1) There are core systems and networks that make the network more vulnerable to physical attack than was originally planned. I'm hopeful that going forward, in the best interests of low latency and high bandwidth, we'll see more and more of the giant backbone providers doing mesh-like interconnects with each other all across their respective networks, instead of thinking in terms of discrete exchange points.
2) "Routing traffic" isn't the issue. European traffic already stays in Europe (etc). This is an issue regarding who controls the policies that control the root nameservers. In other words, who decides how domain-name disputes are settled, what the rules are for top-level domains, and what the rules and regulations are for domain registrars. Already most countries are served by locally-controlled top-level registrars underneath ICANN. Unfortunately for the whiners, if you want a coherent worldwide domain name system, someone has to set the policies, and it's us. The UN's ability to govern anything is a joke, much less govern technical policy affecting the Internet. It should stay in the US where it belongs.
I guess so. I always assumed they named it javascript because they were trying to be loosely java-like in the syntax of their scripting language (not that they succeeded in doing so anyways).
This guy should get together with Mr. Wolfram. It sounds like these ideas overlap a lot with the stuff in his (highly recommded) "A New Kind of Science": http://www.wolframscience.com/
I agree with you, except for the Python part. Python is an ill fit for a language that's meant to be embedded in a (X)HTML, because (X)HTML does not honor content whitespace (and neither to a lot of related tools) and Python relies on whitespace for structure.
I could see trying to standardize a subset of Ruby though. Drop some of the ambiguous (or more difficult to implement parts) and access to operating system services (like fork(), etc), just keep the very basics necessary for pure code and modular OO, give it a well-though-out built-in object model for the DOM (and perhaps some built-in libraries of functionality for things like XML/XSLT, xmlHttpRequest-like stuff, etc), and keep the language compatible back to real Ruby (that is to say, all BrowserRuby code runs on a real Ruby interpreter, but not vice-versa).
Re-reading the above, it sounds like I'm basically describing a rehash of what the Javascript guys did. The difference would be that (1) We can do a better job today now that the problem domain is better understood, (2) It will actually be compatible (javascript code does not run in a real java environment unfortunately), and (3) It will be based on a much better language (no offense, but Java sucks).
Normally I advocate Perl over Ruby, but in this context Ruby probably makes more sense (in the very broadest sense, the languages are fairly comparable anyways).
But what exactly is the aim of OLPC? I know the simple aim is to get governments and NGOs to buy lots of these rugged little devices and pass them out to children. But what's the intended effect on the children? Will most of these countries where they're deploying (where apparently cow-power might be necessary to even turn the thing on) have internet access? Without that, is it basically a compact calculator/dictionary/encyclopedia (I'm assuming they're loading some practical software like that)? Because this is a lot more work than simply getting them calculators, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.
If most of the users can get reliable internet access out of it, I'm all for it. The internet is insanely empowering for a group of people like that. I just wouldn't suspect that they're going to have much access. Without internet access, I don't see much use for a computer in a society that isn't already first-world and at least at a certain level of economic development.
For those of us on the other side of the fence from you (rationalists? naturalists? a{gnos|thies}tic? whatever), we don't think there's a distinction. I don't hate you, and I don't wish anything ill on you, but I am very firmly convinced that you are very misguided.
I don't buy that anyone can come to an independent and rational conclusion that Christianity (or anything remotely similar in nature) is valid. Either your rationality is questionable, or you've been brainwashed. Quite likely both. I consider myself a very open-minded person, and I'm not generally a mean person, but I place your belief system in roughly the same category as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Your belief system is more successful than that of the FSM because it was constructed to easily brainwash and be nearly impossible to unequivocally refute. Your belief system is the result of thousands of years of the evolution of competing belief systems. The ones that win that game are the ones that are not refutable and therefore are also neither testable nor disprovable. I don't feel any need to give any ground on this issue. Rationality dictates my course of action here.
On the "777" issue, I don't think the backup snapshots are writable in the general sense, so it wouldn't much matter if your backup of a file had writable perms. What you're probably more interested is a file you initially created as 755 and later changed to 700 (which is basically the same issue as your "accidental publication" concern). The answer is that Time Machine allows you to explicitly ask it to delete all historical copies of a given file, for precisely these kinds of reasons.
I don't find it surprising either. It sounds like the expected results to me. Basically, when a person first discovers it's possible to edit something on wikipedia, and wants to do so, they probably don't have an account. Therefore their first (perhaps even first few) submissions or edits are likely to be anonymous. These new users fall into two basic categories: Well-meaning individuals, and idiots who deface wikipedia. The idiots continue to submit anonymously because a named account doesn't last long for them, if they even bother. The well-meaning types either never edit again once they've made their one special-interest contribution, or they go on to get an account when they start editing more regularly. If one assumes that in the general population, the the idiot defacers are a small but vocal minority, then the natural fallout would be that high-volume anonymous posters are the idiots, and low-volume (once in a while, or once period) contributors would have high quality.
