I have been using del.icio.us for years - I actually have a fair amount of stuff in it.
Guess I will have to figure out how to reclaim that. I added a couple of sites just this week.
Too bad, all of the "cool" stuff just gets left for dead by these companies. If yahoo fucks with Flickr, we will have to have words, I use that thing all the time.
The overwhelming majority of stuff that I do online doesn't need flash -- I see it in ads more than I do anything useful, and that gets blocked by noscript before it can discover that I don't even have Flash installed.
When I do need flash, I go into a fairly closed down VM image and run it -- and that's pretty rare, like twice/month tops. While I'm sure there are sites that people use that require it, I've always avoided it like mad and don't feel like I'm missing anything important.
A high enough threshold for expensive can make for impossible.
and the low bid was probably made by some young programmer who doesn't apriciate the scope of the project
Not hardly. This was several senior people on both sides all trying to capture requirements and understand the scope. By necessity, their own senior people had to limit the scope of the initial project.
Over time, however, you discover everything that the legacy software does... and frequently discover that half of what they told you about the system is utterly false, and the other half was woefully incomplete. So, everything you've built in that depends on your understanding of uniqueness, scope, and content... well, suddenly none of that is true (and quite possibly never was across the whole system).
The trick is getting managment on the ball enopugh to identify people able to complete the project and willing to pay them, in spite of the fact that some other firm gave a lower quote.
I question if you've been involved in replacing a legacy application with 30+ years of history and data in it.
This isn't about people not being on board, or some lame-ass low bid by someone who didn't understand what they'd gotten into. Some of these systems have effectively been built up iteratively over decades, and are business critical. Replacing them can be completely non-trivial... and, in some cases, almost insurmountable without massive investments.
Now COBOL is basically used in years-old legacy code which is held together by the programming equivalent of duct tape. And nobody wants to touch that mess. Oh no.
While that's likely true, it's hardly unique to COBOL.
Any codebase which is over, say, 5 years or more, is likely creaking under its own weight and nobody really knows how all of the parts work anymore.
The software also likely runs day in, day out, 365 days/year, and does everything it has been developed to do. I've seen projects that try to replace such legacy systems -- after you've spent millions trying to write something new which does most of what you need, you discover that there's huge gaping holes in your coverage, and you're nowhere near where you'd need to be to replace it. Often, the project gets scrapped at that point as people realize you're never going to be a viable replacement.
Hell, I knew a guy in the 90s who was retired from a company, and drawing his full pension, and working as a consultant at big $$$ rates to maintain the stuff he did before he got paid. All said and done, he was making about 4x in retirement what he made before he retired. They simply had no other people who could have possibly had the 30 years of experience he had on this mammoth system which ran on mainframes.
Trying to get rid of that old creaky legacy code is nigh on impossible in some cases.
But then they use security questions as a second line of defense, which is just another password, and a much longer and therefore stronger one at that (if it’s done properly – which most people don’t do, of course).
I cringe when I see most places trying to do that.
They've usually got a canned list of around 5-10 questions that you can't change, they're almost always the *same* questions as everybody, and it's usually not that difficult to track down some of that information.
Hell, I don't want to have to answer questions they pick, because if everybody is asking the same question, it devalues the whole point of information that only I should know. Hell, if someone gets access to that information, then you're really SOL.
in effect it invalidates ownership and turns it into licensing.
And you can betcherass that there's a whole lot of people sitting around in the industries you describe which would love for that to happen. In fact, I suspect they're trying every legal strategy they can to be sure of that.
The whole world ran by EULAs and copyright lawyers.
The decision [...] has serious implications for U.S. retailers that obtain their goods on the gray market.
The problem is, this whole "gray" market thing.
If you purchase the goods legally in the country you bought them in, there's no gray. If you take property you own and move it from one country to another, there's no gray. If you sell property you own, there's no gray either.
So, how is legally buying a product in one place, and selling it in another "gray" -- because copyright law says so? So we can guarantee corporate profits? If it costs 20 bucks in Vietnam, why is it worth 2000 bucks in New York?? Does selling this to Americans increase its value?
