Local policy makers should make preparations for what happens in a generation or two, agreed. This is, however, a solved problem. More money/jobs from the energy industry means that other businesses have paying customers- hair salons, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores - every segment of the economy benefits from the inflow of money to the area. Over the next 10-20 years, blighted abandoned areas become vibrant again. At that point, they are attractive places to build any business. That's the time that policy makers should encourage investment in any business that exports it's product or service out of the city. Manufacturing, software, universities- anything that is purchased by people outside the state will do just fine to maintain an inflow of cash to keep the local economy doing well.
Right now, these areas are so run-down that nobody wants to put any business there. It's a third- world environment, but with unions and Democrat labor laws. An influx of cash could allow Detroit to be rebuilt as a modern city again, which would then need to have intelligent policies just like any other modern city.
> Then you may be surprised to know that Windows NT had a version for DEC Alpha (and possibly a couple of other RISC CPUs), along with compilers to match.
From 1995 or 1996 until 1999, as I recall. So three or four years. Windows has been around for 29 years, since 1985. So let's try this:
90% of Microsoft's effort has been focused purely on x86, while Linux as always been architecture-agnostic.
I understand where you're coming from. As you may know, I've been doing infosec for a long time, and I know the difference between "compliant" and "secure". I'm rather surprised you chose CompTIA Security+ as your example of a bad security certification. The new one especially is quite comprehensive, in my view. Not that a single certification can ensure that a candidate is ready to perform any and all jobs related to security, but I'd say that if even 10% of the people designing and maintaining these systems had enough knowledge to pass Security+, we'd be in a lot better shape.
He had a huge criminal enterprise to run, tons of money to launder, murders to order, and hopefully he'd make some time to enjoy his ill-gotten gains before he eventually made a mistake and got busted. If he was wasting his time setting up a captcha, that was pretty stupid. The smart thing would be for him to have someone eho understands banking and finance take care if the banking and finance, someone who understands programming take care of the programming, someone who understands high-capacity server infrastructure take care of the server infrastructure, ehile he ran the whole operation and spent some time on his boat. Actually, not really. He was successful before silk road,so the smart thing to do would have been to continue to make money legally. That has the advantage of not ending with a prison sentence.
98 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux. Most phones also run Linux. See also consumer electronics of all kinds - TVs, routers, webcams, consumer NAS drives... Linux works everywhere. As Linux has been installed everywhere over the last few years, Microsoft has gone from a monopoly, the 800 pound gorilla, to trying to catch up in order to survive.
There is a reason for this. Linux didn't make any assumptions about what hardware people were going to use next week. Even the architecture could be whatever you anted that day - DEC Alpha, Blackfin, ARM (any), Atmel AVR, TMS320, 68k, PA-RISC, H8, IBM Z, x86, assorted MIPS, Power, Sparc, and many others. Microsoft built specifically for the desktop, and supported one platform - x86. Suddenly, most new processors being sold were ARM, and screens shrank from 23" to 4". Microsoft could only scramble and try to come up with something, anything tat would run on the newly popular ARM processors, and ended up with Windows RT. Linux kept chugging along because they had never made any assumptions about the hardware in first place. To start maing those assumptions now would be stupid.
We don't know whether smart watches will be all the rage next year, or if cloud computing wll take off even more than it has, or virtualization, or a resurgence of local computing with power, battery-friendly APUs and roll-up displays. To specialize for "dektop" hardware or "server" hardware would be dumb, because we don't know what those are going to look like five years from now, or if either will be a major category. How many people here remember building web sites for WebTV? How well did that pay off, investing in building a WebTV version, then a Playstation version? The sites that faired these changes the best built fluid, adaptive sites that don't CARE what kind of client is being used to view them - they just work, without being tailored to any specific stereotype of some users.
Sure, your tax money will continue to pour into Tesla, because green. Most of this won't be tax-financed, though. It'll be paid for by forcing Nevada homeowners to pay Tesla for the lunchtime power production that'll be shunted to ground since they aren't home to use it.
> I find it a bit hard to believe that a guy who is able to get one of the largest black-market enterprises running on a server
Do you find it hardto believe that Paypal's engineers make significantly more obvious mistakes? They do, of course. The thing about crime, and security, is that you can do a hundred things just right, and be taken down by the one thing you missed. It's adversarial like sports, but unlike sports 47-2 is a losing score for the team who scored 47. Those two items on which you let the authorities score put you in prison.