I switch from being a longtime EDGE user to basic 3G (just plain UMTS, no HSDPA) on a Nokia N75 device. I'm able to switch back and forth at will for testing. The bottom line is that UMTS gives me double the bandwidth and less than half the latency. Better all over. I haven't tried HSDPA, perhaps that in particular is the problem. It has much higher transfer rates than plain UMTS and EDGE, and I have no idea what the CPU usage or latency is like. Mostly, I use EDGE/UMTS for four things:
1) Very rarely, browsing the web via Opera Mini on my phone to look up a movie showtime while I'm out or something like that 2) Google Maps for Mobile 3) Gmail Mobile 4) Tethered data access over bluetooth to my MacBookPro, where I use it for browsing, corporate email, and lots of interactive SSH sessions.
My subjective experience is that all four are better on UMTS than EDGE.
Linus clearly plans for the Linux kernel to support DRM in the future if hardware and future content seems to demand it. Has has no qualms about supporting DRM, as long as it's done "right". When and if DRM comes to the kernel, those provisions of the GPL could have serious consequences for Linux, perhaps even making it illegal to realistically use Linux on the DRM hardware it was designed to support.
Jesus, did I just hear you say, "the right thing to do is to fork over the money if he's got a gun"? By some very temporally localized definition of the word "safe", that might be the safest course of action, but how can you say that's the right thing to do? It's certainly the wrong thing for the criminal to do. Why is it the right thing to do to give up your property (or anything else)?
This isn't a matter of execution for robbery or vigilante justice. Follow the logic (try to turn off that emotion center from the article):
1) Stranger demands your property/cash, and has no right to do so. 2) You say, "no", which is about the only reasonable response to such a request. 3) Robber pulls gun, threatens your life in order to convince you to say yes. 4) Your response to the unlawful threat of lethal force by this criminal is pretty much unbounded.
If you decided to shoot him in order to stop this threat of unlawful lethal force, and succeed in doing so, you've done nothing wrong. The important distinction here is that you are not shooting someone for trying to take $50 from you. You're shooting them in order to stop the unlawful threat on your life, to defend yourself against lethal force. If they hadn't brought the lethal force to the table, then a simple "no" would have sufficed to protect one's property.
AI? Whatever. Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this. It will come about by building the right sort of neural-net building blocks, arranging them in roughly the right kind of networks (probably via genetic selection algorithms rather than manually), and then teaching it much in the way one raises and teaches a small child. That's *if* we can solve the huge problems that still lie in our way going down that path (not the least of which is raw processing power).
This kind of shit isn't even in the right ballpark, and it's not going down the right road, and it's simply not productive in the long term. But gee, it gets headlines and research grants because it makes laymen say "ohhh neat". AI scientists of the world - I challenge you to get off your collective asses, stop pandering to morons, and get down to business with the decades of work that remain to be done.
Wikipedia already tracks past revisions of an article. Each article has a revision history. What you get when use wikipedia is the latest version of the document. The most simplistic and obvious fix for vandalism is this: Whenever someone submits a revision to a document, that revision has to remain the latest version (with no more edits by that person or anyone else) for 24 hours before it becomes the version which is shown to visitors as the main version. If another edit happens before the 24 hours is up, the clock is reset and it's another 24 hours before that version can become the main one (and the one currently showing still hasn't changed). What this means is that "edit wars" flip-flopping content back and forth in periods of hours will be invisible to the wiki-browsing public (Whereas editors/contributors always have the option to view the "raw" most-recent version of course).
We already have plenty of "good guys" at wikipedia who go watch the list of recently-edited documents for vandalism or inappropriateness and correct it - the problem is just that they cannot get to them all in time. This gives them a 24-hour window to catch the problem and fight it back. Only when the doc "settles down" for 24+ hours will an updated revision be available to the world. And it requires no user ratings or moderation system beyond what has already been in place, or special priveleges, or anything of the sort.
THe only real problem with this is news / current events. But there's already a seperate wikinews for that kind of thing, and you could always categorically handle "current events" docs differently. This is a system for protection encyclopedic articles.
I tend to agree. I don't waste cycles learning every new fad that comes out. I keep myself generally abreast of all the new things, and I might even buy on O'Reilly book on something and spend an evening reading it if it looks like it might become a big thing. But I don't bother to really *learn* how to use some new thing until some opportunity arises where it might be genuinely useful to me.
Quite possibly Timmy wouldn't be of much help to anyone, and might worsen the situation. The Libertarian view is that we don't take away someone's rights based on future probabilities. In the event of some serious national emergency, you never know, Timmy might be having a moment of clarity between meth binges and might be very helpful. An armed society is a free society. And in an armed society, even a methed-up Timmy would think twice about doing anything stupid, and would probably never even have his day in court if he did do something stupid, because he'd get shot by the nearest person who notices him being reckless and/or homicidal with a full-auto.
