I'm very "late to the party", just heard about Rob a few hours ago. It's a minor devastation, a fleeting reminder of mortality in this immortal software universe we've built and live in.
Everything good that could be said about Rob has already been said, in more eloquent ways than I could say. So why am I posting at all? Well, when a loved one has passed, I'd like to believe that repetition of praises is never shunned but always welcomed. So here I am to add mine.
So I will echo what others have said and add my own thoughts. I discovered slashdot in the late 90's, it was *the* place for news in the nascent world of "internet tech nerds", but it wasn't just a place for nerds to read the news -- it was a "safe place" where we could just be nerds, talk about those things that mainstream news had no interest in covering, and have fun.
Those early days of/. will forever be special to me, and I'm happy to have been a part of them. I know that the early work of any startup is, at core, the passion of a few committed individuals, and I am and will be forever grateful for Rob and his contributions to that effort. RIP Robin Miller, you done good, super damn good, at least by the reckoning of this stupid nerd. I'm gonna miss ya, sincerely.
And to the current/. crew -- I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but I am very impressed with the stewardship you have taken of this platform. After many years of "asleep at the wheel' management, you are doing an honor to Rob by keeping this site to its original mission, continuing to grow it, and keeping a fresh mind to the future. thank you for keeping it real, I'm looking forward to more of the good stuff.
Rob (speaking to your ghost, or your family or whatever) -- you helped organize open source nerds on the Internet in a super-early, super-critical-important time when we *needed* to be organized! Whatever anyone wants to say to the contrary, F them, slashdot was a very important part of making open source, Linux, all of that, a part of the national conversation and you did it. You won, we all won. Linux is now running most server infrastructure and a majority of mobile devices. MEGA PROPS TO YA AND YOURS!
I've managed a team that spent more than one day just isolating where a bug was occurring. If you don't have expert-level developers (expensive!!), be very afraid. Every once in a while a nasty bug will pop up that takes 5-10 days to finally fix. Development on large codebases is very slow due to poor modularization/code structure from the start, which I have sadly never seen done right.
If you have a greenfield situation, and really want to use node, make sure your first developer is top-notch, not only in coding skill but in coding structure. Hopefully it can be designed so that its tendencies are not to become a giant hairball -- but it still might anyway.
Bureaucrats and Control-Freaks Fantasize that Somehow, Everyone in the Entire World Will Mindlessly Obey Their Regulation to Keep 3D-printed Gun Blueprints Offline For Good
People *do* care about privacy. 86% have taken some steps to clean up digital footprints. There's other stats that show the interest, but there's some serious overtones of impotence -- that there's just not that much anyone can do about it -- we all need all these super valuable cloud services so we must lock ourselves in to big vendors, who then might abuse our trust (or get hacked themselves, being a rich target).
But Greenwald is absolutely right, we must provide for our own safety, we cannot ever delegate the ultimate responsibility for that, and yet, does this mean that we must throw in with mega-corps, to trust with our freedom?
I think there is another way.
http://cloudstead.io/ is something I've been working on for the better part of 2014. Cloudstead is a free & open (AGPL'd) cloud operating system, designed to free you and me and everyone from dependence on the mega-cloud services. And more generally, to start owning more your cloud apps instead of renting everything and paying the landlord with your privacy, your cash or both.
A lot of common apps have been commoditized; excellent open source versions are available. Cloudstead's default setup includes email, calendar, and file sharing but it can run any app -- php, rails, java, python, you name it. Lots of integrated features -- single sign on, app-wide search, address book, automated backup/restore, this is a cohesive cloud OS, not a hodgepodge of apps. And it's totally portable: it can move itself from one place to another, from a public cloud (ec2) to private hardware (your datacenter or office), or if you're getting really paranoid, onto a USB stick (bring it live later, somewhere else, when you feel safe). A cloudstead really is your cloud and will do only your bidding.
Cloudstead is currently in beta testing. If you would like a cloudstead to take for a spin and see how easy it is to own your cloud, please send me an email: jonathan (shift two sym) cloudstead.io
It never amazes me how much people can flame without even reading the article, which in this case is impossible since slashdot posted a broken link in the story. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.
Next these jokers will tell Saudi Arabia that the Dutch should be free to export porn there.
