Oh, come on now. If this had been the real reason then it would have been worded much more professionally. The wording on Damage's site is clearly carried by emotions.
Which one is worse, the fool or the fool that follows him? I find the attention/flames that everybody is giving to SCO highly surprising, as a result it is hard for bystanders to differentiate between the opponents. It would be much more mature of Linus and Co to either ignore the whole matter or respond professionally, instead of playing the same game.
Most simple programming people don't really understand or care too much about the details of the language or VM design (e.g. checked/unchecked exception model) as long as the main paradigm and features are similar. But they really care about tools, and how easy one or another IDE makes it to throw together a simple app. And since so far the majority of reviews and user opinions favor VS.Net, Java will indeed face some hard times.
It is interesting that Slashdot crowd is usually quite willing to give harsh punishments to spammers. They say that since spammers take away millions of hours of people's time, it is comparable to murder, and life sentence is quite appropriate. Well, the exact same argument applies here, this guy is no better than the worst spammers and I don't see why he should get any more sympathy.
Unfortunately this would not help either. There are significant proven mineral reserves under the ice of Antarctica but no one seems to be very interested in mining it because of cost issues. With Mars the cost would be several orders of magnitude higher, so don't have any hopes about that.
Then be part of the solution and start fighting network abuse in your country.
BTW, what have you done to fight abuse in the US? To me personally, spam blacklisting is a much bigger problem than spam itself because many organizations abroad (like some departments of my former Uni) with whom I sometimes have to communicate (I live in the US right now) blacklist all major US ISPs (MSN, AOL, Yahoo, AT&T) and justify this behavior with the arrogance of US sys-admins that tend to block all foreign mail. This tit-for-tat behavior does not benefit anyone and if anything pisses me off it's the arrogant attitude of sys-admins who for some reason forget their place and think they have absolute power to decide with whom the people in their organization may communicate with and with whom they cannot.
I am working on a.Net/SQL based web application that is supposed to support hundreds of thousands of users and hundreds of requests per second while delivering dynamic, personalized content (sort of like Slashdot does). And btw, it does use reflection, you just have to be smart about it. It requires some careful design but is definitely doable. However, the poster's problems don't seem to be so much with.Net as with SOAP and SQL. Also, he does not specify what the exact bottlenecks are, does he run out of memory? Disk I/O? Hits some built in limit in SQL or anywhere else? But of course, if he identified what the particular problem was then he could perhaps just fix it easily and couldn't post it on Slashdot;)
As someone who comes from Estonia, let me offer a few reasons on how this change happened: 1) Geographic and cultural closeness to Finland. Finland is one of the most wired countries in the world, and the multitudes of cell-phone carrying Finns crossing the border to buy cheap booze left a strong impression, creating more demand for telecommunications infrastructure. Never underestimate the power of neighborly envy:) 2) Liberal and fast growing banking system. Banking was probably the fastest growing sector in Estonian economy in the nineties, being built from ground up and supported by the fiscal policy of the government. Estonian banks invested heavily in technology and as a result I could do more in an Estonian online bank (like sending money to anyone in the country in a matter of seconds, free of charge) in 1995 than I can do today in a US online bank. 3) Prioritizing computer and Internet education in schools. This was a fortunate brainchild of some younger politicians, and as a result computers are a natural thing in younger people's lives now. See this link or the Tiger Leap site for more information.
Sometimes I wish the Soviets would have gotten to the Moon first because then Americans wouldn't have had any other choice but to put a man on Mars to save face. Either that or a nuclear strike against the USSR (I'm not kidding, there were people who seriously suggested that to the US administration if the Soviet Moon program got too far) because otherwise the political situation would have been intolerable. It's all political, science is a third-rate consideration, and noble goals like actual expansion to the space are not even mentioned. But still, I wish them luck, any step forward for whatever reasons is better than our current self-admiring stagnation (like how long can we hype the moon landing?? It is still the main exhibit in all space-related museums after 35 years!)
I would look at a Top Coder victor the same way I would look at someone who can answer trivia questions correctly. The experience is incredibly valuable, but I wouldn't say that they are parallel at all. Most of the questions and tests are biased against people who have experience doing competitions. A veteran programmer would probably perform 10x better in a real world environment, and is much more valuable than a TopCoder winner who is still in school... but I could be wrong.