An armed society is a free society - not only from bad governments, but from bad people. Unarmed sheep can be just as easily controlled, abused, and killed by a criminal as they can a corrupt police officer or a government gone sour.
The way they plan to force this issue is that after X% of the market is DRM/TCPA-enabled, content providers will start only serving content to DRM/TCPA customers. The first day it'll be like, "Well, I can still use my old-school machine, just not to view CNN.com", and eventually a year or three down the road you won't be able to view any content from any major corporate providers. At least that's the plan. I suspect if they even get that far down the road, the anti-DRM/TCPA public community will largely replace those resources anyways.
It was intentional, but I don't consider it an outright Troll, as I really meant and believed what I said. Trolls are about deception and lying.
What a load of rubbish - maybe you're thinking of c++ there. Java doesn't even have multiple inheritance (for good reasons) and using Java is not nearly as verbose as languages where you have to re-invent the wheel due to a lack of libraries.
You're right, it was a mistake to mention MI, that just kinda bled over from my usual frothing at the mouth at overzealous OO designers in other languages. Scratch "multiple inheritance" from the statement and I still stand by it though.
I suspect that you, along with many others, have a conception of Java that was formed when it was a buzz word and everyone and their CTO wanted in on the hot steamy action. Just because a lot of rubbish Java programmers filled up the sudden void does not mean that people who are 'real' programmers as you put it don't use Java and have grown to love it. It is frustrating that so many people don't learn it properly, sometimes not even OO theory, but that's not Java's fault.
I was definitely generalizing about "real programmers". I'm quite sure there are some very talented programmers, who for one twisted reason or another (probably a money decision) have learned to code well in Java. I still doubt there are any who would have chosen it on their own from the get-go without some external influence.
Look beyond the hype, analyse the (now more mature) language & platform with an objective eye. Use it. Read 'Effective java'. Use a good IDE. (Eclipse is free) When you've used it for a year and started to get familiar with the libraries come back and let everyone know what you think. I challenge you... otherwise you're ignorant and should really keep quiet.
I'm never one to keep quiet. The more abrasive and ignorant my opinion the louder I'll shout it, it's what Slashdot is all about:)
If anything, I think early Java was probably better than current Java. Back then, there was a single consistent platform, and one standard set of libraries, etc. I'm not saying the addons since weren't neccesary - but in the meantime there has been an explosion of Java environments and Java libraries. Porting a Java app from one application server to another can be more complicated than porting an ANSI C/C++ app across disparate POSIX platforms to someone who isn't well-versed in either, which to me largely defeats the purpose of Java. You may as well have stuck with C/C++ in that case - why invent a new language?
But then there's also the "All OO, All The Time" thing. I think it's ridiculuous for a language to limit a person to only OO techniques. Some things just are not objects, and do not abstract well as objects. I'm very much in the camp that believes that OO should be used judiciously only for those things which readily and naturally abstract to Objects. Some languages allow the mixing of OO and non-OO idioms easily, but Java isn't one of them.
All the people who bash Java really don't know anything much about it usually.
Oh, but I do know. Many times I've had to rescue broken/unupgradable Java applications and port them to a sane "LAMP"-ish platform. Aside from everything else above, another problem is that in a world of such enforced and many-layered abstraction, it is so easy for Java programmers to fall prey to Leaky Abstractions (google the article), and completely miss very serious bugs, even security ones when using the standard Java security abstractions. Ask any JSP author to describe the server<->browser flow of information that happens at any point somewhere in the middle of his application, and he'll generally tell you he has no clue. Good luck debugging those issues if the abstraction isn't perfect (which it isn't, see the Leaky Abstractions paper again).
Sure it has its problems & faults - I would never claim it's perfect. I started doing Java simply
Java was never hip
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I've watched Java ever since it first started making waves, back when Sun thought it would be the ubiquitous language for rich web content running in browser plugins, and had demos of a little anthropomorphisized coffee been dancing across your netscape browser that we had to show off at trade shows.
Java sucks. I've been saying it for so many years that I've mostly given up on mentioning it anymore. But I'm taking the effort today to make another rant about it, since this article happened to bring it up.
Java has never been hip. Everyone I've ever known or heard of that was a Java advocate or a Java programmer was never really a programmer to begin with. All the hard-core guys I've ever met, who really know how to code well in any language (and who know how to do really clever things for fun, but then smartly avoid cleverness when at all possible in production code), never liked Java. Java is an industry buzz pushed around by publicists, managers who don't know better, vendors who could care less what the right answer is, and "coders" who learned from a Java for Dummies book which they had time to read after being layed off from yet another position in which they were useless and incompetent. The vast majority of Java source code I've ever read has made me want to puke. What can be expressed succinctly in 40 lines of instantly recognizable code in any other language becomes a multiple-inheritance heirarchy of 40 classes in the hands of a "professional java developer". All those people who seem to succeed at navigating twisted inefficient beauracracies for a living, and twisting them further as they go, seem to be exactly the kind of people who love a language like java.
