10 MB email limit I wouldn't allow that on any mail server I run.. 1 MB tops. Email is not for large file transfers.
Back in 1999-2000 time frame I was working at an office that had been acquired by a larger company. Said larger company used Exchange for all their email needs. Our office used an old desktop running linux. It was shoved in a corner of the server room but mainly forgotten.
I had set a limit of 1MB on email attachments on the linux server after some secretaries decided to start swapping 40MB word docs back and forth via email instead of the shared drives. They pretty much killed the mail server simply because it didn't have the disk space or IO speed to handle 40 MB attachments.
One day the HR department in the larger company decided to send out a 20MB PR fluff make you feel good about working here newletter.. via email.. to all 500+ employees.. Completely crashed the exchange server. Our little email server happily rejected the garbage and kept on trucking.
About 9 months after I left that company I got a call to rebuild the linux server. The hard drive had failed and no one knew anything about it.
At another company there was an old Novell Netware 3.x server in a closet.. covered in about an inch of dust with an uptime in the 4 year range.
Actually Mitnick was held without bail or trial for four years. During this pre-plea bargain time he was under court order to not touch anything more complex than a calculator.
Of course the government did learn their lesson. Now when they have someone they don't like but can't prove it in court... Well they just throw them in gitmo.
Without any communication to the outside world or even access to a lawyer people tend to just forget about them.
Because the founding fathers thought they took care of that rather unambiguously.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
However, for a number of reasons that amendment is now inconvenient. Rather than outlaw it, it is just being (illegally IMO) regulated to death. Give it another 50 to 100 years and the popular support to repeal it will be there.
When you actually look at the bill of rights you will find that most of them have been steadily watered down over the years.
-Jerry PS: IMO only the third one hasn't been watered down. They just build bases now.
Actually you can have DRM in open source which is what GPL v3 is trying to prevent.
Imagine adding in a new DRM codec to mplayer. That new code loads a license file, decodes the license using Public Key Cryptography to get the real decryption keys to decode the DRM'd media. Or even worse having to talk to a central server to get the decryption keys.
DRM is a major threat. I'm not sure that GPL3 will be an effective solution. But at least RMS,etc. are making an attempt.
I believe he probably did read and remember it all. If you think back on it most of what you do in school is repetition. From the article he tends to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else until he gets it. My guess is that someone would diagnose him with Aspergers if they examined him.
Around 8yo I was reading about atomic theory, theory of relativity, etc. And I understood the vast majority of it. That ability to focus on one thing and block everything else out greatly speeds things up. Of course it has to be something "interesting".. Otherwise your just bored so you read a book, listen to the radio and watch tv... All at the same time:)
Hopefully they will evalute the kid and force him to work on the things he is weak at.. Some of the common ones are speech abnormalities, clumsiness, social interactions, etc.
I always go for a pay raise when switching jobs.. Why else would you switch jobs?... Oh.. You mean getting a raise and staying at the same job? hmm.. I seem to remember a friend of a friend saying that used to happen. I'm sure it's an urban legend though. Similar to pension plans and bigfoot.
I know I'm working for the pay I got in 2000 (minus promised bonuses of course). At least until I start my new job in December.
And yes I'm on a Java project using XML/XSLT as the presentation layer. Personally I find XSLT's to be overly complicated pages. It has also been much slower and much more memory intensive than a comparable Bean/Struts/JSP solution.
A good Bean/Struts/JSP solution would make extensive use of JSP tags and not have any raw Java code in them.
On the other hand you can go with a code heavy JSP solution with methods and inner classes defined in the JSP itself.
I've used PHP in the past and remember it being on par with JSP. You can be as clean as you want in PHP or as dirty as you want.
But in the business world PHP won't make inroads easily. Businesses are trying to reduce the number of languages they have to keep expertise in. XML is replacing EDI as the data interchange standard on a large number of fronts. Java is being pushed very successfully by IBM, etc as the enterprise language to do everything in.