DANE seems very nearly pointless to me. Maybe I'm mising something. The victim goes to Paypal.com. Their browser checks the certificate to make sure it's really Paypal.com, as opposed to a MITM or someone who hijacked Paypal's DNS. That's the typical use for TLS, right?
So checking the cert is supposed to protect the user from an adversary who can intercept packets addressed to Paypal.com and send back bogus responses. That means the adversary can intercept DNS packets intended for Paypal.com and respond wuth a bogus cert record. Nothing has been gained unless you can independently verify the DNS records using some other mechanism. It's proposed that DNSSEC be used for this. DNSSEC basically means the DNS record is signed, so to trust the DNS we need to validate the cert used to sign the DNS. Okay, soall we have to do is find a way to validate a DNS signing cert. If we can validate that cert, we can trust the ssl cert.
Hmm, we validate someone's cert by first validating their cert? I don't think we've made any progress toward solving the problem.
> The problem is that they are blocking commercial activities while allowing recreational activities
You can't see the difference between you operating a toy over an uninhabited field vs UPS and Amazon operating a fleet if thousands of commercial drones operating in neighborhoods? With commerce comes scale.
The sites got certificates and installed them several years ago, before thw current "https everywhere " trend. In other words, they decided that because they were handling sensitive information, they needed a secure connection. Maybe they have an order form,that accepts credit cards, whatever. For some reason, they needed to be more secured than most sites. The URL in the address bar says "https", indicating that it is secured. We know that although they publicly declared that their site should be secured, it isn't.
Contrast xkcd.com. Randall didn't get a certificate, because you don't need a secured connection to look at nerd comics. Which site presents a security risk? The site that has no need of tls, or the site that needs to be secured, but isn't?
* xkcd might actually have a cert, if they sell stuff on the site or whatever. I didn't bother checking because it's beside the point whether that specific site uses a cert.
These two are very, very handy for careful programmers, who don't just assume that everthing always works, and that noone is trying to hack, or enter "weird" input like a name with a single quote, such as o'Malley.
Examples: open(INPUT, $file) or die "Couldn't open input: $!");
compare other languages, where being careful requires that every other line start with "if (!": if(!open(INPUT, $file) ) {
die "Couldn't open input: $!"; }
Similarly: die ("That's an awfully long name") if (($name > 1024)); vs: if ($name > 1024) {
die("That's an awfully long name"); }
If you're regularly checking your assumptions, I think the syntax is very handy.
Perl is my preferred language for the majority of tasks that I do. I really like Perl overall. TIMTOWTDI annoys me, though. There is a right way to do it. Once is a great while, there are two correct ways, and still one best way.
TIMTOWTDI seems more appropriate for PHP, "do it however, as long as it looks like it kinda works for now. It's not like we're actual programmers who know what we're doing".
> It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two
Yep. Pretty much everything I own runs Linux, so no matter what device I'm working on the shell interface is the same. On my phone I use the graphical interface most of the time, of course, but I _can_ open a command line and find out what's using al my storage space it just the same as I would on my work desktop, my laptops, my server, my NAS, my PBX, and anything else I own.
At my 8-5 job, the company-owned machine has the same bash shell, which works the same way, running on an OSX kernel instead.
My experience is that when new versions of Word have problems opening a file created by a previous version, the solution is to open them in OpenOffice and use OO to save to the newest MS Word format (or leave them as odt).
In that way, OpenOffice has BETTER compatibility with various types of MS Word documents than MS Word itself does.
I'm not faulting them, just saying that while everybody screws up in different ways, the liberal tendency toward being idealistic and focusing on motives means their particular downfall is that they tend to want very badly to achieve the impossible, without making much actual progress. As an example, pollution from power plants (and fatal illnesses caused by them) could have been reduced over 90% by switching from coal to nuclear. Liberals refused that option, choosing instead to,wish that the sun shone at night in order to provide solar-electric.
Conservatives, almost by definition, screw up by being so afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater that they keep the stinky old bathwater for far too long. Different ways of thinking create different problems, that's all. Probably the ideal situation would be for the liberals to set the goals, then turn it over to the conservatives to implement effective action to move toward those goals.