The reason Antigua won was because the US laws are not consistent. US was claiming a "moral exemption" but only transactions to offshore casinos were being regulated. Antigua's argument, which the WTO agreed with, was that if you claim the moral exemption, you have to be consistent, across the board.
If Saudi Arabia only allowed porn from Saudi websites but made Dutch porn illegal, you might have an argument. But if SA decides to ban all porn, the WTO is OK with that too.
Read the fricking article next time. Someone with such a low slashdot ID as you should know better.
CAVEAT EMPTOR -- buyer beware (+ link to auction)
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
While I have to admit this whole thing is quite hilarious -- I has to ask, was the buyer a total idiot? I mean, look at the seller's ebay profile:
He had a NEGATIVE 2 rating, all based on auctions that took place BEFORE the auction that caused all the fury. Seriously, I think twice about buying from anyone who's had more than a couple negative feedbacks EVER. This guy did 4 auctions, 3 of which he screwed the buyers on. Caveat emptor dude....
The MIB determined that one of the root causes of the mishap was an inadequate GN&C software development process. Changes to the flight code and simulation models were often incorporated without adequate documentation. In one case in particular, a change to the navigation system's reset logic was made that introduced the use of GPS velocity (as measured from the primary GPS receiver) as the new, estimated DART velocity whenever a reset occurred. This then, became the only instance in which this particular parameter was to be accepted directly into the navigation system's logic.
Most of the DART team was unaware that the GPS velocity output was to be used in this way by the navigation system's software. Because this was thought to be an "unused" parameter, personnel responsible for testing the receiver's performance and those using the mathematical models of the components never realized the need to correct the problem with the biased velocity measurement or include the bias in the receiver's simulation model. Because of this, the velocity output of the receiver hardware and that of the simulated receiver did not match. As a result, the pre-flight simulations failed to reveal the adverse effect of the inaccurate velocity measurement from the primary GPS receiver as seen during the mission.
(emphasis added)
So the simulation does not actually simulate reality... another sign of total incompetence. Your tax dollars at work.
...examination of raw test data and performance of independent tests of some flight components by the government insight team were defined by NASA project management to be "out-of-scope."
...
In DART's case, the lack of adequate risk management contributed to a zero- fault tolerant design and inadequate testing that resulted in an insufficient collision avoidance system, among other things....
Ah, only the best and brightest in software engineering for our tax dollars...
Just heard on the radio yesterday that Madonna's entrace will be quite dramatic. Apparently she will be lowered onto the stage nailed to a $10 million cross, made mostly of diamonds.
My first thought: Maybe this could explain the high ticket cost???
My second thought: Ooooh, how risque, Madonna. Offending Christians is so passe, and far too easy. If she really wanted to be offensive, she should walk on stage dressed as Muhammed. That would take some guts.
Libertarians believe in individual rights, not corporate rights.
The corporation as a government-granted entity. The Libertarian view would be that the corporate charter should go back to only being granted for projects for the public good, like bridges.
It's pretty lame to make a statement and then continue to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously admitting that you are in fact full of shit. Somehow you've managed to do this better than anyone I've seen in a long time. Congratulations.
Even constraining our domain to the world of webapps, I disagree that language choice is an "absolutely subjective" decision. If I were building a simple 2-form webapp then Java would be absolute overkill, when PHP or RoR could get the job done 10x as fast.
So in this case, there is some objectivity to it -- Java entails a certain amount of overhead that is just not worth if the situation doesn't demand it. No one would deploy an Oracle parallel server to run a 3-table database that had no transactional requirements.
OK, I understand and agree that the Java "Object" analogy does not fit well for the Ruby situation.
I'm just curious: With strongly-but-dynamically typed Ruby, is it possible to do static ("compile" time) type checking? If not, how can a function/method make any assumptions about what parameters are passed in and what methods/operations they support? Is it purely by convention, and enforced solely by unit tests? Is there an easy and reliable way to rename or rescope methods without resorting to a recursive grep (which might pickup identically named methods on other types)?
