I've had multiple projects get killed in the middle of a solid Beta. Usually so did the departments developing them. One of them got killed not because of customers or technical issues, but because the CEO's ego wouldn't let him be controlled by his investors. So they pulled funding.
I've had one project get killed after it had been in commercial release for about 2 months.
The question is, why on earth do any computer with sensitive information there uses Flash or Silverlight?
Because secure systems take time and money to develop and banks don't want to spend either. Hey, look! We got a UI up and running in 2 days! We're ready to go live on Monday!
Ugh. You cant even stop the screen from blanking in Ubuntu without executing SEVERAL command lines involving 3 separate processes. I like Linux, but damn they make shit harder than it needs to be sometimes. I would LOVE for Linux to at least have feature parity in simple stuff like disabling screen blanking. That sort of thing should be exposed in the UI, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.
?
System Menu/Preferences/Power. It's virtually identical to the way you'd do it in Windows.
Ask Slashdot: "Aren't most programming projects over-budget, behind-schedule, and eventual failures? Just like countless studies, textbooks, etc. have documented for as long as there has been IT?"
This isn't some new shocking trend. There was not, in the misty past, some sort of utopia where programmers regularly worked 40-hour weeks, never got laid off, were well-managed, and code shipped on-time, bug-free, and projects never got canceled because of screwups. I'm pretty sure every Software Engineering course ever touches on at least some of this.
Just about any complex project in any industry has a ludicrously high failure rate. Starting a new business, launching a new consumer product, designing and building massive complex machines, running governments, etc.
There's always a lot of ways for things to go wrong, and far fewer ways for everything to go right.
There was a time when 40-hour weeks were more common, and we got paid "supper money" for exceeding it (being salaried, no actual OT).
We also had to work fairly hard to get laid off, instead of it being the natural fate of the entire department when the project ended/was terminated. Our pre-existing knowledge of the business was considered a valuable asset, and we were seen as flexible enough to re-assign to other tasks, and even pay for training, instead of pulling in a whole new team who knew nothing about how the company ran just because they were alleged to come pre-supplied with certain skills.
Projects did run late, fail, etc. just as much then as now. But morale issues weren't endemic back then. You didn't live in daily fear of layoffs the way people do now. It was a whole different millenium.
I only worked at one company where Management By Intimidation was the general rule. It was the worst job I ever held. I'd recommend them to no one. And their attitude towards employees leaked over to customers as well, I found out some years later. They were the only option in a vertical market I was involved in, so we had our customers buy their product. And our customers hated them. Fortunately, after a year or 2 we'd changed platforms so that we were able to tie in to more civil vendors instead.
Technically, Symbolic Logic is mathematics. But the Calculus of Propositions was only part of one of the 3 sections of the book I used. In addition to boolean symbolic logic, it covered non-Aristotelian logic (something that's sneered at in this brave new all-or-nothing modern world), and the fuzzier non-mathematical aspects as well. I do believe that it was considered a philosophy textbook at the local university, though.
In Florida, you'll see Hurricane info signs on the Interstates, listing a low-end FM radio station frequency. It's usually going to be the local public radio/NPR affiliate.
The local weather radio channel is also designated as an emergency information source, and I believe that's a national mandate.
I'm covered. Have a battery/crank radio with AM, FM, Weather and shortwave (for what that's worth anymore). Plus a battery-backed weather radio with SAME alert capability.
Lem's concern wasn't on science, per se, it was on exploring alternative human conditions. The "science" was just a prop.
Like many Sci-Fi authors in the 1960s and later, Lem wasn't interested in the gee-whiz march of technology. At that point technology was marching fast enough that you either had to resort to problematic tech such as FTL drives and telepathy or risk having your science be disproven and your tech be obsolete within your own lifetime.
think about the savings from tech support & maintenance...
... because they won't need to support Linux or perform maintenance on it? Or do fairys do that for you with Linux?
Yep. The apt-get fairy does the maintenance. And it's considered axiomatic that a single operator can ride herd on about 10 times as many Linux machines as a Windows operator can on Windows machines.
