While I agree that all of the hype about XML is out-of-control and a lot of the things said about XML don't hold up when you start to use it (describes the data - NOT!) and it can be a ROYAL pain in the ass, I find myself using it a lot because it _is_ defined.
For example, I recently integrated our web store with our fulfillment vendor here in Japan. I suggested XML but their system is only set up to work with CSV files (I need to visit their IT operations - I smell Excel on Windoze - what can you expect from guys who pack boxes all day long). Now CSV files are all fine and well, but you have to work through a bunch of other issues now. For example, what happens when the customer's company name has a "," in it - you have to agree on an escaping mechanism. XML has those kind of things ALREADY defined. It may be a pain in the ass to get XML to do something but most things that you can get it to do have been defined so you don't have to discuss the subject with the other people you're working with.
And how are people able to write 500+ page books about it? Well, go try writing an XSL stylesheet that actually does something:-). You'll understand real quick.
It's interesting that you raise the issue of sovereignity but don't seem to know what it means. Sovereignity basically means that, as a nation, you can do whatever the hell you feel like and you're not responsible to anyone else. So, guess what - the US acted as a sovereign nation. Had the FBI gone to Russia and kidnapped these guys back to the US there would be an issue of violating Russia's sovereignity.
And, if you actively criticize China - I wouldn't recommend taking a trip there.
Taking on a project of this scale by yourself requires a monumental amount of arrogance. Now, that's not a bad thing necessarily (especially if you pull it off), however the fact that you asked other people for their advice shows you don't have enough arrogance to bring this thing to fruition. Either do it, or don't do it. If you're so smart that you know all about 3D mathematics and physics and computer graphics and have a solid background in programming (doesn't knowing all about computer graphics kind of require this?) then you should have done the design work for this kind of project in the past.
Japan's in the middle of a recession
on
Jobs in Japan?
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you don't speak Japanese, don't expect that you can get an IT job easily. I went to the first Slashdot meetup in Tokyo and everyone was looking for a new job and having a tough time finding one. The foreign financials (i.e. Merrill Lynch, etc.) are good places to work but they all have budget problems right now. Most American firms have repatriated their R&D and localization so there's little demand there for English speakers or developers. Working as an IT specialist inside a Japanese corporation requires that you speak Japanese.
Those are some of the places and then there were all of the twenty-something VPs of X (marketing, communications, business development) making $100K+ when they should have been working at Starbuck's and all of the "I know how to program HTML dudez!!!" webmasters making $60K+. Not to mention caterers for dot com "launch parties". And Herman Miller (Aeron chairs)
The answer is obvious. Tilley FOUND the vehicle and is too dense to understand the real principles behind it. He made up all that BS about TEV because the name on the parts didn't sound "real enough." We all know that proper DeLoreans from the future run on Mr. Fusion!
Really you guys - all of the clues were in the first post. Circle is always the same size, only the tickmarks move. Everyone who said "Breshenham's" gets a D+. Pre-computation of sine & cosine gets an F+.
Long ago a friend of mine was working on an add-in computer driven compass for the F-16 for a big defense contractor. She called me up looking for graphics algorithms (she was the junior engineer on the project). She was fighting with her boss who wanted to install an FPU to speed up their circle drawing routine (this drew the compass rose onto the screen) while she thought they could speed it up by switching algorithms. Why did her boss want an FPU - well, because software sine and cosine routines were too slow. (BTW, the circle was always the same size and just the tick marks actually moved).
I was the engineering manager and one of the founders at a start-up. The founders and "upper management" were very well taken care of when it came to stock options but the CEO was really tight when it came to the regular employees. I'd fought with the CEO and CFO on this subject several times and been shot down. One day one of my top engineers came to me and said that he was considering another offer that offered significantly more stock. I was able to take that to the CEO and whack him upside the head with it. I did additional option grants and pay raises for EVERYONE in the engineering group.
