and BluRay all over again. Look at how well that is working out. DRM is broken by design.
That depends on what problem it is you think it pretends to solve. A computer made to only run signed code doesn't have the same fundamental weakness as DRM has where the private key has to be somewhere to decrypt it, nobody but Microsoft is going to have Microsoft's private signing key and unless they give you that option disabling the signature check is going to be extremely hard. Getting any other code to run - except user space code in Win8's application sandbox - will be as hard as cracking the Xbox360 or the PS3. I suspect that with a "boiling the frog" strategy the current document said people MUST be able to disable it on x86, the next one will say MAY and with a nudge and a wink to the OEMs it's going to end up at MAY NOT.
1. Financing is one thing, but your rant about the FDA is way off the mark. You think unregulated greed is going to give you better results? That they're not going to lie about their efficiency, downplay side effects and sacrifice lives for the sake of profit - all actual medical effects of course not guaranteed and no liability for harm in the small print. How's that strategy been working out for your banking sector?
2. Have you any idea how many fucked up doctors there are out there who shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine, even with the system that's in place? You think any clown should be able to start calling themselves doctor and cutting people open or feeding them prescription drugs? At the same time as you're doing away with malpractice insurance so now they'll be economically screwed as well as medically screwed?
3. No doubt you Americans have a rather fucked up system, but what does that have to do with medical patents? We also have to deal with patents here in Europe and we don't have these issues, that should be a pretty good clue you're barking up the wrong tree. Try a lawsuit-happy country that loves to award $millions and you're off to a good start.
Do you think a tractor company should get "license" and charge royalties (however the amount) on the the food the tractor produces?
Well, do you think it should be illegal for me to buy some tractors and lease/rent them out to farmers, charging either for time or miles driven or both? Maybe I want to run some kind of Tractors as a Service (TaaS) system providing tractor capacity on demand the way I find best and charging by the food produced. Maybe that's the only kind of service the tractor company wants to offer. You make it sound like you have to sell your work and I disagree, you just shouldn't be able to have it both ways. Today you have licenses that look and act like a sale except the consumer gets less rights and the corporation selling it more rights. Why should we move away from an age-old, balanced, simple and understandable form of commerce towards one where we're constantly forced to agree to 100-page EULAs full of incomprehensible legalese?
The courts actually beat down the "this book is licensed, not sold" bullshit and they ought to do the same for CDs, DVDs, software, ebooks and whatnot else too. If it has the characteristics of a sale then it's a sale and the laws governing sales apply and nothing else. It's not going to happen but it's one of the things that makes me want IP reform and a return to when you owned your own stuff. Or if you didn't, well then it was at least blindingly obvious that it was someone else's. They've sold people on a false sense of ownership which there is no longer any legal reason to say they have and it's probably the biggest ripoff of the digital age.
I wouldn't get your hopes up too much, they're not really doing anything to map out the neurons in the eye. They're just punching through and stimulating whatever neurons are behind that spot of the retina, which will be "close enough" to give you a low-resolution grayscale image but they haven't got a clue on how to stimulate only one type of receptors so you can have color or to map it accurately so you can have high resolution. A working eye is a helluva sensor and I suspect we'll be using night vision goggles and such to translate invisible light to visible light for many decades to come.
I think he meant "on the web" as in "accessible from the web", since there's a ton of protocols that have never ever been part of any web browser. Yes, a web page may link to a mailto: URI, but at least traditionally that would always launch an e-mail client that speaks other protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. It's just a way to hand you off to a specific spot outside the web by passing parameters, not part of the web. Just like me launching a web page from my application doesn't make it a web browser, I just handed you off to a specific location on the web. Those non-HTTP links are a great boon to the web to be sure, but only the links are on the web. Whatever they point to are outside it.
I'm generally not anal about it though, I usually sneak in a "it's not web-based but..." continuing the conversation rather than stop and outright contradict them. If they're curious about it I'll explain that there are different protocols just like us humans have different languages, the web uses a very popular one but it's not the only one. Webmail is a good example, why is it called that and not just email? Because email wasn't originally on the web - in fact it's older than the web, so if you use an email client like Outlook you're not using the web. Webmail was created so you could talk to the email system from your web browser. The smart people will understand that there's a whole system back there talking in other ways, the rest well you hopefully haven't confused them too much.
The Linux game market is really those gamers who refuse to dual boot or run WINE. That is a group far smaller than you suggest. The current Steam customers don't really count since the Linux version would simply cannibalize sales of the Windows version and generate no new revenue for the developer.
It's not that binary. For "important" games that I wanted badly and was willing to dual boot or deal with WINE for, yes I was a Steam customer. But I'd probably make more casual or impulse purchases if I knew okay this is tested and supported and will work with no hassle under Linux, like say their deal of the day or weekend sales. But sure yes, quite a few purchases would be pure cannibalization.