> Now, if your motivation is to make them dependent on you, that is a different issue. However, there is no evidence to support that is Bill Gate's intention with his philanthropy.
Newton's third law says that for every action, there is an equal reaction. Motivation and intent are not part of the formula. If you do X, Y will happen. It doesn't matter a bit what you're thinking about when you do X. You intentions affect how you FEEL, that's it. Other people are affected by your ACTIONS. If you set up a situation where they are in a dependent role, they'll be practicing dependence. Wishing that weren't true doesn't enter into it at all.
That's unfortunate for U.S. liberals because they have a lot of GREAT intentions. They really, really want to save the planet by driving 35 miles to buy soy and hemp at the organic market. Unfortunately, their actions, driving 35 miles, just burned a gallon and half of gas each way. Their intentions are so right, so pure. It's just that their actions are normally all wrong.
I've had dozens of individuals stay with me for a while, either in my spare bedroom or on my couch. A couple of my friends do the same. When someone is "down on their luck", just got out of prison, sobering up, whatever we get a call. My experience and my observation of others is that we can do a lot of good if we say to the person "I see you're down in a hole. I've been there, let me show you the way out." We show them how to get a job, right away, even with a felony record. We show them how to rent a place to stay without having money saved for the deposits , including utility deposits.
On the other hand, if we try to carry them of the hole instead of showing them the way out, it virtually always fails. Feeding them today means that in a few hours they'll be hungry again. It ensures their situation doesn't improve. What improves their situation is to say "come with me and I'll show you how we can earn somemoney today so you cqn buy groceries ". That gives them the skill, the mechanics of how to go earn money whenever you need to, but more importantly it gives them a new pattern "when you're running low on groceries, go do some work to earn some" rather than "when you're low on groceries, call someone and ask if they'll buy you groceries ". These are the facts from our experience.
You're very careful about extracting just the right words from a quote, and avoiding the words right before, in order to pretend you're arguing against someone by saying precisely the same thing they just said.
I said: > up through Windows 98 they tried fighting against the internet trend. That's over half of Microsoft's existence
Your reply: Sorry, but this is BS. At best it is true for the Win 9x strain of Windows.
Ok, so what I said about Windows 9x is only true of Windows 9x (and it's predecessors)? So in other words, it's precisely wtf I just said. PS - There entire philosophy and corporate culture didn't do a 180 overnight. They did realize that if they fought the internet, the internet would win, but even on phones and tablet their STILL trying to make it disk-based rather than network based, with multi-GB software packages installed and running locally on the tablet. This year, 2014, they are still doing that with their current tablets. Local computing is their thing.
> You don't know what COM is.
Ever altered a foreign object's vtable to point to your own component instead, by calculating the offset of a method pointer and using RtlMoveMemory to hijack the system object's method? Come back when you can pull that off successfully and we can talk about how COM works.
> COM is a language-neutral binary object model, which ensures that the system has a common object model where objects can be consumed regardless of what language was used to develop them.
You keep repeating that the components don't need to be written in the same language, as if not having a stupid requirement were the purpose of COM. Not so much. Microsoft did talk that up as a selling point since their previous approach did have stupid requirements, but that's kind of like saying the purpose of a car is to not require a specific brand of gas. According to you, a car isn't transportation, it's "an gasoline-brand-neutral machine". Have you thought about what you mean by "objects can be consumed"? That means a program can use the facilities of another, separately developed program. In other words, one program can be embedded in another. "but COM was *never* about being able to embed objects". Yeah, that's pretty much what is does. That winsock control you include in your program using COM? It's an object, embedded in your program. An object embedded. Instead of embedding it, if you want to use an object provided by something large, like Excel.exe, you might link to it. So using COM you can either embed an object (winsock) or link to an object (Excel). You can do object linking, and object embedding. In other words, Object Linking and Embedding. Add "on the internet" to that and you can rename it ActiveX.
> It is still very much at the core of Windows, mainly because it is so efficient (being a binary standard it has extremely little overhead - especially for in-proc objects).
It's pretty efficient IF early binding is used. When late binding is needed, that's a thousand times slower.
you pointed out, the two programs don't need to be written in the same language.
