Anyone who doesn't have the very basic level of knowledge required to know better than to leave the SA password blank doesn't have any business running a security-sensitive system, regardless of the vendor. SQL Server and Oracle are TOOLS. Installed straight out of the box they do essentially NOTHING - someone who only knows to click the 'next' button on the install wizard has no use for an RDBMS.
Don't get me wrong, I think not making the SA password change a part of the install is a bad idea, since it's easy to forget when you get busy with making your database actually do something. The only flaw here is in the wizard.
As for the ability to control the OS from SQL, that's not a bug, that's a feature. =] Granted, it's not a feature most of us use, and the stored procedure should probably be removed. That's just another part of being aware of the security implications of any system you put on the Internet.
As for the original note's comparison of the Piranha thing and this non-problem, get a life, people. What is it with/.'ers and this persecution complex? It's worse than an old Amiga users group meeting. Stop whining about the unfair treatment of Linux in the media and worry a little more about putting out some quality code.
My friends and I used to program virtual robots in a primitive BASIC-like language for an old DOS-based game called 'Warbots'. It was very easy to learn, but complex enough to keep it interesting.
A far more advanced version was called, I believe, 'PC Robots'. It was actually an API that would let you program your robots in just about any language (it provided libraries for C, Pascal, and Assembler, at least) and allowed you to create very complex robots to compete in a large arena. It required a lot of attention to things like power management, navigation, and fire control. The competitive element really served to capture the users' interest, and spawned some pretty creative solutions.
There's always the old corewars type systems, but they're a lot more abstract and for many people not as much fun as watching their robots fight it out on screen.
A quick check of AltaVista returned the following URL that might be of interest. I don't know if it's related to the old PC Robots, but it looks pretty similar.
Even in the technological backwater that is California's Central Coast, it's starting to make a difference. We're selling our house at the moment, and one of the selling points is that it's already wired with Cat 5 and has DSL service. On the other side of that, one of my biggest criteria in picking a new place has been distance from the central office. I found a place that's a bit small, but it's tempting since it's about 100 feet from the CO. =]
That might not be the best idea... when I was in New Zealand, calling an 800 number in the States cost me NZ$0.90/min, while regular (non-800) calls cost me about NZ$0.40/min. Go figure.
Worked for me. I spent a couple of weeks in New Zealand, and decided against getting an ISP account. Internet cafes were everywhere - I was in a town of 500 people or so and I found four different places within walking distance. They're typically using WebRamps or something similar, so you might even be able to plug your own laptop into their network.
It's not fair to say that coding efficiency in static pages isn't an issue. Personally, I despise HTML editors and write everything in a plain text editor with plenty of white space and indents for readability, but I've got a couple of novice users responsible for maintaining certain pages, and they insist on using MS Office wizards for creating their content. The result is that a simple 3-page table is now 170K+ and takes about 6 seconds to render in Netscape on a PII-350. Unfortunately, we're stuck with Office for maintaining the source documents, and the users don't have the time or desire to learn any better conversion tools, so I can only see this situation getting worse.
As for dynamic content, with high-volume sites I'm sure efficiency is a big issue. I understand the big guys like Yahoo have gone to great lengths to optimize their code - if they hadn't, I don't think any amount of hardware would handle the load. But in my own experience with fairly low-volume sites, the bigger problem is in producing clean, readable, debuggable, and reusable code. That's not always an easy task in PHP or ASP, and I've seen a number of big-name sites (who somehow neglected to fix the::$DATA bug:) with truly horrible coding. Why is it we seem to be ignoring the lessons of 30 years of programming when we're building these sites? (Don't even get me started about web programming security practices...)
At the high school level and above, I think laptops are a great idea. I used one in college for taking notes, since I can type at about 90 WPM but I can't read my own handwriting. And a few instructors even had some class material available in electronic format, at least for the Computer Science classes.
But all issues of affordability and responsibility aside, I really don't see laptops being very useful in the elementary school environment. Around here at least, the schools are lucky to have Internet connectivity, and when they do they usually don't have the support staff to keep equipment working properly. And the biggest problem I see is that teachers, at least the ones I've dealt with, tend to be some of the most non-computer literate folks around. Can we honestly expect already overworked and often undertrained teachers to learn how to generate materials that will be of any more practical use than good old Xeroxed handouts?
The only reason to provide computing devices to students is to enhance their educational experience - something no hardware can do on its own.