The "retraining cost" boogeyman argument no longer carries any credibility. It's a lot easier for most people to adjust to a Linux desktop than it is to adjust to that montrosity that Windows 8 foisted on us.
You obviously haven't been paying close attention to Bugs Bunny if you think that he's a magic shelter. There's some really wicked humor in there. It just happens to go over our heads when we're young.
There is this ridiculous delusion of "innocence" when it comes to young children and sex. Children are are born aware of sexuality. One of the most embarrassing things about parenthood can be convincing them not to display that awareness in polite company.
Of course, there's porn and then there's S&M. But that's not so much sex as sex+violence, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the violence part that I'm worried about, just as much as I am when there's no sex, but lots of pistol-whipping, waterboarding, guns, and fists.
Our closest genetic relatives are chimpanzees and bonabos. Chimps have very rigid sexual controls, and they also display a lot of aggressiveness - including sexual attacks. Bonabos are very free and open about sex and reportedly a lot less inclined to be violent. Maybe they're on to something.
I entirely agree one should supervise children. Children should only be watching safe channels, and adults should supervise them. But your proposal is to invade the safe channel - to replace Cartoon Network with snuff movies. This is not putting porn where the unsupervised can find it, this is forcing porn into areas where reasonable people would not expect to find it.
It is not "children might", it is "you are forcing on children". The difference between consensual sex and rape, the difference between guns in self defence and firing at random in a shopping mall.
BS. It's putting objectionable material out in front of them, but unless you're doing a Clockwork Orange on them, the nasty little buggers don't have to watch it. They can switch channels or turn it off or leave the room.
It's called Free Will. And it's amazing how many of God's Anointed want to take it away from us.
Ultimately, it says that A) other people cannot be trusted to find their own way into Heaven, so we have to force them there. and B) we don't trust God to ensure that other people's life experiences won't allow them to become worthy in their own right.
Porn or no porn, for most of us, life is going to consist of all sorts of unpleasant experiences. It's what we make of the sum total of those experiences that counts. Parents - and other authority figures - are expected to train children, not control them. Leave that for the physical dangers of life. If they see porn and it traumatizes them, counsel them. Just like you should be counselling them over scenes of violence and destruction.
And if you don't believe in God, then the "Think of the Children" argument is pretty weak and you need to present scientific evidence.
Or maybe accept ALL the evidence and weigh the overall statistics instead of extrapolating from cherry-picked points. Realizing that the difference between statistical behavior and deterministic behavior is that there's a joke about a statistician who drowned in a lake averaging 2 inches deep. Because statistics are what you use when analyzing things that fluctuate a lot and occasionally do the exact opposite of what is expected. But only occasionally.
Microsoft wasn't thoughtful enough to provide a port of Visual Basic for Linux. But there are lots of programs that deserve something between quick-and-dirty and full-on C or Java. Perl and Tcl were kind of filling that space, but one's write-only and the other isn't a complete system, but rather a way of stringing system tools together, one step up from raw shell scripts.
Python is Linux's version of Visual Basic. It's easy to understand, has a rich set of system interface libraries (which install without the frustration I tend to get from CPAN), is easy to write in, and even has code optimization support.
I considered moderating you, but I think this is really a case of <whine> "C++ is haaardddd, learning it enough to understand how to plug in a new module is going to take me months. Instead I'm going to rewrite it" </whine>
Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..
Frankly, its fsking stupid and its another sign that redhat is jumping the shark.
Plus, do you really want to depend on the skills of some "leet" hacker that thinks python is an appropriate tool for this?
Considering that Anaconda itself is written in python, that shark is about 15 years in the rear-view mirror. They didn't pick the name "Anaconda" for nothing.
I guess that python was an appropriate tool after all.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 1
The problem is, there's no separation of concerns.
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept was based on the idea of a set of specialists each with separate concerns. In modern projects that would mean something like 1 (or more) person(s) for the web page design, possibly another (maybe on loan) for the artwork, maybe even 1 JavaScript expert and at least one person on the backend for the business logic and database interactions. Plus someone to co-ordinate it, architect it and - the horror! someone to document it.