This sliding scale for the cost of goods is to all of our detriment -- you're not paying what the product is worth, you're paying what the market can artificially jack up the price to be, and have the courts to enforce that consumers get screwed.
What I think that this means is that Costco can't go to a distributor in Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. where Omega watches are sold much cheaper than in the US, buy them, import them and then sell them at the store in the US.
Effectively supporting collusion and price fixing so that people can sell their products at an inflated rate in the US and other Western countries while selling them for what they really cost elsewhere.
However, you can't buy foreign products in a foreign country and then resell them in the US without permission.
I hope to hell they clarify this and limit its scope to importing large quantities and doing this for purposes of commerce. Because, this would mean that you can't sell anything you own without "permission" of the copyright owner.
I mean, if I personally bought an Omega watch (*drool*), I hope to hell I still retain right of first sale and could sell it if I so chose.
Essentially if this applies to individuals, it means you don't actually own anything. The whole point of Right of First Sale is it is your property. You can use it, loan it, sell it, or destroy it at will.
I'm not even sure of how copyright applies here -- no copy is being made, and the manufacturer isn't being deprived of either rights or revenue.
I understand what this is trying to limit, but I'm afraid it will have further reaching implications.
Two you should check out are... The Big Bang Theory
Tried it... still can't watch a sitcom of any form.
Um, no, everybody fucking didn't cause it
Oh, that was a joke -- I know where it came from and how it spreads. Hell, I remember when they gave it a name. I've known people who died from it... I know all too much about it.
all teenagers percieve everything about the world as sucking because a teenager's brain hasn't fully formed.
Yeah, just wait until their brains are finished and they realize they were right and that they're caught up in the machine. Dead Head stickers on Cadillacs and all that.:-P
But, anyway, we digress and should probably be telling some of the kids born in the 80's to get off of our lawns.;-)
Oh, some of the old rockabilly and pinup stuff was pretty cool. Some of the anti-fashion punk stuff is also kinda cool.
As to hair, um, aren't you the shaved head generation?
Lucky enough to still have my hair. Mostly I was thinking of the "big hair" the girls wore or some of the "Flock of Seagulls" kinda stuff -- though, the emo kids seem to still do that. And, I've had blue hair before, so I shouldn't talk.
TV has always sucked, but it didn't suck nearly as badly as it does now.
Agreed. It seems like the shows HBO is doing are the ones with actual characters and plots. The 80's ruined me for sitcoms -- now they all seem the same to me with the same bad setups, and only minor variations on themes.
women would come up to you in a bar and say "wanna smoke a joint and fuck?
That's my point... you guys fucked everybody, so now we can't fuck anybody. Bastards!!;-)
The world sucking is a direct effect of being a teenager.
Wait, teenagers actually cause the world to suck? What are they, some kind of anti-particle?
Granted, there was a whole lot of bad stuff in the '80s
o Music
o Fashion
o Hair
o TV
o Those really weird dancing flowers
o The "California Raisins" and most forms of Claymation at the time
o Yuppies
o Everybody was completely shallow and lame
o AIDS
As someone who spent his adolescent and teen years in the 80s, I cringe that everybody is still so damned nostalgic about it. There might be a few bright spots (you covered a few) -- but as a decade, it was crap.:-P
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's going away.
Well, yeah. That part is obvious.
But, I just don't see nearly as many people buying a 3D capable TV as they hope. I've been holding off on buying anything HD because I don't care, and because the specs for HD have changed several times in the last decade. 3D is just another thing in this "moving target".
I'm betting TVs will go through at least one more "new hotness" cycle in the next two years or so, which will leave everybody who jumped on this stuff standing out in the cold.
They're far more interested in locking down the content and making you buy new TVs than making sure that the specification for TVs remains constant for anywhere near as long as NTSC did.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been using del.icio.us for years - I actually have a fair amount of stuff in it.