So, 3 years later, that engineer is still with the company. I left 2 years ago when the CEO decided he didn't like me any more. The CEO left 1 1/2 years ago when the board of directors decided they didn't like him anymore. So, it all depends on the situation
This quote from the Senate memo sums up the basic contradiction:
Owners of copyrighted works remain concerned that valuable digital copyrighted works are subject to infringement when distributed in American homes to analog television sets in free over-the-air terrestrial broadcasts, and in peer-to-peer online services.
Now, either it's valuable, or it's free. If you're going to give it away for free then you can't start complaining about what people do with it. Why should people feel like they're pirating music or videos? We get them free on the radio and free on television all the time. How are we stealing when these things are broadcast at us continuously. You may say that the broadcasters paid for us, but let's look at that. Even the proposed fees (and defeated, or at least deferred) for Internet broadcasting (which were much higher than what radio stations are charged) don't add up to real theft -.0014 cents/song/listener (I got that number here). Average song is 3 minute long, let's say I listen to music continously throughout the day, so 16 hours a day. That comes out to 320 songs per day or 116800 songs per year. My music bill for the year? 163.52 - cents! Where is the theft?
In other words - programming is hard!
on
Bitter Java
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, if you write a system that runs across multiple servers you can end up with a poorly performing system if you don't know how to separate functionality out properly. From the Unix Hater's Handbook:
If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough rope to hang yourself from the yardarm.
I would say that Java shortens the rope but then lets you hook it up to a power winch. Modern toolkits and languages are really powerful. Being able to write a distributed application so easily that YOU DIDN'T NOTICE HOW DAMN MANY CROSS SERVER CALLS YOU WERE MAKING is pretty amazing. On the last large project I did we used Java and I noted that Java made locking so easy that we swept right past the easy locking problems (like, did you remember to release the lock) and straight into the really nasty ones. I think that going beyond "Learn Java in 21 Days" into how to break your functionality out properly is a wonderful topic for a book but the gratuitous swipe a Java doesn't seem useful. Just remember, "Power tools for power fools."
Every driver doesn't need to be able to talk to all of the hardware or access every bit of memory. Right now, any driver that has a bad pointer can go and trash all of memory. Many "drivers" don't talk directly to the hardware anyway - for example, SCSI disk drives. Those that do could be run with just the hardware they need to talk to accessible. Yes, something does have to run with access to everything. The goal is to make that something as small as possible. Microkernel OS's have been going down this path for a while.
I don't think very many people would refer to Linux as "well-designed" especially given some of the recent nonsense like slipping out one VM implementation and slamming in another. This isn't to say that Linux is bad - but its design is a copy of a design that's well over 30 years old now.
"Software crashes!! Get it? OK??" The first thing that needs to get fixed is attitudes like this. There's no reason for software to crash. It is possible to design an OS where drivers don't have the ability to go and trample over everything. We've been restrained in the past because of processor speeds but that is really not an issue now. The main thing holding us back is legacy OS's like Linux and Windows.
Nonsense like "driver certification" will not help. This is kind of like saying "Well, we've designed a car where putting a plastic Jesus on your dashboard may cause the car to explode in flames at any time. Be sure to buy a plastic Jesus that's been Toyota certified." Drivers and most portions of the OS can and should be run in their own little sandboxes for both robustness and security. Whether we'll be able to get there in the next 30 years is another question.
Last year all of the train companies here in Tokyo were telling people they should turn their cell phones off on the trains because they might cause somebody's pacemaker to crash. I think Japanese have a problem with telling people "Will you shut that damn thing off - it annoys me" and instead come up with these more neutral excuses for telling people to turn things off. Judging by the success of last year's no cell phone campaigns, I don't think this one will be very successful either. Anyhow, web surfing (wading - try it using i-Mode) or writing e-mail puts out a lot less RF than talking since you're not continuously transmitting.
