Didn't Tom Watson (founder of IBM) once claim that the world only needed 5 computers, and he was the man to build them?
Yes, and at the then current price/performance curves he was right.
Of course this was (even before) back when a mechanical calculator cost about a thousand bucks and a thousand bucks was worth a thousand bucks. Now you've got 4-function calculators (with bad buttons) at give-away prices.
Change the price/performance curves and the definition of "enough" changes.
The only people this affects is other proprietary information horders.
The thing that struck me is that the patent really applies only to proprietary competition to GPL'd software.
I'm firmly convinced that the future of IT lies in essentially the supply chain, where that chain has more than two links, and where it is neither possible nor desirable to have all the links under your control. This leads to an unholy alliance between suits and hackers neither of whom want to have anything to do with the other and who totally reject the basic assumptions and priorities of the other. Oddly enough, methinks the suits need the hackers more than the hackers need the suits.
Bugs is bad. Totally different means of coping, but this is the common ground. Also what matters to suits is of extreme indifference to hackers and vice-versa. So overall it's worth a pittance to do something that helps out the other side enormously.
GPL'd "Product". Customer: What's this src thingee? What do I do with it? Vendor: That's the source. Your're paying us so that you don't have to mess with it. Customer: Can I install this on my home computer? Friends? Neighbors? Vendor: Completely legal. However, those are your support headaches, not mine. Hacker: I think I've found a bug in old-version, still in latest version. Steps to duplicate and possibly even a potential fix. Vendor: Thankee. Fixing foo breaks bar, but maybe this fixes both.
To make a hurricane, you need lots of warm surface water under the path of the would-be hurricane. If there's enough warm surface water in the equatorial Atlantic, any minor squall coming off the west coast of Africa will likely become a hurricane. If you've got a good handle on ocean surface conditions, by itself, you can make fairly reliable predictions on numbers and strengths of hurricanes. Where they hit land is another matter. What's really missing is good modeling of the oceans.
I just don't think the models are there yet. That's an understatement.
"wherein the total licensing cost comprises a software license for all employees of the entity and all customers of the entity." Emphasis added.
Maybe not so obvious.
Per employee pricing for all employees is obvious. Dunno what they're up to with extending it to all customers, somehow I expect it will turn out to be a very wise move.
"The ends justify the means, and all that?" Good one, but if the ends do not justify the means, then what does justify the means? If the means are not employed to effect some end, then why are the means employed? What is true is that ordinary ends do not justify extraordinary means.
"management team"? Like a "sanitary engineer" is almost certainly not an engineer, a "management team" is almost certainly not a team. The term "team" is used in the hopes of maybe getting a wee bit of cooperation out of the members.
Real teams are pretty rare, and when they do exist they tend not to advertise themselves. The use of the term "team" is a fairly good indicator that it is not in fact a team, but a pretender.
Probably not. Too many other ports. The only legitimate traffic is on the local LAN, which works perfectly well without a gateway. Simpler, easier, and possibly more effective than a firewall.
won't even load Microsoft's website anymore Gizmo happy. And Microsoft wonders why they are having so much problems with viruses and worms. If you hang a "Kick me." sign on your rear, people will find a way.
Then you go off and talk about social and economic changes. Sure, these changes are important, but they are not warfare.
From what I understand of history, the social and economic changes are both the primary causes and the primary consequences of warfare. Been that way for at least the last several thousand years.
Teams are an "in place of" not and "in addition to" type of thingee.
Management judges a team on results, not on how the results were achieved. If a team fails to perform, it's back to the old way of doing things. Management's rights regarding teams is the ultimate solution, to destroy the teams.
A teams actions must be transparent and accountable for their actions, right up the chain of leadership. That isn't a team. It's a chain of command. Weakest link and all that.
Windoz is more like an ancient rustbucket of a car that stops running if you remove that plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary on the dash.
Sounds accurate. And my NT4 Domain Controller/File Server has been up and running continuously for the last 2+ years.
That's not stability. That's just not rocking the boat. No patches. No updates. No upgrades. Original IE which is never used. No gateway. Intentionally. Can only talk to the LAN.
If you're so allegedly smart, figure it out and let us know what it *is* doing.
It doesn't take a lot of smarts to know that it is hardly necessary to know exactly what something is doing to know that it is doing something.