For most places Struts/JSP is the presentation layer they go with. XML/XSLT has interest.. But the speed/memory issues hold them back right now. Anyone suggesting PHP gets pushed towards the Java solutions.
And of the 5 Fortune 500 companies in this area I have worked with 4 are going Java. 1 is going.NET.
-Jerry
Esprit terminals, room mates and sisters.
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 1
This goes back to college. I had finished my MP (Machine Problem) in just 20 hrs.. Everything seemed to be working fine so I decided to delete the emacs backup files (~) before I submitted my work.
Unfortunately the shift key was small and the return key large on those old Esprits. And of course I had removed the alias rm='rm -i' as being too annoying. So my rm *~ turns into rm * and it happily deletes all my files.
Unfortunately I had no backups (soft or hard copy). It only took me 10 hrs to do it the second time.. And I remember thinking at the time that it was much better code the second time around.
Later in that same semester I came back to my dorm room to get on my Amiga.. I find my room mate sitting at my desk and the first thing he says is "I didn't do it!". My brand new 150mb HD is dead. I'm still not sure if he was telling the truth or not.. But I threatened him with extreme bodily harm if I ever found him near the computer again.
Of course going even farther back there is the time my sister dumped a large glass of cherry koolaid into my C64 disk box. I saved about 50% of the disks.
If you actually read the PDF you would see that they compared the opcode sequences between sobig and various programs.
The important bit is that when sobig was compared to Atomic Mail Sender (AMS) they didn't find much in the way of opcode sequence matches. What was there was standard glue code that just has to be there.
When they compared sobig to Send-Safe they found big chunks of common code, strings, etc.
And they don't say that Ruslan Ibragimov is the author. They say he and/or his development team. Assuming he has 4-5 developers working for him it could be one developer who swiped the Send-Safe code and used it to develop sobig. Although I would bet on Ruslan giving the nod on the development of sobig.
This type of analysis is how people find GPL violations. Unless you take alot of effort to completely rearrange the code it keeps the same signatures, embedded strings, etc.
The analysis appears to be sounds. LEA should use Ruslan as a starting point to track down the person(s) responsible for sobig.
But since we are talking about spam tool/virus/worm writers I think the Aliens quote is best..
I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
p.getChildren().remove(c); will not remove c from the database; it will ony remove the link to p (and cause a NOT NULL constraint violation, in this case). You need to explicitly delete() the Child. Of course delete() is what actually deletes from the database.
In the applications I usually write the user can do many things to the set of objects (multiple page round trips) and want them committed only when they hit that final save.
And here is the kind of sequencing, parent<->child linking problem I have.
Page->Group->TechSpec
->Products->TechSpecData Additionally there is a link between TechSpec and TechSpecData.
The deletes have to go TechSpecData, Products, TechSpec, Group, Page. The inserts have to go Page, Group, TechSpec, Products, TechSpecData.
And of course the key from TechSpec has to cascade to the referencing TechSpecData.
Even if you ignore the fact you can't mark an object for deletion.. I can find no reference to controlling the order of the operations of children if you call saveOrUpdate.
In the persistence layer I use I can mark groups for deletion, modify the page and other groups. And then with a single Page.save() get everything deleted, inserted, and updated.
Under hibernate I found I had to use the essentially the same code to track and sequence things properly.
But since all of these things were done by Hibernate for you.. Just how do I mark an object for deletion during the saveOrUpdate? How do I specify the order of operation for the delete/insert/updates?
I've had the misfortune to inherit a project that was written by someone who believed Hibernate is a persistence layer.
Hibernate is tempermental at best and broken at worst. The biggest problem is it has it's own special language called HSQL which gets converted into SQL at runtime.
