And that's one of the problems with modern capitalism...in the odd case that you don't claim to know nothing and be irresponsible, you're inviting people to sue you. How many times have I heard in the same breath "X Co, Inc, is a huge, evil, corrupt institution with no care for its customers" and "let's sue them so we can have money?"
I run a very small (read: profits are almost half my car payment) web hosting service under the flag of openness and freedom of content. I started it because I got upset that every single host I went with wanted to corral me into a year contract, tell me what I couldn't do or say and take credit and the ability to edit my personal thoughts and ideas. Originally, it was a co-op, and I began to take on extra users who wanted the same thing -- ownership of their work and a fair charge for the low bandwidth they were moving.
In the past three months we've grown a dozen times larger -- so big that I no longer know every site op by name. Now, I don't want to have to force the new people to sign a TOS or a EULA. I think that posting the rules on the frontpage should be good enough for everybody. But I'm afraid. We've had a couple users ask if they could serve porn, and when I said no a few signed up anyway. I trust them (and check my logs), but if I go away on vacation and one of them starts serving nude shots of Frankie Muniz, I'm the one who gets in trouble. I'm the one who's got his name on the tax forms, and I don't intend to incorporate the business.
So I'm stuck. I want to let users do their own thing, own their own shit, but I'm the one who's ass is on the line. If one site slips up, they all go down. Everybody loses their stuff and all the good I've tried to do, all the bright young folks I've formed relationships with are scrambling for a new host. Someday soon I'll need to call my lawyer (okay, I don't have a lawyer to call my own, I'll have to pick a name out of the phone book) and have him draw me up a plan for a TOS. It'll probably be pretty brutal. Legally, I'll have to claim responsibility or ownership over users and content so I'll have the ability to pull it if I have to. And I'll have to do the same stupid shit, bowing to C&Ds and dropping user info and so forth.
It won't make me as a host and as a person any more of an asshole. I won't trade email addresses for cigarettes or claim rights to rkm's work. But I'll look just as corporate and uncaring as the rest.
Just think about it, baby, before you hate the legalese. You can't avoid being screwed without screwing somebody on paper. At the end of the day, it all comes down to who you trust, and after these long years with Slashdot, OSDN and SourceForge, I guess I trust VA. I have to, they designed my new server!
Shameless plug: webslum.net. Say you read this post and I'll give you a free shell:)
Miguel, in an otherwise well thought out and well constructed rebuttal to TSH (Typical Stallman Hype), makes one comment I take great exception to...something to the effect of "CIL is Microsoft picking up where Java left off."
Excuse me, when the hell did Sun Microsystems "leave off"? Version 1.4 is coming out the door at any time, with such nice features as buffers and extensive regular expression support, and all of a sudden they've "left off"? Java will run on nearly every system ever created and in all sorts of unusual situations and suddenly Sun dropped the ball?
Look, Java is effing huge. People do write applications in it, and I'm not talking about ticker applets. Today's machines can run Sun's graphics engine as well as they can run GTK, and it's available underneath any OS. Any "work" that Microsoft is doing on the CIL has already been done by Sun, with the exception that MS' byte code executes faster and has better UI support.
But is there any wonder? An implementation of the CIL requires a lot of work on the part of the window management driver authors, meaning there's plenty of room for tuning. An implementation of Swing requires very little -- implement a fiew basic AWT classes and Swing, which is "100% Pure Java," will work atop the older class. Meaning that there has to be a lot more abstract code in Java. Meaning you can be damn sure your application looks the same everywhere and there won't be any glitches due to "factionalied" implementations.
Of course, most of the development world is still coping with the idea that different platforms require different code (hence the laundry lists inside Makefiles). The Java paradigm won't let you do that. It says, "write that shit once and deal with the slow down, it shouldn't be a dealbreaker for cross platform code." It shouldn't be. But it is. Many development houses can't get over this. Hell, I mentioned to our IT guy that I was doing our mailserver in java and he thought I meant an applet, scoffing "Write once, run nowhere."
CIL is an attempt to get under the skin of this, but it's a flawed attempt. Jesus, all the development time and heartache going into the optimization of x-platform windowing "frameworks" and "toolkits" where there already is one seems headstrong. Actually, it seems idiotic, and it's why I seethe whenever I hear somebody drop.NET like it's a great new IDEA.
"But C sharp has improved garabage collection, language integration and runs anywhere." Yeah, that's Java for you. "But.NET allows you to compile ASP code." JSP. "Tighter integration with IIS allows you to better utilize ISAPI." Servlets. "Serialization and persistance." EJB.
Jesus, why isn't Sun mopping the floor with these idiots???
Yeah, of course it's easier to discover a 'sploit in open source. The question is whether it's worthwhile to look or not. If a hole is 'sploited, then spotted and fixed within hours, what good is it?
As a hacker, it's in your best interest to stay undercover for as long as possible...and "obscure security" is the best cloud cover I can think of. "Oh, there's no hackers in there, it's too much work to find the hole" is not the excuse I'd like to give my employer when I've got a colony of scriptkids running eggies on my print server.