Actually it's not as simple as that. In order to be successful in TopCoder competitions, one has to be a rather smart person (in fact the 2001 winner is "the smartest guy in the world"), with good analysis, generalization and abstraction skills, and above all, a quick thinker. The problems are not trivial to dissect, and time pressure is strong. So for a long term employment (3+ years), I would rather hire a young successful TopCoder participant (one can always gain experience but not smarts) than a regular but experienced guy.
The main reason is actually political, not technical. Imagine a world where we have really foolproof and very convenient electronic voting (like everybody just voting from home over the Internet, provided that a good and secure protocol is invented for it). Elections would be hundreds of times cheaper because of lesser staff and organization costs. As a result it would become possible to have people vote for many more issues than just who is going to be a president (think Switzerland where almost everything is decided by popular vote). We would never have DMCA or any of the other strange laws pushed through by special interest groups and hurting the general public. Congress would suddenly lose 90% of its importance, becoming just a law-drafting institution without too much decision power. Obviously this is something that today's rich and powerful would never want to happen, and they would fight long and hard before giving any of this power up.
why pay for a 17" mid range LCD screen over a 21" Natural Flat top of the line CRT monitor?
The ratio might come down once US manufacturers also start figuring the cost of recycling into the price. In Europe it is mandatory for computer makers to take back their old stuff, and recycle it in a reasonable way, as opposed to the US where most old computers end up in basements or landfills. Of course, it makes prices higher but in the end, everybody wins. And recycling a CRT is much more expensive than recycling an LCD, so the price difference is smaller.
I've blocked South Korea completely by routing all Korea IP blocks to a blackhole (non-existant IP address). If you'd like to do the same for this (and perhaps other countries and select ISPs), see http://www.blackholes.us/ Click on (South) Korea.
And similarly, many departments in the university I used to go in Estonia have blocked MSN, Yahoo, AOL and all other significant US ISPs because most of their spam originates from there. Obviously, such blind blocking is not a very good idea, and Koreans certainly don't have a monopoly in irresponsiblity.
"A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said "Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton"
It reminds of the several attempts to make a movie based on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In one case, it almost happened, and then some exec found that hey, why does the Earth get destroyed? Can we somehow skip that part, or have a conclusion where the hero triumphantly brings the Earth back from destruction? And of course, that was the end of it.
Not that such anecdotal evidence would count but I've personally bought more handhelds than desktops already in the last two years or so. This technology is moving faster, so there's more incentive to upgrade. And quite many of my coworkers are showing off their new Pocket PCs as well.
Any survey where the very first question is "What is your e-mail address?" makes me very very suspicious, especially when they collect all sorts of financial data as well. Still, given Slashdot's anti-spam attitude, I thought that maybe they are a decent organization and checked their privacy policy. Vain hope, it actually bluntly says: SAGE might also use this email address to notify you of other related news and we all know what this usually means, right? Now call me paranoid but I've been burned by much more innocent looking sites asking for my e-mail address.
We both have to guess what the course contents will actually be (no matter what books they use)
Well, one difference is that I have actually been to a Microsoft security training, and it was nothing like what you're describing. Instead, it described how to find, exploit and avoid buffer overflows, how to store secrets reliably, how to determine good access controls to processes and objects, how to avoid common weaknesses in network protocols etc etc. Very useful stuff, actually.
Out of this will come lots of students thinking about security the Microsoft way. They'll believe that more security features (ACLs, etc.) in a system make it more secure. They'll think that if they just throw more tools and wizards at software, they can handle anything.
Why do you spread such bulls^H^H^H^H^H misinformation if you don't know what you're talking about? I believe Microsoft security courses are based on Writing Secure Code, a real good book by two MS insiders. It's all about secure coding techniques, not features.
dare we suggest that microsoft start this initiative with its employees first?
This has already happened. Remember when Windows development was halted for a month to find and fix security issues last February? At the same time, all technical people at Microsoft had to go through a special security training. It was based on Writing Secure Code by some MS insiders, a real good book in fact. I would think the particular course mentioned in the article would also feature this book.
