As opposed to dropping everything else and spending 30-40 years rewriting it?
Re:Who actually cares about the "good" ratings?
on
Gaming the App Store
·
· Score: 1
Yeah but it's harder to come up with solid, verifiable negatives about a product. Since I primarily only care whether I can live with whatever downsides are present, negative "this sucks! i hate it!" reviews are worthless, while "this feature doesn't work as intended" I can do further research on and see whether this is a one-off case or common.
No, "real developers" do as much as they can to meet a deadline. No more... but often quite a bit less. There is no motivation to go "above and beyond" for "professional" work. Why bother? You've met the specs, and you almost certainly don't have the time.
On the contrary, with free software, the people who use the software make the software. This is not someone tinkering out of some kind of bored interest. These are people who have a need, and work on code until that need is met. They are out there. They do not have minimum requirements. They do not have deadlines. They will not stop, ever, until the code is done.
Unlike a "professional" who will stop as soon as possible and get the hell out, because there is no reason for any more, and usually reason for less.
"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"
Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.
Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.
I learned my lesson quickly. After each meeting that I skipped, my boss would show up in my office (effectively destroying the block of time I was saving), and then he'd tell me about 5 more projects brought up in the meeting that were automatically approved.
Your manager wasn't doing his job. Your manager's job is to shield you from this crap, to shoot down stuff that will suck your time, and generally make sure you have what you need to get your job done---including time. Your manager is your advocate, your agent, so to speak. If you work in a "top-down" organization where your boss is someone else's advocate, especially his boss's, find a new job.
When I log into $FORUM, how do I make sure that I am giving my password to $FORUM and not to someone who has intercepted my Internet connection?
You don't. Unless you call up $FORUM_OWNER at a verified number (not off the domain)---which means you first have to investigate and verify who the owner is---and get them to verify their certificate fingerprint. You do that every time you log in somewhere? I didn't think so.
The PKI "authorities" do no checking. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can get a "valid" cert, so if you're relying on that...
banks and so on
Every time you shop online, you deal with banks.
No, you deal with merchants. Merchants deal with a chain of other people, who may or may not be banks. Credit card companies are not, but your card may be managed through one.
This is because you're not thinking big enough. Local news is world news: something always happens somewhere. It's a matter of which people care about it. Traditional media has capitalized on high-profile stories that will draw lots of attention ("low-hanging fruit," to use the annoying buzzphrase).
However, this means we're missing a huge chunk of actual world news. While we know of a few major items, we don't know about the aggregate of everything else. How many people died today? Glancing at Google News, you might note that maybe some people died from bombings, and a few others in battle, and maybe a few to flu. But that's a very tiny selection. High profile cases. How many people died in traffic accidents? Or from other disease or poor health? Old age? What regions? What were the numbers?
This is actual interesting information which would probably change our perspective drastically on a lot of issues. Unfortunately it takes a good bit of work to put it together, and it doesn't quite get you glamorous headlines. But it's world news, and the sort of thing that would be worth paying for.
It's just that now that we can assume local clusters and WANs worth of co-operating data stores, there
are probably better, more performant ways of implementing persistence, replication, distribution of data
than traditional RDBMS implementations.
You can also assume magical fairy dust and free energy, but that doesn't make it so. You can ask if there are better ways, but you can't assume it, and in the end you will find there is no magic.
Clusters and replication are NOT NEW. Not even remotely new. There is, in fact, nothing new architecturally at all that would indicate some new capability that hasn't already been repeatedly analyzed and tried. That doesn't mean you can't tweak something for a situation, or that you need a giant Oracle database for everything, but "the web" and "cheap hardware" change the equation by precisely nothing.
What has changed the equation is cheap, unimportant data, which covers the majority of the web. "Real" applications, where data integrity is important (like say, your bank account), and immediate accuracy guaranteed, require the main thing you use a database for: data integrity. Your facebook page, your google search, that blog entry, or some video on youtube: these don't matter. If it's a little slow, or doesn't update immediately, or you get an error, no one is losing money. No one cares.
In essence, if a reliable database isn't important for your app, your app isn't really handling important data. This may be fine; in the mainstream, there's a lot of noncritical stuff. But this doesn't make databases unimportant.
This is the scientist's/mathematician's/logician's fallacy. You have a field of expertise which ostensibly can explain everything it encounters: except it never encounters anything it can't explain, because its nature doesn't allow these encounters to happen. They are excluded as irrelevant or nonexistent. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist.
