I cannot tell you how many articles I've found on wikipedia that are completely full of crap. And since I don't have the time to sit around and watch for when someone comes along and changes it back or to something equally false
I've not found this to be such a big problem myself and the reason being that wikipedia do keep a revision log of all changes (article history). If I notice some apparent vandalism, I usually just look at the article history for the revision previous to the one which corrupted the current revision and simply copy the former edit into a new revision. This means that I as an average reader of most topics in just a few seconds can help reduce the noise without being a domain expert of each vandalized topic I notice.
In my experience, most vandalism I've encountered have been pure spam (marketing) where some jerk replaces an entire article with their advertisement. This to me is no different than managing spam in my inbox. I do believe a lot of "average" eyes will be able to notice spam, even though they are not domain experts of each and every topic treated on Wikipedia.
When it comes to "twisting of facts" though, some domain expertise is required in order to correct an article or revert it to a suitable earlier revision. Again, I think it's more beneficial than not to have many eyes on the ball since the aggregated pool of people versed in any specific topic is larger than it would be had the system be closed to a selected few. It's simple economics of labor and production, the same as that driving the open source landscape.
A (perhaps some what halting) analogy would be to imagine what the Roman empire would have been like if the only people who produced anything in that society would have been the "self appointed" elite of the Senate instead of the whole of the Roman empire. My bet is that the fruits of the labor of many far exceeds that of a few.
I'm sorry to hear that your pet-language didn't get endorsed by a market actor and in a way which would have benefitted you. Now aside from that, I however commend SUN for making this endorsement for the reasons I'll outline below.
The gist of my point of view in this regard is that any effort at further developing, refining, standardizing and documenting useful tools and technologies is something I consider to be a good thing. The motives a company has for doing this matters very little to me, since I'm a pragmatist seeking the best process, tools, governance model or what have you for any given problem context.
If this effort by SUN means I get much needed standardization and documentation of the Ruby language, it's an initiative which benefits *me* regardless of the reason SUN is doing it. If a resulting standardization effort would be supported by peer vendors like IBM and Weblogic I could very likely expect to see a R2EE stack and the resulting application server support for Ruby, with very possibly a clean way of component interaction between Java modules and (j)ruby modules in the same JVM process. Or at least the latter, allowing me to reuse the existing Java stacks.
There are some really nice constructs in parts of the J2EE and J2SE stacks which I would like to use through the Ruby language, such as the servlet specification realization and the various containers (J2EE, pico and Spring ones). Now I know a lot of Ruby (and esp. Rails) people like to advocate "Just write all the code yourself to get fat free libraries"[1] in contrast to re-using "bloated libraries and stacks"[1] as is common in most other languages and esp. in Java. This type of argument has bugged many developers whose job it is to solve real problems under constraints of budget and time and as such a proper governance model[2] for Ruby is essential. It is essential in that it helps propel the language from being just another language to a platform which may be used as an alternative or a complement to the dominating Java language for enterprise development.
Being able to use Ruby and Java modules together in the same JVM with the module contracts between the two languages being interface based would "make my day". I firmly believe there are problems and tasks where strongly typed languages are preferred while at the same time there are other problems where a dynamically typed language would be most advantageous. Having the option of choice between the two while being able to retain existing infrastructure, middleware and architectures would be a sweet thing indeed.
[1] Both statements are paraphrased from variants heard uttered or seen written on various web sites. The underlying argument being that since the Ruby language is so "simple", "verbose" while still being succinct the effort for writing libraries would be lower than in other languages. This argument as most people know is seldom an option due to project constraints such as time, budget, skills and domain expertise.
[2] You may think what you will of SUN's stewardship of Java and the related specifications, but one thing is clear and it is that those specifications have tremendous buy-in both by the major IT vendors but also by most corporations around the globe. I don't think there is any denying that. If we at least acknowledge and attribute a bit of this success to SUN, then I at least don't think that the Ruby language would be worse off by SUN supporting it than otherwise.
Well the suggestion you provide has been tried and discarded on numerous occansions due to practicality. Freenet is to my knowledge the only surviving attempt at what you suggest, but it also suffers immensly from poor performance (throughput). The most likely reason why Relakks provides a simple proxy design is that they have almost unlimited bandwidth for dirt cheap price to and from their hosting location, thus the performance would likely be as good as the throughput between your location and the Relakks location.
Now as for the records. Relakks is a pay-up-front kind of service amd since you pre-pay a fixed amount they don't need to keep any records other than "Usar A payed the monthly fee". Since their business model don't require usage / traffic statistics for billing (contrary to many other ISPs) they don't need to keep traffic logs and thus it's impossible to correlate a customer's payment info to anything else. This means that even if they were forced to hand over the specific details of suspected individual "User B" all the government would obtain is what is already available in the white pages or in the records of the Swedish IRS (public information). No new information will be gleaned from subpoenas and the government is rather aware of that which should eliminate their desire for requesting such information from Relakks in the first place.
The mov extension is typically used by Apple Quicktime video files. Thus your beef is with Apple and not Microsoft.
What I really lack is a way / program to move a video stream from one container format to another without transcoding the video stream. For example, the Ogg format hosts MPEG4 steams fairly well, so why can't I simply "lift" Microsoft MPEG4 or Apple MPEG4 videos from their respective proprietary containers to the open Ogg container?
It's pretty detremental to spurring increase in collective effort for addressing bugs in software, when people on the receiving end (the ones with CVS/SVN commit access) behave like jerks. I can't even recall the number of development lists I've been on where some committer has some grudge with a minute detail of a patch and simply responds "no way" or "This won't be committed because the indentation is not to my liking" or similar. Instead of being arses, why not fix the tiny details they complain about and submit the patch while responding to the submitter with "Thanks alot for the contribution, we really appreciate your work".
An example from one of the submissions for the Coverity bugs in Mozilla where the coder who made the patch actually had the balls to set the arrogant committer prick right.
Description: Pointer "value" dereferenced before NULL check
------- Comment #1 From timeless 2006-05-07 06:30 PDT [reply] -------
Created an attachment (id=221174) [edit] reorder null check
------- Comment #2 From Nelson Bolyard 2006-05-07 18:09 PDT [reply] -------
(From update of attachment 221174 [edit]) Sorry, file changes that include lots of gratuitous tab->space conversion will not be acceptable.
------- Comment #3 From timeless 2006-05-08 00:03 PDT [reply] -------
that's fine. it's not my job to fix your bugs. i provide patches as a courtesy
Could you please put an address to a site describing this setup? If not, could you at least send me a message describing how to get in contact with you?
I've numerous times to build a for me optimal silent and capable PVR, but have still not found the right combination of hardware and software. The most successful experiment was based on MythTV and an Epia board (about 3 years ago), but the Epia was too weak to handle anything more than PAL resolution. Also the MythTV interface was slow as a dog. Thus I'd be very interested to hear about your experience, what software you chose, kernel + modifications as well as chosen hardware. If you don't fancy "retailing" (e.g. selling outside your circle of friends) then perhaps you at least wouldn't mind sharing your experience in this area?
So, does Vista have a system administration account or not?