These aren't really independent genres per se
on
Top Ten Dying Game Genres
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They are regular genres confined to limited technical resources. One example that they have is "Text adventure". Well, obviously, people are not interested text games any more but it doesn't mean that the niche is gone, it has just been filled with games with more technical capabilities but which still satisfy the same needs and appeal to the same types of people. Or another example: They mention that "beat 'em up games" are gone, and say that it was because they were 2D. Again, obviously no one is interested in Street Fighter or something like that but it doesn't mean that the whole idea of beating the shit out virtual monsters has vanished. In fact, all of these have just evolved, when you look at any modern game, you can always see the features that are borrowed from old games and just enhanced with new tech.
I am a citizen of one of those countries. By polls 80% of our population is opposed to the war. It is not a coincidence that the supporting countries are relatively small and poor. Their governments have been easier to bribe and pressure. The only country in the worlds where the population is supporting the war is USA, and that's because of the propaganda in mainstream media (the same people who support the war, also believe that it was Saddam Hussein who organized 9/11, which is clearly a nonsense). Even in UK, 70% of people are against the war.
Economically, its already helping. Looked at the stock exchange lately?
Wrong again. The stock market is just climbing out of the hole where it fell because of the uncertainty. Now that the end is near, we're just restoring the equilibrium.
Where were all these protestors when Clinton got us into Bosnia?
There's a huge difference between ending a war, and starting one, hence the the protests.
If we leave the US as a huge target that never retaliates, there is _nothing_ stopping every islamic crackpot in the world from taking a shot at us.
Iraq is a secular country, and Saddam Hussein is certainly not an islamic crackpot. He has done absolutely nothing to the US that would justify attacking his country and killing hundreds of thousands of people (the first Gulf war killed 100-200000 people and it was mostly in deserts, it is going to be mostly in cities this time).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on now. If this had been the real reason then it would have been worded much more professionally. The wording on Damage's site is clearly carried by emotions.
Which one is worse, the fool or the fool that follows him?
I find the attention/flames that everybody is giving to SCO highly surprising, as a result it is hard for bystanders to differentiate between the opponents. It would be much more mature of Linus and Co to either ignore the whole matter or respond professionally, instead of playing the same game.
Most simple programming people don't really understand or care too much about the details of the language or VM design (e.g. checked/unchecked exception model) as long as the main paradigm and features are similar. But they really care about tools, and how easy one or another IDE makes it to throw together a simple app. And since so far the majority of reviews and user opinions favor VS.Net, Java will indeed face some hard times.
He deserves a punishment fitting the crime
It is interesting that Slashdot crowd is usually quite willing to give harsh punishments to spammers. They say that since spammers take away millions of hours of people's time, it is comparable to murder, and life sentence is quite appropriate. Well, the exact same argument applies here, this guy is no better than the worst spammers and I don't see why he should get any more sympathy.
Exploitable mineral content
Unfortunately this would not help either. There are significant proven mineral reserves under the ice of Antarctica but no one seems to be very interested in mining it because of cost issues. With Mars the cost would be several orders of magnitude higher, so don't have any hopes about that.
Then be part of the solution and start fighting network abuse in your country.
BTW, what have you done to fight abuse in the US?
To me personally, spam blacklisting is a much bigger problem than spam itself because many organizations abroad (like some departments of my former Uni) with whom I sometimes have to communicate (I live in the US right now) blacklist all major US ISPs (MSN, AOL, Yahoo, AT&T) and justify this behavior with the arrogance of US sys-admins that tend to block all foreign mail. This tit-for-tat behavior does not benefit anyone and if anything pisses me off it's the arrogant attitude of sys-admins who for some reason forget their place and think they have absolute power to decide with whom the people in their organization may communicate with and with whom they cannot.