"That message merely indicates that the OS has halted in a known state where all files have been closed, and the OS is no longer running."
Evidence. I assume that purports to explain what happens on a system shutdown. That explanation fails to account for the time consumed. In the time unaccounted for, Microsoft software is doing something. Microsoft does not want to give any indication as to what it is doing. I'e seen a couple of systems killed by going through the approved shutdown procedure, none by killing power.
Programming doesn't introduce some new kind of situation to deal with that teams of two haven't been dealing with for centuries.
1. "their strengths have to fix your weaknesses, your strengths have to fix their weaknesses" By far the most important. An old rule of thumb (before the Mythical Man Month) was that "if one programmer can do it in one year, two programmers can do it in two years." When and if the "two heads are better than one" comes enough into play, the answer can be two months!
3. "who is going to do what". Bad place for management to meddle. People tend to hide their weaknesses, even from management. When a team works, individual weaknesses are very well hidden from all onlookers.
4. "One system should keep track of what's going on." Absolutely. In fact one bad system will beat two good systems. You can tolerate different goals or directions. You cannot tolerate different positions of where you are now.
6. "Keep everyone else out of it!" Effective teams become very suspicious of all "foreigners", not excluding management.
It's just good when both are experienced but have different kind of knowledge. This way, both will focus on different aspects and make the entire thing better. [Emphasis added]
Different skill sets. That's the crux. When it works, it dominates everything else.
On the other hand, if both have totally different approaches to the problem, it can cause a nuclear war, especially if both programmers have a large ego.
If both egos are after the same turf, you will have problems. With a bit of skill in working in close without being annoying, enormous egos can be amazingly cooperative so long as they do not invade each other's turf. You play black, I play red, we both grab the winnings.
The difference is NT workstations which have never had their software reloaded. The difference is NT workstations which have uptimes depending almost completely on how good the UPSs are. The difference is an NT Domain controller with a half-decent UPS that be up for 2 or 3 years as a good guess.
Close all files and halt takes how long? It's doing something else. Even Microsoft isn't that bad.
Bah. Treat 'em like idiots and they'll behave like idiots.
Smart humans, stupid computers is the way to play it. The dumber the human and the smarter the computer, it more important it is to play it that way. Just because the computer wants something doesn't mean that you do or should want that something. After all it just a computer. What's the price on zombied computers these days? A few hundred dollars for a few thousand computers, IIRC. That should help put things into perspective.
What you are experiencing is the back end of (on the front end, I can do so much better if this and that...) (or worse, I want to be distinctive, so I'll change this and that...)
There's a reason standards bodies move so inexorably slowly. What is standard is really on what everybody agrees to (or has to agree to). What is standard is the stuff that isn't worth being different. Think about it.
This is also why Open Source has an unfair advantage. It is very easy to go non-standard and gain whatever advantages therefrom. But going non-standard also carries the penalty of being non-standard. Therefore if I've gone non-standard and I want to be able to depend on what I've done, it's worth more than a little time and effort to try to make my stuff acceptable to whatever owns the standard. This gives a counter-intuitive valuation to my "Intellectual Property".
which would all be a non-issue if indeed the tests ARE the "standard."
Specifying the syntax of a language or an implementation is relatively easy. Specifying the semantics of a language or an implementation is relatively difficult.
You have a valid program. It compiles and executes successfully. But it does not do at all what you expected. I've seen it, Algol68, the machine code was plausible considering the source, but nowhere near doing what the student intended.
With about any language, I've always had to run a few test cases to find out what they really mean by what they say. I can well undertand Sun's desire to have absolute control over exactly what the tests are.
"It is now safe to turn off your computer."... Quality freefall.
It's related. There is an arrogance that Microsoft knows best that is implicit in that statement. Whether or not it is actually safe to turn off the computer is very much outside of Microsoft's knowledge. In fact the safest thing to do when a system is acting bonkers is to hit reset or the power switch on old computers or pulling the power plug or removing the battery on new compouter where the power switch is no longer functional. The reasoning goes that when the system has its brains scrambled it desperately wants to write those scrambled brains to disk and thus perpetuate the scramble.
Remember when MS supposedly shut down for a month to work on security issues? That was about 4 years ago. Not only did the problems not go away, but the occurance of gaping new exploits increased significantly.
