I would bet (and this is just a guess) that the amount of respect they pay to 'off the record' comments is directly related to the chance that they'll need quotes/interviews from you in the future.
Some guy who plays computer games likely has no off the record priviliges. On the other hand, someone like President Bush likely has all of the leeway that he could possibly want. It's simple economics really... they can afford to piss off the gamer.
Uhm, I think he was emphasizing the UTAH not the R-. I feel confident in saying this because, well the R- wasn't bold in the original comment.
Utah of course being the home of SCO.
Re:Lawyers have figured it out.
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
A more interesting case study is something like a dentist. My father is a dentist, and as such I've been around that profession for the first 18 years of my life.
The first time I ever thought about it, I was convinced that a young dentist was the best. They where fresh out of school with all of the latest and greatest techniques, tools, and training. Obviously (to me) current knowledge is way better than the antiquated knowledge of your older dentist.
Experience has taught me otherwise. I actually much prefer older and more experienced dentists. A good professional stays current on their profession (and most dentists are good professionals it seems) and as such they supplement their very pratical knowledge with their very practical experience. That's a very good combination of skill (Developed over time), instincts (developed over time), and knowledge that most young dentists simply can't compete with.
I'm sorry, but if in fact the COMMENTS are identical.. that's pretty compelling and easily spotted by a non-programmer.
There are interesting questions to answer.. like WHO introduced the code, but in terms of credibility, identical comments are the surest sign of copy/paste that I can think of.
Your telling me that this is different than an electronically distributed romance novel? How does that have any more value (beyond entertainment value, which both clearly have) than the house online?
Re:Microsoft and "Windex"
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You've obviously never actually TALKED to a Microsoft systems engineer.
The ones that I have met have been looking at ways to incorporate the things that really 'work' in Unix into the Windows codebase. I spent over 2 hours talking to one guy in particular who was desperately trying to get a full permissions based file system into the Windows code base. There are numerous ongoing R&D efforts at Redmond completely aimed at making Unix style security, scalabity, and stability available in a user friendly fashion inside of Windows.
I beleive that the culture at Redmond stresses revenue, not particular ties to even their own products. They recognize that they are losing the server battle.. They are winning the useability/administration battle. They are losing (badly) in terms of reliability and security. This company understands (better than any other) the importance of customer perception. Customers associate Unix with all of the things that Microsoft fails at. By building a SERVER product that is based on a Unix foundation, with a windows style UI and admin tools they gain the perception of a server platform that IS secure and stable. That's what Microsoft cares about.. and it makes perfect sense.
Wouldn't THAT be the biggest piece of Karma ever.. the much maligned Linux distribution (particuarly hated on Slashdot) actually saves the day..
Re:Profit on selling customer list?
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I bet they've profited from this, greatly.
AOL has the luxury of being both part of the problem (huge customer list) and part of the solution (spam fighting tools). They sell both.
To the user they offer 'advanced' spam fighting tools. The users see the problem as external to AOL (EVERYONE gets spam after all), and continue to use AOL because they offer at least some kind of protection. This creates, in the users mind, value.
It is not in AOL's best interest for Spam to simply go away. Much like telemarketing is in the best interests of the phone companies (they CREATE the problem by selling phone numbers, and also sell the tools to fight the callers). AOL merely wants to propogate the perception that they are on 'our' side of the spam battle.
The Remote stuff is more a nice additional feature that the manufacturers get almost for free. IR is a very important feature for transferring data between the PDA and everything else (other PDA's, Desktops, Laptops, and even printers). It just so happens that your TV remote works on the same basic technology, and they where able to add this feature almost for free.
Your missing the actual point. This does not describe a method for reading private implementation details, but a method for directly ACCESSING them.
class { private:
myMethod();//Can be accessed in.NET }
This means that not only can I discover the private implementation of a class, but then I can turn around and make direct calls on it.