Uh, I think this definition
might help things out a bit (emphasis added):
A strongly-typed programming language is one in which each type of data (such as integer, character, hexadecimal, packed decimal, and so forth) is predefined as part of the programming language and all constants or variables defined for a given program must be described with one of the data types. Certain operations may be allowable only with certain data types. The language compiler enforces the data typing and use compliance. An advantage of strong data typing is that it imposes a rigorous set of rules on a programmer and thus guarantees a certain consistency of results. A disadvantage is that it prevents the programmer from inventing a data type not anticipated by the developers of the programming language and it limits how "creative" one can be in using a given data type.
Even leaving aside the obvious compile-time checking issue, how is Ruby strongly-typed if I can change the type of any variable reference willy-nilly? That's like programming in Java and declaring every variable as an instance of "Object". Sure you can shuffle Strings and Integers around all you want, but it does very little to help type-safety issues.
- jonathan.
Semantically, we can say that 'x' dynamically grew to hold a reference to the new string "foobar". Of course behind the scenes different object instances are created and/or shuffled around behind the String reference named 'x'.
The _contents_ of the string is immutable, but semantically those contents can grow/shrink behind the object reference to them.
Different tools for different people; different tools for different jobs.
I could not agree more. But the important distinction here is that the decision of which tool to use is not solely a matter of personal preference. The particulars of the task at hand also come into play.
It remains to be seen what range of applications RoR works best for - at first glance a wide range of webapps looks promising. The range of apps that Java is good for is fairly well known. Many folks are quick to point out java's shortcomings, but few would argue that Java is the best tool for _every_ job, and oftentimes the perceived shortcomings are actually just a misapplication of the tool. If you try to pound a nail in with a screwdriver, do you blame the screwdriver?
The main problem I have with RoR is that the Ruby language is weakly typed. Automated refactoring tools that can rename methods, shuffle variables and methods around different scopes are very handy and very difficult to do in a highly dynamic language like Ruby. This is not to say that those dynamic attributes don't come in handy in some applications, but for maintaining a very large codebase, refactoring tools are a must-have.
Developers who complain about 'I change this name and the compiler complains' must still be using vi or emacs to write code. IDEs like Eclipse or Intellij make this a moot point.
Instead of changing the parameter type String from Integer, why not override the method and declare an identically named one that takes the alternate parameter type? Then new code can use the new method, and old code doesn't break.
What's the problem? Maybe you could provide a better example of whatever point you were actually trying to make.
There is _ONE_ string class in java, it's java.lang.String. It can be arbitrarily long, it can dynamically grow and shrink. It could have bells on its toes if you really wanted.
A better example might be the existence of java.sql.Date when we already have java.util.Date, or the confusion-causing collection classes like Hashtable vs HashMap, and Vector vs ArrayList (the formers were part of java 1.0, the latters added later and generally preferable).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very "late to the party", just heard about Rob a few hours ago. It's a minor devastation, a fleeting reminder of mortality in this immortal software universe we've built and live in.
Everything good that could be said about Rob has already been said, in more eloquent ways than I could say. So why am I posting at all? Well, when a loved one has passed, I'd like to believe that repetition of praises is never shunned but always welcomed. So here I am to add mine.
So I will echo what others have said and add my own thoughts. I discovered slashdot in the late 90's, it was *the* place for news in the nascent world of "internet tech nerds", but it wasn't just a place for nerds to read the news -- it was a "safe place" where we could just be nerds, talk about those things that mainstream news had no interest in covering, and have fun.
Those early days of /. will forever be special to me, and I'm happy to have been a part of them. I know that the early work of any startup is, at core, the passion of a few committed individuals, and I am and will be forever grateful for Rob and his contributions to that effort. RIP Robin Miller, you done good, super damn good, at least by the reckoning of this stupid nerd. I'm gonna miss ya, sincerely.
And to the current /. crew -- I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but I am very impressed with the stewardship you have taken of this platform. After many years of "asleep at the wheel' management, you are doing an honor to Rob by keeping this site to its original mission, continuing to grow it, and keeping a fresh mind to the future. thank you for keeping it real, I'm looking forward to more of the good stuff.
Rob (speaking to your ghost, or your family or whatever) -- you helped organize open source nerds on the Internet in a super-early, super-critical-important time when we *needed* to be organized! Whatever anyone wants to say to the contrary, F them, slashdot was a very important part of making open source, Linux, all of that, a part of the national conversation and you did it. You won, we all won. Linux is now running most server infrastructure and a majority of mobile devices. MEGA PROPS TO YA AND YOURS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Plutonium *does* exist in nature, albeit in very tiny quantities, not suitable for industrial use.