Remember, hackers are probing your network anyway. They're already looking for holes and testing the waters. They're the guys hunting for change in the payphones at the bus station and testing the lock on the door marked "employees only." They aren't going to be affected by the "obscurity" of closed source networking.
With microsoft, security isn't simply a matter of finding a bug in the software (which isn't as easy as you seem to think; MS has relatively high developer turnover and runs a LOT of legacy code nobody really "knows", remember Linus's line about the AT&T fix?). It's a matter of finding a bug, proving it's a bug, getting MS to admit it's a bug and eventually release a patch. With open source, you can bypass every one of these steps.
Again, Winformant, in a desperate attempt to seem like they aren't a bunch of toadies, has struck an "independent" blow against linux's "security myth," by proving that more holes were found in linux than in Windows.
Well, duh. Linux is full of holes. But that's not winformant's problem. You see, each of those holes was cleared up in a matter of days and a patch was freely available. There were no egos and press releases claiming there are no holes. There were no programmers waiting around while Marketing decided the best colour for the patch's installation wizard. There was no downtime as millions of machines had to get the file from a single MS server because the patch's license didn't allow redistribution. There were no hours of wringing hands as sysadmins watched hackers pick off their boxes one by one because there's no workaround while the patch was built. There was no possibility for diving into the code and fixing it yourself; and if there was there'd be no way to release the patched dll. Oh, and if a linux machine was compromised, there was little chance of it polluting the entire network...because the bug affected less than 1% of the install base of that particular OS, and not 100%.
Not to mention the reason that so many Linux patches were "found" rather than "discovered" is that bored sysadmins can sit around with sheets of source code, hoping to find a hole and make a name for themselves on BugTraq. With windows...well, you'd better be good with BlackIC and ASM, because it's the only way you're finding the hole.
I'm sick of programmers with degrees who can't program. Honestly, 100 level CS classes are supposed to be the acid test; if you don't have the basic problem solving skills to perform simple conditional logic, understand arrays and symbolic links, and output "hello world," you shouldn't be a CS major. And yet I've seen CS students in upper level classes (there was one in my networking group in his senior year) who can't write a program from scratch without a book or template to guide them.
This is a major difference from consultation. Copying hurts the computer world, it hurts other students (who have one less peer to help them through the rough patches with hints and examples) and it unalienably hurts the cheater most of all. I dropped out of my CS department to work for IBM *because* there were so many students sliding by and yet still maintaining higher averages than mine.
Of course, I am guessing that the GT system will probably be fairly stupid at first, and it won't take long for some overworked freshman to write an app to automatically thwart it. But this system will definitely help keep honest people honest.
Microsoft, contrary to popular belief, didn't try and squash Java initially. They loved it! And they didn't try and make it MS proprietary, so much as extend it in a Microsoft way. They let it access windows at a lower level, making it faster and more powerful. They added in extra options, so that Java code could make Windows do tricks. Basically, they did the same thing that Sun does all the time -- they extended the basic language by building new APIs. And they did a good job...i'm still using a lot of the features (such as NT services in Java and java "exes", mini executable JVMs). Such a good job that Sun got freightened, and rather than rely on the decency of the language and their hardware to carry them into the 21st century, they sued MS.
And so MS, who realised that Java was the way to go, had to build Java themselves. They've done so in a shitty, "Visual Basic" kind of way with CLR and.NET. It's more marketting than code now, like Vader was more machine than man. And I blame Sun for this...but I'm not angry. EJB and JSP save my ass on a daily basis.
Speaking of which, Apple is proof positive that breaking compatibility is not the deal breaker. They broke it moving from b&w to colour, again moving from 68k to PPC, moving from 7 to 8 and now again moving from 9 to X. Each time they'd release something that was midway between the two to ease the transition and each time, amidst grumbling, they succeeded in moving their user base to the next level. Why? Because each new level was visibly better. PPCs were so much faster with the new code, G3s and G4s likewise, and X is such a nicer interface than 9 that everybody (even people whose computers aren't good enough to run it) wants it.
It's microsoft's job to make each new OS worth the upgrade (and, sadly, XP has a bunch of new features that do make it worthwhile). That's what drives upgrades, and that's what makes little things like "not being able to use old, poorly coded applications" not so important.
I work in the online news business and this is nothing new. I'd say most news stories are based on press releases, which in turn are a way for companies to advertise new products and services without actually paying for ad space. And in the slightly-more-insidious zone, there are stories called "advertisals" that are totally advertisements, reported on by the newspaper and looking just like independent reports that are paid for as a form of advertising.
It's been done by the Times, done all the time by the Post, and for many papers is the most lucrative form of advertising. Every hear of a shopper?
What you need to remember here is that newspapers are now, and have been for a while, simply vehicles for the advertisements that make the paper money. The nickle you pay covers most of the $.27 worth of paper you're buying and is just to elevate the paper above the sleazy shoppers and coupon mags in your imagination and justify a higher ad rate. When you lay out a newspaper, you lay the ads out first...content, stories and comics and columns, are just there to fill in the dead space. It's sort of cynical to think about it this way, and it's this sort of business that leads to a reluctance to make waves with articles or opinions, for fear of losing advertisers (and not readership, which isn't as important to the immediate business of the newspaper).