The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.
He does. All the time. And people try bending the rules and stretching the definitions. All the time. You make it sound like Linus only had to tell them once and everybody'd go "well alright then" but it's more like a horny teenager with a girl on the back row of the cinema. No matter how many times those hands are pushed back they'll be back in a slightly different way or after another round of sweet talk. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about or what this "girl" thing is, you can imagine it's like the lobbyists in politics. No matter how many times a bill is defeated they'll keep pushing for new laws that amount to the same. In all three cases they just don't quit until they succeed.
Secondly: How does the system react to imminent crashes? If this performs worse than what the driver was already doing, it can cause a crash.
And the related question, even if the computer did everything as "right" as possible how would you prove it did? All it takes is for a person to get up on the stand and say "No sir, I did not run over and kill that man. I was going to swerve around him into the ditch but the car took over control and ran straight over him. My driving may have been reckless but it was the car that killed him." No matter if it's true or not, would be possible or not, the makers of this system would have to get up there on the stand and defend their interference and try proving they did not in any possible way made things worse.
I agree with your analysis, if the computer can handle near-crash situations well then surely it can handle the more mundane driving of making turns, following lanes and signs and traffic lights. Near crashes have all the hard parts with pedestrians, bikers and other cars, huge set of possible actions, hard to predict outcomes and is the hard part of AI driving. If you had this system you could install it on Google's car and together you'd have your fully self-driving car already, I don't see how you could create one without the other. Not to mention then the systems could actually talk to each other rather than trying to guess the thoughts of the driver.
No, you won't, because the waterfall model requires you to put everyone in a room and not let them leave until they have agreed to a set of requirements that they can live with.
That only works on the absolutely tiniest of projects. My usual impression that the big wig with the sign-off power is far too busy and important to be on your project. You get appointed some kind of representative, who is supposed to gather requirements from the users - or usually just a representative subset of them, compile it, hopefully do some kind of QA and present it for the big wig to sign. At best possibly the one person on your team has some grasp of the total solution to be delivered, but the coverage is spotty and the requirements are ambiguous, conflicting, don't contain things they think are implicit or obvious or just not detailed enough.
That you could in theory hammer out into a very detailed and implementable spec, but what you also get is feature bloat because if it's not in the spec it's out so you try to include every feature that might be nice to have or that you might possibly need. But I suppose all of that would be fine if eventually it delivered well, the problem is most IT projects fail. And they fail not because of these bells and whistles but because they fail to deliver the core functionality and value. To use a car analogy, it's like spending a ton of money on interior decoration only to find the engine design is a bust and the car will never roll off the production line or the world changed between when your SUV design started and it was delivered.
Of course those that profess the waterfall method tend to say that with enough planning you should never have a failure, if you just do the paper exercise well enough you should know up front whether it'll be a success or not. Agile is saying the only true proof is to deliver, so you start with what is supposed to give most business value and you either succeed and expand or fail and fail early. If I'm going for a drive I haven't planned every turn of the wheel, acceleration and breaking up front. I know the direction I'm going, probably the route unless there's a detour but the details are worked out as I go.
The only perfectly safe rocket is the one on the ground. As an astronaut you sit on top of what's practically a controlled explosion travelling thousands of miles per hour and where being slightly off course means you'll either crash and disintegrate or disappear into deep space with no hope of return. That said, I think the way SpaceX is going about it is the right way - build reliable rockets that are used for satellites and cargo, then put a human capsule in it. The #1 criteria for any human launch vehicle should be a proven track record, tighten all the tolerances a notch and increase the inspections so your manned flight isn't the one out of spec and let it fly. How should we land on other planets? The same way we've landed probes and if humans can't survive that then make a probe that lands like a human mission would.
That said, a better question is if astronauts are cost effective anymore. Yes, people are quick to point out all the things humans could do that our current robots can not but with the budget of a human mission we could build more robots and make them more complex too. I don't think many people understand exactly the constraints probes and rovers operate under, for example Spirit and Opportunity has a power budget of about 0.6 kWh/day and has been down to under 0.1 kWh/day in winter. You'd need massive insulation which means a large, unmovable structure you can't leave and a power budget orders of magnitude higher just not to freeze to death. I doubt life on Mars would be very glamorous.
Maybe, maybe not. If the requirements really are constantly changing, Agile poses a very real risk of never producing a working product. At some point, you have to step back and say, "Okay, we're never going to have a working building if we can't decide whether we're building a house or an office building." At some point, you simply must stop doing the agile stuff to just beat on the project for an arbitrarily long period of time until you have something that is functional for some fixed set of goals, and worry about dealing with the fallout later.