HSQL is supposed to be database neutral. However, things don't work the way they are supposed to all the time. Specifically CLOB/BLOBs on DB2 for OS390 crash the OS390 JVM. Other things fail (sometimes silently) in unexpected ways. I suspect alot of the problems I have with hibernate are due to the fact that it's hard for most people to access a JVM running on OS/390 talking to DB2 on OS/390. Because of that hibernate apparently has little/no testing against that environment.
Hibernate has more features than JDBC but in the end you still have to build out your real persistence layer code to handle all the parent<->child relationship things in your object hierarchies.
I already have programs that will take a database schema and create the domain, broker and standard SQL statements for JDBC based persistence layers. Hibernate doesn't save any development time for me. And anyone else that has been doing java for a few years probably has the same sort of tools and it won't save them any time either.
However, if you were starting from scratch, in an environment heavily supported by Hibernate it probably would not be a bad choice to go with. Just don't think it will magically do all the hard things like tracking updated/deleted/new objects, cascading auto generated keys from parent to child (or child to parent if your tables swing that way) or sequence delete/update/inserts to avoid referential integrity problems.
The Pandemic flu of 1918-1919 - 10-25% exposed died, 25-37 million victims. They think it was a mutated swine flu.
Bubonic plague (bacteria actually but just to point out a very deadly NATURAL biological agent) - ~90% exposed died, ~137 million victims.
When europeans came to the US the diseases they brought wiped out about 90% of the Native American population simply because they didn't have the resistances the Europeans had.
So you think a genetically engineered flu like what was in The Stand isn't possible? That it couldn't have a kill rate as high as 90+%?
Genetic engineering of this kind is far worse than radiation. At least radiation will decay and disappear in 50,000 years or so.
Biological agents mutate and get stronger through the standard darwinian evolutionary processes.
They only reason we got rid of smallpox was there was a global effort to vaccinate everyone on the planet for decades. Colds and flu strains are so numerous that we haven't been able to devise a way to get rid of the ones we know of..
And they want to build super versions of something we can't irradicate now?
To paraphase from memory The Stand: This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a wimper.
I've had DirectTV for about 6-7 yrs now. During heavy rain/snow/etc it might get choppy or just cut out. And the occasional no visible reason blackout as well. But I'd put it on the order of 1-2 hrs total for a year.
The only possible issue is that you don't get local channels (with the exception of a few select major cities). Personally, I don't watch network TV anymore so it's a non-issue for me.
If you look at actively maintained code over the long term you eventually get to the point where not much of the original code is left.
When doing development on an existing codebase I always look at two questions:
Would it be faster to redesign/rewrite?
Would it be more maintainable to redesign/rewrite?
If the answer is yes to both, you may have a case for a complete rewrite.
Your argument about software being fundamentally different from a building is not really accurate.
If you *wanted* to you could gradually increase a houses foundation. You could turn a single family home into a 100 story skyscraper.
You can jack up the house, put down a new foundation, etc, etc.
However, it would have been cheaper and quicker to bulldoze and start from scratch. No one in the real world attempts to do it that way since everyone understands what a building is. They understand what what people are proposing is too major of a change and is just not safe.
With software most of the decision makers don't understand software at all. So they view it in simplistic terms and have no concept of how sweeping the changes they have requested really are.
But it's true, you can take a code base and add a tremendous amount of features to it. You can fundamentally change the design of it incrementally.
It would have been cheaper and easier to do a full rewrite though. Unfortunately software doesn't collapse like a building does when people make stupid decisions like that. Instead managers see slipped time lines and horrid programs. Eventually they get cleaned up and run properly.
Of course over the years, I've learned that Rewrite and Redesign are bad words. Refactor and retrofit are much better words to use right now.
Would you put an "addition" on a skyscraper to change it from:
100 stories, 40 ft x 40 ft to
200 stories, 80 ft x 80 ft?
Programs are designed to do certain tasks with room for expansion.
As time goes on, tasks are added.. Eventually, the tasks grow well beyond that expansion factor in the original design and a rewrite often in order.