> "if you don't want pictures of your tits online, don't let anyone take pictures of your tits", implies that these actions are both immoral and stupid.
I don't know where you're coming up with this moral thing. Unless you define "immoral" to basically the same thing as "stupid", which would actually be fairly accurate but few people realize that these days. If you're a Hollywood starlet and you send out pictures of your boobs, someone is likely to show their buddy. That buddy sends it to his buddies and pretty soon your tits are all over the internet. "If you do this, it will likely result in that" isn't a statement of morality as commonly understood at this point in time.
Of course, if one actually reads a book of "morality" you'll find it says "don't fuck your neighbor's wife because that could get you killed. A prostitute is cheap, screwing your neighbor's wife could cost you your life." Today, though, we like to pretend that morality is either a) because God said so or b) a very abstract philosophical concept. Really, most of the great teaching is about how not to end up dead, how to have a happy life. In other words, how to not be stupid.
Windows, and DOS before it, was designed and built as the anti-server. Before DOS, there were network operating systems like Unix, where one server serviced many users. Didk Operating System (DOS) got it's very name and identity from bring the opposite - not a network operating system, but one based on everything running from the local disk. It ran on PERSONAL computers (PCs), so called because they were the opposite of the shared enterprise computers that came before. Microsoft did a great job of making a personal computer with all resources on the disk.
After the nice Windows desktop, Microsoft invested a billion dollars developing and deploying a technology called COM. The basic idea of COM was that you could embed documents from one program inside documents from another program, and that did cool things. Rhen the WWW came along, with the img tag. That approach threatened Microsoft's billion dollar investment, so up through Windows 98 they tried fighting against the internet trend.
That's over half of Microsoft's existence that they spent building the perfect opposite of a server. Linux was built to be like Unix, which was designed and built as a server from day one. Not surprisingly, Linux is good at what it was made for (network computing) and Windows is good at what it was designed to do - user-friendly local desktop work.
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Local policy makers should make preparations for what happens in a generation or two, agreed. This is, however, a solved problem. More money/jobs from the energy industry means that other businesses have paying customers- hair salons, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores - every segment of the economy benefits from the inflow of money to the area. Over the next 10-20 years, blighted abandoned areas become vibrant again. At that point, they are attractive places to build any business. That's the time that policy makers should encourage investment in any business that exports it's product or service out of the city. Manufacturing, software, universities- anything that is purchased by people outside the state will do just fine to maintain an inflow of cash to keep the local economy doing well.
Right now, these areas are so run-down that nobody wants to put any business there. It's a third- world environment, but with unions and Democrat labor laws. An influx of cash could allow Detroit to be rebuilt as a modern city again, which would then need to have intelligent policies just like any other modern city.
Simple question - would you prefer geothermal energy rather than energy obtained by fracturing?
> Then you may be surprised to know that Windows NT had a version for DEC Alpha (and possibly a couple of other RISC CPUs), along with compilers to match.
From 1995 or 1996 until 1999, as I recall. So three or four years. Windows has been around for 29 years, since 1985. So let's try this:
90% of Microsoft's effort has been focused purely on x86, while Linux as always been architecture-agnostic.
I understand where you're coming from. As you may know, I've been doing infosec for a long time, and I know the difference between "compliant" and "secure". I'm rather surprised you chose CompTIA Security+ as your example of a bad security certification. The new one especially is quite comprehensive, in my view. Not that a single certification can ensure that a candidate is ready to perform any and all jobs related to security, but I'd say that if even 10% of the people designing and maintaining these systems had enough knowledge to pass Security+, we'd be in a lot better shape.
He had a huge criminal enterprise to run, tons of money to launder, murders to order, and hopefully he'd make some time to enjoy his ill-gotten gains before he eventually made a mistake and got busted. If he was wasting his time setting up a captcha, that was pretty stupid. The smart thing would be for him to have someone eho understands banking and finance take care if the banking and finance, someone who understands programming take care of the programming, someone who understands high-capacity server infrastructure take care of the server infrastructure, ehile he ran the whole operation and spent some time on his boat. Actually, not really. He was successful before silk road,so the smart thing to do would have been to continue to make money legally. That has the advantage of not ending with a prison sentence.
> Paypal engineers do not go to prison for an extended period of time when they are caught.
Neither does the script monkey that Ulbricht hired to set up the captcha.