I attended the first CIFS conference held up in Redmond back in 1996 or 1997 when I was working for Apple. One of the SAMBA team members also participated, I think it was Andrew Tridgell. The MS people were actually very respectful to Andrew. One of the funny things about SMB/CIFS was that there was NO documentation on the protocol. All MS had was three different codebases (Windows for Workgroups, Win '95 and Win NT) implementing the damn thing in slightly or sometimes majorly different ways. They stood up in front of us and admitted it. As a result, there were several times when Andrew was the only person in the room who knew the answer to a particular question. Overall, though, their basic attitude was "We're Microsoft - you have to put up with our bogus crap"
There were also definitely portions of SMB that they wanted to keep secret, most notably the manner in which authentication was handled. When heckled from the floor about that, their response was "If we opened the whole protocol suite to you there would be no need for a NT server box in your network." !!!!
I was able to view the whole conference as kind of an amusing episode since none of the problems really affected me directly. However, the majority of the conference attendees were poor schmoes who had started developing something that fit into the MS networking scheme and their companies and jobs were dependent on the MS stuff. They had a definite love/hate attitude towards Microsoft.
Overall, my feeling at the time was that MS encouraged the SAMBA team. If you check the SAMBA web site, you'll see a picture of a number of the SAMBA team at the '98 CIFS conference which I'm sure was also MS sponsored. So, I don't think MS is actively discouraging SAMBA. (Interestingly, who's another key player with CIFS? Network Appliance)
Looking at the numbes cited for campaign contributions to this bozo, the numbers are pretty small. TV & Movies contributed $20,000 to this guy and for that they get to own the computer industry?
I think Slashdot has enough members to create a pretty well funded PAC if people kick in $20 or so. All this letter writing stuff is just nonsense. We all know money talks.
I have a room full of built-it-myself machines with cables running all over the place. I also have a living room with nice furniture, a nice A/V system, some pictures on the wall. What kind of computer do I put in the living room? The cheapest p-o-s I can find, or something that I spent a little more money on that looks nice? I'm not sure if I'd put one of those new iMacs in my living room, but it's got a better shot than a cheap-o beige box with a Shamrock monitor.
Did you try using Internet Explorer 1.0? Any other company would have folded up and disappeared if that was their product. Sure, Netscape produced some crummy code and went down the tubes as a result. However, Microsoft would also have gone down the tubes long ago without their OS monopoly to prop up all their mistakes. Their ability to play the Terminator and just keep coming is a major factor in stifling innovation in the computer industry. Hey, I've got a great idea for writing new web browser software - now, what idiot wants to fund me to go up against Microsoft?
Well, for one thing, false positive matches. We believe fingerprints are unique. However with more than 6 billion people on the planet, the odds that everybody is really unique don't sound that good. And, what if someone has a partial print from a crime scene that happens to match a part of your finger? The way the system is set up now, they can't get a false positive match with you - they don't have the information.
I installed 802.11 at my house about a year ago and had been planning to enable encryption for some time. But, I live in a small suburb in Tokyo and there's nothing really important on my home networks so defending against the risk of someone cruising past my house with a laptop wasn't a real high priority.
A few weeks ago I found some logins coming from weird IP addresses on our webserver (outsourced, located in the US). After a bit of the usual tracking down, I finally figured out what had happened - my neighbors had installed a wireless network also! 802.11 is being pushed pretty hard here in Japan and several companies are shipping combo 802.11/ISDN Router boxes that are just plug and play (amazingly, ISDN is actually easy to configure here in Japan. Still dog slow but NTT does love it).
Anyhow, I enabled the basic WEP stuff mainly just to keep our networks separate. Now, for the high security stuff, there's an easy solution. I find anyone hanging around outside my house with a laptop they will be introduced to my baseball bat.
Actually, Apple bought the Cray to help with designing the injection molds for the plastic cases. Turns out that those are rather tricky to design. By the time I was at Apple in 1996 the Cray was being used as a storage system that people could do backups to.
As usual, if you don't want to go along with this little invasion of your privacy you're tarred as a whacko. See the lunch lady's comments - "They think the FBI's going to get them or something." Why don't you want to give your fingerprints to us? We're _good_ people. We would never, ever, ever abuse your trust. We promise!