An equivalent of the Unix "root" user account or is it more like Ubuntu where the admin account is "hidden" by default and you have to sudo / RunAs whenever you want to do something outside your sandbox? I'm one of those people who do "sudo su -" whenever I put on my "admin hat" and I really hope Vista has an admin account since doing RunAs for every app. when doing sys-admin stuff is pretty tedious.
This is the result of the typical bums on seats accounting made by most large organizations. I've found it especially common in organizations which are governed without representative coming from the "trenches" (someone who long ago started out "on the floor" as a developer and has touched most facets of the development and maintenance cycle). The bums on seats mentality is a legacy from the industrial revolution and hardly applicable to information centric companies. Unfortunately there are a lot of companies and organizations which have management teams consisting only of people which are able to equate one resource = one unit of productivity.
Even IBM realized in the 60's that a small team selected field experts for the problem context produced magnitudes more value than a large team of mixed resources [1]. Talent tops number of resources in the information domain which is something still not obvious to a lot of organizations.
[1] Although I've heard stories that even IBM have certain organizations suffering from the bums on seat syndrome. Perhaps they're simply too big and poor to educate all their managers the lessons learned in the 60ies.
The *bad guy* will be using the transport medium which has the lowest associated risk and effort for their purpose. If the electronic passport system scheme proves to be costly to circumvent, the person might instead opt to for example use boat for transportation (seeing as port security is rather lax most places in the world).
Bad guys are not more stupid than the average person. There is a reason they hijack for example Securitas money transports at strategic sections of the road where law enforcement will not get to in time, instead of trying to breach heavy airport security perimeters to get into the area where money is offloaded planes and onto the armored trucks.
The law of least resistance applies to bad guys as well.
I agree. I've set up an email server with associated web front-end which is used to manage e-mail for myself, family and friends. The main reason behind it was not data retention however, but the obvious notion that communicative information is valuable and we want to own that information ourselves. Having about 5 years of email data over several accounts allows for some interesting data munching (more proficient spam filtering, tracking of trends, finding advice through text analysis and so on). This is the stuff that normally reserved to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft because too many people don't realize that information is what is valuable in the 21:th century and happily sacrifice both privacy and any future potential their data may provide.
The obvious business model for "IT" in the 21:th century is not to sell software but to use or create software for yourself which operate on your data and/or leeched data and offering tailored services for users. Owning the data gives you absolute monopoly for providing services based on that data. This is the ultimate goal of capitalism, monopoly, where you dictate all terms associated with the offering (terms and price) and never have to worry about any competition in that context:-)
As for data retention, we naturally have some kind which in our case is simple mirroring of the data to different servers hosted at different locations. Using different locations is important to avoid a situation where an accident in one location (such as a fire) wipes out the equipment and all data in one go. As for service redundancy, we don't use that since the cost / benefit is not favorable in our situation. If the server dies, someone has to manually restore the backup of the server's file systems and the data from a mirror. This leads to a downtime of perhaps up to a day which is deemed acceptable by all users (MTBF is currently 4 years, since we experienced a disk failure last year and restoration took 4 hours at that time). Note that this is a conscious decision where we attribute great value to our data but not as much on service availability.
Regarding the price numbers for initial acquisition I guess you may be right that the price difference between a "PC" and a MacBook (Pro) may be rather small when counting on a price / feature in a feature comparison. If a buyer (consumer or a procurement department) wants all the features, the comparison is valid, but if they only want a subset it becomes skewed since the "PC" camp has more variety in model selections (likelier to find a product composed of just the desired features which helps drive the cost down).
My statement that every single software has a windows equivalent was formulated badly. Of course that is unlikely just as proving that there are no pink elephants are impossible. Bad choice of words. What I meant was that for the broad domains there are equivalents on windows. Naturally there are always specific domains which require (or at least use) equipment only available in a specific form, such as tied to an OS and hardware (I even wrote a domain specific application for my Texas Instruments calculator while in college which had no counter part on other platforms) and I do not expect the Mac/OSX platform to be any different in that regard.
For the rest of your comments, I found nothing I could disagree with, but at present I still find it difficult to address a number of questions which crop up (and which I outlined to an extent in the original post) when a Mac/OSX switch is brought up. Right now it feels like I have to continue a lengthy analysis of the domain(s) the asking party is to use their computer(s) for before giving them either a list of pros and cons and letting them selves decide or simply reply "wait 2 more years" (for the Apple market to grow and the economic reasoning of Big Companies to start shifting). However, for computer illiterate or comparatively novice consumers I think the reply "buy a mac for you typical internet needs and a gaming console for you or your kids" would not be such a bad response as a general advice.
Myself, I think I'm unfortunately one of those people who will just have to wait and see a few years before it's worthwhile to raise this switch or plans for progressive migration again in my corporation. Until then I'll continue to try finding case studies where other large companies have made or attempted switching.
PS. I posted some additional replies to another commentator which also provided insightful counter points if you're interested. I got a few mails as well, which I simply referred to that posting as well, thus the reference to "other commentators" in that corpus.
For a general address of the counter points, please see my comment to another comentator:
For one of your points specific to your comment, my reply is:
Just because you know how to operate a web browser or transfer a bunch of files to another machine (e.g. a web server) does not make you qualified computer specialist. I'd argue that managing personal blogs / web sites and the like are still something you can do with little or no technical expertise this day and age due to the wide availability of stream lined process tools for these specific tasks. Even Apple includes that capability in the ILife package, which should tell you something.
First off, the examples I provided were paraphrased to real world categories of questions I've received when I've brought up a Mac switch. Since OSX came out I've been rather interested in it seeing as I have a Unix background, but at most turns I've found myself unable to provide sufficient answers to these questions when Mac and OSX was raised in a discussion.
Instead of replying to all comments of my post separately, I'll try to keep them in one, this one which means I'll be addressing some points which you did not raise in your comment as well. I'll also continue to treat corporate users and consumers differently since their driving forces for using a computer and software is inherently different (consumers use computers to do what their hearts desire while corporate users use them for specific tasks governed by a specific set of constraints)
Regarding the SAP GUI, yes using either Netweaver appserver to deliver HTML pages or the java gui might be an option in some cases. However if the GUI has been adapted with tools (which is often the case) such as GuiXT and / or some custom (non-SAP) window controls added to the UI then it requires the SAP GUI product and one is locked into the Windows world. My company as well as many other F500 companies are in this latter situation, meaning a migration would be extremely expensive (non-justifiably so on a TCO basis):-(
When it comes to software selection, if it's up to the end user or a small group (such as in small companies, for consumers or certain organizational units like R&D at multi-corps) the problem is often minor since alternative software may be found or a VMWare clone (Parallel) may be used. This pretty much dictates the viability of selecting alternatives or role centered tooling evaluations which you propose for businesses.
In large organizations there almost always are IT policies, standards and processes which must be adhered to. This includes what software is allowed to run on a company owned computer, how that computer is to be administered and what the end-user is allowed to do with the machine. Most of the large organizations I've visited has some kind of software repository with tailored installs for their approved platforms which means you must get it from that repository, even if you could yourself purchase it from a vendor. Anything not in the repository are not viable alternatives for large companies.