98 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux. Most phones also run Linux. See also consumer electronics of all kinds - TVs, routers, webcams, consumer NAS drives ... Linux works everywhere. As Linux has been installed everywhere over the last few years, Microsoft has gone from a monopoly, the 800 pound gorilla, to trying to catch up in order to survive.
There is a reason for this. Linux didn't make any assumptions about what hardware people were going to use next week. Even the architecture could be whatever you anted that day - DEC Alpha, Blackfin, ARM (any), Atmel AVR, TMS320, 68k, PA-RISC, H8, IBM Z, x86, assorted MIPS, Power, Sparc, and many others.
Microsoft built specifically for the desktop, and supported one platform - x86. Suddenly, most new processors being sold were ARM, and screens shrank from 23" to 4". Microsoft could only scramble and try to come up with something, anything tat would run on the newly popular ARM processors, and ended up with Windows RT. Linux kept chugging along because they had never made any assumptions about the hardware in first place. To start maing those assumptions now would be stupid.
We don't know whether smart watches will be all the rage next year, or if cloud computing wll take off even more than it has, or virtualization, or a resurgence of local computing with power, battery-friendly APUs and roll-up displays. To specialize for "dektop" hardware or "server" hardware would be dumb, because we don't know what those are going to look like five years from now, or if either will be a major category. How many people here remember building web sites for WebTV? How well did that pay off, investing in building a WebTV version, then a Playstation version? The sites that faired these changes the best built fluid, adaptive sites that don't CARE what kind of client is being used to view them - they just work, without being tailored to any specific stereotype of some users.
> I would hope
Hope is good. Got some change to go with that? That's what'l solve everything - hope and change. (I'm hoping for some change right about now).
Sure, your tax money will continue to pour into Tesla, because green. Most of this won't be tax-financed, though. It'll be paid for by forcing Nevada homeowners to pay Tesla for the lunchtime power production that'll be shunted to ground since they aren't home to use it.
> I find it a bit hard to believe that a guy who is able to get one of the largest black-market enterprises running on a server
Do you find it hardto believe that Paypal's engineers make significantly more obvious mistakes? They do, of course. The thing about crime, and security, is that you can do a hundred things just right, and be taken down by the one thing you missed. It's adversarial like sports, but unlike sports 47-2 is a losing score for the team who scored 47. Those two items on which you let the authorities score put you in prison.
DANE seems very nearly pointless to me. Maybe I'm mising something. The victim goes to Paypal.com. Their browser checks the certificate to make sure it's really Paypal.com, as opposed to a MITM or someone who hijacked Paypal's DNS. That's the typical use for TLS, right?
So checking the cert is supposed to protect the user from an adversary who can intercept packets addressed to Paypal.com and send back bogus responses. That means the adversary can intercept DNS packets intended for Paypal.com and respond wuth a bogus cert record. Nothing has been gained unless you can independently verify the DNS records using some other mechanism. It's proposed that DNSSEC be used for this. DNSSEC basically means the DNS record is signed, so to trust the DNS we need to validate the cert used to sign the DNS. Okay, soall we have to do is find a way to validate a DNS signing cert. If we can validate that cert, we can trust the ssl cert.
Hmm, we validate someone's cert by first validating their cert? I don't think we've made any progress toward solving the problem.
> The problem is that they are blocking commercial activities while allowing recreational activities
You can't see the difference between you operating a toy over an uninhabited field vs UPS and Amazon operating a fleet if thousands of commercial drones operating in neighborhoods? With commerce comes scale.
The sites got certificates and installed them several years ago, before thw current "https everywhere " trend. In other words, they decided that because they were handling sensitive information, they needed a secure connection. Maybe they have an order form,that accepts credit cards, whatever. For some reason, they needed to be more secured than most sites. The URL in the address bar says "https", indicating that it is secured. We know that although they publicly declared that their site should be secured, it isn't.
Contrast xkcd.com. Randall didn't get a certificate, because you don't need a secured connection to look at nerd comics. Which site presents a security risk? The site that has no need of tls, or the site that needs to be secured, but isn't?
* xkcd might actually have a cert, if they sell stuff on the site or whatever. I didn't bother checking because it's beside the point whether that specific site uses a cert.
I'm not sure how I ended up typing those extra parens. Odd.