A perfect example of that is Sendmail. A sendmail.cf is a scary place to visit. That's why you have so many complete redesign/rewrites (Qmail, Postfix, etc).
Although I haven't read the book the comment was straight forward to understand.
Heinlein predicted the war. However, he predicted the US stayed out of it and Europe self-destructed.
In actuallity the US WOULD have stayed out if not for Pearl Harbor. Because of Pearl Harbor, we did get involved and deviated from Heinlein's prediction.
So in answer to your question, he predicted the war, but got the outcome wrong. Although I don't think you had to be psychic to predict a war occuring in the late 1930's.
First off, students have no personal privacy in schools. Their lockers can be searched at will (officially that's school property). They can be searched at will (don't remember the example but the students were searched under the guise of safety).
Personal expression is expressly forbidden. Students have been punished for passing out urls to websites that were critical of the school. Said URL was not on school computers or developed on school time. Any any attempt to develop any sort of paper without administrative supervision is quickly squashed.
Basically the constitution doesn't apply if your under 18.
Let's try this under a new context:
I don't think there is any privacy issue in a work context. An employee should expect to be under constant surveillance while at work, and careful monitoring of employees, their activities, and company resources will result in more productive companies and higher profits.
However, please note that this policy doesn't invade the personal privacy of employees: they aren't being required to submit to searches, give up personal expression, etc. This is merely a measure to monitor compliance with existing company policies.
Actually, I wouldn't say that you can't observe evolution.
When I was growing up, My dad and I hunted rabbits. You could kick a rabbit up, the dogs would chase it and it would come back to where it started in a fairly short run (1/4 mile usually).
The a few years later we had a large coyote problem come into the area which wiped out most of the rabbits. When they came back their behavior was much different. The rabbits would run for a mile or longer before coming back to where they started.
Evolution in action. The rabbits that could run longer/faster survived being found by coyotes and lived to breed.
You can find examples of small steps of evolution if your paying attention. If small steps occur, those steps over large periods of time would become large.
But it does boggle the mind that in the end we came from something the size of the common cold.
Personally, I think it'd be funny if when these ppl got to heaven God said, yes I created evolution. I didn't want to spend all my time tinkering with all the animals on that little blue spec.
Although I didn't post the slam... Unfortunately I *have* used FoxPro and Visual Fox Pro.
At a previous company we went through the transition from FP to VFP 3. It was the buggiest crappiest POS you could ever imagine.
We made an agreement with our manager. If this list of critical bugs gets fixed in VFP 5, we'll stay with it. Otherwise we are switching to VB.
I learned alot of VB at that company and can say I never had anywhere near the issues in VB that I had in VFP.
Also, whenever we called MS on a VFP issue the standard response was that's a known issue with no work around. MS has always considered FP it's bastard step-child. They couldn't say they were going to bury it.. But they really never fed it or kept it real healthy either.
BTW, versions I have used: FP 2.6, VFP 3+5. VB 3-6.
Slashdot Mirror
No not forever.. The record so far is 14 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
John Titor would be the person to help you out with that.
Will a four digit ID do?
I played Wasteland on a C64.
I can remember swapping disks around to get a full inventory to the shop in Las Vegas..
And killing that massive bot at the intersection.. What was it some sort of Scorpion bot?
10 MB email limit I wouldn't allow that on any mail server I run.. 1 MB tops. Email is not for large file transfers.
Back in 1999-2000 time frame I was working at an office that had been acquired by a larger company.
Said larger company used Exchange for all their email needs. Our office used an old desktop running linux. It was shoved in a corner of the server room but mainly forgotten.
I had set a limit of 1MB on email attachments on the linux server after some secretaries decided to start swapping 40MB word docs back and forth via email instead of the shared drives. They pretty much killed the mail server simply because it didn't have the disk space or IO speed to handle 40 MB attachments.
One day the HR department in the larger company decided to send out a 20MB PR fluff make you feel good about working here newletter.. via email.. to all 500+ employees.. Completely crashed the exchange server. Our little email server happily rejected the garbage and kept on trucking.