This is not only stupid, it is totally untrue. ALL the beasties of the world have sex for pleasure, and only for pleasure, because they are unable to make the jump in symbolic logic that says "hey, if i get my swerve on I contniue my species." There are species of monkeys that have been seen to be homosexual, and many many animals that rub their genitals against things for arousal. But don't take my word for it...Cecil Adams did a column on it YEARS ago that's available in the annals of straightdope.com.
I might give you that cetaceans are the only animal besides humans that understand what sex results in, however. They seem clever enough to understand simple symbolic logic, but so are apes. Personally, I think a big, smelly, sweaty ape would be the perfect mascot for MySQL, a database which has thrown its dookie at real developers for far too long.
does the PostgreSQL elephant have a name? I vote for "stampy."
Seriously, though, what kind of a logo is a dolphin for a database? When I think of dolphins, I think of these unreliable, playful creatures that basically live the life of riley, eating fish and playing tricks on sailors all day long. Whereas an elephant...well, they never forget, do they?
The best part was the part at the end when he lists the OSs and machines and network systems in his office. Is it just me, or do these interviews with "famous" techies always seem to end with one of these run downs. In a way, it's a bit like the end of the center spread in Playboy:
Stephen Satchell (Virgo) Turn ons: MacOS, Linux, open solutions, long walks on the beach.
Turn offs: Monopolies, broken PDAs, Winmodems.
You forgot the worst part of it all: most of these subscription services force you into a yearly contract where it costs more to get out than to stay in.
Why is this important? Because it takes away the most basic consumer right: the right to good service. A company that you are forced into paying every month has no reason to give you good service. They have no reason to deliver on their promises, because they know you don't have the clout to resist payment or break the contract.
Other subscriptions make us wary to use real services by hiding the ability to cancel. I've had a couple services keep charging me even after I'd cancelled...seems they "lost" my cancellation request. Nobody wants to go through the hassles of recouping money just to hear slightly better radio or play an online game...which is why subscription models, unless undertaken cautiously, are severely flawed.
1990: Square releases Final Fantasy 1. Realises people will play games with shitty graphics, no story as long as they are interrupted every three minutes with slow, unrewarding, repetitive fighting.
1992-94: Square releases FF 2 and 3, which rock.
1994: Square releases Chrono Trigger, which sucks, and yet nobody seems to notice. Birth of the fanboy.
1995: Square releases Secret of Evermore, which is a good game, and thusly the newly born fanboys hate it. They proceed to beat Chrono Trigger again, trying to make the primitive chick get nekkid.
1997: Square revolutionizes the RPG world by introducing the first in a long line of homosexual protagonists. Mister T gets his first job as a game model.
1997: Realising that matches in fighting games last too long, sometimes upwards of 90 seconds, Square releases Bushido Blade. Gameplay consists of running at a guy and pushing a button.
1998: Square releases Final Fantasy Tactics, revolutionizing the world of Games that Look and Play Just Like Shining Force, But Aren't.
1998: Xenogears is released, a 60 hour game with 10 minutes of pretty FMV and 20 hours of engaging gameplay. Also, 29 hours and 50 minutes of utter crap.
My 98 VW Passat has a boost chip (+47 hp, +66 ft-lbs), a McIntosh amp, a door mounted wall socket, a built in link for my PDA and so forth.
My coworker's 2000 Impala has a supercharger, larger injectors, a custom fuel program, custom ABS and traction control (to allow the supercharger to catch the wheels with full torque, which will definitely spin them), a WIn NT based PC and a big amp adjustment.
My friend's 2001 Accord has a dreamcast in his glove box and a pop up monitor installed in dash.
It takes more skill, but there is NO problem hacking cars any way you want to anymore -- so long as your car manufacturer lets you do so. I guarantee you it is not so easy to hack a Benz or a Bimmer due to their theft systems. Even the Passat requires you have a password to reset your MFD (economy / odo) and radio. But with these in mind, the world is your oyster, man.
This is a crock of shit. MP3 compresses better than AC3, and yet audiophiles everywhere are going whack for DVD. The problem is not MP3, it's TRADED MP3s, which are encoded under strange circumstances at low low bitrates. A set top mp3 box is designed to be used with a component stereo, not the boom boxes and all-in-one crap of the average MP3 trader. So if you've got the pricepoint for audiophiles, a form factor for audiophiles and so forth, then why curse it by making a machine that sounds like a clock radio.
Without composite audio out, I guarantee you that the noise level of the outputs makes them totally worthless for even the less picky audio enthusiasts like myself. If I pause the machine and get a buzz through my otherwise totally clean Sherwood and MC500 pair, then the box isn't worth a ten dollar gift certificate.
