Now if it's true that hacking involves design and is not mere brute code generation, what does this mean for "extreme programming"? In particular, isn't the doctrine of prewritten unit tests impossible to uphold if this is the case? I know that typically the way that I work is an awful lot like the sketching methodology that Graham describes, and it's basically impossible to write a test suite until after I've beaten the module into a nearly finished state.
Does this mean that XP is only good for the boring stuff like connected legacy systems to web servers (to use his example)? Perhaps XP should be XMP -- "Extremely Mundane Programming"?;^)
I recall distinctly the first time I saw Doom was early in my college days when some guys were playing in the computer lab. Upon seeing my slack jaw one of them commented that they might have found a new player.
The best thing was that one of my roommates worked in the lab, and so many a night were burned away playing after hours 4-man deathmatch, or better, downloading.wad files for new maps. I remember one firefight against a Cyberdemon that had all four of us in close proximity just hurling everything we had at this thing when a comrade stepped in my line of fire and suddenly we were all toast. "AWRRIGHT, WHO FIRED THE ROCKET?!?":^0
Yep, generally speaking, you still get what you pay for. That's a lesson my parents drilled into my head from the time I was a child -- you're better off spending more at the outset for a higher quality item than buying a cheaper item with earlier obsolescence.
Case in point, the Nakamichi amplifier I bought 12 years ago for $600 is still cranking along just fine, and I've gotten that many years of superior sound quality from it compared to say, a $200 Technics. My dad's is even older and is only soon to be retired because it predates too many audio-video advances.
Even in the instance of a BSA audit of individual students, possession of the CD would quickly be explained by pointing to the MS event on a University calendar. It's silly to think that any fines would be levied against users over trivial licensing issues regarding software provided by the BSA's most powerful member for said member's clear strategy of proselytization among students.
IANAL but I'd bet dollars to donuts that any such litigation would be derailed immediately on the grounds that 1) there is currently in place a "solution" to the finding of their monopoly status; and (more importantly) 2) that this was software provided for non-commercial use and as such MS should not see any profit from it. I would expect that the restrictions in antitrust law against distribution of products to undercut the competition do not hold for non-commercial agreements.
That said, targetting students is an established corporate strategy with real commercial benefits when students knowledgeable in a particular skill start showing up en masse at interviews. But perhaps our handy new doctrine of preemption could be utilized to attack MS in advance for the legions of.NET students on the horizon!:^P
Even if it's closer to false advertising, because there isn't any direct profit going to MS from the distribution of the software, this "problem" is a non-starter.
What MS is trying to do is to create a viable developer base among students in order to facilitate later corporate acceptance of.NET, and they're not going to get upset about dinky shit like this -- and neither will any court -- as long as that objective is met. This tactic is nothing new, illegal, surprising or interesting.
I didn't see anything in the article describing when they started doing this, but my experience with TurboTax 2001 matches this too closely to be mere coincidence.
Last Spring I installed it on my dual boot machine and suddenly I couldn't boot into Linux. LILO would start up and die after printing "LI" to the screen. Reinstalling LILO didn't help, either, and I had to resort to a hackeyed system of going from the Windows bootloader to GRUB. Seeing as it's a computer I use for work, I wonder if they could be held legally responsible for the time lost and damage to my system?
The guiding principle of Perl language design is to borrow whatever works from other languages. Rather than a regimented and legislated design like Java or Eiffel, Perl revels in its own freedom. It is ecclectic, and it does lack orthogonality in more than a few respects, but it has supported full object-oriented programming since version 5. Perl 6 will be much more amenable to academic types as a fresh rewrite of the language according to more standard "principles".
Perhaps points 1 and 3 are somehow connected? If Oregonians generally feel poor, can you blame them for not voting for tax increases? The shortened school year -- a genuine tragedy I agree -- is also a direct result of lack of funds. As to your final point: news flash! Democrats and Republicans typically are at odds with one another.