About 9 months after I left that company I got a call to rebuild the linux server. The hard drive had failed and no one knew anything about it.
At another company there was an old Novell Netware 3.x server in a closet.. covered in about an inch of dust with an uptime in the 4 year range.
-Jerry
Actually Mitnick was held without bail or trial for four years.
During this pre-plea bargain time he was under court order to not touch anything more complex than a calculator.
Of course the government did learn their lesson. Now when they have someone they don't like but can't prove it in court... Well they just throw them in gitmo.
Without any communication to the outside world or even access to a lawyer people tend to just forget about them.
-Jerry
Because the founding fathers thought they took care of that rather unambiguously.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
However, for a number of reasons that amendment is now inconvenient. Rather than outlaw it, it is just being (illegally IMO) regulated to death. Give it another 50 to 100 years and the popular support to repeal it will be there.
When you actually look at the bill of rights you will find that most of them have been steadily watered down over the years.
-Jerry
PS: IMO only the third one hasn't been watered down. They just build bases now.
Actually you can have DRM in open source which is what GPL v3 is trying to prevent.
Imagine adding in a new DRM codec to mplayer.
That new code loads a license file, decodes the license using Public Key Cryptography to get the real decryption keys to decode the DRM'd media. Or even worse having to talk to a central server to get the decryption keys.
DRM is a major threat. I'm not sure that GPL3 will be an effective solution. But at least RMS,etc. are making an attempt.
I believe he probably did read and remember it all.
:)
If you think back on it most of what you do in school is repetition.
From the article he tends to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else until he gets it.
My guess is that someone would diagnose him with Aspergers if they examined him.
Around 8yo I was reading about atomic theory, theory of relativity, etc. And I understood the vast majority of it. That ability to focus on one thing and block everything else out greatly speeds things up. Of course it has to be something "interesting".. Otherwise your just bored so you read a book, listen to the radio and watch tv... All at the same time
Hopefully they will evalute the kid and force him to work on the things he is weak at.. Some of the common ones are speech abnormalities, clumsiness, social interactions, etc.
-Jerry
I always go for a pay raise when switching jobs.. Why else would you switch jobs? ... Oh.. You mean getting a raise and staying at the same job?
hmm.. I seem to remember a friend of a friend saying that used to happen.
I'm sure it's an urban legend though. Similar to pension plans and bigfoot.
I know I'm working for the pay I got in 2000 (minus promised bonuses of course).
At least until I start my new job in December.
-Jerry
Depends on what you consider "code".
.NET.
I would call all of these xsl tags "code".
xsl:choose
xsl:when
xsl:otherwise
xsl:for-each
xsl:if
xsl:call-template
xsl:with-param
And yes I'm on a Java project using XML/XSLT as the presentation layer.
Personally I find XSLT's to be overly complicated pages. It has also been much slower and much more memory intensive than a comparable Bean/Struts/JSP solution.
A good Bean/Struts/JSP solution would make extensive use of JSP tags and not have any raw Java code in them.
On the other hand you can go with a code heavy JSP solution with methods and inner classes defined in the JSP itself.
I've used PHP in the past and remember it being on par with JSP. You can be as clean as you want in PHP or as dirty as you want.
But in the business world PHP won't make inroads easily. Businesses are trying to reduce the number of languages they have to keep expertise in. XML is replacing EDI as the data interchange standard on a large number of fronts. Java is being pushed very successfully by IBM, etc as the enterprise language to do everything in.
For most places Struts/JSP is the presentation layer they go with. XML/XSLT has interest.. But the speed/memory issues hold them back right now. Anyone suggesting PHP gets pushed towards the Java solutions.
And of the 5 Fortune 500 companies in this area I have worked with 4 are going Java. 1 is going
-Jerry
This goes back to college. I had finished my MP (Machine Problem) in just 20 hrs.. Everything seemed to be working fine so I decided to delete the emacs backup files (~) before I submitted my work.