Guess I will have to figure out how to reclaim that. I added a couple of sites just this week.
Too bad, all of the "cool" stuff just gets left for dead by these companies. If yahoo fucks with Flickr, we will have to have words, I use that thing all the time.
And that your video card or something doesn't work.
The first thing I thought when I read this was "what does it break"? There must be a reason this stuff was in the kernel.
Sounds like a political statement to me. Of course, I love this part from the article:
It's like a Monty Python sketch or something.
Well, my goal was to be crystal clear. All these puns, makes you want to shake your head.
Careful, you'll make him hot under the collar. ;-)
Or, don't install it if you can live without it.
The overwhelming majority of stuff that I do online doesn't need flash -- I see it in ads more than I do anything useful, and that gets blocked by noscript before it can discover that I don't even have Flash installed.
When I do need flash, I go into a fairly closed down VM image and run it -- and that's pretty rare, like twice/month tops. While I'm sure there are sites that people use that require it, I've always avoided it like mad and don't feel like I'm missing anything important.
A high enough threshold for expensive can make for impossible.
Not hardly. This was several senior people on both sides all trying to capture requirements and understand the scope. By necessity, their own senior people had to limit the scope of the initial project.
Over time, however, you discover everything that the legacy software does ... and frequently discover that half of what they told you about the system is utterly false, and the other half was woefully incomplete. So, everything you've built in that depends on your understanding of uniqueness, scope, and content ... well, suddenly none of that is true (and quite possibly never was across the whole system).
I question if you've been involved in replacing a legacy application with 30+ years of history and data in it.
This isn't about people not being on board, or some lame-ass low bid by someone who didn't understand what they'd gotten into. Some of these systems have effectively been built up iteratively over decades, and are business critical. Replacing them can be completely non-trivial ... and, in some cases, almost insurmountable without massive investments.
Contrary to popular believe, # of digits in Slashdot ID is only loosely correlated to beard-length.
I'm sure we've got a fair few neck-beards with 7 digit IDs.
Oh crap, it was number 3 for me -- BASIC, Pascal, COBOL.
COmmon Business Oriented Language -- do I get a cookie?
Crap, I am old.
While that's likely true, it's hardly unique to COBOL.
Any codebase which is over, say, 5 years or more, is likely creaking under its own weight and nobody really knows how all of the parts work anymore.
The software also likely runs day in, day out, 365 days/year, and does everything it has been developed to do. I've seen projects that try to replace such legacy systems -- after you've spent millions trying to write something new which does most of what you need, you discover that there's huge gaping holes in your coverage, and you're nowhere near where you'd need to be to replace it. Often, the project gets scrapped at that point as people realize you're never going to be a viable replacement.
Hell, I knew a guy in the 90s who was retired from a company, and drawing his full pension, and working as a consultant at big $$$ rates to maintain the stuff he did before he got paid. All said and done, he was making about 4x in retirement what he made before he retired. They simply had no other people who could have possibly had the 30 years of experience he had on this mammoth system which ran on mainframes.
Trying to get rid of that old creaky legacy code is nigh on impossible in some cases.
I cringe when I see most places trying to do that.
They've usually got a canned list of around 5-10 questions that you can't change, they're almost always the *same* questions as everybody, and it's usually not that difficult to track down some of that information.
Hell, I don't want to have to answer questions they pick, because if everybody is asking the same question, it devalues the whole point of information that only I should know. Hell, if someone gets access to that information, then you're really SOL.
And you can betcherass that there's a whole lot of people sitting around in the industries you describe which would love for that to happen. In fact, I suspect they're trying every legal strategy they can to be sure of that.
The whole world ran by EULAs and copyright lawyers.
The problem is, this whole "gray" market thing.
If you purchase the goods legally in the country you bought them in, there's no gray. If you take property you own and move it from one country to another, there's no gray. If you sell property you own, there's no gray either.