Let's take a look at a couple of extremely progressive things that Oregon has approved:
Doctor assisted suicide
Medical marijuana
The light rail system in Portland
I can tell you're pissed of at your state; why then don't you do something about it, like participate in public school board meetings, campaign for tax increases, or run for office?
Check one of the other
links to the pictures provided in this thread, and you'll see that it is merely a rendering function to display html in a particular manner. It's not even a skin, a la Netscape or RealPlayer, it's nothing more than a manner of formatting the page (in a clunky and unusable manner). In other words, it almost certainly has zero effect on performance.
Exactly, this case doesn't speak at all to whether the DMCA is itself legitimate, but rather whether ElcomSoft was in violation of it. This is good news in the sense that it sets a precendent for how to avoid prosecution under the law, but in no way actually undermines the law itself, which is what we truly need to happen.
Re:Good For Them
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm a developer, not a network admin
Same here. I just wanted a desktop that would enable me to do my work, not qualify as a part-time job to use. I've been running MDK 9 for about 8 weeks now, and I've booted into Win2k about twice during that whole time. In contrast, when my Linux partition was RH 7.2 I spent the bulk of my time under Windows b/c the RH desktop was so cluttered with redundant (many non-functional) menus, terrible multimedia capabilities, printing didn't work.
You could say MDK is for newbies, but another way of putting it is that they made some tough choices and cut a lot of bs that end users shouldn't have to deal with. If you want tighter control over your system, use Debian or Gentoo or something. I simply needed a working desktop, and Mandrake did a great job providing it.
Anecdotal evidence is not an argument. Here's an excerpt from an article in the Seattle Times addressing precisely your point:
Many car drivers complain bitterly about motorcycle riders. They say riders exceed speed limits, and indeed speed was a factor in more than half the deaths of riders between ages 21 and 30 from 1993 to 2001 in Washington state. They say riders drive while drunk, and indeed alcohol was involved in 109 of the 365 accidents. They also say that riders weave in and out of traffic, pass on the right and don't signal.
So, to them, the findings of a NHTSA-funded study, the most comprehensive ever conducted on motorcycle safety, may come as a surprise. Looking at 4,500 accidents in Los Angeles, researchers found that when motorcycles and other vehicles collided, it is usually the driver in the car who violated the motorcyclist's right of way. While that study was done in 1981, periodic looks at state police reports in Washington suggest its findings hold true today, said Dave Wendell, program manager for Evergreen Motorcycle Safety Training in Seattle.
"Car drivers don't see us because they're not looking for us," Wendell said. "They're looking for something at least 6 feet wide with two headlights."
Curious that we have this article which lays out the MS strategy to focus on total cost of proprietary vs free software, and now this. Question for the resident trolls: isn't it a more effective method to wait at least a little while between the setup and troll?
I'm really not impressed with Maria Cantwell. Between her support for Dubya's idiotic warplans with Iraq and her support for MS (of course due to the fact that she was a RealNetworks exec), she'd have to run against a neonazi to get my vote next time around -- and I'm a registered Dem!
when the economy's in a slump, disrupting PC's biggest moneymaker isn't in anybody's interests except those getting squashed by MS.
This is probably true in the short term; longer term, we'd be better off. But what I find so troubling is that even a relatively minor recession like the one we're in now will cause our judicial system to ignore its own principles.
Even on Slashdot the GPL is largely misunderstood. It principally dictates that if you redistribute the software you must also redistribute the source; it does not require that you redistribute the source in order to use the code yourself in whatever fashion you require. Your error is exactly the misunderstanding that MS capitalizes upon in describing the GPL as 'viral'.
.NET, DCOM, CORBA, KCOP, etc all pervert the idea of "object orientation" by making elaborate communcation protocols which are only "object oriented" because they call some part of the protocol an "object". Real object-orientation means there is some commonality of functionality, and the only instances I can think of that really work are the original Unix where everything known then (terminals, printers, tapes, disks) used the same read/write/seek calls, and Plan9 which tries to extend this to networks and file systems).