Unfortunately the shift key was small and the return key large on those old Esprits. And of course I had removed the alias rm='rm -i' as being too annoying. So my rm *~ turns into rm * and it happily deletes all my files.
Unfortunately I had no backups (soft or hard copy). It only took me 10 hrs to do it the second time.. And I remember thinking at the time that it was much better code the second time around.
Later in that same semester I came back to my dorm room to get on my Amiga.. I find my room mate sitting at my desk and the first thing he says is "I didn't do it!". My brand new 150mb HD is dead. I'm still not sure if he was telling the truth or not.. But I threatened him with extreme bodily harm if I ever found him near the computer again.
Of course going even farther back there is the time my sister dumped a large glass of cherry koolaid into my C64 disk box. I saved about 50% of the disks.
-Jerry
If you actually read the PDF you would see that they compared the opcode sequences between sobig and various programs.
The important bit is that when sobig was compared to Atomic Mail Sender (AMS) they didn't find much in the way of opcode sequence matches. What was there was standard glue code that just has to be there.
When they compared sobig to Send-Safe they found big chunks of common code, strings, etc.
And they don't say that Ruslan Ibragimov is the author. They say he and/or his development team.
Assuming he has 4-5 developers working for him it could be one developer who swiped the Send-Safe code and used it to develop sobig. Although I would bet on Ruslan giving the nod on the development of sobig.
This type of analysis is how people find GPL violations. Unless you take alot of effort to completely rearrange the code it keeps the same signatures, embedded strings, etc.
The analysis appears to be sounds. LEA should use Ruslan as a starting point to track down the person(s) responsible for sobig.
But since we are talking about spam tool/virus/worm writers I think the Aliens quote is best..
I say we dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
-Jerry
Now that's quite interesting..
I double checked the current hibernate docs and there is no way to mark an object for deletion.
Specifically look here
p.getChildren().remove(c);
will not remove c from the database; it will ony remove the link to p (and cause a NOT NULL constraint violation, in this case). You need to explicitly delete() the Child.
Of course delete() is what actually deletes from the database.
In the applications I usually write the user can do many things to the set of objects (multiple page round trips) and want them committed only when they hit that final save.
And here is the kind of sequencing, parent<->child linking problem I have.
Page->Group->TechSpec
->Products->TechSpecData
Additionally there is a link between TechSpec and TechSpecData.
The deletes have to go TechSpecData, Products, TechSpec, Group, Page.
The inserts have to go Page, Group, TechSpec, Products, TechSpecData.
And of course the key from TechSpec has to cascade to the referencing TechSpecData.
Even if you ignore the fact you can't mark an object for deletion.. I can find no reference to controlling the order of the operations of children if you call saveOrUpdate.
In the persistence layer I use I can mark groups for deletion, modify the page and other groups. And then with a single Page.save() get everything deleted, inserted, and updated.
Under hibernate I found I had to use the essentially the same code to track and sequence things properly.
But since all of these things were done by Hibernate for you..
Just how do I mark an object for deletion during the saveOrUpdate?
How do I specify the order of operation for the delete/insert/updates?
Inquiring minds want to know.
-Jerry
I've had the misfortune to inherit a project that was written by someone who believed Hibernate is a persistence layer.
Hibernate is tempermental at best and broken at worst. The biggest problem is it has it's own special language called HSQL which gets converted into SQL at runtime.
HSQL is supposed to be database neutral. However, things don't work the way they are supposed to all the time. Specifically CLOB/BLOBs on DB2 for OS390 crash the OS390 JVM. Other things fail (sometimes silently) in unexpected ways. I suspect alot of the problems I have with hibernate are due to the fact that it's hard for most people to access a JVM running on OS/390 talking to DB2 on OS/390. Because of that hibernate apparently has little/no testing against that environment.