Come on, for the love of christ somebody had to have a decent stereo on the team that developed this! Nobody in their right mind uses analog anymore for anything other than vinyl or magnetic tape, it is impossible to clean the signal even over the three feet between components. And when your signal is already digital (as it is before the cheap DAC on the sound card gets ahold of it and messes it up), why the hell not supply it as digital, so that $300 DAC in the sherwood isn't just twiddling it's thumbs. Coaxial outputs are basically free, and even optical out is hardly prohibitive anymore.
Keep it digital, folks, analog is the useless buzzing child of the past.
I call it "customer loyalty," for which they're just trying to suppress popularity. I mean, consider this: I had to rebuild EVERYTHING on my mac the other day, it was just toasted. Now, when I rebuilt, I didn't have to reinstall OSX 10 over my busted 10.1 install...and then reinstall 10.1, as you might have to do with other OSs. Everything I needed was on the 10.1 disc, which I got free from my friends at the mac store.
This is really no different than Microsoft allowing time-kill downloads of XP RC, and you really don't expect MS not to get all uptight about people hacking the time-kill code, do you? THe OSX upgrade is similar in that you have to modify it to get a full version of the software, which is justifiably more expensive. Sure, for the hackers who want a whole OS of 10.1, it's in there, but it also allows Joe Q. iMac to get a functional OS without spending $100 to get the "full retail" version. By this I mean that OSX 10.0.1 was NOT a truly functional OS, and 10.1.0 was...giving people who have essentially been paid beta testers a very close to retail version of the software is unheard of customer loyalty, and I think it's rude to complain that they are trying to suppress information that allows people to take advantage of their generosity.
My PowerBook has a 14 inch 1024x768 screen. I hate it. At 14 inches, I'd much rather have 1280x1024 -- because Apple uses such large fonts & such for its interface that they take up nearly 10% of my screen.
Don't get me wrong...i absolutely love OSX...but on a lappy, space is the most important commodity.
Three points to the man who knows who John Kacere is. That being said, the reason I'm down with the K is that he's the only artist I've seen that can essentially turn a nude into a still life. And not in the gross way that Giger turns a nude into a landscape.
Seriously -- not speaking from a naysayer standpoint or as somebody who thinks that SETI is a complete waste of time, although I am both of these -- what if ETs don't do math?
I know, it's hard to fathom. But imagine this: human appreciation of art and life is rarely build on logical thought. When I say that my favorite painter is John Kacere, it has nothing to do with the trigonometry of his brush strokes and everything to do with what I like, a much more concept ideal. Conversation is a way of attempting to apply logic to what is essentially an illogical process, to explain a biological reaction with words and phrases.
So what would I think if Chewbacca beamed a thirty meg prime number into my PowerBook? I sure as hell wouldn't pick up instantly on its nature. I'd probably try and run it through a gif converter or play it on Audion before I'd think to perform the three year process that would uncover it as a prime number. If we're trying to make contact with primes, it seems that we're restricting our target intelligence to creatures smarter than me. Which seems defeatist. Why not start smaller, with a fibinacci sequence or the differential calculus or a DivX file of "The Facts of Life" (divx having been developed in less than a year)? Don't we realize that they'll want to check our math even if they do figure out what the stream of gibberish we're sending is all about?
And finally, what are they going to think when it gets there? Ifome superintelligent race of beings gets a message of a fact they already knew from a race of eggheads in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milky way, they're not inviting us to the intergalactic luau -- they're taking that hot race of Beings of Pure Sex from Omicron Six!
Are you satisfied with the finished product of the live action Tick? I was a huge fan of both the comic and the cartoon series and am sure that if you can keep up the quality of dialog and acting you had in last night's episode that I'll be glued to it as well. But the differences between the three are immense...especially in the humour department (for example, my favorite joke from the comic was "We are hedge. Move along." which probably wouldn't work in either the cartoon or the live action). Do you, as the characters' creator and a comic artist, find yourself looking at the finished product and saying, "yes, that's what I see when the Tick jumps along the rooftops of my dreams?" Which of the three incarnations is your favorite?
Yes, but read a lot of books that don't have a book on tape available. Like 95% of the market. The only books available on tape are best sellers or otherwise popular books...if i want to listen to, say, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency or the Faerie Queene or RedHat Linux Unleashed, books I can get on ebook but not as a book on tape, i'm up a creek.
Of course, a text to speech reader isn't going to sound anywhere near as nice as an audiobook...but until you can find an audiobook of my email, or my students' papers, or the latest press release from Sun Microsystems, i'll take the coder.
Incidentally, a guy I work with has a father who designs for Chrysler. He said that the big D-C was "really interested" in applications of text to speech. Think about it: ebooks that read themselves to you while you drive, driving directions and traffic info read to you rather than displayed on a screen (most nav screens require you to take your eyes entirely off the road and down the dash as much as 18 inches...eep!). You've got a much more useful interface, and with a low cost(though they'll charge you a grand, i'm sure) , easy to interface chip, they'll have no excuse not to bring this much safer system for data interaction to my dash today, and not six years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's one of the problems with modern capitalism...in the odd case that you don't claim to know nothing and be irresponsible, you're inviting people to sue you. How many times have I heard in the same breath "X Co, Inc, is a huge, evil, corrupt institution with no care for its customers" and "let's sue them so we can have money?"