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that all of the hype about XML is out-of-control and a lot of the things said about XML don't hold up when you start to use it (describes the data - NOT!) and it can be a ROYAL pain in the ass, I find myself using it a lot because it _is_ defined.
For example, I recently integrated our web store with our fulfillment vendor here in Japan. I suggested XML but their system is only set up to work with CSV files (I need to visit their IT operations - I smell Excel on Windoze - what can you expect from guys who pack boxes all day long). Now CSV files are all fine and well, but you have to work through a bunch of other issues now. For example, what happens when the customer's company name has a "," in it - you have to agree on an escaping mechanism. XML has those kind of things ALREADY defined. It may be a pain in the ass to get XML to do something but most things that you can get it to do have been defined so you don't have to discuss the subject with the other people you're working with.
And how are people able to write 500+ page books about it? Well, go try writing an XSL stylesheet that actually does something :-). You'll understand real quick.
It's interesting that you raise the issue of sovereignity but don't seem to know what it means. Sovereignity basically means that, as a nation, you can do whatever the hell you feel like and you're not responsible to anyone else. So, guess what - the US acted as a sovereign nation. Had the FBI gone to Russia and kidnapped these guys back to the US there would be an issue of violating Russia's sovereignity.
And, if you actively criticize China - I wouldn't recommend taking a trip there.
Taking on a project of this scale by yourself requires a monumental amount of arrogance. Now, that's not a bad thing necessarily (especially if you pull it off), however the fact that you asked other people for their advice shows you don't have enough arrogance to bring this thing to fruition. Either do it, or don't do it. If you're so smart that you know all about 3D mathematics and physics and computer graphics and have a solid background in programming (doesn't knowing all about computer graphics kind of require this?) then you should have done the design work for this kind of project in the past.
If you don't speak Japanese, don't expect that you can get an IT job easily. I went to the first Slashdot meetup in Tokyo and everyone was looking for a new job and having a tough time finding one. The foreign financials (i.e. Merrill Lynch, etc.) are good places to work but they all have budget problems right now. Most American firms have repatriated their R&D and localization so there's little demand there for English speakers or developers. Working as an IT specialist inside a Japanese corporation requires that you speak Japanese.
Those are some of the places and then there were all of the twenty-something VPs of X (marketing, communications, business development) making $100K+ when they should have been working at Starbuck's and all of the "I know how to program HTML dudez!!!" webmasters making $60K+. Not to mention caterers for dot com "launch parties". And Herman Miller (Aeron chairs)
The answer is obvious. Tilley FOUND the vehicle and is too dense to understand the real principles behind it. He made up all that BS about TEV because the name on the parts didn't sound "real enough." We all know that proper DeLoreans from the future run on Mr. Fusion!
Mmmmm....waffle house. The only good thing I ever found in Huntsville Alabama
Really you guys - all of the clues were in the first post. Circle is always the same size, only the tickmarks move. Everyone who said "Breshenham's" gets a D+. Pre-computation of sine & cosine gets an F+.
Long ago a friend of mine was working on an add-in computer driven compass for the F-16 for a big defense contractor. She called me up looking for graphics algorithms (she was the junior engineer on the project). She was fighting with her boss who wanted to install an FPU to speed up their circle drawing routine (this drew the compass rose onto the screen) while she thought they could speed it up by switching algorithms. Why did her boss want an FPU - well, because software sine and cosine routines were too slow. (BTW, the circle was always the same size and just the tick marks actually moved).
I know those guys - they're not the smartest guys in the world but they do get some neat toys to play with.
I was the engineering manager and one of the founders at a start-up. The founders and "upper management" were very well taken care of when it came to stock options but the CEO was really tight when it came to the regular employees. I'd fought with the CEO and CFO on this subject several times and been shot down. One day one of my top engineers came to me and said that he was considering another offer that offered significantly more stock. I was able to take that to the CEO and whack him upside the head with it. I did additional option grants and pay raises for EVERYONE in the engineering group.