And while we're at it, "LAMP" isn't really a good term for what's killing Java. For starters, Java can kill itself just fine without any external help. Secondly, the idiom that most people mean when they say "LAMP" can be had without those specific technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl). Some people do it with FreeBSD, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, and Ruby (but FLPR doesn't have the same ring to it). My point is, this isn't the victory of Apache, or Linux, or MySQL, or Perl. It's a victory of concise, well-built, community-maintained, open-source software over corporate-inspired and corporation-pleasing bloated nasty red-tape-tangled environments like Java (or SAP, or any of a number of stupid software ideas to come along in recent decades)./rant mode off
So is cancer these days. Odds are high that unless you flame out early in a car wreck or something befor you reach 50, you will get a cancer of some type before you die.
I've never had that problem. Over the past several years I've given anywhere from 2-6 weeks notice at various employers, and my access was never terminated until my final day. I was usually working full days over the final period, helping to take care of all the loose ends (like documenting things that only I knew that probably should have been documented earlier, transitioning projects and tasks to other people, helping interview replacements, etc).
I can't imagine an employer locking a sysadmin-type out of the company (physically or electronically) immediately on being given notice, unless your past actions gave them a reason to be highly distrustful of you. Even then, simple logic dictates that an admin bent on revenge who wanted to cause damage would plant the seeds before turning in the notice, which makes your CIO's actions irrational either way.
But those same cops would probably all be glad to bust your ass for smoking pot at home on a your day off and not bothering anyone. Even if in some fantasy-land the vast majority of all policemen suddently became reasonable, honest enforcers of American law (which means constitutional laws - a great number of current federal, state, and local laws are blatantly unconstitutional these days) that really matter, is that a good reason to put so much power in the hands of the government? Can you reliably predict that the next generation of policemen or politicians will be so nice? You can't, so you're rolling the dice with the fate of the world your children will live in.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is what it's supposed to be about. If you're not directly infringing on someone else's ability to live a free and happy life of their own, there should be no law against anything one chooses to own or do. I'd paste a bunch of quotes from the authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the founders of this nation, that back this up, but you know, if you're reading this, either you're of a violently different opinion and could care less, or you can google it your damn self, because my paste key is all worn out. Anti-gun laws? Unconstitutional. Anti-drug laws? Unconstitutional. Standing Army in times of Peace? Unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn't say anything about speeding in a car of course, but I feel that speeding laws are certainly against the spirit of the Constitution. The prosecution of a victimless crime on the premise that a certain behavior is stastically likely to lead to a real crime with a victim is unconstitutional. It's the early shades of the Pre-Crime stuff that PKD predicted, that we all saw in Minority Report on the tube. Stop it before it gets out of hand.
I'm in the latter stages now of my first serious professional project using AJAX-style methods. In my experience so far, it can go either way in terms of server load versus a traditional page-by-page design. It all depends on exactly what you do with it.
For example, autocompletions definitely raise server load as compared to a search field with no autocompletion. Using a proper autocomplete widget with proper timeout support (like the Prototype/Scriptaculous stuff) is a smart thing to do - I've seen home-rolled designs that re-checked the autocomplete on every keystroke, which can bombard a server under the hands of a fast typist and a long search string. But even with a good autocomplete widget, the load will go up compared to not having it. That's the trade-off. You've added new functionality and convenience for the user, and it comes at a cost. Many AJAX enhancement techniques will raise server load in this manner, but generally you get something good in return. If the load gets too bad, you may have to reconsider what's more important to you - some of those new features, or the cost of buying bigger hardware to support them.
On the flip-side, proper dynamic loading of content can save you considerably processing-time and bandwidth in many cases. Rather than loading 1,000 records to the screen in a big batch, or paging through them 20 at a time with full page reloads for every chunk - have AJAX code step through only the records a user is interested in without reloading the containing page - big win. Or perhaps your page contains 8 statistical graphs of realtime activities in PNG format (the PNGs are dynamically generated from database data on the server side). This data behind each graph might potentially update as often as every 15 seconds, but more normally goes several minutes without changing. You can code some AJAX-style scripting into the page to do a quick remote call every 15 seconds to query the database's timestamps to see if any PNG's would have changed since they were last loaded, and then replace only those that need updating, only when they need to be updated. Huge savings versus sucking raw data out of the database, processing it into a PNG graph, and sending that over the network every 15 seconds as the whole page refreshes just incase anything changed.
Nothing is a privelege, you've been brainwashed by the Canadians too long. It's basically your inherent right to do whatever you damn well please, so long as it doesn't *directly* interfere with someone else doing whatever they damn well please. Anything else is an artificial control construct designed to keep powerful entities in power, directly or indirectly.