I had a program that generated this kind of stuff
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
Ever use a program called 'Babble'? You could feed it multiple text samples, and it'd chop them up and spit out syntactically valid but meaningless babble composed of fragments of the input samples. Feed it a text on evolution, one on media, and a Star Trek episode summary or two, and you've got a JonKatz article! Perfect for an 'alternative' media outlet like/. where it doesn't actually matter if an article doesn't make a damn bit of sense to anyone not using mind-altering substances.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who doesn't have the very basic level of knowledge required to know better than to leave the SA password blank doesn't have any business running a security-sensitive system, regardless of the vendor. SQL Server and Oracle are TOOLS. Installed straight out of the box they do essentially NOTHING - someone who only knows to click the 'next' button on the install wizard has no use for an RDBMS.
/.'ers and this persecution complex? It's worse than an old Amiga users group meeting. Stop whining about the unfair treatment of Linux in the media and worry a little more about putting out some quality code.
Don't get me wrong, I think not making the SA password change a part of the install is a bad idea, since it's easy to forget when you get busy with making your database actually do something. The only flaw here is in the wizard.
As for the ability to control the OS from SQL, that's not a bug, that's a feature. =] Granted, it's not a feature most of us use, and the stored procedure should probably be removed. That's just another part of being aware of the security implications of any system you put on the Internet.
As for the original note's comparison of the Piranha thing and this non-problem, get a life, people. What is it with
I think the phonetic Chinese translation of 'Coca Cola' comes out to 'bite the wax tadpole', if I remember right.
My friends and I used to program virtual robots in a primitive BASIC-like language for an old DOS-based game called 'Warbots'. It was very easy to learn, but complex enough to keep it interesting.
A far more advanced version was called, I believe, 'PC Robots'. It was actually an API that would let you program your robots in just about any language (it provided libraries for C, Pascal, and Assembler, at least) and allowed you to create very complex robots to compete in a large arena. It required a lot of attention to things like power management, navigation, and fire control. The competitive element really served to capture the users' interest, and spawned some pretty creative solutions.
There's always the old corewars type systems, but they're a lot more abstract and for many people not as much fun as watching their robots fight it out on screen.
A quick check of AltaVista returned the following URL that might be of interest. I don't know if it's related to the old PC Robots, but it looks pretty similar.
http://www.necrobones.com/atrobots/
Even in the technological backwater that is California's Central Coast, it's starting to make a difference. We're selling our house at the moment, and one of the selling points is that it's already wired with Cat 5 and has DSL service. On the other side of that, one of my biggest criteria in picking a new place has been distance from the central office. I found a place that's a bit small, but it's tempting since it's about 100 feet from the CO. =]
I saw one at (ugh) Fry's the other day, and I think it claimed to be capable of 9600. Seems like even 2400 should work fine for e-mail, though...
That might not be the best idea... when I was in New Zealand, calling an 800 number in the States cost me NZ$0.90/min, while regular (non-800) calls cost me about NZ$0.40/min. Go figure.
Worked for me. I spent a couple of weeks in New Zealand, and decided against getting an ISP account. Internet cafes were everywhere - I was in a town of 500 people or so and I found four different places within walking distance. They're typically using WebRamps or something similar, so you might even be able to plug your own laptop into their network.
As for dynamic content, with high-volume sites I'm sure efficiency is a big issue. I understand the big guys like Yahoo have gone to great lengths to optimize their code - if they hadn't, I don't think any amount of hardware would handle the load. But in my own experience with fairly low-volume sites, the bigger problem is in producing clean, readable, debuggable, and reusable code. That's not always an easy task in PHP or ASP, and I've seen a number of big-name sites (who somehow neglected to fix the ::$DATA bug :) with truly horrible coding. Why is it we seem to be ignoring the lessons of 30 years of programming when we're building these sites? (Don't even get me started about web programming security practices...)
But all issues of affordability and responsibility aside, I really don't see laptops being very useful in the elementary school environment. Around here at least, the schools are lucky to have Internet connectivity, and when they do they usually don't have the support staff to keep equipment working properly. And the biggest problem I see is that teachers, at least the ones I've dealt with, tend to be some of the most non-computer literate folks around. Can we honestly expect already overworked and often undertrained teachers to learn how to generate materials that will be of any more practical use than good old Xeroxed handouts?
The only reason to provide computing devices to students is to enhance their educational experience - something no hardware can do on its own.
Ever use a program called 'Babble'? You could feed it multiple text samples, and it'd chop them up and spit out syntactically valid but meaningless babble composed of fragments of the input samples. Feed it a text on evolution, one on media, and a Star Trek episode summary or two, and you've got a JonKatz article! Perfect for an 'alternative' media outlet like /. where it doesn't actually matter if an article doesn't make a damn bit of sense to anyone not using mind-altering substances.