So, 3 years later, that engineer is still with the company. I left 2 years ago when the CEO decided he didn't like me any more. The CEO left 1 1/2 years ago when the board of directors decided they didn't like him anymore. So, it all depends on the situation
This quote from the Senate memo sums up the basic contradiction:
Owners of copyrighted works remain concerned that valuable digital copyrighted works are subject to infringement when distributed in American homes to analog television sets in free over-the-air terrestrial broadcasts, and in peer-to-peer online services.
Now, either it's valuable, or it's free. If you're going to give it away for free then you can't start complaining about what people do with it. Why should people feel like they're pirating music or videos? We get them free on the radio and free on television all the time. How are we stealing when these things are broadcast at us continuously. You may say that the broadcasters paid for us, but let's look at that. Even the proposed fees (and defeated, or at least deferred) for Internet broadcasting (which were much higher than what radio stations are charged) don't add up to real theft - .0014 cents/song/listener (I got that number here). Average song is 3 minute long, let's say I listen to music continously throughout the day, so 16 hours a day. That comes out to 320 songs per day or 116800 songs per year. My music bill for the year? 163.52 - cents! Where is the theft?
So, if you write a system that runs across multiple servers you can end up with a poorly performing system if you don't know how to separate functionality out properly. From the Unix Hater's Handbook:
I would say that Java shortens the rope but then lets you hook it up to a power winch. Modern toolkits and languages are really powerful. Being able to write a distributed application so easily that YOU DIDN'T NOTICE HOW DAMN MANY CROSS SERVER CALLS YOU WERE MAKING is pretty amazing. On the last large project I did we used Java and I noted that Java made locking so easy that we swept right past the easy locking problems (like, did you remember to release the lock) and straight into the really nasty ones. I think that going beyond "Learn Java in 21 Days" into how to break your functionality out properly is a wonderful topic for a book but the gratuitous swipe a Java doesn't seem useful. Just remember, "Power tools for power fools."
Every driver doesn't need to be able to talk to all of the hardware or access every bit of memory. Right now, any driver that has a bad pointer can go and trash all of memory. Many "drivers" don't talk directly to the hardware anyway - for example, SCSI disk drives. Those that do could be run with just the hardware they need to talk to accessible. Yes, something does have to run with access to everything. The goal is to make that something as small as possible. Microkernel OS's have been going down this path for a while.
I don't think very many people would refer to Linux as "well-designed" especially given some of the recent nonsense like slipping out one VM implementation and slamming in another. This isn't to say that Linux is bad - but its design is a copy of a design that's well over 30 years old now.
"Software crashes!! Get it? OK??" The first thing that needs to get fixed is attitudes like this. There's no reason for software to crash. It is possible to design an OS where drivers don't have the ability to go and trample over everything. We've been restrained in the past because of processor speeds but that is really not an issue now. The main thing holding us back is legacy OS's like Linux and Windows.
Nonsense like "driver certification" will not help. This is kind of like saying "Well, we've designed a car where putting a plastic Jesus on your dashboard may cause the car to explode in flames at any time. Be sure to buy a plastic Jesus that's been Toyota certified." Drivers and most portions of the OS can and should be run in their own little sandboxes for both robustness and security. Whether we'll be able to get there in the next 30 years is another question.
Last year all of the train companies here in Tokyo were telling people they should turn their cell phones off on the trains because they might cause somebody's pacemaker to crash. I think Japanese have a problem with telling people "Will you shut that damn thing off - it annoys me" and instead come up with these more neutral excuses for telling people to turn things off. Judging by the success of last year's no cell phone campaigns, I don't think this one will be very successful either. Anyhow, web surfing (wading - try it using i-Mode) or writing e-mail puts out a lot less RF than talking since you're not continuously transmitting.