I am working on a .Net/SQL based web application that is supposed to support hundreds of thousands of users and hundreds of requests per second while delivering dynamic, personalized content (sort of like Slashdot does). And btw, it does use reflection, you just have to be smart about it. It requires some careful design but is definitely doable. .Net as with SOAP and SQL. Also, he does not specify what the exact bottlenecks are, does he run out of memory? Disk I/O? Hits some built in limit in SQL or anywhere else? ;)
However, the poster's problems don't seem to be so much with
But of course, if he identified what the particular problem was then he could perhaps just fix it easily and couldn't post it on Slashdot
As someone who comes from Estonia, let me offer a few reasons on how this change happened: :)
1) Geographic and cultural closeness to Finland. Finland is one of the most wired countries in the world, and the multitudes of cell-phone carrying Finns crossing the border to buy cheap booze left a strong impression, creating more demand for telecommunications infrastructure. Never underestimate the power of neighborly envy
2) Liberal and fast growing banking system. Banking was probably the fastest growing sector in Estonian economy in the nineties, being built from ground up and supported by the fiscal policy of the government. Estonian banks invested heavily in technology and as a result I could do more in an Estonian online bank (like sending money to anyone in the country in a matter of seconds, free of charge) in 1995 than I can do today in a US online bank.
3) Prioritizing computer and Internet education in schools. This was a fortunate brainchild of some younger politicians, and as a result computers are a natural thing in younger people's lives now. See this link or the Tiger Leap site for more information.
Sometimes I wish the Soviets would have gotten to the Moon first because then Americans wouldn't have had any other choice but to put a man on Mars to save face.
Either that or a nuclear strike against the USSR (I'm not kidding, there were people who seriously suggested that to the US administration if the Soviet Moon program got too far) because otherwise the political situation would have been intolerable. It's all political, science is a third-rate consideration, and noble goals like actual expansion to the space are not even mentioned. But still, I wish them luck, any step forward for whatever reasons is better than our current self-admiring stagnation (like how long can we hype the moon landing?? It is still the main exhibit in all space-related museums after 35 years!)
I would look at a Top Coder victor the same way I would look at someone who can answer trivia questions correctly. The experience is incredibly valuable, but I wouldn't say that they are parallel at all. Most of the questions and tests are biased against people who have experience doing competitions. A veteran programmer would probably perform 10x better in a real world environment, and is much more valuable than a TopCoder winner who is still in school... but I could be wrong.
Actually it's not as simple as that. In order to be successful in TopCoder competitions, one has to be a rather smart person (in fact the 2001 winner is "the smartest guy in the world"), with good analysis, generalization and abstraction skills, and above all, a quick thinker. The problems are not trivial to dissect, and time pressure is strong.
So for a long term employment (3+ years), I would rather hire a young successful TopCoder participant (one can always gain experience but not smarts) than a regular but experienced guy.
The main reason is actually political, not technical. Imagine a world where we have really foolproof and very convenient electronic voting (like everybody just voting from home over the Internet, provided that a good and secure protocol is invented for it). Elections would be hundreds of times cheaper because of lesser staff and organization costs. As a result it would become possible to have people vote for many more issues than just who is going to be a president (think Switzerland where almost everything is decided by popular vote). We would never have DMCA or any of the other strange laws pushed through by special interest groups and hurting the general public. Congress would suddenly lose 90% of its importance, becoming just a law-drafting institution without too much decision power.
Obviously this is something that today's rich and powerful would never want to happen, and they would fight long and hard before giving any of this power up.
What he did was illegal and wreckless
;)
I guess you mean reckless because a wreck was actually involved in the story
PS. Mul on küll hea meel näha teisi eestlasi /.'il.
:) Slashdot pakub ikka iga päev mingeid üllatusi. Kus sa elad muidu?
Hahaa
why pay for a 17" mid range LCD screen over a 21" Natural Flat top of the line CRT monitor?
The ratio might come down once US manufacturers also start figuring the cost of recycling into the price. In Europe it is mandatory for computer makers to take back their old stuff, and recycle it in a reasonable way, as opposed to the US where most old computers end up in basements or landfills. Of course, it makes prices higher but in the end, everybody wins.
And recycling a CRT is much more expensive than recycling an LCD, so the price difference is smaller.
I've blocked South Korea completely by routing all Korea IP blocks to a blackhole (non-existant IP address). If you'd like to do the same for this (and perhaps other countries and select ISPs), see http://www.blackholes.us/ Click on (South) Korea.
And similarly, many departments in the university I used to go in Estonia have blocked MSN, Yahoo, AOL and all other significant US ISPs because most of their spam originates from there. Obviously, such blind blocking is not a very good idea, and Koreans certainly don't have a monopoly in irresponsiblity.