These two are very, very handy for careful programmers, who don't just assume that everthing always works, and that noone is trying to hack, or enter "weird" input like a name with a single quote, such as o'Malley.
Examples:
open(INPUT, $file) or die "Couldn't open input: $!");
compare other languages, where being careful requires that every other line start with "if (!":
if(!open(INPUT, $file) ) {
die "Couldn't open input: $!";
}
Similarly:
die ("That's an awfully long name") if (($name > 1024));
vs:
if ($name > 1024) {
die("That's an awfully long name");
}
If you're regularly checking your assumptions, I think the syntax is very handy.
Perl is my preferred language for the majority of tasks that I do. I really like Perl overall. TIMTOWTDI annoys me, though. There is a right way to do it. Once is a great while, there are two correct ways, and still one best way.
TIMTOWTDI seems more appropriate for PHP, "do it however, as long as it looks like it kinda works for now. It's not like we're actual programmers who know what we're doing".
> It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two
Yep. Pretty much everything I own runs Linux, so no matter what device I'm working on the shell interface is the same. On my phone I use the graphical interface most of the time, of course, but I _can_ open a command line and find out what's using al my storage space it just the same as I would on my work desktop, my laptops, my server, my NAS, my PBX, and anything else I own.
At my 8-5 job, the company-owned machine has the same bash shell, which works the same way, running on an OSX kernel instead.
My experience is that when new versions of Word have problems opening a file created by a previous version, the solution is to open them in OpenOffice and use OO to save to the newest MS Word format (or leave them as odt).
In that way, OpenOffice has BETTER compatibility with various types of MS Word documents than MS Word itself does.
> Yeah! With blackjack! And hookers!
Make that poker instead of blackjack. Liquor in the front, poker in the rear.
I'm not faulting them, just saying that while everybody screws up in different ways, the liberal tendency toward being idealistic and focusing on motives means their particular downfall is that they tend to want very badly to achieve the impossible, without making much actual progress. As an example, pollution from power plants (and fatal illnesses caused by them) could have been reduced over 90% by switching from coal to nuclear. Liberals refused that option, choosing instead to,wish that the sun shone at night in order to provide solar-electric.
Conservatives, almost by definition, screw up by being so afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater that they keep the stinky old bathwater for far too long. Different ways of thinking create different problems, that's all. Probably the ideal situation would be for the liberals to set the goals, then turn it over to the conservatives to implement effective action to move toward those goals.
> Now, if your motivation is to make them dependent on you, that is a different issue. However, there is no evidence to support that is Bill Gate's intention with his philanthropy.
Newton's third law says that for every action, there is an equal reaction. Motivation and intent are not part of the formula. If you do X, Y will happen. It doesn't matter a bit what you're thinking about when you do X. You intentions affect how you FEEL, that's it. Other people are affected by your ACTIONS. If you set up a situation where they are in a dependent role, they'll be practicing dependence. Wishing that weren't true doesn't enter into it at all.
That's unfortunate for U.S. liberals because they have a lot of GREAT intentions. They really, really want to save the planet by driving 35 miles to buy soy and hemp at the organic market. Unfortunately, their actions, driving 35 miles, just burned a gallon and half of gas each way. Their intentions are so right, so pure. It's just that their actions are normally all wrong.
I've had dozens of individuals stay with me for a while, either in my spare bedroom or on my couch. A couple of my friends do the same. When someone is "down on their luck", just got out of prison, sobering up, whatever we get a call. My experience and my observation of others is that we can do a lot of good if we say to the person "I see you're down in a hole. I've been there, let me show you the way out." We show them how to get a job, right away, even with a felony record. We show them how to rent a place to stay without having money saved for the deposits , including utility deposits.
On the other hand, if we try to carry them of the hole instead of showing them the way out, it virtually always fails. Feeding them today means that in a few hours they'll be hungry again. It ensures their situation doesn't improve. What improves their situation is to say "come with me and I'll show you how we can earn somemoney today so you cqn buy groceries ". That gives them the skill, the mechanics of how to go earn money whenever you need to, but more importantly it gives them a new pattern "when you're running low on groceries, go do some work to earn some" rather than "when you're low on groceries, call someone and ask if they'll buy you groceries ". These are the facts from our experience.