I believe you mean "real-object orientation" not "real object-orientation". Object-oriented programming is characterized principally by the conjunction of data and behavior, which the protocols you denigrate adhere to rigourously. In contrast, your idea of object orientation appears to mean a unified manner of interacting with real objects. But grouping common functions is merely sane programming, not a particular paradigm, and certainly not what the rest of the world means by OOP.
Okay, so it'll be harder to mount a windows partition effectively, but this doesn't affect transmission of documents, especially if they're stored in an XML format. As for me, I think it's more valuable to have files that I can read outside of their native filesystem rather than have a readable filesystem filled with unreadable files.
This discussion prompted me to do some reading on French solutions to the problem, given that that nation is almost entirely dependent on nuclear power due to a near complete lack of coal, natural gas, oil, and I guess very little hydroelectric.
Unfortunately, contrary to the insistence by the Bush administration that we merely have to follow France's example, they are in much the same pickle as we, both in terms of having a permanent storage location (they don't), and in terms of public perception of permanent storage (the rural folks over there don't like the idea any more than the folks in Nevada).
A May 2001 article from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
The conclusion suggested by these articles is that the French have adopted nuclear power not out of a preference for it, but out of a lack of options. And, that rather than having figured out a reliable and acceptable method for dealing with the waste produced, they are now struggling with the consequences of decisions made out of desperation 30 years ago.
I think it's a mistake to approach the problem in terms of minimizing the footprint you leave. Why set yourself up in opposition to the system when you can utilize it's own methods to protect yourself?
For instance, why not use a grocery card with purchases that you would *want* people to see, like that you buy lots of broccoli and juice? In the worst case scenario, if an insurance company ever saw those records they'd believe you had lower cancer risk. Pay in cash for things you want them *not* to see, such as the bag of chocolates, smokes and double bottle of cheap red wine.
Put books on gardening and cooking on your credit card bill, pay in cash for books on hacking.
Use an ordinary mobile phone except for when you truly *need* privacy, and for god's sake turn it off when you cross state lines to buy grass!
Set up email accounts in several different classes: One that you *want* identified with you for legitimate personal/professional contact; one for questionable personal use (e.g., dirty jokes) that you access through a proxy server; one as a throwaway that you don't really care about, say for registration sites. And don't mix them up!
The point is to understand the system well enough to *purposely shape* the profile that's built of you rather than eliminating it all together. The latter option is becoming increasingly unrealistic.
"Kirsten Dunst is a very good actress, and each of her tits under a wet shirt is worth a quarter the price of admission. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that makes a man sitting alone in a theater instinctively squeeze the Hamm's he smuggled in."
I heard recently about a software package (no reference, sorry) for managing company resources based on a security model of aggregate permissions. Suppose the administrator for a system dies (as in this Norway case), two non-administrator employees might together be given permission to access the database as admin.
The software is based on a point system where a person at a particular organizational level would possess N points to contribute toward a group effort requiring security clearance.
Guess that's not too good if you're an abusive employer though... "Mutiny on the LAN!";)
One thing that makes this fundamentally different from other distributed computing efforts is that the network of computers working has to change dynamically, which means it's not well-suited for the run-as-screensaver model. Because it involves recursion through a tree, exploration of a branch will often involve an increase in the number of machines devoted to calculating the consequences of that particular branch as many (the non-leaf nodes) will themselves branch off. Moreover, a parent process must wait for it's child processes to finish before it can report back to its parents.
This is very different from the model where each machine downloads a discrete chunk of data to process and return to a server. It also means that the client would have to run constantly in the background in order for this to be effiencient -- otherwise an entire branch could get held up by a single machine that isn't in a state of rest waiting to do something useful.