Consider, moreover, that the laws of reality may not hold everywhere. What if universal constants are local? What if pi is an even 4 in some places, and integers are irrational? We've seen a very, very, very tiny corner of a universe that's incredibly huge. Everything may be fixed, but then again, we don't have a lot of data.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
Heh. If you think that, you have never written (or perhaps grokked) a single line of Common LISP in SLIME. There is nothing quite like developing your code while it's running. And debugging and changing your code. While it's still running. And, well, never really being out of your program.
IDEs are a quaint imitation. Source analysis? Pfft. How about "active running code analysis" that's tied into what you're currently editing. Integrated debugger? Pfft. You mean you have to stop your program to fix the function you're in the middle of?
It's like any benchmark though... if the samples are all clipping, you can't compare it. Finding the maximum is the point. If your code runtime tests finish in 0.00s (or within the margin of error), you can't tell which is fastest. If all the graphics cards render at maximum FPS, you can't tell which is best. Likewise, if a team "wins", you can't really tell how good they are: "win" is not a useful metric, because you can't tell how far beyond "win" they went.
Whereas people like me are advocates of just scrapping the whole damn thing because the potential benefits of doing so are way more interesting than the deprecated business models that it will finally put to bed.. and because I believe it is fundamentally the right thing to do, from a "you don't tell me what I can and can't do and I'll do the same" sense of what right means.
This is fundamental misthinking about copyright. Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors... it's the same thing that keeps you from writing a book (or whatever), changing a few things, and publishing it under their name. Of course, as soon as you want to publish it, even if you self-publish, it becomes a "business model" which you seem to find deprecated. Any open source license out there---GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, CC, etc---are built on copyright.
If you want everything you do to be in an unrestricted public domain, well: you can have that. Do so. But, if you want to tell me that my works must also be unrestricted public domain works: well, you're doing exactly what you claim to be against.
[...] it's hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us in the wrong direction.
This coming from a generation that still thinks web apps are cool.
2. Development backed by a professional company
3. Program is usually relatively complete and bug free
You're kidding me right? Most 3rd party software is utter craptastic BS. And you can't fix it because you don't have the source. Or even see what's going on. And without a massively expensive support contract coupled with a vendor who actually has a good support team, your "professional company" that is "backing" it is much like tier-1 cell phone support: read off a script; if that doesn't fix it, you're SOL.
I would sortof find this amusing but the grammar is wrong; for two items, you use only "and" with no comma. Of course, given slashdot's excellent track record for precision grammar...
A good programmer know how to be correct form of lazy: do not reinvent the wheel.
YES. Good lazy is "I shouldn't have to do all this work, either use someone else's, or make the computer to it for me." Bad lazy is "whine, I don't want to figure anything out, I just want to get it done." The difference is crucial; the first is willing to spend time learning to save unnecessary labor, the latter is willing to do unnecessary labor to save learning. The former is laziness, the latter is stupidity.
...especially when you don't know what "better" is and you're too lazy to learn: unwillingness to learn is stupidity. Like the quote says, ignorance is curable; stupidity is terminal.
People who use these things and think they're great and that they're doing amazing things don't realize that the time they're taking and the problems they're struggling with are long-solved trivialities. Nothing new. Nothing cool. It's like someone struggling with a bunch of complicated excel formulas to make their spreadsheet do something that you could do in a few lines of your favorite scripting language.
Unfortunately this is something that afflicts most of the industry these days, and we end up thinking half-assed pieces of crap are cool just because you see them in your browser.
Software is ALWAYS reliable. It is the code that people write that sucks.
Yeah right. Even a simple ADD instruction will give the wrong result when the hardware fails. And hardware will fail.
Software isn't "reliable, but." It's only as reliable as it can be. "Those damn kids and their fancy functions" isn't the problem. The problem is fundamental complexity; no magic wand will make that go away.
For those that disagree, tell me why? Why is a programming error FIXABLE but not PREVENTABLE?
Sure, you can write provably error-free code... but you have to solve the halting problem first.
I live in Washington state, where it's illegal to use a hand-held phone while driving. If I'm trying to immediately contest a ticket and get pulled over for using a phone while driving, will parkingticket.com automatically contest that one as well? Otherwise it's gonna be a vicious circle.
So exactly how often do you get pulled over and issued a parking ticket?
I'm going to file a patent for "something cool you can do with technology".
I'll make millions.
That would require someone do something cool with technology. Who is? Google may be a nice company, but web mail, craptastically feature-light "office apps", and search engines aren't exactly "cool". And who is doing anything else? (No, Apple isn't doing anything cool, either.)