:)
I run a very small (read: profits are almost half my car payment) web hosting service under the flag of openness and freedom of content. I started it because I got upset that every single host I went with wanted to corral me into a year contract, tell me what I couldn't do or say and take credit and the ability to edit my personal thoughts and ideas. Originally, it was a co-op, and I began to take on extra users who wanted the same thing -- ownership of their work and a fair charge for the low bandwidth they were moving.
In the past three months we've grown a dozen times larger -- so big that I no longer know every site op by name. Now, I don't want to have to force the new people to sign a TOS or a EULA. I think that posting the rules on the frontpage should be good enough for everybody. But I'm afraid. We've had a couple users ask if they could serve porn, and when I said no a few signed up anyway. I trust them (and check my logs), but if I go away on vacation and one of them starts serving nude shots of Frankie Muniz, I'm the one who gets in trouble. I'm the one who's got his name on the tax forms, and I don't intend to incorporate the business.
So I'm stuck. I want to let users do their own thing, own their own shit, but I'm the one who's ass is on the line. If one site slips up, they all go down. Everybody loses their stuff and all the good I've tried to do, all the bright young folks I've formed relationships with are scrambling for a new host. Someday soon I'll need to call my lawyer (okay, I don't have a lawyer to call my own, I'll have to pick a name out of the phone book) and have him draw me up a plan for a TOS. It'll probably be pretty brutal. Legally, I'll have to claim responsibility or ownership over users and content so I'll have the ability to pull it if I have to. And I'll have to do the same stupid shit, bowing to C&Ds and dropping user info and so forth.
It won't make me as a host and as a person any more of an asshole. I won't trade email addresses for cigarettes or claim rights to rkm's work. But I'll look just as corporate and uncaring as the rest.
Just think about it, baby, before you hate the legalese. You can't avoid being screwed without screwing somebody on paper. At the end of the day, it all comes down to who you trust, and after these long years with Slashdot, OSDN and SourceForge, I guess I trust VA. I have to, they designed my new server!
Shameless plug: webslum.net. Say you read this post and I'll give you a free shell
Miguel, in an otherwise well thought out and well constructed rebuttal to TSH (Typical Stallman Hype), makes one comment I take great exception to...something to the effect of "CIL is Microsoft picking up where Java left off."
.NET like it's a great new IDEA.
.NET allows you to compile ASP code." JSP. "Tighter integration with IIS allows you to better utilize ISAPI." Servlets. "Serialization and persistance." EJB.
Excuse me, when the hell did Sun Microsystems "leave off"? Version 1.4 is coming out the door at any time, with such nice features as buffers and extensive regular expression support, and all of a sudden they've "left off"? Java will run on nearly every system ever created and in all sorts of unusual situations and suddenly Sun dropped the ball?
Look, Java is effing huge. People do write applications in it, and I'm not talking about ticker applets. Today's machines can run Sun's graphics engine as well as they can run GTK, and it's available underneath any OS. Any "work" that Microsoft is doing on the CIL has already been done by Sun, with the exception that MS' byte code executes faster and has better UI support.
But is there any wonder? An implementation of the CIL requires a lot of work on the part of the window management driver authors, meaning there's plenty of room for tuning. An implementation of Swing requires very little -- implement a fiew basic AWT classes and Swing, which is "100% Pure Java," will work atop the older class. Meaning that there has to be a lot more abstract code in Java. Meaning you can be damn sure your application looks the same everywhere and there won't be any glitches due to "factionalied" implementations.
Of course, most of the development world is still coping with the idea that different platforms require different code (hence the laundry lists inside Makefiles). The Java paradigm won't let you do that. It says, "write that shit once and deal with the slow down, it shouldn't be a dealbreaker for cross platform code." It shouldn't be. But it is. Many development houses can't get over this. Hell, I mentioned to our IT guy that I was doing our mailserver in java and he thought I meant an applet, scoffing "Write once, run nowhere."
CIL is an attempt to get under the skin of this, but it's a flawed attempt. Jesus, all the development time and heartache going into the optimization of x-platform windowing "frameworks" and "toolkits" where there already is one seems headstrong. Actually, it seems idiotic, and it's why I seethe whenever I hear somebody drop
"But C sharp has improved garabage collection, language integration and runs anywhere." Yeah, that's Java for you. "But
Jesus, why isn't Sun mopping the floor with these idiots???
Yeah, of course it's easier to discover a 'sploit in open source. The question is whether it's worthwhile to look or not. If a hole is 'sploited, then spotted and fixed within hours, what good is it?
As a hacker, it's in your best interest to stay undercover for as long as possible...and "obscure security" is the best cloud cover I can think of. "Oh, there's no hackers in there, it's too much work to find the hole" is not the excuse I'd like to give my employer when I've got a colony of scriptkids running eggies on my print server.
Remember, hackers are probing your network anyway. They're already looking for holes and testing the waters. They're the guys hunting for change in the payphones at the bus station and testing the lock on the door marked "employees only." They aren't going to be affected by the "obscurity" of closed source networking.