Now, a concerning the use of a virtualized guest environment for running the "old OS" and the associated mandatory software. Running a software based VM hosting a guest operating system which is different from the one of the host will always be slower than native since a lot of function call mappings need to be performed (Note I can't speak for hardware VMs in this context since I've yet to experience it myself). How much slower depends on the differences in APIs and dynamic behaviors of the tasks being performed by guest and host OSes. VMs however work pretty well as servers where the functionality of a GUI is of secondary importance. E.g. in VMWare I've measured about 80-90% "crunching" performance when compared to native execution using a windows host running Linux and vice versa. Where even the market leader fails to deliver performance is in the GUI department. To this date I've yet to see a single instance where accelerated graphics on a different guest OS is working and even the software rendered GUIs leave a lot to be desired in terms of performance. Depending on application this matters a lot or little. For video editing, CAD operations and the like it's a show stopper. This also includes gaming for consumers.
As for the consumer point of addressing gaming by purchasing a console and use that as a complement to a "workstation Mac", it's a good alternative which likely would satisfy the gaming requirement of most house holds. I believe only a small portion of gamers would decline this option and they are what the media calls "power gamers" or "ha
In a speech by Mark I heard him explain that the entire Ubuntu initiative is a purely social contribution in a philanthropic sense from his side. Canonical is not in this to make money.
Most people with insane riches want to be seen as philanthropic. Bill G. for example started a foundation where he funds initiatives related to education and health (a wide domain where he helps financing selected initiatives).
Mark on the other hand is more focused and is aiming at a specific and narrow problem domain in the technology sector. He wants to help Linux become a viable computing platform option for the average person, by providing both financing as well as leadership. Seeing that Slashdot is mostly comprised of people who have an education and "food on their table", the work of Mark will likely have a more direct impact on our lives than other initiatives, thus making the effort of Mark rather interesting in our little technology corner of the world.
Being an industry professional I am (as I believe many of you are as well) constantly consulted by friends and family about technical matters. If one day these people would be willing to start using a platform which I am familiar with, the effort on my part as well as those seeking help would greatly diminish and we would all be able to spend more time on stuff that matters. Ubuntu is in that regard an extremely interesting initiative to me personally and I commend Shuttleworth for incepting Ubuntu and his colleagues and the rest of the contributing community for focusing on the last 10% of what Debian is missing for wide spread adoption.
By switching to OSX one would have to sacrifice a *lot* of programs. Every single software available on Mac has an equivalent in the Windows domain. Looking at it from the other perspective, an extremely small amount of Windows software is available for the Mac. For entertainment forget gaming, which is a huge computer centric entertainment. For work, forget using anything from IBM, forget using the SAP client (SAP GUI) if your work requires it. Forget a *lot* of other essential corporate applications.
Regarding hardware, switching from say a Thinkpad to a MacBook would eliminate the outstanding trackpoint (best precision pointer device since Gateway stopped manufacturing their laptops with trackballs). Also forget being able to buy pretty much any hardware you fancy since very few of them have drivers for OSX. Even Linux is better at supporting hardware than OSX, so Apple has a long way to go.
Now, how would I convince a consumer to switch to something which is more expensive while lacking both the breadth and width of software and hardware options they currently enjoy? When they ask about upgrades, how would I explain to them that Apple charges rediculous premiums for *any* kind of hardware upgrade? How would I convince my company to switch when just 10% of their essential software even has an equivalent on OSX?
Apple is in my view is still a niche product in the corporate world (though now expanded to certain research departments which usually don't follow the major corporate policies or use the same tools, much as the old Apple base, the marketing departments). For consumers never having used a computer though (some still exist I hear) and computer professionals they might have a market. The former group since they use the computer in a very menial way and the latter since they know computer design and can probably make the switch with little effort and they'll also be able to fill in some of the software gaps with FOSS alternatives. The lion's share of the consumer market will be more difficult to switch I think since they consist of non-technical people who have spent significant time and effort learning to use MS Windows and programs which only run on Windows. They likely also fancy gaming as important to an extent.
According to the merger telco. the only substantial argument for the merger from the company's side is that they want to get into the embedded device business. They hope to provide a platform for media processing on cell phones, TVs and the like.
Interesting that they think they'll be able to continue having a good relationship with nVidia. I'd guess it's just PR speak though for "as soon as the merger is complete, you're unimportant to us".
The CEO Hector Ruiz went on and on like a drone, repeating the same fluff over again (like background noise) and it wasn't until those few moments where his minions were allowed to speak something intelligible was said.
I think it's been widely acknowledged that the biggest problem with MS is the sheer scale of what they've tried to do in recent years. There's little experience in the industry of how to develop projects on the scale of Windows or Office effectively, no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws, performance hits, or whatever other scalability problems in software with dev teams of the size they use.
I don't agree with your statement. I'd say there's plenty of experience in the industry of how to develop solutions similar to Microsoft's and on a similar scale. I can think of a few projects which delivered even more complex results. The s/360 project at IBM comes to mind, including both hardware architecture as well as software. If you haven't already done so, I'd recommend reading the book "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems (History of Computing)".
No vast endeavour is ever simple. However, with enough collective experience and proper thought before starting out (design in the computing domain), the hurdles will be significantly less and the goal more likely to be reachable.
On a final note, I hold some optimism towards Ozzie taking the helm since he has clearly observed the fundamental challenge of MS, that of managing complexity (a primary responsibility of any architect). By simplifying the stack, the cost of further development will decrease and MS will be able to respond much more quickly to changes in the market. Microsoft is now simply forced to pay back on a technical mortgage which has been steadily increasing over the years, which is a usual trait unless teams are given time to make suitable refactorings of code after a release cycle.
They seem to now have reached a point where the system is about to collapse (read. the ROI is becoming unacceptable) unless they pay back the technical loan. A best practice is to pay back these "one-offs", "hacks" or "invalid design choices" as quickly as possible, preferably right after a release cycle. Unfortunately not all companies see the value in keeping the code up to snuff and Microsoft might have pushed these refactoring excercises too far down the road leading to a situation where it's cheaper to simply do a re-write (creating a new solution "from scratch").
The thing which made Google ads acceptable led to the enormous success of Google was that the web page ads were unobtrusive, i.e. didn't distract the site visitor from the content the visitor was trying to digest. If you recall, at the time of Google ad launch, all contemporary and competing advertisers were in a race for creating the most obnoxious adds with the seeming goal of distracting the visitor as much as possible (blinking, bleeping, animating etc.).
As long as Google can provide ads which doesn't distract me or interfere with my goal of accessing a certain web resource, then I'm fine with it. I really hope they've looked at some "anti patterns" for video advertising, which would include any ad which breaks the video stream by inserting a, to the context unrelated video of advertising, a video having nothing to do with the content the viewer wants to see. Some examples are the damn FBI-warnings in the beginning of most DVDs, commercial "breaks" (or artistic terrorism) imposed by those TV channels which are paid for by advertising (most US channels are good examples of this anti-pattern) or attempts by online content providers to mimic the horrid intrusive advertising scheme from broadcast TV, such as Gamespot (beginning each clip with a totally unrelated and forced upon video clip).
I agree. I don't understand why the FSF isn't sendng Eben Moglen to important meetings like this instead of RMS. Eben is both extremely well spoken and dress for the occasion (being a lawyer after all).
There are pros and cons as with every place on earth.