One whole month, Well golly gee! Actually one month would be enough to stop hiding stuff and never under any circumstance use or require scripts or ActiveX controls for anything remotely related to security. [x] Hide files extension for known file types. That by itself is enough to wreck any attempts at achieving security. The message is loud and clear. Linux worms never seem to get anywhere. People see them and react violently to anything sneaking around trying to be invisible.
Task Manager doesn't show everything. Microsoft Windows comes with a pre-installed root kit!
wouldn't that signifigantly reduce the amount of time it takes to decay
Nothing that is at all reasonable will have any influence on the decay rate. Bombarding it in a cyclotron or some such might do something, probably not, but anything less doesn't stad a chance.
Although I don't like how Python's current implementation basically acts as a de facto standard (there should be a real standard rather than just a reference implentation that doesn't really reference anything)
Errrr, a reference implementation is something that is referenced by other things, not something that references other things.
Actually a reference implementation is a cheap and effective way to define a standard. The standard is what the reference implementation does. What the standard should be is a different matter and tends to get very hairy very quickly.
As for the versions that many distributions ship based on GCC 3.x, they generally don't pass all the tests.
Which could help explain why Sun is so sensitive about it.
If you have to depend on something, you need to be able to depend on that something. A fixed test suite help assure that at least the bugs don't keep changing on you. As things get more complicated, faster, and more out of sight, everything really has to be better just to break even.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Tom Watson (founder of IBM) once claim that the world only needed 5 computers, and he was the man to build them?
Yes, and at the then current price/performance curves he was right.
Of course this was (even before) back when a mechanical calculator cost about a thousand bucks and a thousand bucks was worth a thousand bucks. Now you've got 4-function calculators (with bad buttons) at give-away prices.
Change the price/performance curves and the definition of "enough" changes.
The only people this affects is other proprietary information horders.
The thing that struck me is that the patent really applies only to proprietary competition to GPL'd software.
I'm firmly convinced that the future of IT lies in essentially the supply chain, where that chain has more than two links, and where it is neither possible nor desirable to have all the links under your control.
This leads to an unholy alliance between suits and hackers neither of whom want to have anything to do with the other and who totally reject the basic assumptions and priorities of the other. Oddly enough, methinks the suits need the hackers more than the hackers need the suits.
Bugs is bad. Totally different means of coping, but this is the common ground. Also what matters to suits is of extreme indifference to hackers and vice-versa. So overall it's worth a pittance to do something that helps out the other side enormously.
GPL'd "Product".
Customer: What's this src thingee? What do I do with it?
Vendor: That's the source. Your're paying us so that you don't have to mess with it.
Customer: Can I install this on my home computer? Friends? Neighbors?
Vendor: Completely legal. However, those are your support headaches, not mine.
Hacker: I think I've found a bug in old-version, still in latest version. Steps to duplicate and possibly even a potential fix.
Vendor: Thankee. Fixing foo breaks bar, but maybe this fixes both.
To make a hurricane, you need lots of warm surface water under the path of the would-be hurricane. If there's enough warm surface water in the equatorial Atlantic, any minor squall coming off the west coast of Africa will likely become a hurricane.
If you've got a good handle on ocean surface conditions, by itself, you can make fairly reliable predictions on numbers and strengths of hurricanes. Where they hit land is another matter.
What's really missing is good modeling of the oceans.
I just don't think the models are there yet.
That's an understatement.
"wherein the total licensing cost comprises a software license for all employees of the entity and all customers of the entity." Emphasis added.
Maybe not so obvious.
Per employee pricing for all employees is obvious.
Dunno what they're up to with extending it to all customers, somehow I expect it will turn out to be a very wise move.
"The ends justify the means, and all that?"
Good one, but if the ends do not justify the means, then what does justify the means? If the means are not employed to effect some end, then why are the means employed? What is true is that ordinary ends do not justify extraordinary means.
"management team"? Like a "sanitary engineer" is almost certainly not an engineer, a "management team" is almost certainly not a team. The term "team" is used in the hopes of maybe getting a wee bit of cooperation out of the members.
Real teams are pretty rare, and when they do exist they tend not to advertise themselves. The use of the term "team" is a fairly good indicator that it is not in fact a team, but a pretender.
You're pretty safe, even with a gateway setting.
