The funny thing is that the major wineries have contemplated changing from cork to screw caps for several years now because screw caps are cheaper and much more reliable (bad corks sometimes taint a wine).
However the reason they haven't switched is exactly the perception that people have that screw caps mean cheap/bad wine.:)
There are multiple facets to why scripting is descriminated against. Some of it is justified and some is not.
For starters, the biggest myth of scripting languages is that they don't perform well. The bottom line is that there are very few applications where the overhead of the scripting language is going to outweigh the performance cost of a bad design or poorly written code.
That said, the biggest problem with scripting languages is that they are so easy to use. The tends to create a coding cowboy type environment where folks solve a problem really quickly in a script but that script is never kept in version control, or it is written in a language that noone else in the company is trained to use, or it contains hard coded entries for database passwords, or there are hundreds of scripts and it becomes a nightmare to make a change to the way things work because the scripts don't share any codebase...
Note that none of the above problems are the fault of the scripting language. They are more the fault of developers abusing them. In a sense, scripting languages leave a lot of rope for folks to hang themselves with. And because lots of folks do hang themselves with them, there is a lot of ammunition that people can use to spread FUD on scripting languages.
But perhaps most importantly, there is this goofy thing called human nature. For some reason, we silly humans are easily duped into thinking that "you get what you pay for". It's marketing/sales 101, and it happens all over the place. For example, if you see two bottles of wine, one for $2 and another for $20, odds are that most people will be convinced that the $20 bottle is a better wine, even though there is no evidence whatsoever to base that decision on.
Well, scripting languages are typically free, so the natural inclination of people is to think that they aren't as good as products for languages that sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, I don't see this ever really changing, but then I've never been accused of being an optimist...
I think certification of computer service technicians would be great if there were vendor neutral certifications available that were accepted as industry standard.
The problem is that most computer certifications these days are created by the vendors themselves as a way of both generating additional revenue as well as bolstering the marketing power of their products.
Bah. There is nothing wrong with single sign on as a concept. Everything you are squawking about relates to the current implementation approaches.
What if instead of having a single signon on the server there was instead a standardized "single sign on agent" that people could have on their local machines. This agent would automatically do the work of creating "randomized" logins and passwords for each remote system.
Furthermore, it could provide a standard way to register to new sites (via a standard protocol tunnelled through HTTP/HTTPS most likely). Something along the lines of popping up a list of the information items that the remote site wants/requires (e.g. name, address, etc) and you can just check or uncheck the things you want to send them.
Now, when you change your email address all you should have to do is click a button on your client side agent and it will do the work of updating all of the remote sites that you have accounts on for you (obviously you can override this and choose specifically which ones you want notified).
Furthermore, what if this agent information had a standard format for extracting the information (similar to password protected private key files). Now you could easily export information from one of your machines and import it to another.
And finally, this could support the ability for "credential servers", so that users could optionally decide to store their credential information remotely on these servers rather than locally (of course the local client would cache this information in case of a credential server outage). This would NOT be a required feature, but some users might prefer the convenience of this approach and be willing to sacrifice the additional security vulnerability.
This is the type of single sign on that I want. Where I as the owner of the information get to choose the location and content of the data that every site receives.
This is a great little addictive game where the object is to push boxes through a maze to designated destinations without getting any of them stuck (e.g. pushing one into the corner...you can't push it out of there)
Doom was successful in balancing a reasonable image quality with a fast frame rate, but it really required a modern, fast
computer to run well. In 1994, quite a lot of people upgraded their computers mainly because they wanted to play games.
This is commonplace now, but it was almost unheard of before Doom.
Perhaps the professor should have checked into the history of a series of 3D games called Wing Commander. Every damn version of that game required an upgrade for reasonable performance...and it was doing 3D well before Wolf3D (ok, it was cheating because the backgrounds for space are simple, but it is a noteworthy game in 3D gaming).
(a) In General.--Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202
willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial
gain--
(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not
more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and
(2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for
not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense.
So how can Dmitry's actions be interpretted as being for commercial or private financial gain?
Just cruise a boat loaded with a nuclear payload through international waters and cruise towards the Pacific seaboard of the US. Detonate as close as possible, possibly with a short range missle.
I really don't know the budget of these "rogue nations", but I'm guessing buying a boat is a hell of a lot cheaper than an ICBM.