Whether or not the source code is available does not make software less secure.
Disagree. Security is not a static rating but a process; part of that process is fixing found problems. Guess which is easier to fix: the stuff you've got the source to, or the stuff you have to wait 6 months before the vendor acknowledges as flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to dropping everything else and spending 30-40 years rewriting it?
Yeah but it's harder to come up with solid, verifiable negatives about a product. Since I primarily only care whether I can live with whatever downsides are present, negative "this sucks! i hate it!" reviews are worthless, while "this feature doesn't work as intended" I can do further research on and see whether this is a one-off case or common.
No, "real developers" do as much as they can to meet a deadline. No more... but often quite a bit less. There is no motivation to go "above and beyond" for "professional" work. Why bother? You've met the specs, and you almost certainly don't have the time.
On the contrary, with free software, the people who use the software make the software. This is not someone tinkering out of some kind of bored interest. These are people who have a need, and work on code until that need is met. They are out there. They do not have minimum requirements. They do not have deadlines. They will not stop, ever, until the code is done.
Unlike a "professional" who will stop as soon as possible and get the hell out, because there is no reason for any more, and usually reason for less.
That's a great idea... I can have my e-book reader power itself!
"Haw haw a text editor that duz stuff, we here around these parts just use NOTEPAD.EXE"
Yawn. Tired jokes that aren't funny anymore.
Text editing, text processing, and generally manipulating anything involving language---especially natural language---is the most complicated thing that's ever done on a computer. Yet people---even supposedly knowledgeable people---demand stupidly broken tools that lack sophisticated tools for doing a sophisticated thing. When you understand this, jokes about "ha ha your text-editor-operating-system does X" aren't funny. It makes you wonder why other text editors don't do things.
I learned my lesson quickly. After each meeting that I skipped, my boss would show up in my office (effectively destroying the block of time I was saving), and then he'd tell me about 5 more projects brought up in the meeting that were automatically approved.
Your manager wasn't doing his job. Your manager's job is to shield you from this crap, to shoot down stuff that will suck your time, and generally make sure you have what you need to get your job done---including time. Your manager is your advocate, your agent, so to speak. If you work in a "top-down" organization where your boss is someone else's advocate, especially his boss's, find a new job.
authentication (which very few sites need
When I log into $FORUM, how do I make sure that I am giving my password to $FORUM and not to someone who has intercepted my Internet connection?
You don't. Unless you call up $FORUM_OWNER at a verified number (not off the domain)---which means you first have to investigate and verify who the owner is---and get them to verify their certificate fingerprint. You do that every time you log in somewhere? I didn't think so.
The PKI "authorities" do no checking. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can get a "valid" cert, so if you're relying on that ...
banks and so on
Every time you shop online, you deal with banks.
No, you deal with merchants. Merchants deal with a chain of other people, who may or may not be banks. Credit card companies are not, but your card may be managed through one.
#603
The only person who is less smart now is you.
However, this means we're missing a huge chunk of actual world news. While we know of a few major items, we don't know about the aggregate of everything else. How many people died today? Glancing at Google News, you might note that maybe some people died from bombings, and a few others in battle, and maybe a few to flu. But that's a very tiny selection. High profile cases. How many people died in traffic accidents? Or from other disease or poor health? Old age? What regions? What were the numbers?
This is actual interesting information which would probably change our perspective drastically on a lot of issues. Unfortunately it takes a good bit of work to put it together, and it doesn't quite get you glamorous headlines. But it's world news, and the sort of thing that would be worth paying for.
It's just that now that we can assume local clusters and WANs worth of co-operating data stores, there are probably better, more performant ways of implementing persistence, replication, distribution of data than traditional RDBMS implementations.
You can also assume magical fairy dust and free energy, but that doesn't make it so. You can ask if there are better ways, but you can't assume it, and in the end you will find there is no magic.
Clusters and replication are NOT NEW. Not even remotely new. There is, in fact, nothing new architecturally at all that would indicate some new capability that hasn't already been repeatedly analyzed and tried. That doesn't mean you can't tweak something for a situation, or that you need a giant Oracle database for everything, but "the web" and "cheap hardware" change the equation by precisely nothing.
What has changed the equation is cheap, unimportant data, which covers the majority of the web. "Real" applications, where data integrity is important (like say, your bank account), and immediate accuracy guaranteed, require the main thing you use a database for: data integrity. Your facebook page, your google search, that blog entry, or some video on youtube: these don't matter. If it's a little slow, or doesn't update immediately, or you get an error, no one is losing money. No one cares.