Probably not. Too many other ports.
The only legitimate traffic is on the local LAN, which works perfectly well without a gateway. Simpler, easier, and possibly more effective than a firewall.
won't even load Microsoft's website anymore
Gizmo happy. And Microsoft wonders why they are having so much problems with viruses and worms. If you hang a "Kick me." sign on your rear, people will find a way.
Then you go off and talk about social and economic changes. Sure, these changes are important, but they are not warfare.
From what I understand of history, the social and economic changes are both the primary causes and the primary consequences of warfare. Been that way for at least the last several thousand years.
Teams are an "in place of" not and "in addition to" type of thingee.
Management judges a team on results, not on how the results were achieved.
If a team fails to perform, it's back to the old way of doing things.
Management's rights regarding teams is the ultimate solution, to destroy the teams.
A teams actions must be transparent and accountable for their actions, right up the chain of leadership.
That isn't a team. It's a chain of command. Weakest link and all that.
Windoz is more like an ancient rustbucket of a car that stops running if you remove that plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary on the dash.
Sounds accurate. And my NT4 Domain Controller/File Server has been up and running continuously for the last 2+ years.
That's not stability. That's just not rocking the boat.
No patches. No updates. No upgrades.
Original IE which is never used.
No gateway. Intentionally. Can only talk to the LAN.
If you're so allegedly smart, figure it out and let us know what it *is* doing.
It doesn't take a lot of smarts to know that it is hardly necessary to know exactly what something is doing to know that it is doing something.
"That message merely indicates that the OS has halted in a known state where all files have been closed, and the OS is no longer running."
Evidence.
I assume that purports to explain what happens on a system shutdown.
That explanation fails to account for the time consumed.
In the time unaccounted for, Microsoft software is doing something.
Microsoft does not want to give any indication as to what it is doing.
I'e seen a couple of systems killed by going through the approved shutdown procedure, none by killing power.
Programming doesn't introduce some new kind of situation to deal with that teams of two haven't been dealing with for centuries.
1. "their strengths have to fix your weaknesses, your strengths have to fix their weaknesses"
By far the most important. An old rule of thumb (before the Mythical Man Month) was that "if one programmer can do it in one year, two programmers can do it in two years." When and if the "two heads are better than one" comes enough into play, the answer can be two months!
3. "who is going to do what". Bad place for management to meddle. People tend to hide their weaknesses, even from management. When a team works, individual weaknesses are very well hidden from all onlookers.
4. "One system should keep track of what's going on."
Absolutely. In fact one bad system will beat two good systems.
You can tolerate different goals or directions. You cannot tolerate different positions of where you are now.
6. "Keep everyone else out of it!" Effective teams become very suspicious of all "foreigners", not excluding management.
It's just good when both are experienced but have different kind of knowledge. This way, both will focus on different aspects and make the entire thing better. [Emphasis added]
Different skill sets. That's the crux. When it works, it dominates everything else.
On the other hand, if both have totally different approaches to the problem, it can cause a nuclear war, especially if both programmers have a large ego.
If both egos are after the same turf, you will have problems. With a bit of skill in working in close without being annoying, enormous egos can be amazingly cooperative so long as they do not invade each other's turf. You play black, I play red, we both grab the winnings.
Resetting due to a crash has nothing to do with turning the power off - which is the only time you'll get that message.
Please learn the difference.
Message?
Crash?
No crash. No messsage. Just something steps out of line a bit.
Terminate with extreme prejudice. Killing power is quite effective.
The difference is NT workstations which have never had their software reloaded.
The difference is NT workstations which have uptimes depending almost completely on how good the UPSs are.
The difference is an NT Domain controller with a half-decent UPS that be up for 2 or 3 years as a good guess.
Close all files and halt takes how long?
It's doing something else. Even Microsoft isn't that bad.
Bah. Treat 'em like idiots and they'll behave like idiots.
Smart humans, stupid computers is the way to play it.
The dumber the human and the smarter the computer, it more important it is to play it that way.
Just because the computer wants something doesn't mean that you do or should want that something. After all it just a computer. What's the price on zombied computers these days? A few hundred dollars for a few thousand computers, IIRC. That should help put things into perspective.
So now you know how us web developers feel
...) ...)
I almost sympathize.