Socially The most obnoxious trait is social segregation, where people with similar views and income tend to run (almost exclusively) in the same circles. Sticking out (of the crowd) is frowned upon. If your a social chameleon, then you'd have little trouble hanging with different crowds though.
There is also another odd trait called "Svensson syndromet" (The syndrome of the average Swede), which has traditionally been described as a manifestation of despising success (i.e. jealousy). However, in reality I've observed it's more specific, a rage against seemingly undue awarding (e.g. seeing or reading about someone making, to the observer, an unfair amount of money). Many times this is due to lack of understanding regarding what the job of the successful person really entails. An example of the manifestation might be the huge salaries awarded certain corporate directors and especially in times of controversy, such as when Ericsson fired tens of thousands of people while the board of directors and president of operation awarded themselves huge bonuses and salary increases.
Otherwise, most people have a "I don't take any crap from you" mentality which stretches all the way from private to corporate life (causing some degree of inconvenience in local branches of multi-national cops. where the management find it difficult to follow the "manager's handbook"). This however has led to an overall climate of respect for individuals (instead of seen as pawns, resource numbers and the like).
Politically There is a general chasm between the opinion and values of politicians of the major parties and the general public. Also, the politicians are not afraid of ignoring any and most promises made before an election after the election. Unfortunately, this blatant ignorance of public values are shared between the two major political blocks and most people tend to vote on either side out of tradition. This voting behavior means that politicians can lie and trample the will of the people again and again while still only facing a minor risk of not being re-elected to office. Even if they were to fail *one* re-election campaign, they still pull enough clout to continue their own agenda as a major body in the Swedish version of the "house of representatives".
In the last 5 years, the political climate has quickly deteriorated as a consequence of heavy lobbying from American interests either directly or indirectly (through the EU). Seeing as Sweden is a small country ruled by politicians who traditionally have had to fear very little for consequences of their actions (as described above), the government has very quickly bowed down to outside pressure by the Americans and the EU. However, I feel the population is very close to a breaking point right now with a lot of external values imposed on them within a a short time span, without their consent or having been advised so likely "something" will happen (or erupt) within a few years to restore the original values of Sweden with regards to freedom and respect.
Income Moving here temporarily would likely be a bit of set back economically for someone moving from the US, since the economy is tailored towards those spending a long time in the country (preferably from birth to death). This is due to the relatively high taxes used to distribute the wealth. The idea underlying the economy is still "Government knows best" and as such certain social attributes have been identified and sponsored by the state, such as subsidized kinder garden, free college, almost no toll roads, pension system for all, subsidized health care, limit on medical expenses (a maximum amount you need to spend per year on medicine, after that it's free) and so on. If you are in a situation in life where you don't have a need for those benefits, then you'll be getting a more sour deal than the model citizen the system was designed for. In such a situation, the US system with "pay everything yourself from you
Yes, download Tor and try logging into your slashdot account. I tried it with several obtained proxy-IP addresses and slashdot had *blacklisted* them all.
Now, I understand that Tor assumes a wide spread use of proxy end points in order to function as designed, but at present, such end points seem to be very few (otherwise slashdot wouldn't have an almost 100% hitrate on detecting these relay points).
Why would you care what language is being used to create an app in the first place unless you are the supplier requiring you to maintain it?
I some how assume you are referring to the dead horse argument that "java is slow". Well it totally depends on what you are trying to do and how you use the Java framework. Some points on which to compare C and runtimes such as Java.
Native widget support: C Check, Java Check (SWT)
Portable GUI code between platforms or even Window managers on the same platform: C No, Java Check (SWT)
Native code execution for maximum performance where needed: C Check, Java Check (JIT even allows for profile data guided native code translationon on the fly which no C runtime can do that I'm aware of)
Deterministic cost of algorithms: C Check, Java No (The promised pluggable GC API still missing)
Susceptible to buffer overflows: C Check, Java No.
IBM developed their own graphical toolkit SWT which simply wraps native widgets since they were of the same opinion as people in general at that time, that Sun utterly dropped the ball on both their GUI initiatives (Swing and AWT). SWT enables GUIs to act and look like native platform GUIs since... it relies on the actual underlying widgets of the platform the OS the app is running on. That is Gnome for Linux/Gnome, Microsoft widgets through Win32 API on Windows and whatever Apple is using on OSX.
Currently there is to my knowledge only one area where any sane person would use C, C++ or Assembly over more modern (read higher level) languages namely realtime programs. The reason why Java is no option in this case has to do with the absence of the pluggable GC interface (was hoping it would arrive with 1.5 but I guess we'll have to wait some yet). Another category where Java isn't suitable is for you typical "one-liner" programs (or general small command line programs designed to fit into the typical "unix" pipe chaining design) due to the slow startup time of the JVM (Unpacking of 35 MB zip file and loading of hundreds of classes needed or not during the JVM initialization).
Now unless you are creating a realtime program (such as a game for example), great performance can be obtained by mixing C and Java. Using C or assembler together with Java (or another higher-level language) when you want to optimize the bottleneck algorithm to use every ounce of your latest and greatest "Itanium processor". Minimizing the use of lower level languages decreases the maintenance cost if you're targetting multiple environments (zOS, AS/400, AIX, Solaris, Windows, OSX..) since you only have to maintain platform specifics for the minimal amount of C/Asm code used instead of hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code for your typical non-trivial application.
I'd argue that the vast majority of business software are not realtime systems and as such I doubt you'd notice a difference if the program was coded in C, Assembler, C# running on DotNet or Java since they all would appear the same from an interface standpoint and responsiveness which you would observe.
IBM's replacement of Notes code named Hannover is essentially a stripped down eclipse platform (really the Rich Client Platform offering) with a bunch of plugins added to the work bench for whatever features Notes currently implements.
As a current victim working at a company which is a Notes/Domino shop I really look forward to the Hannover release since it will be based on a fully documented and open platform. Being based on Eclipse I really look forward to the massive amount of inhouse plugins which will written shortly after the release. Really can't think of a more integrated base as a platform for my company's (or any company's for that matter) need of inhouse tooling
Ok, I'll humor you. Let me elaborate my line of thought a bit. Firt off, most computer components are made outside the US (mainly in asia) in areas which are presently outside the control of the US government. Secondly, computer equipment is built by assembling a lot of parts which makes it very unlikely that a single system other than the most trivial example would be made up entirely of US components or circuitry.. I'd further put it forth as implausible that any buyer of high-tech goods would make the effort to and be willing to pay for a complete circuitry analysis of all components in the purchased goods.
If this assumption is plausible, then it would lend to plenty of opportunity (even for a single components manufacturer) to add whatever logic or feature they want on the hardware (or even in combination with firmware, but the latter is more risky since SW analysis is cheaper than the equivalent for HW, thus more likely to be done). These "extra features" could include for example some logic on harddrives, the motherboard or anywhere where data passes through. Another "feature" to couple the intercept logic with could be a passive electro-magnetic receiver which upon receiving a certain radio signal (authentication) could enable a short distance transmission of for transferring intercepted data.
The point I was trying to make was simply that there is no feasable way of protecting yourself against intelligence gathering if the adversary is intent on gaining your intel. Especially in "high-tech" there are countless of ways to gather intel covertly which today rival the tried and true approach of elisting services of people already having had their vetting and the proper clearance (insiders).