Slashdot Mirror
1) There are core systems and networks that make the network more vulnerable to physical attack than was originally planned. I'm hopeful that going forward, in the best interests of low latency and high bandwidth, we'll see more and more of the giant backbone providers doing mesh-like interconnects with each other all across their respective networks, instead of thinking in terms of discrete exchange points.
2) "Routing traffic" isn't the issue. European traffic already stays in Europe (etc). This is an issue regarding who controls the policies that control the root nameservers. In other words, who decides how domain-name disputes are settled, what the rules are for top-level domains, and what the rules and regulations are for domain registrars. Already most countries are served by locally-controlled top-level registrars underneath ICANN. Unfortunately for the whiners, if you want a coherent worldwide domain name system, someone has to set the policies, and it's us. The UN's ability to govern anything is a joke, much less govern technical policy affecting the Internet. It should stay in the US where it belongs.
I guess so. I always assumed they named it javascript because they were trying to be loosely java-like in the syntax of their scripting language (not that they succeeded in doing so anyways).
This guy should get together with Mr. Wolfram. It sounds like these ideas overlap a lot with the stuff in his (highly recommded) "A New Kind of Science": http://www.wolframscience.com/
I agree with you, except for the Python part. Python is an ill fit for a language that's meant to be embedded in a (X)HTML, because (X)HTML does not honor content whitespace (and neither to a lot of related tools) and Python relies on whitespace for structure.
I could see trying to standardize a subset of Ruby though. Drop some of the ambiguous (or more difficult to implement parts) and access to operating system services (like fork(), etc), just keep the very basics necessary for pure code and modular OO, give it a well-though-out built-in object model for the DOM (and perhaps some built-in libraries of functionality for things like XML/XSLT, xmlHttpRequest-like stuff, etc), and keep the language compatible back to real Ruby (that is to say, all BrowserRuby code runs on a real Ruby interpreter, but not vice-versa).
Re-reading the above, it sounds like I'm basically describing a rehash of what the Javascript guys did. The difference would be that (1) We can do a better job today now that the problem domain is better understood, (2) It will actually be compatible (javascript code does not run in a real java environment unfortunately), and (3) It will be based on a much better language (no offense, but Java sucks).
Normally I advocate Perl over Ruby, but in this context Ruby probably makes more sense (in the very broadest sense, the languages are fairly comparable anyways).
But what exactly is the aim of OLPC? I know the simple aim is to get governments and NGOs to buy lots of these rugged little devices and pass them out to children. But what's the intended effect on the children? Will most of these countries where they're deploying (where apparently cow-power might be necessary to even turn the thing on) have internet access? Without that, is it basically a compact calculator/dictionary/encyclopedia (I'm assuming they're loading some practical software like that)? Because this is a lot more work than simply getting them calculators, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.
If most of the users can get reliable internet access out of it, I'm all for it. The internet is insanely empowering for a group of people like that. I just wouldn't suspect that they're going to have much access. Without internet access, I don't see much use for a computer in a society that isn't already first-world and at least at a certain level of economic development.
I don't buy that anyone can come to an independent and rational conclusion that Christianity (or anything remotely similar in nature) is valid. Either your rationality is questionable, or you've been brainwashed. Quite likely both. I consider myself a very open-minded person, and I'm not generally a mean person, but I place your belief system in roughly the same category as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Your belief system is more successful than that of the FSM because it was constructed to easily brainwash and be nearly impossible to unequivocally refute. Your belief system is the result of thousands of years of the evolution of competing belief systems. The ones that win that game are the ones that are not refutable and therefore are also neither testable nor disprovable. I don't feel any need to give any ground on this issue. Rationality dictates my course of action here.
On the "777" issue, I don't think the backup snapshots are writable in the general sense, so it wouldn't much matter if your backup of a file had writable perms. What you're probably more interested is a file you initially created as 755 and later changed to 700 (which is basically the same issue as your "accidental publication" concern). The answer is that Time Machine allows you to explicitly ask it to delete all historical copies of a given file, for precisely these kinds of reasons.
I don't find it surprising either. It sounds like the expected results to me. Basically, when a person first discovers it's possible to edit something on wikipedia, and wants to do so, they probably don't have an account. Therefore their first (perhaps even first few) submissions or edits are likely to be anonymous. These new users fall into two basic categories: Well-meaning individuals, and idiots who deface wikipedia. The idiots continue to submit anonymously because a named account doesn't last long for them, if they even bother. The well-meaning types either never edit again once they've made their one special-interest contribution, or they go on to get an account when they start editing more regularly. If one assumes that in the general population, the the idiot defacers are a small but vocal minority, then the natural fallout would be that high-volume anonymous posters are the idiots, and low-volume (once in a while, or once period) contributors would have high quality.