What you are experiencing is the back end of
(on the front end, I can do so much better if this and that
(or worse, I want to be distinctive, so I'll change this and that
There's a reason standards bodies move so inexorably slowly.
What is standard is really on what everybody agrees to (or has to agree to).
What is standard is the stuff that isn't worth being different. Think about it.
This is also why Open Source has an unfair advantage.
It is very easy to go non-standard and gain whatever advantages therefrom.
But going non-standard also carries the penalty of being non-standard.
Therefore if I've gone non-standard and I want to be able to depend on what I've done, it's worth more than a little time and effort to try to make my stuff acceptable to whatever owns the standard. This gives a counter-intuitive valuation to my "Intellectual Property".
Oh, and test suites don't introduce bugs.
No, but passing a test suite introduces bugs.
(You don't pass, you change something.)
The exact details of the test suites control which bugs will be in conforming implementations.
When it bites you, you discover that it's a bug. But it and all its kin were never non-bugs.
If the implementation does not meet what the requirements should have been, you have a bug. Don't confuse need with ability.
which would all be a non-issue if indeed the tests ARE the "standard."
Specifying the syntax of a language or an implementation is relatively easy.
Specifying the semantics of a language or an implementation is relatively difficult.
You have a valid program. It compiles and executes successfully. But it does not do at all what you expected. I've seen it, Algol68, the machine code was plausible considering the source, but nowhere near doing what the student intended.
With about any language, I've always had to run a few test cases to find out what they really mean by what they say. I can well undertand Sun's desire to have absolute control over exactly what the tests are.
You're arguing that if you're "risk averse" you won't fix bugs. That's so obviously wrong I don't know where to begin.
You might begin by realizing that any change does in fact change things and sometimes breaks things that you thought were completely unrelated.
Sun's not that risk averse, but I'd bet some of their customers are.
What are you talking about? The USA isn't switching to the metric system...
Now that's a long time, isn't it?
"It is now safe to turn off your computer." ... Quality freefall.
It's related.
There is an arrogance that Microsoft knows best that is implicit in that statement. Whether or not it is actually safe to turn off the computer is very much outside of Microsoft's knowledge. In fact the safest thing to do when a system is acting bonkers is to hit reset or the power switch on old computers or pulling the power plug or removing the battery on new compouter where the power switch is no longer functional. The reasoning goes that when the system has its brains scrambled it desperately wants to write those scrambled brains to disk and thus perpetuate the scramble.
Remember when MS supposedly shut down for a month to work on security issues? That was about 4 years ago. Not only did the problems not go away, but the occurance of gaping new exploits increased significantly.
One whole month, Well golly gee! Actually one month would be enough to stop hiding stuff and never under any circumstance use or require scripts or ActiveX controls for anything remotely related to security.
[x] Hide files extension for known file types.
That by itself is enough to wreck any attempts at achieving security. The message is loud and clear. Linux worms never seem to get anywhere. People see them and react violently to anything sneaking around trying to be invisible.
Task Manager doesn't show everything. Microsoft Windows comes with a pre-installed root kit!
wouldn't that signifigantly reduce the amount of time it takes to decay
Nothing that is at all reasonable will have any influence on the decay rate. Bombarding it in a cyclotron or some such might do something, probably not, but anything less doesn't stad a chance.
"Can open source and closed standards work together?
No they can't really,
Closed standards:
meter as a measure of distance.
second as a measure of time.
liter as a measure of volume.
These are closed in that neither you nor I stand any chance of changing anybody's mind as to what they should be.
When everybody gets to mess with the standards the standards cease to be standards.
Although I don't like how Python's current implementation basically acts as a de facto standard (there should be a real standard rather than just a reference implentation that doesn't really reference anything)
Errrr, a reference implementation is something that is referenced by other things, not something that references other things.
Actually a reference implementation is a cheap and effective way to define a standard. The standard is what the reference implementation does. What the standard should be is a different matter and tends to get very hairy very quickly.
As for the versions that many distributions ship based on GCC 3.x, they generally don't pass all the tests.
Which could help explain why Sun is so sensitive about it.
If you have to depend on something, you need to be able to depend on that something. A fixed test suite help assure that at least the bugs don't keep changing on you. As things get more complicated, faster, and more out of sight, everything really has to be better just to break even.