However, getting people who are really good together and getting them to work together is espensive. In the current climate, it's considered smarter to demand that one single person fulfill (and be expert in) all of the above functions. This actually can take longer, since there's no opportunity for parallelization, but since it's less people, it's cheaper. Bonus points for getting it done offshore.
Quality? Security? Pffft! We'll do that in 2.0. Or maybe 4.0. Or not.
Yes. It's being dropped because it gave the illusion of security without the actuality.
Unfortunately, a LOT of very public websites are running on old expired certs, which isn't really any better.
People need to stop thinking that "software doesn't wear out" - meaning in this case, the security vouchers. Bits may remain unchanged, but the world does not, and if you expect the entire cost of the system is what you paid for at the "cash register" without accounting for ongoing maintenance, you're a fool.
Re:bringing in more H1Bs will solve this problem
on
IT Job Hiring Slumps
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unfortunately, a lot more employers are demanding quick-and-dirty JavaScript-style solutions than rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions.
Because getting a pretty UI up in a hurry makes it look "done", but making something with quality takes time without "doing anything" that PHBs and users can see.
I like Systemd in concept. It potentially allows setting up dependencies from the outside, much as Inversion of Control does in software. Meaning that the systems don't need to know as much about other systems because it's wired into the overall system configuration. And, unlike init scripts, you can make the management of subsystems dependent on the actual state of other subsystems, not simply assume that because one was scheduled to come up before another that that's what actually happened.
However, the one thing you should absolutely positively NEVER do is replace a major product with one that lacks critical commonly-used functions of the original product, and that's the fatal problem with not only systemd, but Gnome 3, and some would argue various versions of Nautilus.
And when developers ignore the angry mobs, tell them that they're unappreciative or stupid, or otherwise incapable of recognizing a Superior Product when they see it doesn't do any good for anyone. If your new shiny toy doesn't cut it, you either need to add those critical functions before shoving the old system off the pier or admit that your design is too flawed to handle it and go back to the drawing board.
I like systemd in concept and am prepared to become a full convert. But only when it restores the essential functions that systemd provided.
However, I totally loathe systemd's partner in crime journalctl and frankly don't see myself ever learning to love it. Too much replacing simple functions with complex commands and too much opacity in the log storage itself.
ActiveDirectory has less functionality than OpenLDAP. As for ease of administration, I set an OpenLDAP up last week. The hard part isn't setting up the server, it's maintaining the data in the server and for that I've used a Java GUI app for years.
I have installed Windows and Linux quite a bit over the years and for a long time, Windows was the ease-of-use winner. Especially in the very early days when I had to crack open the box, read off all the vendor and model information on the video and network cards, fiddle with DIP switches and hunt down drivers. For about 5 years now, however, it has actually been easier to install a Red Hat/Fedora or Ubuntu Linux for desktop use than it has been to install Windows.
And OSX isn't that different from Linux. If it's really easier to use it's simply because Apple corrals specializes in that. One of the ways they do that is by restricting what you can do with it. Linux is messier, true, but not really that much harder to administer via a DDD (drag/drop/drool) UI these days.
Ease of installation of commercial products can be problematical, definitely. A lot of the complex products are inexcusably difficult to install regardless of the target OS. However, that's really up to the vendor. And yes, it's true that commercial apps are frequently available only on selected distros. But that's partly because since they're closed-source and don't want to pay for the extra work to make their stuff run on every distro in the world no one else can handle the porting.
Slashdot Mirror
It would flip a coin...
Maybe it should just ask the cat.
I've had multiple projects get killed in the middle of a solid Beta. Usually so did the departments developing them. One of them got killed not because of customers or technical issues, but because the CEO's ego wouldn't let him be controlled by his investors. So they pulled funding.
I've had one project get killed after it had been in commercial release for about 2 months.
I doubt very many would-be martyrs have been deterred by death penalties.
The question is, why on earth do any computer with sensitive information there uses Flash or Silverlight?