Probably you'd have to have a pool of volunteer machines that operates kind of like swap space. That is, when there's a new branch to explore, the parent process looks for available machines and farms out the work on the fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if it's true that hacking involves design and is not mere brute code generation, what does this mean for "extreme programming"? In particular, isn't the doctrine of prewritten unit tests impossible to uphold if this is the case? I know that typically the way that I work is an awful lot like the sketching methodology that Graham describes, and it's basically impossible to write a test suite until after I've beaten the module into a nearly finished state.
Does this mean that XP is only good for the boring stuff like connected legacy systems to web servers (to use his example)? Perhaps XP should be XMP -- "Extremely Mundane Programming"? ;^)
I recall distinctly the first time I saw Doom was early in my college days when some guys were playing in the computer lab. Upon seeing my slack jaw one of them commented that they might have found a new player.
The best thing was that one of my roommates worked in the lab, and so many a night were burned away playing after hours 4-man deathmatch, or better, downloading .wad files for new maps. I remember one firefight against a Cyberdemon that had all four of us in close proximity just hurling everything we had at this thing when a comrade stepped in my line of fire and suddenly we were all toast. "AWRRIGHT, WHO FIRED THE ROCKET?!?" :^0
Yep, generally speaking, you still get what you pay for. That's a lesson my parents drilled into my head from the time I was a child -- you're better off spending more at the outset for a higher quality item than buying a cheaper item with earlier obsolescence.
Case in point, the Nakamichi amplifier I bought 12 years ago for $600 is still cranking along just fine, and I've gotten that many years of superior sound quality from it compared to say, a $200 Technics. My dad's is even older and is only soon to be retired because it predates too many audio-video advances.
Even in the instance of a BSA audit of individual students, possession of the CD would quickly be explained by pointing to the MS event on a University calendar. It's silly to think that any fines would be levied against users over trivial licensing issues regarding software provided by the BSA's most powerful member for said member's clear strategy of proselytization among students.
IANAL but I'd bet dollars to donuts that any such litigation would be derailed immediately on the grounds that 1) there is currently in place a "solution" to the finding of their monopoly status; and (more importantly) 2) that this was software provided for non-commercial use and as such MS should not see any profit from it. I would expect that the restrictions in antitrust law against distribution of products to undercut the competition do not hold for non-commercial agreements.
That said, targetting students is an established corporate strategy with real commercial benefits when students knowledgeable in a particular skill start showing up en masse at interviews. But perhaps our handy new doctrine of preemption could be utilized to attack MS in advance for the legions of .NET students on the horizon! :^P
Even if it's closer to false advertising, because there isn't any direct profit going to MS from the distribution of the software, this "problem" is a non-starter.
What MS is trying to do is to create a viable developer base among students in order to facilitate later corporate acceptance of .NET, and they're not going to get upset about dinky shit like this -- and neither will any court -- as long as that objective is met. This tactic is nothing new, illegal, surprising or interesting.
I didn't see anything in the article describing when they started doing this, but my experience with TurboTax 2001 matches this too closely to be mere coincidence.
Last Spring I installed it on my dual boot machine and suddenly I couldn't boot into Linux. LILO would start up and die after printing "LI" to the screen. Reinstalling LILO didn't help, either, and I had to resort to a hackeyed system of going from the Windows bootloader to GRUB. Seeing as it's a computer I use for work, I wonder if they could be held legally responsible for the time lost and damage to my system?
The guiding principle of Perl language design is to borrow whatever works from other languages. Rather than a regimented and legislated design like Java or Eiffel, Perl revels in its own freedom. It is ecclectic, and it does lack orthogonality in more than a few respects, but it has supported full object-oriented programming since version 5. Perl 6 will be much more amenable to academic types as a fresh rewrite of the language according to more standard "principles".
Finally, even Java Junkies runs on the Perl/DBI/MySQL Everything Engine.