You're very careful about extracting just the right words from a quote, and avoiding the words right before, in order to pretend you're arguing against someone by saying precisely the same thing they just said.
I said:
> up through Windows 98 they tried fighting against the internet trend. That's over half of Microsoft's existence
Your reply:
Sorry, but this is BS. At best it is true for the Win 9x strain of Windows.
Ok, so what I said about Windows 9x is only true of Windows 9x (and it's predecessors)? So in other words, it's precisely wtf I just said.
PS - There entire philosophy and corporate culture didn't do a 180 overnight. They did realize that if they fought the internet, the internet would win, but even on phones and tablet their STILL trying to make it disk-based rather than network based, with multi-GB software packages installed and running locally on the tablet. This year, 2014, they are still doing that with their current tablets. Local computing is their thing.
> You don't know what COM is.
Ever altered a foreign object's vtable to point to your own component instead, by calculating the offset of a method pointer and using RtlMoveMemory to hijack the system object's method? Come back when you can pull that off successfully and we can talk about how COM works.
> COM is a language-neutral binary object model, which ensures that the system has a common object model where objects can be consumed regardless of what language was used to develop them.
You keep repeating that the components don't need to be written in the same language, as if not having a stupid requirement were the purpose of COM. Not so much. Microsoft did talk that up as a selling point since their previous approach did have stupid requirements, but that's kind of like saying the purpose of a car is to not require a specific brand of gas. According to you, a car isn't transportation, it's "an gasoline-brand-neutral machine". Have you thought about what you mean by "objects can be consumed"? That means a program can use the facilities of another, separately developed program. In other words, one program can be embedded in another. "but COM was *never* about being able to embed objects". Yeah, that's pretty much what is does. That winsock control you include in your program using COM? It's an object, embedded in your program. An object embedded. Instead of embedding it, if you want to use an object provided by something large, like Excel.exe, you might link to it. So using COM you can either embed an object (winsock) or link to an object (Excel). You can do object linking, and object embedding. In other words, Object Linking and Embedding. Add "on the internet" to that and you can rename it ActiveX.
> It is still very much at the core of Windows, mainly because it is so efficient (being a binary standard it has extremely little overhead - especially for in-proc objects).
It's pretty efficient IF early binding is used. When late binding is needed, that's a thousand times slower.
you pointed out, the two programs don't need to be written in the same language.
> "if you don't want pictures of your tits online, don't let anyone take pictures of your tits", implies that these actions are both immoral and stupid.
I don't know where you're coming up with this moral thing. Unless you define "immoral" to basically the same thing as "stupid", which would actually be fairly accurate but few people realize that these days. If you're a Hollywood starlet and you send out pictures of your boobs, someone is likely to show their buddy. That buddy sends it to his buddies and pretty soon your tits are all over the internet. "If you do this, it will likely result in that" isn't a statement of morality as commonly understood at this point in time.
Of course, if one actually reads a book of "morality" you'll find it says "don't fuck your neighbor's wife because that could get you killed. A prostitute is cheap, screwing your neighbor's wife could cost you your life." Today, though, we like to pretend that morality is either a) because God said so or b) a very abstract philosophical concept. Really, most of the great teaching is about how not to end up dead, how to have a happy life. In other words, how to not be stupid.
Windows, and DOS before it, was designed and built as the anti-server.
Before DOS, there were network operating systems like Unix, where one server serviced many users. Didk Operating System (DOS) got it's very name and identity from bring the opposite - not a network operating system, but one based on everything running from the local disk. It ran on PERSONAL computers (PCs), so called because they were the opposite of the shared enterprise computers that came before. Microsoft did a great job of making a personal computer with all resources on the disk.
After the nice Windows desktop, Microsoft invested a billion dollars developing and deploying a technology called COM. The basic idea of COM was that you could embed documents from one program inside documents from another program, and that did cool things. Rhen the WWW came along, with the img tag. That approach threatened Microsoft's billion dollar investment, so up through Windows 98 they tried fighting against the internet trend.
That's over half of Microsoft's existence that they spent building the perfect opposite of a server. Linux was built to be like Unix, which was designed and built as a server from day one. Not surprisingly, Linux is good at what it was made for (network computing) and Windows is good at what it was designed to do - user-friendly local desktop work.