So, how is legally buying a product in one place, and selling it in another "gray" -- because copyright law says so? So we can guarantee corporate profits? If it costs 20 bucks in Vietnam, why is it worth 2000 bucks in New York?? Does selling this to Americans increase its value?
This sliding scale for the cost of goods is to all of our detriment -- you're not paying what the product is worth, you're paying what the market can artificially jack up the price to be, and have the courts to enforce that consumers get screwed.
Effectively supporting collusion and price fixing so that people can sell their products at an inflated rate in the US and other Western countries while selling them for what they really cost elsewhere.
Brilliant!! Let the gouging begin!
I hope to hell they clarify this and limit its scope to importing large quantities and doing this for purposes of commerce. Because, this would mean that you can't sell anything you own without "permission" of the copyright owner.
I mean, if I personally bought an Omega watch (*drool*), I hope to hell I still retain right of first sale and could sell it if I so chose.
Essentially if this applies to individuals, it means you don't actually own anything. The whole point of Right of First Sale is it is your property. You can use it, loan it, sell it, or destroy it at will.
I'm not even sure of how copyright applies here -- no copy is being made, and the manufacturer isn't being deprived of either rights or revenue.
I understand what this is trying to limit, but I'm afraid it will have further reaching implications.
The commercials. The figurines. The t-shirts. Just too much.
Tried it ... still can't watch a sitcom of any form.
Oh, that was a joke -- I know where it came from and how it spreads. Hell, I remember when they gave it a name. I've known people who died from it ... I know all too much about it.
Yeah, just wait until their brains are finished and they realize they were right and that they're caught up in the machine. Dead Head stickers on Cadillacs and all that. :-P
But, anyway, we digress and should probably be telling some of the kids born in the 80's to get off of our lawns. ;-)
It was for about a week or two ... and then it became over-saturated and annoying. It was everywhere.
They also ruined a perfectly good song for me.
Oh, some of the old rockabilly and pinup stuff was pretty cool. Some of the anti-fashion punk stuff is also kinda cool.
Lucky enough to still have my hair. Mostly I was thinking of the "big hair" the girls wore or some of the "Flock of Seagulls" kinda stuff -- though, the emo kids seem to still do that. And, I've had blue hair before, so I shouldn't talk.
Agreed. It seems like the shows HBO is doing are the ones with actual characters and plots. The 80's ruined me for sitcoms -- now they all seem the same to me with the same bad setups, and only minor variations on themes.
That's my point ... you guys fucked everybody, so now we can't fuck anybody. Bastards!! ;-)
Wait, teenagers actually cause the world to suck? What are they, some kind of anti-particle?
o Music
o Fashion
o Hair
o TV
o Those really weird dancing flowers
o The "California Raisins" and most forms of Claymation at the time
o Yuppies
o Everybody was completely shallow and lame
o AIDS
As someone who spent his adolescent and teen years in the 80s, I cringe that everybody is still so damned nostalgic about it. There might be a few bright spots (you covered a few) -- but as a decade, it was crap. :-P
*laugh* You had a choice? Someone toured me through a room full of mainframes in about 1981 and showed me a mini-computer.
The rest was inevitable -- like a moth a flame. :-P
Jeebus, if any post needed to end with "now get off my lawn", that would be one.
Sorry, I kid. Couldn't resist. =)
Cue the "It's not hacking, it's cracking" lunacy in 5 ...4 ... 3 ...
Well, yeah. That part is obvious.
But, I just don't see nearly as many people buying a 3D capable TV as they hope. I've been holding off on buying anything HD because I don't care, and because the specs for HD have changed several times in the last decade. 3D is just another thing in this "moving target".
I'm betting TVs will go through at least one more "new hotness" cycle in the next two years or so, which will leave everybody who jumped on this stuff standing out in the cold.
They're far more interested in locking down the content and making you buy new TVs than making sure that the specification for TVs remains constant for anywhere near as long as NTSC did.
Well, I have a robot vacuum, so I'm not going to deny their existence.
However, I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a robot.
Either "rightsizing" or "termination with prejudice".