Perhaps points 1 and 3 are somehow connected? If Oregonians generally feel poor, can you blame them for not voting for tax increases? The shortened school year -- a genuine tragedy I agree -- is also a direct result of lack of funds. As to your final point: news flash! Democrats and Republicans typically are at odds with one another.
Let's take a look at a couple of extremely progressive things that Oregon has approved:
I can tell you're pissed of at your state; why then don't you do something about it, like participate in public school board meetings, campaign for tax increases, or run for office?
Check one of the other links to the pictures provided in this thread, and you'll see that it is merely a rendering function to display html in a particular manner. It's not even a skin, a la Netscape or RealPlayer, it's nothing more than a manner of formatting the page (in a clunky and unusable manner). In other words, it almost certainly has zero effect on performance.
Amen brother, here's some more:
Exactly, this case doesn't speak at all to whether the DMCA is itself legitimate, but rather whether ElcomSoft was in violation of it. This is good news in the sense that it sets a precendent for how to avoid prosecution under the law, but in no way actually undermines the law itself, which is what we truly need to happen.
I'm a developer, not a network admin
Same here. I just wanted a desktop that would enable me to do my work, not qualify as a part-time job to use. I've been running MDK 9 for about 8 weeks now, and I've booted into Win2k about twice during that whole time. In contrast, when my Linux partition was RH 7.2 I spent the bulk of my time under Windows b/c the RH desktop was so cluttered with redundant (many non-functional) menus, terrible multimedia capabilities, printing didn't work.
You could say MDK is for newbies, but another way of putting it is that they made some tough choices and cut a lot of bs that end users shouldn't have to deal with. If you want tighter control over your system, use Debian or Gentoo or something. I simply needed a working desktop, and Mandrake did a great job providing it.
Anecdotal evidence is not an argument. Here's an excerpt from an article in the Seattle Times addressing precisely your point:
Many car drivers complain bitterly about motorcycle riders. They say riders exceed speed limits, and indeed speed was a factor in more than half the deaths of riders between ages 21 and 30 from 1993 to 2001 in Washington state. They say riders drive while drunk, and indeed alcohol was involved in 109 of the 365 accidents. They also say that riders weave in and out of traffic, pass on the right and don't signal. So, to them, the findings of a NHTSA-funded study, the most comprehensive ever conducted on motorcycle safety, may come as a surprise. Looking at 4,500 accidents in Los Angeles, researchers found that when motorcycles and other vehicles collided, it is usually the driver in the car who violated the motorcyclist's right of way. While that study was done in 1981, periodic looks at state police reports in Washington suggest its findings hold true today, said Dave Wendell, program manager for Evergreen Motorcycle Safety Training in Seattle. "Car drivers don't see us because they're not looking for us," Wendell said. "They're looking for something at least 6 feet wide with two headlights."
The full text is here.
Curious that we have this article which lays out the MS strategy to focus on total cost of proprietary vs free software, and now this. Question for the resident trolls: isn't it a more effective method to wait at least a little while between the setup and troll?
I'm really not impressed with Maria Cantwell. Between her support for Dubya's idiotic warplans with Iraq and her support for MS (of course due to the fact that she was a RealNetworks exec), she'd have to run against a neonazi to get my vote next time around -- and I'm a registered Dem!
when the economy's in a slump, disrupting PC's biggest moneymaker isn't in anybody's interests except those getting squashed by MS.
This is probably true in the short term; longer term, we'd be better off. But what I find so troubling is that even a relatively minor recession like the one we're in now will cause our judicial system to ignore its own principles.
Even on Slashdot the GPL is largely misunderstood. It principally dictates that if you redistribute the software you must also redistribute the source; it does not require that you redistribute the source in order to use the code yourself in whatever fashion you require. Your error is exactly the misunderstanding that MS capitalizes upon in describing the GPL as 'viral'.