Because secure systems take time and money to develop and banks don't want to spend either. Hey, look! We got a UI up and running in 2 days! We're ready to go live on Monday!
Ugh. You cant even stop the screen from blanking in Ubuntu without executing SEVERAL command lines involving 3 separate processes. I like Linux, but damn they make shit harder than it needs to be sometimes. I would LOVE for Linux to at least have feature parity in simple stuff like disabling screen blanking. That sort of thing should be exposed in the UI, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.
?
System Menu/Preferences/Power. It's virtually identical to the way you'd do it in Windows.
It isn't people at the bank. It's users of the bank.
Frequently the bank forces the user to use exploitable means just to communicate with the bank.
IE6+ActiveX required, anyone?
Ask Slashdot: "Aren't most programming projects over-budget, behind-schedule, and eventual failures? Just like countless studies, textbooks, etc. have documented for as long as there has been IT?"
This isn't some new shocking trend. There was not, in the misty past, some sort of utopia where programmers regularly worked 40-hour weeks, never got laid off, were well-managed, and code shipped on-time, bug-free, and projects never got canceled because of screwups. I'm pretty sure every Software Engineering course ever touches on at least some of this.
Just about any complex project in any industry has a ludicrously high failure rate. Starting a new business, launching a new consumer product, designing and building massive complex machines, running governments, etc.
There's always a lot of ways for things to go wrong, and far fewer ways for everything to go right.
There was a time when 40-hour weeks were more common, and we got paid "supper money" for exceeding it (being salaried, no actual OT).
We also had to work fairly hard to get laid off, instead of it being the natural fate of the entire department when the project ended/was terminated. Our pre-existing knowledge of the business was considered a valuable asset, and we were seen as flexible enough to re-assign to other tasks, and even pay for training, instead of pulling in a whole new team who knew nothing about how the company ran just because they were alleged to come pre-supplied with certain skills.
Projects did run late, fail, etc. just as much then as now. But morale issues weren't endemic back then. You didn't live in daily fear of layoffs the way people do now. It was a whole different millenium.
I only worked at one company where Management By Intimidation was the general rule. It was the worst job I ever held. I'd recommend them to no one. And their attitude towards employees leaked over to customers as well, I found out some years later. They were the only option in a vertical market I was involved in, so we had our customers buy their product. And our customers hated them. Fortunately, after a year or 2 we'd changed platforms so that we were able to tie in to more civil vendors instead.
Technically, Symbolic Logic is mathematics. But the Calculus of Propositions was only part of one of the 3 sections of the book I used. In addition to boolean symbolic logic, it covered non-Aristotelian logic (something that's sneered at in this brave new all-or-nothing modern world), and the fuzzier non-mathematical aspects as well. I do believe that it was considered a philosophy textbook at the local university, though.
In Florida, you'll see Hurricane info signs on the Interstates, listing a low-end FM radio station frequency. It's usually going to be the local public radio/NPR affiliate.
The local weather radio channel is also designated as an emergency information source, and I believe that's a national mandate.
I'm covered. Have a battery/crank radio with AM, FM, Weather and shortwave (for what that's worth anymore). Plus a battery-backed weather radio with SAME alert capability.
you don't read Lem for hard science.
Lem's concern wasn't on science, per se, it was on exploring alternative human conditions. The "science" was just a prop.
Like many Sci-Fi authors in the 1960s and later, Lem wasn't interested in the gee-whiz march of technology. At that point technology was marching fast enough that you either had to resort to problematic tech such as FTL drives and telepathy or risk having your science be disproven and your tech be obsolete within your own lifetime.
I too, am a Cyberiad fan, incidentally.
think about the savings from tech support & maintenance...
... because they won't need to support Linux or perform maintenance on it? Or do fairys do that for you with Linux?
Yep. The apt-get fairy does the maintenance. And it's considered axiomatic that a single operator can ride herd on about 10 times as many Linux machines as a Windows operator can on Windows machines.
The "retraining cost" boogeyman argument no longer carries any credibility. It's a lot easier for most people to adjust to a Linux desktop than it is to adjust to that montrosity that Windows 8 foisted on us.