I switch from being a longtime EDGE user to basic 3G (just plain UMTS, no HSDPA) on a Nokia N75 device. I'm able to switch back and forth at will for testing. The bottom line is that UMTS gives me double the bandwidth and less than half the latency. Better all over. I haven't tried HSDPA, perhaps that in particular is the problem. It has much higher transfer rates than plain UMTS and EDGE, and I have no idea what the CPU usage or latency is like. Mostly, I use EDGE/UMTS for four things:
1) Very rarely, browsing the web via Opera Mini on my phone to look up a movie showtime while I'm out or something like that
2) Google Maps for Mobile
3) Gmail Mobile
4) Tethered data access over bluetooth to my MacBookPro, where I use it for browsing, corporate email, and lots of interactive SSH sessions.
My subjective experience is that all four are better on UMTS than EDGE.
Linus clearly plans for the Linux kernel to support DRM in the future if hardware and future content seems to demand it. Has has no qualms about supporting DRM, as long as it's done "right". When and if DRM comes to the kernel, those provisions of the GPL could have serious consequences for Linux, perhaps even making it illegal to realistically use Linux on the DRM hardware it was designed to support.
Jesus, did I just hear you say, "the right thing to do is to fork over the money if he's got a gun"? By some very temporally localized definition of the word "safe", that might be the safest course of action, but how can you say that's the right thing to do? It's certainly the wrong thing for the criminal to do. Why is it the right thing to do to give up your property (or anything else)?
This isn't a matter of execution for robbery or vigilante justice. Follow the logic (try to turn off that emotion center from the article):
1) Stranger demands your property/cash, and has no right to do so.
2) You say, "no", which is about the only reasonable response to such a request.
3) Robber pulls gun, threatens your life in order to convince you to say yes.
4) Your response to the unlawful threat of lethal force by this criminal is pretty much unbounded.
If you decided to shoot him in order to stop this threat of unlawful lethal force, and succeed in doing so, you've done nothing wrong. The important distinction here is that you are not shooting someone for trying to take $50 from you. You're shooting them in order to stop the unlawful threat on your life, to defend yourself against lethal force. If they hadn't brought the lethal force to the table, then a simple "no" would have sufficed to protect one's property.
Shhhh! My boss might read that!
The virality of the GPL does not cross the barrier of a database connection. Troll?
AI? Whatever. Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this. It will come about by building the right sort of neural-net building blocks, arranging them in roughly the right kind of networks (probably via genetic selection algorithms rather than manually), and then teaching it much in the way one raises and teaches a small child. That's *if* we can solve the huge problems that still lie in our way going down that path (not the least of which is raw processing power).
This kind of shit isn't even in the right ballpark, and it's not going down the right road, and it's simply not productive in the long term. But gee, it gets headlines and research grants because it makes laymen say "ohhh neat". AI scientists of the world - I challenge you to get off your collective asses, stop pandering to morons, and get down to business with the decades of work that remain to be done.
Wikipedia already tracks past revisions of an article. Each article has a revision history. What you get when use wikipedia is the latest version of the document. The most simplistic and obvious fix for vandalism is this: Whenever someone submits a revision to a document, that revision has to remain the latest version (with no more edits by that person or anyone else) for 24 hours before it becomes the version which is shown to visitors as the main version. If another edit happens before the 24 hours is up, the clock is reset and it's another 24 hours before that version can become the main one (and the one currently showing still hasn't changed). What this means is that "edit wars" flip-flopping content back and forth in periods of hours will be invisible to the wiki-browsing public (Whereas editors/contributors always have the option to view the "raw" most-recent version of course).
We already have plenty of "good guys" at wikipedia who go watch the list of recently-edited documents for vandalism or inappropriateness and correct it - the problem is just that they cannot get to them all in time. This gives them a 24-hour window to catch the problem and fight it back. Only when the doc "settles down" for 24+ hours will an updated revision be available to the world. And it requires no user ratings or moderation system beyond what has already been in place, or special priveleges, or anything of the sort.
THe only real problem with this is news / current events. But there's already a seperate wikinews for that kind of thing, and you could always categorically handle "current events" docs differently. This is a system for protection encyclopedic articles.
I tend to agree. I don't waste cycles learning every new fad that comes out. I keep myself generally abreast of all the new things, and I might even buy on O'Reilly book on something and spend an evening reading it if it looks like it might become a big thing. But I don't bother to really *learn* how to use some new thing until some opportunity arises where it might be genuinely useful to me.
Quite possibly Timmy wouldn't be of much help to anyone, and might worsen the situation. The Libertarian view is that we don't take away someone's rights based on future probabilities. In the event of some serious national emergency, you never know, Timmy might be having a moment of clarity between meth binges and might be very helpful. An armed society is a free society. And in an armed society, even a methed-up Timmy would think twice about doing anything stupid, and would probably never even have his day in court if he did do something stupid, because he'd get shot by the nearest person who notices him being reckless and/or homicidal with a full-auto.