Hibernate has more features than JDBC but in the end you still have to build out your real persistence layer code to handle all the parent<->child relationship things in your object hierarchies.
I already have programs that will take a database schema and create the domain, broker and standard SQL statements for JDBC based persistence layers. Hibernate doesn't save any development time for me. And anyone else that has been doing java for a few years probably has the same sort of tools and it won't save them any time either.
However, if you were starting from scratch, in an environment heavily supported by Hibernate it probably would not be a bad choice to go with.
Just don't think it will magically do all the hard things like tracking updated/deleted/new objects, cascading auto generated keys from parent to child (or child to parent if your tables swing that way) or sequence delete/update/inserts to avoid referential integrity problems.
-Jerry
Obviously you've never been around goats.
They WILL eat ANYTHING.
If you've ever taken a car radiator apart, you'll see all these little metal cooling fins.
One of my dad's friends had a goat that got out. Found the dismantled radiator on the picnic table. Ate alot of the fins.
No, it did not survive it.
-Jerry
Guess you don't read much history do you.
The Pandemic flu of 1918-1919 - 10-25% exposed died, 25-37 million victims. They think it was a mutated swine flu.
Bubonic plague (bacteria actually but just to point out a very deadly NATURAL biological agent) - ~90% exposed died, ~137 million victims.
When europeans came to the US the diseases they brought wiped out about 90% of the Native American population simply because they didn't have the resistances the Europeans had.
So you think a genetically engineered flu like what was in The Stand isn't possible?
That it couldn't have a kill rate as high as 90+%?
Genetic engineering of this kind is far worse than radiation. At least radiation will decay and disappear in 50,000 years or so.
Biological agents mutate and get stronger through the standard darwinian evolutionary processes.
They only reason we got rid of smallpox was there was a global effort to vaccinate everyone on the planet for decades. Colds and flu strains are so numerous that we haven't been able to devise a way to get rid of the ones we know of..
And they want to build super versions of something we can't irradicate now?
To paraphase from memory The Stand:
This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a wimper.
-Jerry
My experience is basically the same.
I've had DirectTV for about 6-7 yrs now.
During heavy rain/snow/etc it might get choppy or just cut out. And the occasional no visible reason blackout as well.
But I'd put it on the order of 1-2 hrs total for a year.
The only possible issue is that you don't get local channels (with the exception of a few select major cities). Personally, I don't watch network TV anymore so it's a non-issue for me.
-Jerry
If you look at actively maintained code over the long term you eventually get to the point where not much of the original code is left.
When doing development on an existing codebase I always look at two questions:
Would it be faster to redesign/rewrite?
Would it be more maintainable to redesign/rewrite?
If the answer is yes to both, you may have a case for a complete rewrite.
Your argument about software being fundamentally different from a building is not really accurate.
If you *wanted* to you could gradually increase a houses foundation.
You could turn a single family home into a 100 story skyscraper.
You can jack up the house, put down a new foundation, etc, etc.
However, it would have been cheaper and quicker to bulldoze and start from scratch. No one in the real world attempts to do it that way since everyone understands what a building is. They understand what what people are proposing is too major of a change and is just not safe.
With software most of the decision makers don't understand software at all. So they view it in simplistic terms and have no concept of how sweeping the changes they have requested really are.
But it's true, you can take a code base and add a tremendous amount of features to it. You can fundamentally change the design of it incrementally.
It would have been cheaper and easier to do a full rewrite though. Unfortunately software doesn't collapse like a building does when people make stupid decisions like that. Instead managers see slipped time lines and horrid programs. Eventually they get cleaned up and run properly.
Of course over the years, I've learned that Rewrite and Redesign are bad words. Refactor and retrofit are much better words to use right now.
-Jerry
Nope.
Would you put an "addition" on a skyscraper to change it from:
100 stories, 40 ft x 40 ft to
200 stories, 80 ft x 80 ft?
Programs are designed to do certain tasks with room for expansion.