You obviously haven't been paying close attention to Bugs Bunny if you think that he's a magic shelter. There's some really wicked humor in there. It just happens to go over our heads when we're young.
There is this ridiculous delusion of "innocence" when it comes to young children and sex. Children are are born aware of sexuality. One of the most embarrassing things about parenthood can be convincing them not to display that awareness in polite company.
Of course, there's porn and then there's S&M. But that's not so much sex as sex+violence, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the violence part that I'm worried about, just as much as I am when there's no sex, but lots of pistol-whipping, waterboarding, guns, and fists.
Our closest genetic relatives are chimpanzees and bonabos. Chimps have very rigid sexual controls, and they also display a lot of aggressiveness - including sexual attacks. Bonabos are very free and open about sex and reportedly a lot less inclined to be violent. Maybe they're on to something.
I entirely agree one should supervise children. Children should only be watching safe channels, and adults should supervise them. But your proposal is to invade the safe channel - to replace Cartoon Network with snuff movies. This is not putting porn where the unsupervised can find it, this is forcing porn into areas where reasonable people would not expect to find it.
It is not "children might", it is "you are forcing on children". The difference between consensual sex and rape, the difference between guns in self defence and firing at random in a shopping mall.
BS. It's putting objectionable material out in front of them, but unless you're doing a Clockwork Orange on them, the nasty little buggers don't have to watch it. They can switch channels or turn it off or leave the room.
It's called Free Will. And it's amazing how many of God's Anointed want to take it away from us.
Ultimately, it says that A) other people cannot be trusted to find their own way into Heaven, so we have to force them there. and B) we don't trust God to ensure that other people's life experiences won't allow them to become worthy in their own right.
Porn or no porn, for most of us, life is going to consist of all sorts of unpleasant experiences. It's what we make of the sum total of those experiences that counts. Parents - and other authority figures - are expected to train children, not control them. Leave that for the physical dangers of life. If they see porn and it traumatizes them, counsel them. Just like you should be counselling them over scenes of violence and destruction.
And if you don't believe in God, then the "Think of the Children" argument is pretty weak and you need to present scientific evidence.
You're not misunderstanding. They are encoding schemes and/or modulation techniques.
One of the differences is that anyone who knows the standard can decode the above. They don't need possession of a decryption key or device.
Want to count the log entries that mention Slashdot? You don't need a special tool for that, just grep slashdot | wc -l .
Not since journalctl took over.
Or maybe accept ALL the evidence and weigh the overall statistics instead of extrapolating from cherry-picked points. Realizing that the difference between statistical behavior and deterministic behavior is that there's a joke about a statistician who drowned in a lake averaging 2 inches deep. Because statistics are what you use when analyzing things that fluctuate a lot and occasionally do the exact opposite of what is expected. But only occasionally.
Microsoft wasn't thoughtful enough to provide a port of Visual Basic for Linux. But there are lots of programs that deserve something between quick-and-dirty and full-on C or Java. Perl and Tcl were kind of filling that space, but one's write-only and the other isn't a complete system, but rather a way of stringing system tools together, one step up from raw shell scripts.
Python is Linux's version of Visual Basic. It's easy to understand, has a rich set of system interface libraries (which install without the frustration I tend to get from CPAN), is easy to write in, and even has code optimization support.
You could do worse.
I considered moderating you, but I think this is really a case of <whine> "C++ is haaardddd, learning it enough to understand how to plug in a new module is going to take me months. Instead I'm going to rewrite it" </whine>
Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..
Frankly, its fsking stupid and its another sign that redhat is jumping the shark.
Plus, do you really want to depend on the skills of some "leet" hacker that thinks python is an appropriate tool for this?
Considering that Anaconda itself is written in python, that shark is about 15 years in the rear-view mirror. They didn't pick the name "Anaconda" for nothing.
I guess that python was an appropriate tool after all.
The problem is, there's no separation of concerns.