With microsoft, security isn't simply a matter of finding a bug in the software (which isn't as easy as you seem to think; MS has relatively high developer turnover and runs a LOT of legacy code nobody really "knows", remember Linus's line about the AT&T fix?). It's a matter of finding a bug, proving it's a bug, getting MS to admit it's a bug and eventually release a patch. With open source, you can bypass every one of these steps.
Again, Winformant, in a desperate attempt to seem like they aren't a bunch of toadies, has struck an "independent" blow against linux's "security myth," by proving that more holes were found in linux than in Windows.
Well, duh. Linux is full of holes. But that's not winformant's problem. You see, each of those holes was cleared up in a matter of days and a patch was freely available. There were no egos and press releases claiming there are no holes. There were no programmers waiting around while Marketing decided the best colour for the patch's installation wizard. There was no downtime as millions of machines had to get the file from a single MS server because the patch's license didn't allow redistribution. There were no hours of wringing hands as sysadmins watched hackers pick off their boxes one by one because there's no workaround while the patch was built. There was no possibility for diving into the code and fixing it yourself; and if there was there'd be no way to release the patched dll. Oh, and if a linux machine was compromised, there was little chance of it polluting the entire network...because the bug affected less than 1% of the install base of that particular OS, and not 100%.
Not to mention the reason that so many Linux patches were "found" rather than "discovered" is that bored sysadmins can sit around with sheets of source code, hoping to find a hole and make a name for themselves on BugTraq. With windows...well, you'd better be good with BlackIC and ASM, because it's the only way you're finding the hole.
$0 for a copy of PostgreSQL
$2000 for a firewall
$1000 for a thorough security consultation
$7000 for beer & chicken wings
I suppose posturing and unbelievable claims are what you can expect from a company whose CEO looks like The Rock.
I'm sick of programmers with degrees who can't program. Honestly, 100 level CS classes are supposed to be the acid test; if you don't have the basic problem solving skills to perform simple conditional logic, understand arrays and symbolic links, and output "hello world," you shouldn't be a CS major. And yet I've seen CS students in upper level classes (there was one in my networking group in his senior year) who can't write a program from scratch without a book or template to guide them.
This is a major difference from consultation. Copying hurts the computer world, it hurts other students (who have one less peer to help them through the rough patches with hints and examples) and it unalienably hurts the cheater most of all. I dropped out of my CS department to work for IBM *because* there were so many students sliding by and yet still maintaining higher averages than mine.
Of course, I am guessing that the GT system will probably be fairly stupid at first, and it won't take long for some overworked freshman to write an app to automatically thwart it. But this system will definitely help keep honest people honest.
Microsoft, contrary to popular belief, didn't try and squash Java initially. They loved it! And they didn't try and make it MS proprietary, so much as extend it in a Microsoft way. They let it access windows at a lower level, making it faster and more powerful. They added in extra options, so that Java code could make Windows do tricks. Basically, they did the same thing that Sun does all the time -- they extended the basic language by building new APIs. And they did a good job...i'm still using a lot of the features (such as NT services in Java and java "exes", mini executable JVMs). Such a good job that Sun got freightened, and rather than rely on the decency of the language and their hardware to carry them into the 21st century, they sued MS.
.NET. It's more marketting than code now, like Vader was more machine than man. And I blame Sun for this...but I'm not angry. EJB and JSP save my ass on a daily basis.
And so MS, who realised that Java was the way to go, had to build Java themselves. They've done so in a shitty, "Visual Basic" kind of way with CLR and
Speaking of which, Apple is proof positive that breaking compatibility is not the deal breaker. They broke it moving from b&w to colour, again moving from 68k to PPC, moving from 7 to 8 and now again moving from 9 to X. Each time they'd release something that was midway between the two to ease the transition and each time, amidst grumbling, they succeeded in moving their user base to the next level. Why? Because each new level was visibly better. PPCs were so much faster with the new code, G3s and G4s likewise, and X is such a nicer interface than 9 that everybody (even people whose computers aren't good enough to run it) wants it.
It's microsoft's job to make each new OS worth the upgrade (and, sadly, XP has a bunch of new features that do make it worthwhile). That's what drives upgrades, and that's what makes little things like "not being able to use old, poorly coded applications" not so important.
I work in the online news business and this is nothing new. I'd say most news stories are based on press releases, which in turn are a way for companies to advertise new products and services without actually paying for ad space. And in the slightly-more-insidious zone, there are stories called "advertisals" that are totally advertisements, reported on by the newspaper and looking just like independent reports that are paid for as a form of advertising.
It's been done by the Times, done all the time by the Post, and for many papers is the most lucrative form of advertising. Every hear of a shopper?
What you need to remember here is that newspapers are now, and have been for a while, simply vehicles for the advertisements that make the paper money. The nickle you pay covers most of the $.27 worth of paper you're buying and is just to elevate the paper above the sleazy shoppers and coupon mags in your imagination and justify a higher ad rate. When you lay out a newspaper, you lay the ads out first...content, stories and comics and columns, are just there to fill in the dead space. It's sort of cynical to think about it this way, and it's this sort of business that leads to a reluctance to make waves with articles or opinions, for fear of losing advertisers (and not readership, which isn't as important to the immediate business of the newspaper).