E.g. by sticking an "RFID tag" or similar device onto the clothes of an employee with enough security clearance to name but one way. Most secure facilities are screened against radio emissions coming into / leaving the screened area. However, since the protected computer hardware is not networked to the outside world people have to pass the screened barrier in order to use the equipment. The same people will also not live in these secured rooms and will eventually have to get home to their families. In this light, I wouldn't put it past any of the larger security agencies (or even companies) in the world of being able to modify a certain shipping of one or more components used in batches for destinations where classified data is processed (e.g. RFID or other radio transmitter technology embedded). Having a receiver on a target (a person) would act as a relay point and once the target is on the outside, the information can easilly be transferred from the target to a third party.
Just look at the capabilities of any modern mobile phone for god's sake and know that a lot of classified research is at least 10 years ahead of technologies available on the public market.
Slashdot Mirror
I've not found this to be such a big problem myself and the reason being that wikipedia do keep a revision log of all changes (article history). If I notice some apparent vandalism, I usually just look at the article history for the revision previous to the one which corrupted the current revision and simply copy the former edit into a new revision. This means that I as an average reader of most topics in just a few seconds can help reduce the noise without being a domain expert of each vandalized topic I notice.
In my experience, most vandalism I've encountered have been pure spam (marketing) where some jerk replaces an entire article with their advertisement. This to me is no different than managing spam in my inbox. I do believe a lot of "average" eyes will be able to notice spam, even though they are not domain experts of each and every topic treated on Wikipedia.
When it comes to "twisting of facts" though, some domain expertise is required in order to correct an article or revert it to a suitable earlier revision. Again, I think it's more beneficial than not to have many eyes on the ball since the aggregated pool of people versed in any specific topic is larger than it would be had the system be closed to a selected few. It's simple economics of labor and production, the same as that driving the open source landscape.
A (perhaps some what halting) analogy would be to imagine what the Roman empire would have been like if the only people who produced anything in that society would have been the "self appointed" elite of the Senate instead of the whole of the Roman empire. My bet is that the fruits of the labor of many far exceeds that of a few.
I'm sorry to hear that your pet-language didn't get endorsed by a market actor and in a way which would have benefitted you. Now aside from that, I however commend SUN for making this endorsement for the reasons I'll outline below.
The gist of my point of view in this regard is that any effort at further developing, refining, standardizing and documenting useful tools and technologies is something I consider to be a good thing. The motives a company has for doing this matters very little to me, since I'm a pragmatist seeking the best process, tools, governance model or what have you for any given problem context.
If this effort by SUN means I get much needed standardization and documentation of the Ruby language, it's an initiative which benefits *me* regardless of the reason SUN is doing it. If a resulting standardization effort would be supported by peer vendors like IBM and Weblogic I could very likely expect to see a R2EE stack and the resulting application server support for Ruby, with very possibly a clean way of component interaction between Java modules and (j)ruby modules in the same JVM process. Or at least the latter, allowing me to reuse the existing Java stacks.
There are some really nice constructs in parts of the J2EE and J2SE stacks which I would like to use through the Ruby language, such as the servlet specification realization and the various containers (J2EE, pico and Spring ones). Now I know a lot of Ruby (and esp. Rails) people like to advocate "Just write all the code yourself to get fat free libraries"[1] in contrast to re-using "bloated libraries and stacks"[1] as is common in most other languages and esp. in Java. This type of argument has bugged many developers whose job it is to solve real problems under constraints of budget and time and as such a proper governance model[2] for Ruby is essential. It is essential in that it helps propel the language from being just another language to a platform which may be used as an alternative or a complement to the dominating Java language for enterprise development.
Being able to use Ruby and Java modules together in the same JVM with the module contracts between the two languages being interface based would "make my day". I firmly believe there are problems and tasks where strongly typed languages are preferred while at the same time there are other problems where a dynamically typed language would be most advantageous. Having the option of choice between the two while being able to retain existing infrastructure, middleware and architectures would be a sweet thing indeed.
[1] Both statements are paraphrased from variants heard uttered or seen written on various web sites. The underlying argument being that since the Ruby language is so "simple", "verbose" while still being succinct the effort for writing libraries would be lower than in other languages. This argument as most people know is seldom an option due to project constraints such as time, budget, skills and domain expertise.
[2] You may think what you will of SUN's stewardship of Java and the related specifications, but one thing is clear and it is that those specifications have tremendous buy-in both by the major IT vendors but also by most corporations around the globe. I don't think there is any denying that. If we at least acknowledge and attribute a bit of this success to SUN, then I at least don't think that the Ruby language would be worse off by SUN supporting it than otherwise.
Well the suggestion you provide has been tried and discarded on numerous occansions due to practicality. Freenet is to my knowledge the only surviving attempt at what you suggest, but it also suffers immensly from poor performance (throughput). The most likely reason why Relakks provides a simple proxy design is that they have almost unlimited bandwidth for dirt cheap price to and from their hosting location, thus the performance would likely be as good as the throughput between your location and the Relakks location.
Now as for the records. Relakks is a pay-up-front kind of service amd since you pre-pay a fixed amount they don't need to keep any records other than "Usar A payed the monthly fee". Since their business model don't require usage / traffic statistics for billing (contrary to many other ISPs) they don't need to keep traffic logs and thus it's impossible to correlate a customer's payment info to anything else. This means that even if they were forced to hand over the specific details of suspected individual "User B" all the government would obtain is what is already available in the white pages or in the records of the Swedish IRS (public information). No new information will be gleaned from subpoenas and the government is rather aware of that which should eliminate their desire for requesting such information from Relakks in the first place.
The mov extension is typically used by Apple Quicktime video files.
Thus your beef is with Apple and not Microsoft.
What I really lack is a way / program to move a video stream from one container format to another without transcoding the video stream. For example, the Ogg format hosts MPEG4 steams fairly well, so why can't I simply "lift" Microsoft MPEG4 or Apple MPEG4 videos from their respective proprietary containers to the open Ogg container?
An example from one of the submissions for the Coverity bugs in Mozilla where the coder who made the patch actually had the balls to set the arrogant committer prick right.
Could you please put an address to a site describing this setup? If not, could you at least send me a message describing how to get in contact with you?
I've numerous times to build a for me optimal silent and capable PVR, but have still not found the right combination of hardware and software. The most successful experiment was based on MythTV and an Epia board (about 3 years ago), but the Epia was too weak to handle anything more than PAL resolution. Also the MythTV interface was slow as a dog. Thus I'd be very interested to hear about your experience, what software you chose, kernel + modifications as well as chosen hardware. If you don't fancy "retailing" (e.g. selling outside your circle of friends) then perhaps you at least wouldn't mind sharing your experience in this area?
So, does Vista have a system administration account or not?
An equivalent of the Unix "root" user account or is it more like Ubuntu where the admin account is "hidden" by default and you have to sudo / RunAs whenever you want to do something outside your sandbox? I'm one of those people who do "sudo su -" whenever I put on my "admin hat" and I really hope Vista has an admin account since doing RunAs for every app. when doing sys-admin stuff is pretty tedious.