Fred Brook's Chief Programmer Team concept was based on the idea of a set of specialists each with separate concerns. In modern projects that would mean something like 1 (or more) person(s) for the web page design, possibly another (maybe on loan) for the artwork, maybe even 1 JavaScript expert and at least one person on the backend for the business logic and database interactions. Plus someone to co-ordinate it, architect it and - the horror! someone to document it.
However, getting people who are really good together and getting them to work together is espensive. In the current climate, it's considered smarter to demand that one single person fulfill (and be expert in) all of the above functions. This actually can take longer, since there's no opportunity for parallelization, but since it's less people, it's cheaper. Bonus points for getting it done offshore.
Quality? Security? Pffft! We'll do that in 2.0. Or maybe 4.0. Or not.
Yes. It's being dropped because it gave the illusion of security without the actuality.
Unfortunately, a LOT of very public websites are running on old expired certs, which isn't really any better.
People need to stop thinking that "software doesn't wear out" - meaning in this case, the security vouchers. Bits may remain unchanged, but the world does not, and if you expect the entire cost of the system is what you paid for at the "cash register" without accounting for ongoing maintenance, you're a fool.
Unfortunately, a lot more employers are demanding quick-and-dirty JavaScript-style solutions than rigorous close-to-the-metal C solutions.
Because getting a pretty UI up in a hurry makes it look "done", but making something with quality takes time without "doing anything" that PHBs and users can see.
nobody with brains installs a GUI on the server.
And will someone PLEASE tell IBM and Oracle that?
I like Systemd in concept. It potentially allows setting up dependencies from the outside, much as Inversion of Control does in software. Meaning that the systems don't need to know as much about other systems because it's wired into the overall system configuration. And, unlike init scripts, you can make the management of subsystems dependent on the actual state of other subsystems, not simply assume that because one was scheduled to come up before another that that's what actually happened.
However, the one thing you should absolutely positively NEVER do is replace a major product with one that lacks critical commonly-used functions of the original product, and that's the fatal problem with not only systemd, but Gnome 3, and some would argue various versions of Nautilus.
And when developers ignore the angry mobs, tell them that they're unappreciative or stupid, or otherwise incapable of recognizing a Superior Product when they see it doesn't do any good for anyone. If your new shiny toy doesn't cut it, you either need to add those critical functions before shoving the old system off the pier or admit that your design is too flawed to handle it and go back to the drawing board.
I like systemd in concept and am prepared to become a full convert. But only when it restores the essential functions that systemd provided.
However, I totally loathe systemd's partner in crime journalctl and frankly don't see myself ever learning to love it. Too much replacing simple functions with complex commands and too much opacity in the log storage itself.
ActiveDirectory has less functionality than OpenLDAP. As for ease of administration, I set an OpenLDAP up last week. The hard part isn't setting up the server, it's maintaining the data in the server and for that I've used a Java GUI app for years.
I have installed Windows and Linux quite a bit over the years and for a long time, Windows was the ease-of-use winner. Especially in the very early days when I had to crack open the box, read off all the vendor and model information on the video and network cards, fiddle with DIP switches and hunt down drivers. For about 5 years now, however, it has actually been easier to install a Red Hat/Fedora or Ubuntu Linux for desktop use than it has been to install Windows.
And OSX isn't that different from Linux. If it's really easier to use it's simply because Apple corrals specializes in that. One of the ways they do that is by restricting what you can do with it. Linux is messier, true, but not really that much harder to administer via a DDD (drag/drop/drool) UI these days.
Ease of installation of commercial products can be problematical, definitely. A lot of the complex products are inexcusably difficult to install regardless of the target OS. However, that's really up to the vendor. And yes, it's true that commercial apps are frequently available only on selected distros. But that's partly because since they're closed-source and don't want to pay for the extra work to make their stuff run on every distro in the world no one else can handle the porting.
Scrabble [TM]
To say that Our ancestors mated with Neanderthals is not correct. Neanderthals are our ancestors, at least in some small part.
If the latter is correct, then so is the former, especially given the apparent lack of IVF technology at the time.
Not necessarily. There's only one alleged case of a Minotaur, for example.