I attended the first CIFS conference held up in Redmond back in 1996 or 1997 when I was working for Apple. One of the SAMBA team members also participated, I think it was Andrew Tridgell. The MS people were actually very respectful to Andrew. One of the funny things about SMB/CIFS was that there was NO documentation on the protocol. All MS had was three different codebases (Windows for Workgroups, Win '95 and Win NT) implementing the damn thing in slightly or sometimes majorly different ways. They stood up in front of us and admitted it. As a result, there were several times when Andrew was the only person in the room who knew the answer to a particular question. Overall, though, their basic attitude was "We're Microsoft - you have to put up with our bogus crap"
There were also definitely portions of SMB that they wanted to keep secret, most notably the manner in which authentication was handled. When heckled from the floor about that, their response was "If we opened the whole protocol suite to you there would be no need for a NT server box in your network." !!!!
I was able to view the whole conference as kind of an amusing episode since none of the problems really affected me directly. However, the majority of the conference attendees were poor schmoes who had started developing something that fit into the MS networking scheme and their companies and jobs were dependent on the MS stuff. They had a definite love/hate attitude towards Microsoft.
Overall, my feeling at the time was that MS encouraged the SAMBA team. If you check the SAMBA web site, you'll see a picture of a number of the SAMBA team at the '98 CIFS conference which I'm sure was also MS sponsored. So, I don't think MS is actively discouraging SAMBA. (Interestingly, who's another key player with CIFS? Network Appliance)
Looking at the numbes cited for campaign contributions to this bozo, the numbers are pretty small. TV & Movies contributed $20,000 to this guy and for that they get to own the computer industry?
I think Slashdot has enough members to create a pretty well funded PAC if people kick in $20 or so. All this letter writing stuff is just nonsense. We all know money talks.
I have a room full of built-it-myself machines with cables running all over the place. I also have a living room with nice furniture, a nice A/V system, some pictures on the wall. What kind of computer do I put in the living room? The cheapest p-o-s I can find, or something that I spent a little more money on that looks nice? I'm not sure if I'd put one of those new iMacs in my living room, but it's got a better shot than a cheap-o beige box with a Shamrock monitor.
Did you try using Internet Explorer 1.0? Any other company would have folded up and disappeared if that was their product. Sure, Netscape produced some crummy code and went down the tubes as a result. However, Microsoft would also have gone down the tubes long ago without their OS monopoly to prop up all their mistakes. Their ability to play the Terminator and just keep coming is a major factor in stifling innovation in the computer industry. Hey, I've got a great idea for writing new web browser software - now, what idiot wants to fund me to go up against Microsoft?
Well, for one thing, false positive matches. We believe fingerprints are unique. However with more than 6 billion people on the planet, the odds that everybody is really unique don't sound that good. And, what if someone has a partial print from a crime scene that happens to match a part of your finger? The way the system is set up now, they can't get a false positive match with you - they don't have the information.
I installed 802.11 at my house about a year ago and had been planning to enable encryption for some time. But, I live in a small suburb in Tokyo and there's nothing really important on my home networks so defending against the risk of someone cruising past my house with a laptop wasn't a real high priority.
A few weeks ago I found some logins coming from weird IP addresses on our webserver (outsourced, located in the US). After a bit of the usual tracking down, I finally figured out what had happened - my neighbors had installed a wireless network also! 802.11 is being pushed pretty hard here in Japan and several companies are shipping combo 802.11/ISDN Router boxes that are just plug and play (amazingly, ISDN is actually easy to configure here in Japan. Still dog slow but NTT does love it).
Anyhow, I enabled the basic WEP stuff mainly just to keep our networks separate. Now, for the high security stuff, there's an easy solution. I find anyone hanging around outside my house with a laptop they will be introduced to my baseball bat.
Actually, Apple bought the Cray to help with designing the injection molds for the plastic cases. Turns out that those are rather tricky to design. By the time I was at Apple in 1996 the Cray was being used as a storage system that people could do backups to.
As usual, if you don't want to go along with this little invasion of your privacy you're tarred as a whacko. See the lunch lady's comments - "They think the FBI's going to get them or something." Why don't you want to give your fingerprints to us? We're _good_ people. We would never, ever, ever abuse your trust. We promise!