This is the result of the typical bums on seats accounting made by most large organizations. I've found it especially common in organizations which are governed without representative coming from the "trenches" (someone who long ago started out "on the floor" as a developer and has touched most facets of the development and maintenance cycle). The bums on seats mentality is a legacy from the industrial revolution and hardly applicable to information centric companies. Unfortunately there are a lot of companies and organizations which have management teams consisting only of people which are able to equate one resource = one unit of productivity.
Even IBM realized in the 60's that a small team selected field experts for the problem context produced magnitudes more value than a large team of mixed resources [1]. Talent tops number of resources in the information domain which is something still not obvious to a lot of organizations.
[1] Although I've heard stories that even IBM have certain organizations suffering from the bums on seat syndrome. Perhaps they're simply too big and poor to educate all their managers the lessons learned in the 60ies.
The *bad guy* will be using the transport medium which has the lowest associated risk and effort for their purpose. If the electronic passport system scheme proves to be costly to circumvent, the person might instead opt to for example use boat for transportation (seeing as port security is rather lax most places in the world).
Bad guys are not more stupid than the average person. There is a reason they hijack for example Securitas money transports at strategic sections of the road where law enforcement will not get to in time, instead of trying to breach heavy airport security perimeters to get into the area where money is offloaded planes and onto the armored trucks.
The law of least resistance applies to bad guys as well.
I agree. I've set up an email server with associated web front-end which is used to manage e-mail for myself, family and friends. The main reason behind it was not data retention however, but the obvious notion that communicative information is valuable and we want to own that information ourselves. Having about 5 years of email data over several accounts allows for some interesting data munching (more proficient spam filtering, tracking of trends, finding advice through text analysis and so on). This is the stuff that normally reserved to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft because too many people don't realize that information is what is valuable in the 21:th century and happily sacrifice both privacy and any future potential their data may provide.
:-)
The obvious business model for "IT" in the 21:th century is not to sell software but to use or create software for yourself which operate on your data and/or leeched data and offering tailored services for users. Owning the data gives you absolute monopoly for providing services based on that data. This is the ultimate goal of capitalism, monopoly, where you dictate all terms associated with the offering (terms and price) and never have to worry about any competition in that context
As for data retention, we naturally have some kind which in our case is simple mirroring of the data to different servers hosted at different locations. Using different locations is important to avoid a situation where an accident in one location (such as a fire) wipes out the equipment and all data in one go. As for service redundancy, we don't use that since the cost / benefit is not favorable in our situation. If the server dies, someone has to manually restore the backup of the server's file systems and the data from a mirror. This leads to a downtime of perhaps up to a day which is deemed acceptable by all users (MTBF is currently 4 years, since we experienced a disk failure last year and restoration took 4 hours at that time). Note that this is a conscious decision where we attribute great value to our data but not as much on service availability.
Thanks for the interesting counter points.
Regarding the price numbers for initial acquisition I guess you may be right that the price difference between a "PC" and a MacBook (Pro) may be rather small when counting on a price / feature in a feature comparison. If a buyer (consumer or a procurement department) wants all the features, the comparison is valid, but if they only want a subset it becomes skewed since the "PC" camp has more variety in model selections (likelier to find a product composed of just the desired features which helps drive the cost down).
My statement that every single software has a windows equivalent was formulated badly. Of course that is unlikely just as proving that there are no pink elephants are impossible. Bad choice of words. What I meant was that for the broad domains there are equivalents on windows. Naturally there are always specific domains which require (or at least use) equipment only available in a specific form, such as tied to an OS and hardware (I even wrote a domain specific application for my Texas Instruments calculator while in college which had no counter part on other platforms) and I do not expect the Mac/OSX platform to be any different in that regard.
For the rest of your comments, I found nothing I could disagree with, but at present I still find it difficult to address a number of questions which crop up (and which I outlined to an extent in the original post) when a Mac/OSX switch is brought up. Right now it feels like I have to continue a lengthy analysis of the domain(s) the asking party is to use their computer(s) for before giving them either a list of pros and cons and letting them selves decide or simply reply "wait 2 more years" (for the Apple market to grow and the economic reasoning of Big Companies to start shifting). However, for computer illiterate or comparatively novice consumers I think the reply "buy a mac for you typical internet needs and a gaming console for you or your kids" would not be such a bad response as a general advice.
Myself, I think I'm unfortunately one of those people who will just have to wait and see a few years before it's worthwhile to raise this switch or plans for progressive migration again in my corporation. Until then I'll continue to try finding case studies where other large companies have made or attempted switching.
PS. I posted some additional replies to another commentator which also provided insightful counter points if you're interested. I got a few mails as well, which I simply referred to that posting as well, thus the reference to "other commentators" in that corpus.
Thanks for replying.
For a general address of the counter points, please see my comment to another comentator:
For one of your points specific to your comment, my reply is:
Just because you know how to operate a web browser or transfer a bunch of files to another machine (e.g. a web server) does not make you qualified computer specialist. I'd argue that managing personal blogs / web sites and the like are still something you can do with little or no technical expertise this day and age due to the wide availability of stream lined process tools for these specific tasks. Even Apple includes that capability in the ILife package, which should tell you something.
Thanks for an excellent reply.
:-(
First off, the examples I provided were paraphrased to real world categories of questions I've received when I've brought up a Mac switch. Since OSX came out I've been rather interested in it seeing as I have a Unix background, but at most turns I've found myself unable to provide sufficient answers to these questions when Mac and OSX was raised in a discussion.
Instead of replying to all comments of my post separately, I'll try to keep them in one, this one which means I'll be addressing some points which you did not raise in your comment as well. I'll also continue to treat corporate users and consumers differently since their driving forces for using a computer and software is inherently different (consumers use computers to do what their hearts desire while corporate users use them for specific tasks governed by a specific set of constraints)
Regarding the SAP GUI, yes using either Netweaver appserver to deliver HTML pages or the java gui might be an option in some cases. However if the GUI has been adapted with tools (which is often the case) such as GuiXT and / or some custom (non-SAP) window controls added to the UI then it requires the SAP GUI product and one is locked into the Windows world. My company as well as many other F500 companies are in this latter situation, meaning a migration would be extremely expensive (non-justifiably so on a TCO basis)
When it comes to software selection, if it's up to the end user or a small group (such as in small companies, for consumers or certain organizational units like R&D at multi-corps) the problem is often minor since alternative software may be found or a VMWare clone (Parallel) may be used. This pretty much dictates the viability of selecting alternatives or role centered tooling evaluations which you propose for businesses.
In large organizations there almost always are IT policies, standards and processes which must be adhered to. This includes what software is allowed to run on a company owned computer, how that computer is to be administered and what the end-user is allowed to do with the machine. Most of the large organizations I've visited has some kind of software repository with tailored installs for their approved platforms which means you must get it from that repository, even if you could yourself purchase it from a vendor. Anything not in the repository are not viable alternatives for large companies.
Now, a concerning the use of a virtualized guest environment for running the "old OS" and the associated mandatory software. Running a software based VM hosting a guest operating system which is different from the one of the host will always be slower than native since a lot of function call mappings need to be performed (Note I can't speak for hardware VMs in this context since I've yet to experience it myself). How much slower depends on the differences in APIs and dynamic behaviors of the tasks being performed by guest and host OSes. VMs however work pretty well as servers where the functionality of a GUI is of secondary importance. E.g. in VMWare I've measured about 80-90% "crunching" performance when compared to native execution using a windows host running Linux and vice versa. Where even the market leader fails to deliver performance is in the GUI department. To this date I've yet to see a single instance where accelerated graphics on a different guest OS is working and even the software rendered GUIs leave a lot to be desired in terms of performance. Depending on application this matters a lot or little. For video editing, CAD operations and the like it's a show stopper. This also includes gaming for consumers.