This is not only stupid, it is totally untrue. ALL the beasties of the world have sex for pleasure, and only for pleasure, because they are unable to make the jump in symbolic logic that says "hey, if i get my swerve on I contniue my species." There are species of monkeys that have been seen to be homosexual, and many many animals that rub their genitals against things for arousal. But don't take my word for it...Cecil Adams did a column on it YEARS ago that's available in the annals of straightdope.com.
I might give you that cetaceans are the only animal besides humans that understand what sex results in, however. They seem clever enough to understand simple symbolic logic, but so are apes. Personally, I think a big, smelly, sweaty ape would be the perfect mascot for MySQL, a database which has thrown its dookie at real developers for far too long.
does the PostgreSQL elephant have a name? I vote for "stampy."
Seriously, though, what kind of a logo is a dolphin for a database? When I think of dolphins, I think of these unreliable, playful creatures that basically live the life of riley, eating fish and playing tricks on sailors all day long. Whereas an elephant...well, they never forget, do they?
dM
The best part was the part at the end when he lists the OSs and machines and network systems in his office. Is it just me, or do these interviews with "famous" techies always seem to end with one of these run downs. In a way, it's a bit like the end of the center spread in Playboy:
Stephen Satchell (Virgo)
Turn ons: MacOS, Linux, open solutions, long walks on the beach.
Turn offs: Monopolies, broken PDAs, Winmodems.
You forgot the worst part of it all: most of these subscription services force you into a yearly contract where it costs more to get out than to stay in.
Why is this important? Because it takes away the most basic consumer right: the right to good service. A company that you are forced into paying every month has no reason to give you good service. They have no reason to deliver on their promises, because they know you don't have the clout to resist payment or break the contract.
Other subscriptions make us wary to use real services by hiding the ability to cancel. I've had a couple services keep charging me even after I'd cancelled...seems they "lost" my cancellation request. Nobody wants to go through the hassles of recouping money just to hear slightly better radio or play an online game...which is why subscription models, unless undertaken cautiously, are severely flawed.
1990: Square releases Final Fantasy 1. Realises people will play games with shitty graphics, no story as long as they are interrupted every three minutes with slow, unrewarding, repetitive fighting.
1992-94: Square releases FF 2 and 3, which rock.
1994: Square releases Chrono Trigger, which sucks, and yet nobody seems to notice. Birth of the fanboy.
1995: Square releases Secret of Evermore, which is a good game, and thusly the newly born fanboys hate it. They proceed to beat Chrono Trigger again, trying to make the primitive chick get nekkid.
1997: Square revolutionizes the RPG world by introducing the first in a long line of homosexual protagonists. Mister T gets his first job as a game model.
1997: Realising that matches in fighting games last too long, sometimes upwards of 90 seconds, Square releases Bushido Blade. Gameplay consists of running at a guy and pushing a button.
1998: Square releases Final Fantasy Tactics, revolutionizing the world of Games that Look and Play Just Like Shining Force, But Aren't.
1998: Xenogears is released, a 60 hour game with 10 minutes of pretty FMV and 20 hours of engaging gameplay. Also, 29 hours and 50 minutes of utter crap.
1999-Present: Same Old Shit.
My 98 VW Passat has a boost chip (+47 hp, +66 ft-lbs), a McIntosh amp, a door mounted wall socket, a built in link for my PDA and so forth.
My coworker's 2000 Impala has a supercharger, larger injectors, a custom fuel program, custom ABS and traction control (to allow the supercharger to catch the wheels with full torque, which will definitely spin them), a WIn NT based PC and a big amp adjustment.
My friend's 2001 Accord has a dreamcast in his glove box and a pop up monitor installed in dash.
It takes more skill, but there is NO problem hacking cars any way you want to anymore -- so long as your car manufacturer lets you do so. I guarantee you it is not so easy to hack a Benz or a Bimmer due to their theft systems. Even the Passat requires you have a password to reset your MFD (economy / odo) and radio. But with these in mind, the world is your oyster, man.
This is a crock of shit. MP3 compresses better than AC3, and yet audiophiles everywhere are going whack for DVD. The problem is not MP3, it's TRADED MP3s, which are encoded under strange circumstances at low low bitrates. A set top mp3 box is designed to be used with a component stereo, not the boom boxes and all-in-one crap of the average MP3 trader. So if you've got the pricepoint for audiophiles, a form factor for audiophiles and so forth, then why curse it by making a machine that sounds like a clock radio.
Without composite audio out, I guarantee you that the noise level of the outputs makes them totally worthless for even the less picky audio enthusiasts like myself. If I pause the machine and get a buzz through my otherwise totally clean Sherwood and MC500 pair, then the box isn't worth a ten dollar gift certificate.