I've managed a team that spent more than one day just isolating where a bug was occurring. If you don't have expert-level developers (expensive!!), be very afraid. Every once in a while a nasty bug will pop up that takes 5-10 days to finally fix. Development on large codebases is very slow due to poor modularization/code structure from the start, which I have sadly never seen done right.
If you have a greenfield situation, and really want to use node, make sure your first developer is top-notch, not only in coding skill but in coding structure. Hopefully it can be designed so that its tendencies are not to become a giant hairball -- but it still might anyway.
Bureaucrats and Control-Freaks Fantasize that Somehow, Everyone in the Entire World Will Mindlessly Obey Their Regulation to Keep 3D-printed Gun Blueprints Offline For Good
but maybe that would have been too long.
People *do* care about privacy. 86% have taken some steps to clean up digital footprints. There's other stats that show the interest, but there's some serious overtones of impotence -- that there's just not that much anyone can do about it -- we all need all these super valuable cloud services so we must lock ourselves in to big vendors, who then might abuse our trust (or get hacked themselves, being a rich target).
But Greenwald is absolutely right, we must provide for our own safety, we cannot ever delegate the ultimate responsibility for that, and yet, does this mean that we must throw in with mega-corps, to trust with our freedom?
I think there is another way.
http://cloudstead.io/ is something I've been working on for the better part of 2014. Cloudstead is a free & open (AGPL'd) cloud operating system, designed to free you and me and everyone from dependence on the mega-cloud services. And more generally, to start owning more your cloud apps instead of renting everything and paying the landlord with your privacy, your cash or both.
A lot of common apps have been commoditized; excellent open source versions are available. Cloudstead's default setup includes email, calendar, and file sharing but it can run any app -- php, rails, java, python, you name it. Lots of integrated features -- single sign on, app-wide search, address book, automated backup/restore, this is a cohesive cloud OS, not a hodgepodge of apps. And it's totally portable: it can move itself from one place to another, from a public cloud (ec2) to private hardware (your datacenter or office), or if you're getting really paranoid, onto a USB stick (bring it live later, somewhere else, when you feel safe). A cloudstead really is your cloud and will do only your bidding.
Cloudstead is currently in beta testing. If you would like a cloudstead to take for a spin and see how easy it is to own your cloud, please send me an email: jonathan (shift two sym) cloudstead.io
recent demo: http://www.cloudstead.io/2014/...
Any/all feedback is appreciated.
thanks.
ah, if only there were a "troll but true" comment rating.
fer chrissakes, i read about this during my morning commute -- on the AP news iphone app.
Slashdot used to break news, now they rehash stuff that the MSM picked up 12 hours earlier, very disappointing. get with the times dudes.
- jonathan.
agreed. this is totally lame. from the page itself:
"Can withstand a hydrogen bomb: The bunker was designed to be able to withstand a near hit by a hydrogen bomb."
That's near hit, not direct hit. I'm going to wait until they excavate a few hundred feet deeper and put the premium datacenter down there.
- jonathan.
i once got a popup error message from MS Access that said:
"Error #some-large-number: There is no message for this error"
I thought that was so existential...
Didn't Stephen Hawking do this like 10 years ago?
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39133
It never amazes me how much people can flame without even reading the article, which in this case is impossible since slashdot posted a broken link in the story. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.
- jonathan.
Next these jokers will tell Saudi Arabia that the Dutch should be free to export porn there.
The reason Antigua won was because the US laws are not consistent. US was claiming a "moral exemption" but only transactions to offshore casinos were being regulated. Antigua's argument, which the WTO agreed with, was that if you claim the moral exemption, you have to be consistent, across the board.
If Saudi Arabia only allowed porn from Saudi websites but made Dutch porn illegal, you might have an argument. But if SA decides to ban all porn, the WTO is OK with that too.
Read the fricking article next time. Someone with such a low slashdot ID as you should know better.