As for the consumer point of addressing gaming by purchasing a console and use that as a complement to a "workstation Mac", it's a good alternative which likely would satisfy the gaming requirement of most house holds. I believe only a small portion of gamers would decline this option and they are what the media calls "power gamers" or "ha
In a speech by Mark I heard him explain that the entire Ubuntu initiative is a purely social contribution in a philanthropic sense from his side. Canonical is not in this to make money.
Most people with insane riches want to be seen as philanthropic. Bill G. for example started a foundation where he funds initiatives related to education and health (a wide domain where he helps financing selected initiatives).
Mark on the other hand is more focused and is aiming at a specific and narrow problem domain in the technology sector. He wants to help Linux become a viable computing platform option for the average person, by providing both financing as well as leadership. Seeing that Slashdot is mostly comprised of people who have an education and "food on their table", the work of Mark will likely have a more direct impact on our lives than other initiatives, thus making the effort of Mark rather interesting in our little technology corner of the world.
Being an industry professional I am (as I believe many of you are as well) constantly consulted by friends and family about technical matters. If one day these people would be willing to start using a platform which I am familiar with, the effort on my part as well as those seeking help would greatly diminish and we would all be able to spend more time on stuff that matters. Ubuntu is in that regard an extremely interesting initiative to me personally and I commend Shuttleworth for incepting Ubuntu and his colleagues and the rest of the contributing community for focusing on the last 10% of what Debian is missing for wide spread adoption.
Do you talk about hardware or software?
By switching to OSX one would have to sacrifice a *lot* of programs.
Every single software available on Mac has an equivalent in the Windows domain. Looking at it from the other perspective, an extremely small amount of Windows software is available for the Mac. For entertainment forget gaming, which is a huge computer centric entertainment. For work, forget using anything from IBM, forget using the SAP client (SAP GUI) if your work requires it. Forget a *lot* of other essential corporate applications.
Regarding hardware, switching from say a Thinkpad to a MacBook would eliminate the outstanding trackpoint (best precision pointer device since Gateway stopped manufacturing their laptops with trackballs). Also forget being able to buy pretty much any hardware you fancy since very few of them have drivers for OSX. Even Linux is better at supporting hardware than OSX, so Apple has a long way to go.
Now, how would I convince a consumer to switch to something which is more expensive while lacking both the breadth and width of software and hardware options they currently enjoy? When they ask about upgrades, how would I explain to them that Apple charges rediculous premiums for *any* kind of hardware upgrade? How would I convince my company to switch when just 10% of their essential software even has an equivalent on OSX?
Apple is in my view is still a niche product in the corporate world (though now expanded to certain research departments which usually don't follow the major corporate policies or use the same tools, much as the old Apple base, the marketing departments). For consumers never having used a computer though (some still exist I hear) and computer professionals they might have a market. The former group since they use the computer in a very menial way and the latter since they know computer design and can probably make the switch with little effort and they'll also be able to fill in some of the software gaps with FOSS alternatives. The lion's share of the consumer market will be more difficult to switch I think since they consist of non-technical people who have spent significant time and effort learning to use MS Windows and programs which only run on Windows. They likely also fancy gaming as important to an extent.
According to the merger telco. the only substantial argument for the merger from the company's side is that they want to get into the embedded device business. They hope to provide a platform for media processing on cell phones, TVs and the like.
The Q&A session is apparently already up at The Pirate Bay (though I didn't manage to download it yet): http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3506714
Interesting that they think they'll be able to continue having a good relationship with nVidia. I'd guess it's just PR speak though for "as soon as the merger is complete, you're unimportant to us".
The CEO Hector Ruiz went on and on like a drone, repeating the same fluff over again (like background noise) and it wasn't until those few moments where his minions were allowed to speak something intelligible was said.
I don't agree with your statement. I'd say there's plenty of experience in the industry of how to develop solutions similar to Microsoft's and on a similar scale. I can think of a few projects which delivered even more complex results. The s/360 project at IBM comes to mind, including both hardware architecture as well as software. If you haven't already done so, I'd recommend reading the book "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems (History of Computing)".
No vast endeavour is ever simple. However, with enough collective experience and proper thought before starting out (design in the computing domain), the hurdles will be significantly less and the goal more likely to be reachable.
On a final note, I hold some optimism towards Ozzie taking the helm since he has clearly observed the fundamental challenge of MS, that of managing complexity (a primary responsibility of any architect). By simplifying the stack, the cost of further development will decrease and MS will be able to respond much more quickly to changes in the market. Microsoft is now simply forced to pay back on a technical mortgage which has been steadily increasing over the years, which is a usual trait unless teams are given time to make suitable refactorings of code after a release cycle.
They seem to now have reached a point where the system is about to collapse (read. the ROI is becoming unacceptable) unless they pay back the technical loan. A best practice is to pay back these "one-offs", "hacks" or "invalid design choices" as quickly as possible, preferably right after a release cycle. Unfortunately not all companies see the value in keeping the code up to snuff and Microsoft might have pushed these refactoring excercises too far down the road leading to a situation where it's cheaper to simply do a re-write (creating a new solution "from scratch").
The thing which made Google ads acceptable led to the enormous success of Google was that the web page ads were unobtrusive, i.e. didn't distract the site visitor from the content the visitor was trying to digest. If you recall, at the time of Google ad launch, all contemporary and competing advertisers were in a race for creating the most obnoxious adds with the seeming goal of distracting the visitor as much as possible (blinking, bleeping, animating etc.).
As long as Google can provide ads which doesn't distract me or interfere with my goal of accessing a certain web resource, then I'm fine with it. I really hope they've looked at some "anti patterns" for video advertising, which would include any ad which breaks the video stream by inserting a, to the context unrelated video of advertising, a video having nothing to do with the content the viewer wants to see. Some examples are the damn FBI-warnings in the beginning of most DVDs, commercial "breaks" (or artistic terrorism) imposed by those TV channels which are paid for by advertising (most US channels are good examples of this anti-pattern) or attempts by online content providers to mimic the horrid intrusive advertising scheme from broadcast TV, such as Gamespot (beginning each clip with a totally unrelated and forced upon video clip).
I agree. I don't understand why the FSF isn't sendng Eben Moglen to important meetings like this instead of RMS. Eben is both extremely well spoken and dress for the occasion (being a lawyer after all).
Everyone is a criminal, all you need to do is watch them long enough and you'll eventually catch them committing a felony
There are pros and cons as with every place on earth.
Socially
The most obnoxious trait is social segregation, where people with similar views and income tend to run (almost exclusively) in the same circles. Sticking out (of the crowd) is frowned upon. If your a social chameleon, then you'd have little trouble hanging with different crowds though.