Well if your requirements are that chaotic, you'll have at least as many problems in waterfall. Agile is a bit more "what do you need the most", so maybe say dry walls, electricity and plumbing. Agile is the "we can retrofit this" concept, if you want downlights we can add that circuit later. If the bathroom needs to be handicap friendly, we can redo the floor plan later. If you want to put in a jacuzzi, we can fit that later. Waterfall is the "let's think this through" concept, maybe we can do all this electricity, plumbing and floor plan once and do it right. Particularly if you have to redo a perfectly good paint job because you had to redo the floor plan or tear up the foundation to lay new pipes. Neither is a miracle cure, if you can get it mostly right the first time do that but if not then you just have to start somewhere rather than wait every detail to be done.
The worst thing I find about Agile is scope creep. We were told we need to manage client expectations, which wouldn't be a problem except we're not allowed to say no, or that we can't do something, and we're not allowed to discuss cost. What I've ended up doing is putting all the request I get in a database then I let the client pick the most important features at the beginning of each cycle. After two or three cycles the clients usually forget about the, "oh, you know what would be really neat!!" features, or they confront me with, "Why hasn't such'n'such been done yet I asked for it two months ago", in which case I tell them it's in the queue. When projects go over budget we leave it to the managers to deal with. After all we're not allowed to discuss cost.
Well, part of agile is that managers have the permission to change priorities (but only between sprints, not during sprints), but they can't put infinite work into a sprint - if something gets prioritized up everything else is prioritized down. And strictly speaking you shouldn't speak costs but you should speak hours - estimated with planning poker or something like that. Here's roughly how I've understood it should happen:
1. The product backlog should contain all the tasks the project should do. Tasks that are far out are coarser and have less secure estimates, but that list is the best estimate on the total scope.
2. Any pet features the manager has wanted should go in the product backlog, that's the only place where he's allowed to add items.
3. Before each sprint, the team detail and estimate sprint tasks from the product backlog that might go into the next sprint, for a small feature this may be a 1:1 but for a large feature there's typically many sprint tasks to one product task.
4. The manager and the scrum master go over the product/sprint items and decide which should go into the next sprint, the sprint is timeboxed and the estimates are given so it's almost like ordering a la carte, you can only get X items from the menu.
5. You can at any time see the scope creep from hours spent + product backlog. Typically you create a burndown chart which shows how many sprints it would take to complete the project given the current backlog and the current velocity (hours delivered/sprint).
If I'm off on vacation and the electricity goes out for 3 days so all my food spoils, I could very well have £50 in losses even though £3 in electricity was all they failed to deliver. While companies in general disclaim actual damages - as well as every other kind of damage - it could still be money out of my pocket that I lost due to their poor service so I can understand people being angry and wanting compensation. Imaging if this was a SLA, would you pay 90% of the normal cost for servers with 90% uptime? Hell no, you'd have huge penalties for outages like that. Unfortunately most consumer SLAs says that you'll get as much service as they please and if they want to fuck you over you better lube up and bend over. Unfortunately reliability costs and if people aren't paying for it, they're not going to get it.
I agree. Every other roll out MS has done was a money grab. 98 should have been 98SE, ME should have been XP. Vista should have been 7.
I don't really mind as long as they release products that are better than the last one. 98 was better than 95 so fair enough IMO, even though SE came shortly after. Vista was a "had to ship" release, it was 5 years since XP and they couldn't wait another 3 years for it to be Win7. But WinME... yeah, that's what computers run in hell. Not the one Satan and the devils use of course, but all those for the (soon to be) tormented souls. And there's a full library with every flavor of Linux, but the USB ports are all glued shut and there's no optical drive. Oddly enough, the user support is still the same service outsourced to Hydrabad...
No, your ISP is not going to monitor anything. But you know all these IP addresses the MAFIAA has been collecting? Well now instead of threatening with harmless C&D letters or trying to sue 10,000 people at once through the courts those will now go as "strikes" directly from the MAFIAA to your ISP. Get enough strikes and you will be harassed and in worst case disconnected by your ISP. They haven't hired on the ISPs to spy on you, but as their private vigilante justice system. Instead of having to deal with courts and their rules and rights, it'll now go straight from the MAFIAA to the ISPs to punishing you without legal interference. Welcome to the corporate justice system, by the corporations, for the corporations so please get in line for your Internet Death Penalty right after your fair hearing.
I don't see how that's going to work at all. Wouldn't most modern browsers block popups, especially those not at all affiliated with the target site? Wouldn't most third-party DNS providers warn you of a redirection as some kind of hostile activity? Wouldn't a NoScript (or similar) browser also defeat some/all of these "notification" methods?
Worst case they could simply /dev/null everything but plain HTTP and redirect that to a "please contact us" page that you have to click through to get your connection back, not unlike how many wifi services makes you sign in / agree to a ToS before letting you proceed. I've never heard of anyone using that on a regular broadband connection before though, but should be fairly straightforward. Hmm, I wonder if this could be patentable - I'd love to throw a little monkey wrench in that system.