This IS Microsofts fault, and it IS potentially quite dangerous. It means that interface code that performs sanity checks/permission checks/etc.. can be bypassed at the whim of a programmer. It means that security mechanisms built into the class can actually be bypassed by directly calling the underlying functions. This isn't a pretty scenario.
Obsfucation is helpful, as it will generally manipulate the actual names of the private methods. However, it still doesn't prevent those obsfucated method names from being called.
Java, on the other hand, DOES prevent this kind of acces. It qualifies scope (at RUNTIME) to ensure that no private methods or members can be actively called from outside of the class that contains them. That's the key difference here.
Unrealistic in Dallas. In order to afford (comfortably) a very average 1800 sq. foot house I live in Denton, which puts me 32 miles away from Work.
Every 5 miles closer to work I get house values increase dramatically. The same house (same builder and everything) is $20,000 more expensive just 15 miles down the road.
Another more pressing problem is that my wife and I both have careers. She is a PhD student at the University of North Texas, I work basically in Irving. It's not feasible for both of us to live close to our respective daily destinations. We can both live 15 miles away, but that doesn't really solve anything does it?
The answer really is functional mass transit. In Dallas (worst case city wise) there is a nice light rail system that runs through the central part of town (right down the central expressway). If you live in the north-central part of town, you can get to the downtown area with no effort.
The problem is that for those of us live in other parts of town the mass transit option is completely non-existent. It would take me 30 minutes to reach a transit station (by car) and then I could ride the rail to the same street as my work and then spend another 25-30 minutes on a Bus. Suddenly my commute has tripled in time if I choose the mass transit option... that's just not feasible.
We need an in-expensive retrofit transport solution. That computer controlled, elevated personal taxi system on slashdot awhile back seems like the most interesting solution I've seen. Monorail type systems have all of the same problems as current light rail, with the added bonus of extra cost. The hub and spoke model heaps inconvienence on the commuter, and is incredibly inefficient at actually getting people to work (although incredibly efficient at getting them all into one place).
I WANT to take mass transit. I hate driving. I'd rather read and drink coffee while someone else drives me... but I simply don't have that option right now. When my wife graduates, mass transit options are going to go a LONG ways in determining which city we live in next.
I disagree.. A very large number of Admins probably don't understand the actual implications of the open relay. To them it's just a more convienent method of running a webserver, or worse yet a default install option.
Your argument is much like saying that if you leave a window down and someones steals your car and runs over a kid, that you should go to jail. Lets make the people responsible(spammers and car thieves) responsible for their actions, not the relatively innocent middleman. Having an open relay just isn't criminal negligience, it's neither obvious nor well understood by most people (including those running small business webservers or OS's with built-in SMTP servers).
From another viewpoint, how do you combat people who are infected with a trojan that is itself a SMTP server? We've seen that this is a favorite trick of spammers.. are the people who had this happen to them responsible? After all, they should have secured their machine better (which raises the interesting proposition of it being actually negligient to be running Windows).
I bet that this was more a statement to get the readership (anti-MS Slashdot crowd) on his side. By dismissing an important MS technology he hoped to actually establish his credibility in this forum.. and it probably worked.
Your an idiot.. It's not hard to emigrate, have fun.
I've actually lived abroad, and while I enjoyed my time (Australia and Italy) overseas.. I do know that most of the rest of the industrialized world has more or less the same amount of freedom that I do right now.
We all have our faults, the U.S. included (and you may not beleive it, but Canada as well). Yet we, as a people, ARE free. We can live where we want, say (most anything) we want, and live the life we want to live. Sure, we have our problems, and we as a people have long been working to fight through them. We (along with the rest of the world) are constantly evolving and trying to find the balanace between outright freedom and the order we need to continue to live the lives we do.
Am I always happy with the U.S. ? Nope.. yet I recognize that we as a people really are a free. If your to blinded by your 'enlightened nature' and your very large chip that resides on your shoulder to see it, well then I hope you spend a few years somewhere else so that you can see exactly how wrong you really are.
Unless these kids are far richer than me when I was in school, they need better legal representation.