Please refer to this Yahoo article which explicitly states that all RedHat is doing is essentially packaging up PostgreSQL and selling "up2date" type functionality for it.
Of course, why anyone would pay for something as simple as "rpm -i postgres-..." is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is that the major wineries have contemplated changing from cork to screw caps for several years now because screw caps are cheaper and much more reliable (bad corks sometimes taint a wine).
:)
However the reason they haven't switched is exactly the perception that people have that screw caps mean cheap/bad wine.
There are multiple facets to why scripting is descriminated against. Some of it is justified and some is not.
For starters, the biggest myth of scripting languages is that they don't perform well. The bottom line is that there are very few applications where the overhead of the scripting language is going to outweigh the performance cost of a bad design or poorly written code.
That said, the biggest problem with scripting languages is that they are so easy to use. The tends to create a coding cowboy type environment where folks solve a problem really quickly in a script but that script is never kept in version control, or it is written in a language that noone else in the company is trained to use, or it contains hard coded entries for database passwords, or there are hundreds of scripts and it becomes a nightmare to make a change to the way things work because the scripts don't share any codebase...
Note that none of the above problems are the fault of the scripting language. They are more the fault of developers abusing them. In a sense, scripting languages leave a lot of rope for folks to hang themselves with. And because lots of folks do hang themselves with them, there is a lot of ammunition that people can use to spread FUD on scripting languages.
But perhaps most importantly, there is this goofy thing called human nature. For some reason, we silly humans are easily duped into thinking that "you get what you pay for". It's marketing/sales 101, and it happens all over the place. For example, if you see two bottles of wine, one for $2 and another for $20, odds are that most people will be convinced that the $20 bottle is a better wine, even though there is no evidence whatsoever to base that decision on.
Well, scripting languages are typically free, so the natural inclination of people is to think that they aren't as good as products for languages that sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, I don't see this ever really changing, but then I've never been accused of being an optimist...
I think certification of computer service technicians would be great if there were vendor neutral certifications available that were accepted as industry standard.
The problem is that most computer certifications these days are created by the vendors themselves as a way of both generating additional revenue as well as bolstering the marketing power of their products.
Bah. There is nothing wrong with single sign on as a concept. Everything you are squawking about relates to the current implementation approaches.
What if instead of having a single signon on the server there was instead a standardized "single sign on agent" that people could have on their local machines. This agent would automatically do the work of creating "randomized" logins and passwords for each remote system.
Furthermore, it could provide a standard way to register to new sites (via a standard protocol tunnelled through HTTP/HTTPS most likely). Something along the lines of popping up a list of the information items that the remote site wants/requires (e.g. name, address, etc) and you can just check or uncheck the things you want to send them.
Now, when you change your email address all you should have to do is click a button on your client side agent and it will do the work of updating all of the remote sites that you have accounts on for you (obviously you can override this and choose specifically which ones you want notified).
Furthermore, what if this agent information had a standard format for extracting the information (similar to password protected private key files). Now you could easily export information from one of your machines and import it to another.
And finally, this could support the ability for "credential servers", so that users could optionally decide to store their credential information remotely on these servers rather than locally (of course the local client would cache this information in case of a credential server outage). This would NOT be a required feature, but some users might prefer the convenience of this approach and be willing to sacrifice the additional security vulnerability.
This is the type of single sign on that I want. Where I as the owner of the information get to choose the location and content of the data that every site receives.
This is a great little addictive game where the object is to push boxes through a maze to designated destinations without getting any of them stuck (e.g. pushing one into the corner...you can't push it out of there)
Perhaps the professor should have checked into the history of a series of 3D games called Wing Commander. Every damn version of that game required an upgrade for reasonable performance...and it was doing 3D well before Wolf3D (ok, it was cheating because the backgrounds for space are simple, but it is a noteworthy game in 3D gaming).
Section 1204 states:
So how can Dmitry's actions be interpretted as being for commercial or private financial gain?
Just cruise a boat loaded with a nuclear payload through international waters and cruise towards the Pacific seaboard of the US. Detonate as close as possible, possibly with a short range missle. I really don't know the budget of these "rogue nations", but I'm guessing buying a boat is a hell of a lot cheaper than an ICBM.
Of course, why anyone would pay for something as simple as "rpm -i postgres-..." is beyond me.