An armed society is a free society - not only from bad governments, but from bad people. Unarmed sheep can be just as easily controlled, abused, and killed by a criminal as they can a corrupt police officer or a government gone sour.
The way they plan to force this issue is that after X% of the market is DRM/TCPA-enabled, content providers will start only serving content to DRM/TCPA customers. The first day it'll be like, "Well, I can still use my old-school machine, just not to view CNN.com", and eventually a year or three down the road you won't be able to view any content from any major corporate providers. At least that's the plan. I suspect if they even get that far down the road, the anti-DRM/TCPA public community will largely replace those resources anyways.
What a load of rubbish - maybe you're thinking of c++ there. Java doesn't even have multiple inheritance (for good reasons) and using Java is not nearly as verbose as languages where you have to re-invent the wheel due to a lack of libraries.
You're right, it was a mistake to mention MI, that just kinda bled over from my usual frothing at the mouth at overzealous OO designers in other languages. Scratch "multiple inheritance" from the statement and I still stand by it though.
I suspect that you, along with many others, have a conception of Java that was formed when it was a buzz word and everyone and their CTO wanted in on the hot steamy action. Just because a lot of rubbish Java programmers filled up the sudden void does not mean that people who are 'real' programmers as you put it don't use Java and have grown to love it. It is frustrating that so many people don't learn it properly, sometimes not even OO theory, but that's not Java's fault.
I was definitely generalizing about "real programmers". I'm quite sure there are some very talented programmers, who for one twisted reason or another (probably a money decision) have learned to code well in Java. I still doubt there are any who would have chosen it on their own from the get-go without some external influence.
Look beyond the hype, analyse the (now more mature) language & platform with an objective eye. Use it. Read 'Effective java'. Use a good IDE. (Eclipse is free) When you've used it for a year and started to get familiar with the libraries come back and let everyone know what you think. I challenge you... otherwise you're ignorant and should really keep quiet.
I'm never one to keep quiet. The more abrasive and ignorant my opinion the louder I'll shout it, it's what Slashdot is all about :)
If anything, I think early Java was probably better than current Java. Back then, there was a single consistent platform, and one standard set of libraries, etc. I'm not saying the addons since weren't neccesary - but in the meantime there has been an explosion of Java environments and Java libraries. Porting a Java app from one application server to another can be more complicated than porting an ANSI C/C++ app across disparate POSIX platforms to someone who isn't well-versed in either, which to me largely defeats the purpose of Java. You may as well have stuck with C/C++ in that case - why invent a new language?
But then there's also the "All OO, All The Time" thing. I think it's ridiculuous for a language to limit a person to only OO techniques. Some things just are not objects, and do not abstract well as objects. I'm very much in the camp that believes that OO should be used judiciously only for those things which readily and naturally abstract to Objects. Some languages allow the mixing of OO and non-OO idioms easily, but Java isn't one of them.
All the people who bash Java really don't know anything much about it usually.
Oh, but I do know. Many times I've had to rescue broken/unupgradable Java applications and port them to a sane "LAMP"-ish platform. Aside from everything else above, another problem is that in a world of such enforced and many-layered abstraction, it is so easy for Java programmers to fall prey to Leaky Abstractions (google the article), and completely miss very serious bugs, even security ones when using the standard Java security abstractions. Ask any JSP author to describe the server<->browser flow of information that happens at any point somewhere in the middle of his application, and he'll generally tell you he has no clue. Good luck debugging those issues if the abstraction isn't perfect (which it isn't, see the Leaky Abstractions paper again).
Sure it has its problems & faults - I would never claim it's perfect. I started doing Java simply
I've watched Java ever since it first started making waves, back when Sun thought it would be the ubiquitous language for rich web content running in browser plugins, and had demos of a little anthropomorphisized coffee been dancing across your netscape browser that we had to show off at trade shows.
Java sucks. I've been saying it for so many years that I've mostly given up on mentioning it anymore. But I'm taking the effort today to make another rant about it, since this article happened to bring it up.
Java has never been hip. Everyone I've ever known or heard of that was a Java advocate or a Java programmer was never really a programmer to begin with. All the hard-core guys I've ever met, who really know how to code well in any language (and who know how to do really clever things for fun, but then smartly avoid cleverness when at all possible in production code), never liked Java. Java is an industry buzz pushed around by publicists, managers who don't know better, vendors who could care less what the right answer is, and "coders" who learned from a Java for Dummies book which they had time to read after being layed off from yet another position in which they were useless and incompetent. The vast majority of Java source code I've ever read has made me want to puke. What can be expressed succinctly in 40 lines of instantly recognizable code in any other language becomes a multiple-inheritance heirarchy of 40 classes in the hands of a "professional java developer". All those people who seem to succeed at navigating twisted inefficient beauracracies for a living, and twisting them further as they go, seem to be exactly the kind of people who love a language like java.