While I have to admit this whole thing is quite hilarious -- I has to ask, was the buyer a total idiot? I mean, look at the seller's ebay profile:
d back&userid=amir6626&iid=6825578528
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFee
He had a NEGATIVE 2 rating, all based on auctions that took place BEFORE the auction that caused all the fury. Seriously, I think twice about buying from anyone who's had more than a couple negative feedbacks EVER. This guy did 4 auctions, 3 of which he screwed the buyers on. Caveat emptor dude....
- jonathan.
So the simulation does not actually simulate reality... another sign of total incompetence. Your tax dollars at work.
- jonathan.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=2060
Some gems:
Ah, only the best and brightest in software engineering for our tax dollars...
- jonathan.
Just heard on the radio yesterday that Madonna's entrace will be quite dramatic. Apparently she will be lowered onto the stage nailed to a $10 million cross, made mostly of diamonds.
My first thought: Maybe this could explain the high ticket cost???
My second thought: Ooooh, how risque, Madonna. Offending Christians is so passe, and far too easy. If she really wanted to be offensive, she should walk on stage dressed as Muhammed. That would take some guts.
- jonathan.
It's pretty lame to make a statement and then continue to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously admitting that you are in fact full of shit. Somehow you've managed to do this better than anyone I've seen in a long time. Congratulations.
GET A CLUE about what many Libertarians believe regarding corporate rights before pulling your uninformed opinions out of thin air.
- jonathan.
Even constraining our domain to the world of webapps, I disagree that language choice is an "absolutely subjective" decision. If I were building a simple 2-form webapp then Java would be absolute overkill, when PHP or RoR could get the job done 10x as fast.
So in this case, there is some objectivity to it -- Java entails a certain amount of overhead that is just not worth if the situation doesn't demand it. No one would deploy an Oracle parallel server to run a 3-table database that had no transactional requirements.
- jonathan.
OK, I understand and agree that the Java "Object" analogy does not fit well for the Ruby situation.
I'm just curious: With strongly-but-dynamically typed Ruby, is it possible to do static ("compile" time) type checking? If not, how can a function/method make any assumptions about what parameters are passed in and what methods/operations they support? Is it purely by convention, and enforced solely by unit tests? Is there an easy and reliable way to rename or rescope methods without resorting to a recursive grep (which might pickup identically named methods on other types)?
- jonathan.
Yes, indeed you're correct.
But, from a programmer's point of view, if I do:
String x = "foo";
x += "bar";
Semantically, we can say that 'x' dynamically grew to hold a reference to the new string "foobar". Of course behind the scenes different object instances are created and/or shuffled around behind the String reference named 'x'.
The _contents_ of the string is immutable, but semantically those contents can grow/shrink behind the object reference to them.
- jonathan.
Different tools for different people; different tools for different jobs.
I could not agree more. But the important distinction here is that the decision of which tool to use is not solely a matter of personal preference. The particulars of the task at hand also come into play.
It remains to be seen what range of applications RoR works best for - at first glance a wide range of webapps looks promising. The range of apps that Java is good for is fairly well known. Many folks are quick to point out java's shortcomings, but few would argue that Java is the best tool for _every_ job, and oftentimes the perceived shortcomings are actually just a misapplication of the tool. If you try to pound a nail in with a screwdriver, do you blame the screwdriver?
The main problem I have with RoR is that the Ruby language is weakly typed. Automated refactoring tools that can rename methods, shuffle variables and methods around different scopes are very handy and very difficult to do in a highly dynamic language like Ruby. This is not to say that those dynamic attributes don't come in handy in some applications, but for maintaining a very large codebase, refactoring tools are a must-have.
Developers who complain about 'I change this name and the compiler complains' must still be using vi or emacs to write code. IDEs like Eclipse or Intellij make this a moot point.
- jonathan.
Instead of changing the parameter type String from Integer, why not override the method and declare an identically named one that takes the alternate parameter type? Then new code can use the new method, and old code doesn't break.
What's the problem? Maybe you could provide a better example of whatever point you were actually trying to make.
- jonathan.
There is _ONE_ string class in java, it's java.lang.String. It can be arbitrarily long, it can dynamically grow and shrink. It could have bells on its toes if you really wanted.
A better example might be the existence of java.sql.Date when we already have java.util.Date, or the confusion-causing collection classes like Hashtable vs HashMap, and Vector vs ArrayList (the formers were part of java 1.0, the latters added later and generally preferable).
- jonathan.