Come on, for the love of christ somebody had to have a decent stereo on the team that developed this! Nobody in their right mind uses analog anymore for anything other than vinyl or magnetic tape, it is impossible to clean the signal even over the three feet between components. And when your signal is already digital (as it is before the cheap DAC on the sound card gets ahold of it and messes it up), why the hell not supply it as digital, so that $300 DAC in the sherwood isn't just twiddling it's thumbs. Coaxial outputs are basically free, and even optical out is hardly prohibitive anymore.
Keep it digital, folks, analog is the useless buzzing child of the past.
I call it "customer loyalty," for which they're just trying to suppress popularity. I mean, consider this: I had to rebuild EVERYTHING on my mac the other day, it was just toasted. Now, when I rebuilt, I didn't have to reinstall OSX 10 over my busted 10.1 install...and then reinstall 10.1, as you might have to do with other OSs. Everything I needed was on the 10.1 disc, which I got free from my friends at the mac store.
This is really no different than Microsoft allowing time-kill downloads of XP RC, and you really don't expect MS not to get all uptight about people hacking the time-kill code, do you? THe OSX upgrade is similar in that you have to modify it to get a full version of the software, which is justifiably more expensive. Sure, for the hackers who want a whole OS of 10.1, it's in there, but it also allows Joe Q. iMac to get a functional OS without spending $100 to get the "full retail" version. By this I mean that OSX 10.0.1 was NOT a truly functional OS, and 10.1.0 was...giving people who have essentially been paid beta testers a very close to retail version of the software is unheard of customer loyalty, and I think it's rude to complain that they are trying to suppress information that allows people to take advantage of their generosity.
Right. No matter how shitty the operating system, it's still a fast machine with an efficient chip, high quality hardware and tons of IO solutions.
My PowerBook has a 14 inch 1024x768 screen. I hate it. At 14 inches, I'd much rather have 1280x1024 -- because Apple uses such large fonts & such for its interface that they take up nearly 10% of my screen.
Don't get me wrong...i absolutely love OSX...but on a lappy, space is the most important commodity.
Three points to the man who knows who John Kacere is. That being said, the reason I'm down with the K is that he's the only artist I've seen that can essentially turn a nude into a still life. And not in the gross way that Giger turns a nude into a landscape.
Seriously -- not speaking from a naysayer standpoint or as somebody who thinks that SETI is a complete waste of time, although I am both of these -- what if ETs don't do math?
I know, it's hard to fathom. But imagine this: human appreciation of art and life is rarely build on logical thought. When I say that my favorite painter is John Kacere, it has nothing to do with the trigonometry of his brush strokes and everything to do with what I like, a much more concept ideal. Conversation is a way of attempting to apply logic to what is essentially an illogical process, to explain a biological reaction with words and phrases.
So what would I think if Chewbacca beamed a thirty meg prime number into my PowerBook? I sure as hell wouldn't pick up instantly on its nature. I'd probably try and run it through a gif converter or play it on Audion before I'd think to perform the three year process that would uncover it as a prime number. If we're trying to make contact with primes, it seems that we're restricting our target intelligence to creatures smarter than me. Which seems defeatist. Why not start smaller, with a fibinacci sequence or the differential calculus or a DivX file of "The Facts of Life" (divx having been developed in less than a year)? Don't we realize that they'll want to check our math even if they do figure out what the stream of gibberish we're sending is all about?
And finally, what are they going to think when it gets there? Ifome superintelligent race of beings gets a message of a fact they already knew from a race of eggheads in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milky way, they're not inviting us to the intergalactic luau -- they're taking that hot race of Beings of Pure Sex from Omicron Six!
Are you satisfied with the finished product of the live action Tick? I was a huge fan of both the comic and the cartoon series and am sure that if you can keep up the quality of dialog and acting you had in last night's episode that I'll be glued to it as well. But the differences between the three are immense...especially in the humour department (for example, my favorite joke from the comic was "We are hedge. Move along." which probably wouldn't work in either the cartoon or the live action). Do you, as the characters' creator and a comic artist, find yourself looking at the finished product and saying, "yes, that's what I see when the Tick jumps along the rooftops of my dreams?" Which of the three incarnations is your favorite?
Yes, but read a lot of books that don't have a book on tape available. Like 95% of the market. The only books available on tape are best sellers or otherwise popular books...if i want to listen to, say, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency or the Faerie Queene or RedHat Linux Unleashed, books I can get on ebook but not as a book on tape, i'm up a creek.
Of course, a text to speech reader isn't going to sound anywhere near as nice as an audiobook...but until you can find an audiobook of my email, or my students' papers, or the latest press release from Sun Microsystems, i'll take the coder.
Didn't I see this first in "Wargames?"
Incidentally, a guy I work with has a father who designs for Chrysler. He said that the big D-C was "really interested" in applications of text to speech. Think about it: ebooks that read themselves to you while you drive, driving directions and traffic info read to you rather than displayed on a screen (most nav screens require you to take your eyes entirely off the road and down the dash as much as 18 inches...eep!). You've got a much more useful interface, and with a low cost(though they'll charge you a grand, i'm sure) , easy to interface chip, they'll have no excuse not to bring this much safer system for data interaction to my dash today, and not six years from now.