In essence, if a reliable database isn't important for your app, your app isn't really handling important data. This may be fine; in the mainstream, there's a lot of noncritical stuff. But this doesn't make databases unimportant.
You know what's awesome about slashdot? That I could laugh at this post ... before I clicked the story.
This is the scientist's/mathematician's/logician's fallacy. You have a field of expertise which ostensibly can explain everything it encounters: except it never encounters anything it can't explain, because its nature doesn't allow these encounters to happen. They are excluded as irrelevant or nonexistent. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist.
Consider, moreover, that the laws of reality may not hold everywhere. What if universal constants are local? What if pi is an even 4 in some places, and integers are irrational? We've seen a very, very, very tiny corner of a universe that's incredibly huge. Everything may be fixed, but then again, we don't have a lot of data.
Heh. If you think that, you have never written (or perhaps grokked) a single line of Common LISP in SLIME. There is nothing quite like developing your code while it's running. And debugging and changing your code. While it's still running. And, well, never really being out of your program.
IDEs are a quaint imitation. Source analysis? Pfft. How about "active running code analysis" that's tied into what you're currently editing. Integrated debugger? Pfft. You mean you have to stop your program to fix the function you're in the middle of?
It's like any benchmark though ... if the samples are all clipping, you can't compare it. Finding the maximum is the point. If your code runtime tests finish in 0.00s (or within the margin of error), you can't tell which is fastest. If all the graphics cards render at maximum FPS, you can't tell which is best. Likewise, if a team "wins", you can't really tell how good they are: "win" is not a useful metric, because you can't tell how far beyond "win" they went.
This is fundamental misthinking about copyright. Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors... it's the same thing that keeps you from writing a book (or whatever), changing a few things, and publishing it under their name. Of course, as soon as you want to publish it, even if you self-publish, it becomes a "business model" which you seem to find deprecated. Any open source license out there---GPL, BSD, Apache, MPL, CC, etc---are built on copyright.
If you want everything you do to be in an unrestricted public domain, well: you can have that. Do so. But, if you want to tell me that my works must also be unrestricted public domain works: well, you're doing exactly what you claim to be against.
This coming from a generation that still thinks web apps are cool.
You're kidding me right? Most 3rd party software is utter craptastic BS. And you can't fix it because you don't have the source. Or even see what's going on. And without a massively expensive support contract coupled with a vendor who actually has a good support team, your "professional company" that is "backing" it is much like tier-1 cell phone support: read off a script; if that doesn't fix it, you're SOL.
I would sortof find this amusing but the grammar is wrong; for two items, you use only "and" with no comma. Of course, given slashdot's excellent track record for precision grammar...
YES. Good lazy is "I shouldn't have to do all this work, either use someone else's, or make the computer to it for me." Bad lazy is "whine, I don't want to figure anything out, I just want to get it done." The difference is crucial; the first is willing to spend time learning to save unnecessary labor, the latter is willing to do unnecessary labor to save learning. The former is laziness, the latter is stupidity.
...especially when you don't know what "better" is and you're too lazy to learn: unwillingness to learn is stupidity. Like the quote says, ignorance is curable; stupidity is terminal.
People who use these things and think they're great and that they're doing amazing things don't realize that the time they're taking and the problems they're struggling with are long-solved trivialities. Nothing new. Nothing cool. It's like someone struggling with a bunch of complicated excel formulas to make their spreadsheet do something that you could do in a few lines of your favorite scripting language.
Unfortunately this is something that afflicts most of the industry these days, and we end up thinking half-assed pieces of crap are cool just because you see them in your browser.
Yeah right. Even a simple ADD instruction will give the wrong result when the hardware fails. And hardware will fail.
Software isn't "reliable, but." It's only as reliable as it can be. "Those damn kids and their fancy functions" isn't the problem. The problem is fundamental complexity; no magic wand will make that go away.
Sure, you can write provably error-free code... but you have to solve the halting problem first.
So exactly how often do you get pulled over and issued a parking ticket?
That would require someone do something cool with technology. Who is? Google may be a nice company, but web mail, craptastically feature-light "office apps", and search engines aren't exactly "cool". And who is doing anything else? (No, Apple isn't doing anything cool, either.)
Yes, but the rest of us as a whole are. And no one cares about you anyway: you don't matter.
Disagree. Security is not a static rating but a process; part of that process is fixing found problems. Guess which is easier to fix: the stuff you've got the source to, or the stuff you have to wait 6 months before the vendor acknowledges as flawed.