Paul Allen left MS more then ten years go and has since been spending his share on all sorts of extravagant projects. Get over it.
"A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said "Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton"
It reminds of the several attempts to make a movie based on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
In one case, it almost happened, and then some exec found that hey, why does the Earth get destroyed? Can we somehow skip that part, or have a conclusion where the hero triumphantly brings the Earth back from destruction? And of course, that was the end of it.
Not that such anecdotal evidence would count but I've personally bought more handhelds than desktops already in the last two years or so.
This technology is moving faster, so there's more incentive to upgrade. And quite many of my coworkers are showing off their new Pocket PCs as well.
Any survey where the very first question is "What is your e-mail address?" makes me very very suspicious, especially when they collect all sorts of financial data as well.
Still, given Slashdot's anti-spam attitude, I thought that maybe they are a decent organization and checked their privacy policy. Vain hope, it actually bluntly says: SAGE might also use this email address to notify you of other related news and we all know what this usually means, right?
Now call me paranoid but I've been burned by much more innocent looking sites asking for my e-mail address.
We both have to guess what the course contents will actually be (no matter what books they use)
Well, one difference is that I have actually been to a Microsoft security training, and it was nothing like what you're describing. Instead, it described how to find, exploit and avoid buffer overflows, how to store secrets reliably, how to determine good access controls to processes and objects, how to avoid common weaknesses in network protocols etc etc. Very useful stuff, actually.
Out of this will come lots of students thinking about security the Microsoft way. They'll believe that more security features (ACLs, etc.) in a system make it more secure. They'll think that if they just throw more tools and wizards at software, they can handle anything.
Why do you spread such bulls^H^H^H^H^H misinformation if you don't know what you're talking about? I believe Microsoft security courses are based on Writing Secure Code, a real good book by two MS insiders. It's all about secure coding techniques, not features.
dare we suggest that microsoft start this initiative with its employees first?
This has already happened. Remember when Windows development was halted for a month to find and fix security issues last February? At the same time, all technical people at Microsoft had to go through a special security training. It was based on Writing Secure Code by some MS insiders, a real good book in fact.
I would think the particular course mentioned in the article would also feature this book.
They are regular genres confined to limited technical resources. One example that they have is "Text adventure". Well, obviously, people are not interested text games any more but it doesn't mean that the niche is gone, it has just been filled with games with more technical capabilities but which still satisfy the same needs and appeal to the same types of people.
Or another example: They mention that "beat 'em up games" are gone, and say that it was because they were 2D. Again, obviously no one is interested in Street Fighter or something like that but it doesn't mean that the whole idea of beating the shit out virtual monsters has vanished.
In fact, all of these have just evolved, when you look at any modern game, you can always see the features that are borrowed from old games and just enhanced with new tech.
Dude.. 45 countries have supported us
I am a citizen of one of those countries. By polls 80% of our population is opposed to the war. It is not a coincidence that the supporting countries are relatively small and poor. Their governments have been easier to bribe and pressure. The only country in the worlds where the population is supporting the war is USA, and that's because of the propaganda in mainstream media (the same people who support the war, also believe that it was Saddam Hussein who organized 9/11, which is clearly a nonsense).
Even in UK, 70% of people are against the war.
Economically, its already helping. Looked at the stock exchange lately?
Wrong again. The stock market is just climbing out of the hole where it fell because of the uncertainty. Now that the end is near, we're just restoring the equilibrium.
Where were all these protestors when Clinton got us into Bosnia?
There's a huge difference between ending a war, and starting one, hence the the protests.
If we leave the US as a huge target that never retaliates, there is _nothing_ stopping every islamic crackpot in the world from taking a shot at us.
Iraq is a secular country, and Saddam Hussein is certainly not an islamic crackpot. He has done absolutely nothing to the US that would justify attacking his country and killing hundreds of thousands of people (the first Gulf war killed 100-200000 people and it was mostly in deserts, it is going to be mostly in cities this time).
Slashdot has found its own niche and comments on non-mainstream tech issues related to the war, instead of just parroting the regular feed. Way to go!