And while we're at it, "LAMP" isn't really a good term for what's killing Java. For starters, Java can kill itself just fine without any external help. Secondly, the idiom that most people mean when they say "LAMP" can be had without those specific technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl). Some people do it with FreeBSD, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, and Ruby (but FLPR doesn't have the same ring to it). My point is, this isn't the victory of Apache, or Linux, or MySQL, or Perl. It's a victory of concise, well-built, community-maintained, open-source software over corporate-inspired and corporation-pleasing bloated nasty red-tape-tangled environments like Java (or SAP, or any of a number of stupid software ideas to come along in recent decades).
So is cancer these days. Odds are high that unless you flame out early in a car wreck or something befor you reach 50, you will get a cancer of some type before you die.
I've never had that problem. Over the past several years I've given anywhere from 2-6 weeks notice at various employers, and my access was never terminated until my final day. I was usually working full days over the final period, helping to take care of all the loose ends (like documenting things that only I knew that probably should have been documented earlier, transitioning projects and tasks to other people, helping interview replacements, etc).
I can't imagine an employer locking a sysadmin-type out of the company (physically or electronically) immediately on being given notice, unless your past actions gave them a reason to be highly distrustful of you. Even then, simple logic dictates that an admin bent on revenge who wanted to cause damage would plant the seeds before turning in the notice, which makes your CIO's actions irrational either way.
But those same cops would probably all be glad to bust your ass for smoking pot at home on a your day off and not bothering anyone. Even if in some fantasy-land the vast majority of all policemen suddently became reasonable, honest enforcers of American law (which means constitutional laws - a great number of current federal, state, and local laws are blatantly unconstitutional these days) that really matter, is that a good reason to put so much power in the hands of the government? Can you reliably predict that the next generation of policemen or politicians will be so nice? You can't, so you're rolling the dice with the fate of the world your children will live in.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is what it's supposed to be about. If you're not directly infringing on someone else's ability to live a free and happy life of their own, there should be no law against anything one chooses to own or do. I'd paste a bunch of quotes from the authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the founders of this nation, that back this up, but you know, if you're reading this, either you're of a violently different opinion and could care less, or you can google it your damn self, because my paste key is all worn out. Anti-gun laws? Unconstitutional. Anti-drug laws? Unconstitutional. Standing Army in times of Peace? Unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn't say anything about speeding in a car of course, but I feel that speeding laws are certainly against the spirit of the Constitution. The prosecution of a victimless crime on the premise that a certain behavior is stastically likely to lead to a real crime with a victim is unconstitutional. It's the early shades of the Pre-Crime stuff that PKD predicted, that we all saw in Minority Report on the tube. Stop it before it gets out of hand.
I'm in the latter stages now of my first serious professional project using AJAX-style methods. In my experience so far, it can go either way in terms of server load versus a traditional page-by-page design. It all depends on exactly what you do with it.
For example, autocompletions definitely raise server load as compared to a search field with no autocompletion. Using a proper autocomplete widget with proper timeout support (like the Prototype/Scriptaculous stuff) is a smart thing to do - I've seen home-rolled designs that re-checked the autocomplete on every keystroke, which can bombard a server under the hands of a fast typist and a long search string. But even with a good autocomplete widget, the load will go up compared to not having it. That's the trade-off. You've added new functionality and convenience for the user, and it comes at a cost. Many AJAX enhancement techniques will raise server load in this manner, but generally you get something good in return. If the load gets too bad, you may have to reconsider what's more important to you - some of those new features, or the cost of buying bigger hardware to support them.
On the flip-side, proper dynamic loading of content can save you considerably processing-time and bandwidth in many cases. Rather than loading 1,000 records to the screen in a big batch, or paging through them 20 at a time with full page reloads for every chunk - have AJAX code step through only the records a user is interested in without reloading the containing page - big win. Or perhaps your page contains 8 statistical graphs of realtime activities in PNG format (the PNGs are dynamically generated from database data on the server side). This data behind each graph might potentially update as often as every 15 seconds, but more normally goes several minutes without changing. You can code some AJAX-style scripting into the page to do a quick remote call every 15 seconds to query the database's timestamps to see if any PNG's would have changed since they were last loaded, and then replace only those that need updating, only when they need to be updated. Huge savings versus sucking raw data out of the database, processing it into a PNG graph, and sending that over the network every 15 seconds as the whole page refreshes just incase anything changed.
Nothing is a privelege, you've been brainwashed by the Canadians too long. It's basically your inherent right to do whatever you damn well please, so long as it doesn't *directly* interfere with someone else doing whatever they damn well please. Anything else is an artificial control construct designed to keep powerful entities in power, directly or indirectly.