I believe you mean "real-object orientation" not "real object-orientation". Object-oriented programming is characterized principally by the conjunction of data and behavior, which the protocols you denigrate adhere to rigourously. In contrast, your idea of object orientation appears to mean a unified manner of interacting with real objects. But grouping common functions is merely sane programming, not a particular paradigm, and certainly not what the rest of the world means by OOP.
Okay, so it'll be harder to mount a windows partition effectively, but this doesn't affect transmission of documents, especially if they're stored in an XML format. As for me, I think it's more valuable to have files that I can read outside of their native filesystem rather than have a readable filesystem filled with unreadable files.
This discussion prompted me to do some reading on French solutions to the problem, given that that nation is almost entirely dependent on nuclear power due to a near complete lack of coal, natural gas, oil, and I guess very little hydroelectric.
Unfortunately, contrary to the insistence by the Bush administration that we merely have to follow France's example, they are in much the same pickle as we, both in terms of having a permanent storage location (they don't), and in terms of public perception of permanent storage (the rural folks over there don't like the idea any more than the folks in Nevada).
A May 2001 article from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
And a transcript from a 1998 Frontline show.
The conclusion suggested by these articles is that the French have adopted nuclear power not out of a preference for it, but out of a lack of options. And, that rather than having figured out a reliable and acceptable method for dealing with the waste produced, they are now struggling with the consequences of decisions made out of desperation 30 years ago.
I think it's a mistake to approach the problem in terms of minimizing the footprint you leave. Why set yourself up in opposition to the system when you can utilize it's own methods to protect yourself?
For instance, why not use a grocery card with purchases that you would *want* people to see, like that you buy lots of broccoli and juice? In the worst case scenario, if an insurance company ever saw those records they'd believe you had lower cancer risk. Pay in cash for things you want them *not* to see, such as the bag of chocolates, smokes and double bottle of cheap red wine.
Put books on gardening and cooking on your credit card bill, pay in cash for books on hacking.
Use an ordinary mobile phone except for when you truly *need* privacy, and for god's sake turn it off when you cross state lines to buy grass!
Set up email accounts in several different classes: One that you *want* identified with you for legitimate personal/professional contact; one for questionable personal use (e.g., dirty jokes) that you access through a proxy server; one as a throwaway that you don't really care about, say for registration sites. And don't mix them up!
The point is to understand the system well enough to *purposely shape* the profile that's built of you rather than eliminating it all together. The latter option is becoming increasingly unrealistic.
The Filthy Critic's take:
"Kirsten Dunst is a very good actress, and each of her tits under a wet shirt is worth a quarter the price of admission. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that makes a man sitting alone in a theater instinctively squeeze the Hamm's he smuggled in."
I heard recently about a software package (no reference, sorry) for managing company resources based on a security model of aggregate permissions. Suppose the administrator for a system dies (as in this Norway case), two non-administrator employees might together be given permission to access the database as admin.
The software is based on a point system where a person at a particular organizational level would possess N points to contribute toward a group effort requiring security clearance.
Guess that's not too good if you're an abusive employer though... "Mutiny on the LAN!" ;)
One thing that makes this fundamentally different from other distributed computing efforts is that the network of computers working has to change dynamically, which means it's not well-suited for the run-as-screensaver model. Because it involves recursion through a tree, exploration of a branch will often involve an increase in the number of machines devoted to calculating the consequences of that particular branch as many (the non-leaf nodes) will themselves branch off. Moreover, a parent process must wait for it's child processes to finish before it can report back to its parents.
This is very different from the model where each machine downloads a discrete chunk of data to process and return to a server. It also means that the client would have to run constantly in the background in order for this to be effiencient -- otherwise an entire branch could get held up by a single machine that isn't in a state of rest waiting to do something useful.
Probably you'd have to have a pool of volunteer machines that operates kind of like swap space. That is, when there's a new branch to explore, the parent process looks for available machines and farms out the work on the fly.