There is also another odd trait called "Svensson syndromet" (The syndrome of the average Swede), which has traditionally been described as a manifestation of despising success (i.e. jealousy). However, in reality I've observed it's more specific, a rage against seemingly undue awarding (e.g. seeing or reading about someone making, to the observer, an unfair amount of money). Many times this is due to lack of understanding regarding what the job of the successful person really entails. An example of the manifestation might be the huge salaries awarded certain corporate directors and especially in times of controversy, such as when Ericsson fired tens of thousands of people while the board of directors and president of operation awarded themselves huge bonuses and salary increases.
Otherwise, most people have a "I don't take any crap from you" mentality which stretches all the way from private to corporate life (causing some degree of inconvenience in local branches of multi-national cops. where the management find it difficult to follow the "manager's handbook"). This however has led to an overall climate of respect for individuals (instead of seen as pawns, resource numbers and the like).
Politically
There is a general chasm between the opinion and values of politicians of the major parties and the general public. Also, the politicians are not afraid of ignoring any and most promises made before an election after the election. Unfortunately, this blatant ignorance of public values are shared between the two major political blocks and most people tend to vote on either side out of tradition. This voting behavior means that politicians can lie and trample the will of the people again and again while still only facing a minor risk of not being re-elected to office. Even if they were to fail *one* re-election campaign, they still pull enough clout to continue their own agenda as a major body in the Swedish version of the "house of representatives".
In the last 5 years, the political climate has quickly deteriorated as a consequence of heavy lobbying from American interests either directly or indirectly (through the EU). Seeing as Sweden is a small country ruled by politicians who traditionally have had to fear very little for consequences of their actions (as described above), the government has very quickly bowed down to outside pressure by the Americans and the EU. However, I feel the population is very close to a breaking point right now with a lot of external values imposed on them within a a short time span, without their consent or having been advised so likely "something" will happen (or erupt) within a few years to restore the original values of Sweden with regards to freedom and respect.
Income
Moving here temporarily would likely be a bit of set back economically for someone moving from the US, since the economy is tailored towards those spending a long time in the country (preferably from birth to death). This is due to the relatively high taxes used to distribute the wealth. The idea underlying the economy is still "Government knows best" and as such certain social attributes have been identified and sponsored by the state, such as subsidized kinder garden, free college, almost no toll roads, pension system for all, subsidized health care, limit on medical expenses (a maximum amount you need to spend per year on medicine, after that it's free) and so on. If you are in a situation in life where you don't have a need for those benefits, then you'll be getting a more sour deal than the model citizen the system was designed for. In such a situation, the US system with "pay everything yourself from you
Yes, download Tor and try logging into your slashdot account.
I tried it with several obtained proxy-IP addresses and slashdot had *blacklisted* them all.
Now, I understand that Tor assumes a wide spread use of proxy end points in order to function as designed, but at present, such end points seem to be very few (otherwise slashdot wouldn't have an almost 100% hitrate on detecting these relay points).
I some how assume you are referring to the dead horse argument that "java is slow". Well it totally depends on what you are trying to do and how you use the Java framework. Some points on which to compare C and runtimes such as Java.
IBM developed their own graphical toolkit SWT which simply wraps native widgets since they were of the same opinion as people in general at that time, that Sun utterly dropped the ball on both their GUI initiatives (Swing and AWT). SWT enables GUIs to act and look like native platform GUIs since ... it relies on the actual underlying widgets of the platform the OS the app is running on. That is Gnome for Linux/Gnome, Microsoft widgets through Win32 API on Windows and whatever Apple is using on OSX.
..) since you only have to maintain platform specifics for the minimal amount of C/Asm code used instead of hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code for your typical non-trivial application.
Currently there is to my knowledge only one area where any sane person would use C, C++ or Assembly over more modern (read higher level) languages namely realtime programs. The reason why Java is no option in this case has to do with the absence of the pluggable GC interface (was hoping it would arrive with 1.5 but I guess we'll have to wait some yet). Another category where Java isn't suitable is for you typical "one-liner" programs (or general small command line programs designed to fit into the typical "unix" pipe chaining design) due to the slow startup time of the JVM (Unpacking of 35 MB zip file and loading of hundreds of classes needed or not during the JVM initialization).
Now unless you are creating a realtime program (such as a game for example), great performance can be obtained by mixing C and Java. Using C or assembler together with Java (or another higher-level language) when you want to optimize the bottleneck algorithm to use every ounce of your latest and greatest "Itanium processor". Minimizing the use of lower level languages decreases the maintenance cost if you're targetting multiple environments (zOS, AS/400, AIX, Solaris, Windows, OSX
I'd argue that the vast majority of business software are not realtime systems and as such I doubt you'd notice a difference if the program was coded in C, Assembler, C# running on DotNet or Java since they all would appear the same from an interface standpoint and responsiveness which you would observe.
IBM's replacement of Notes code named Hannover is essentially a stripped down eclipse platform (really the Rich Client Platform offering) with a bunch of plugins added to the work bench for whatever features Notes currently implements.
As a current victim working at a company which is a Notes/Domino shop I really look forward to the Hannover release since it will be based on a fully documented and open platform. Being based on Eclipse I really look forward to the massive amount of inhouse plugins which will written shortly after the release. Really can't think of a more integrated base as a platform for my company's (or any company's for that matter) need of inhouse tooling
Ok, I'll humor you. Let me elaborate my line of thought a bit.
Firt off, most computer components are made outside the US (mainly in asia) in areas which are presently outside the control of the US government. Secondly, computer equipment is built by assembling a lot of parts which makes it very unlikely that a single system other than the most trivial example would be made up entirely of US components or circuitry.. I'd further put it forth as implausible that any buyer of high-tech goods would make the effort to and be willing to pay for a complete circuitry analysis of all components in the purchased goods.
If this assumption is plausible, then it would lend to plenty of opportunity (even for a single components manufacturer) to add whatever logic or feature they want on the hardware (or even in combination with firmware, but the latter is more risky since SW analysis is cheaper than the equivalent for HW, thus more likely to be done). These "extra features" could include for example some logic on harddrives, the motherboard or anywhere where data passes through. Another "feature" to couple the intercept logic with could be a passive electro-magnetic receiver which upon receiving a certain radio signal (authentication) could enable a short distance transmission of for transferring intercepted data.
The point I was trying to make was simply that there is no feasable way of protecting yourself against intelligence gathering if the adversary is intent on gaining your intel. Especially in "high-tech" there are countless of ways to gather intel covertly which today rival the tried and true approach of elisting services of people already having had their vetting and the proper clearance (insiders).
E.g. by sticking an "RFID tag" or similar device onto the clothes of an employee with enough security clearance to name but one way. Most secure facilities are screened against radio emissions coming into / leaving the screened area. However, since the protected computer hardware is not networked to the outside world people have to pass the screened barrier in order to use the equipment. The same people will also not live in these secured rooms and will eventually have to get home to their families. In this light, I wouldn't put it past any of the larger security agencies (or even companies) in the world of being able to modify a certain shipping of one or more components used in batches for destinations where classified data is processed (e.g. RFID or other radio transmitter technology embedded). Having a receiver on a target (a person) would act as a relay point and once the target is on the outside, the information can easilly be transferred from the target to a third party.
Just look at the capabilities of any modern mobile phone for god's sake and know that a lot of classified research is at least 10 years ahead of technologies available on the public market.