As time goes on, tasks are added.. Eventually, the tasks grow well beyond that expansion factor in the original design and a rewrite often in order.
A perfect example of that is Sendmail. A sendmail.cf is a scary place to visit. That's why you have so many complete redesign/rewrites (Qmail, Postfix, etc).
-Jerry
There comes a time in any softwares life that a rewrite IS the correct decision.
To put it in real world terms...
If you take a single floor home and start adding floors to it, you won't ever turn it into a skyscraper. At least not one I'd ever want to be near.
If you want a skyscraper, you bull doze the house, design the skyscraper and build it.
A lot of early design decisions can really haunt you later. Like the Apache threading example in the article.
-Jerry
It's not unfixable. It's just inconvienent.
Freenet has non-trivial to break privacy for it's users. I won't say unbreakable since that's not really proveable.
Of course it has problems:
1) very slow
2) very unreliable
3) not easily searchble.
Because of these issues it's not going to replace Napster/Kazaa/etc for normal users.
That's always the tradeoff for security anyway. Easy to use or secure? Pick one.
Although I haven't read the book the comment was straight forward to understand.
Heinlein predicted the war. However, he predicted the US stayed out of it and Europe self-destructed.
In actuallity the US WOULD have stayed out if not for Pearl Harbor. Because of Pearl Harbor, we did get involved and deviated from Heinlein's prediction.
So in answer to your question, he predicted the war, but got the outcome wrong. Although I don't think you had to be psychic to predict a war occuring in the late 1930's.
-Jerry
First off, students have no personal privacy in schools. Their lockers can be searched at will (officially that's school property). They can be searched at will (don't remember the example but the students were searched under the guise of safety).
Personal expression is expressly forbidden. Students have been punished for passing out urls to websites that were critical of the school. Said URL was not on school computers or developed on school time. Any any attempt to develop any sort of paper without administrative supervision is quickly squashed.
Basically the constitution doesn't apply if your under 18.
Let's try this under a new context:
I don't think there is any privacy issue in a work context. An employee should expect to be under constant surveillance while at work, and careful monitoring of employees, their activities, and company resources will result in more productive companies and higher profits.
However, please note that this policy doesn't invade the personal privacy of employees: they aren't being required to submit to searches, give up personal expression, etc. This is merely a measure to monitor compliance with existing company policies.
Scary ain't it?
-Jerry
Actually, I wouldn't say that you can't observe evolution.
When I was growing up, My dad and I hunted rabbits. You could kick a rabbit up, the dogs would chase it and it would come back to where it started in a fairly short run (1/4 mile usually).
The a few years later we had a large coyote problem come into the area which wiped out most of the rabbits. When they came back their behavior was much different. The rabbits would run for a mile or longer before coming back to where they started.
Evolution in action. The rabbits that could run longer/faster survived being found by coyotes and lived to breed.
You can find examples of small steps of evolution if your paying attention. If small steps occur, those steps over large periods of time would become large.
But it does boggle the mind that in the end we came from something the size of the common cold.
Personally, I think it'd be funny if when these ppl got to heaven God said, yes I created evolution. I didn't want to spend all my time tinkering with all the animals on that little blue spec.
-Jerry
Although I didn't post the slam...
Unfortunately I *have* used FoxPro and Visual Fox Pro.
At a previous company we went through the transition from FP to VFP 3. It was the buggiest crappiest POS you could ever imagine.
We made an agreement with our manager. If this list of critical bugs gets fixed in VFP 5, we'll stay with it. Otherwise we are switching to VB.
I learned alot of VB at that company and can say I never had anywhere near the issues in VB that I had in VFP.
Also, whenever we called MS on a VFP issue the standard response was that's a known issue with no work around. MS has always considered FP it's bastard step-child. They couldn't say they were going to bury it.. But they really never fed it or kept it real healthy either.
BTW, versions I have used:
FP 2.6, VFP 3+5.
VB 3-6.
-Jerry