No judge on earth is going to award million dollar penalties to the RIAA. I'm betting that this ~$4000 a year penalty represents something like 40% of these kids overall yearly income.
With the exception of some very bizzare child support cases, the courts would not have taken 40% of their income for 4 years. It just doesn't happen.
I did realize that, I was using that to make a point because it does hold true for the majority of Iraqi's. At this point, even those who DO have computers and CD burners are probably not terribly concerned with them.
The fact is that the vast majority of the Iraqi population (Shiites in particular) did not exactly prosper under Saddam. While the countries GDP was pretty good, it's overall distribution of that wealth was among the worst in the world.
Yes there was a pretty decent Sunni middle class, but the majority of Iraqi's live(d) in near third world conditions. Let's not forget that.
That's a large part of the point for the RIAA. While Iraq is busy rebuilding it's infrastructure they can effectively impose their brand of IP law on these people with very little in the way of actual resistance.
To your average Iraqi, who CARES if they have no concept of fair use.. after all they have no running water, much less a CD burner.
This is not without precedent. In the wake of WWII our media conglomerates also imposed similiar types of oppressive IP law in France and West Germany which basically shut down their film makers..
I disagree. What your proposing really skirts the line with fraud, and much of it would illegal in about 85% of the world.
I do think your on the right track. The key is to find a way to make Spam expensive. After all, the problem is that these people can send out 80 million e-mails and the total cost is the price of a list and a few dollars in bandwidth. We need to find a way to fight back and make the cost of transmission higher.
How? I have no idea.. but I'd love to hear some ideas.
Just to clarify. The Zire brand is not aimed at 'low end' devices, but rather is focused as the consumer brand for Palm. So Zire == Consumer oriented devices, while Tungsten == professional.
One of the ideas behind Wine is to simplify the process of porting to Linux. In addition to it's library byte-level compatibility, one of the overriding goals is to give companies who write windows products the ability to port over large parts of their code relatively painlessly while only optimizing certain chunks for Linux.
This gives them a foothold in the Linux market with a reduced investment in terms of developer costs. As the market grows and revenue increases the hope would be that they would begin to see the Linux platform as a viable one encouraging MORE (not less) Linux support.
When given a choice between investing man hours in porting code from Windows to Linux or not having a Linux port at all, most companies will choose the latter. The perception (and it may be accurate) is that Linux is simply not a viable revenue producing platform. Wine (and friends) ease the process of porting. With less initial investment we have a much better chance of getting companies involved in Linux and fighting the perception that Linux is not a viable commercial operating system
Re:OOP is frequently the wrong answer
on
The Post-OOP Paradigm
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Wrong wrong wrong.
What you are identifying is misuse of an OO language, not an inherent shortcoming in an OO system.
Your StrTok is an interesting example. StrTok is not part of any language (true, it's part of the C Standard Library but not an inherent part of the language itself). Thus, if you had to write the tokenizer yourself I would expect basically similiar amounts of C code when compared with the C++ equivalent. The properly modelled OO system would have slightly more code to deal with the class related 'stuff', but in the end they are basically equivalent.
Your initial example of 'students (who) objectize everything' is also flawed. Part of the trick to OO programming is that you must place more emphasis on arriving at proper abstractions. In general a properly abstracted system will require quite a bit less work than the equivalent procedural one. The resulting program MIGHT be slower, but that's more of a language reality than paradigm shortcoming. Properly designed and abstracted OO systems are easy to maintain and much more accomodating of change when compared with similiarly designed procedural systems.
I completely agree that we should always strive to use the tool that gives us the best results. One inherent problem is that we have to answer 2 questions, however. Is this the right tool for NOW... AND is this the right tool to help me design the system that I may need in the future.
Some times the answer is obvious. I'll generally write a shell script of some kind to deal with daily admin types of tasks (IE: Sed to split delimited files for other procesing), but most of my product development tasks require me to look to future flexibility. I find that higher level languages, and OO languages in particular, allow me to design proper systems that can handle the addition of new features and new concepts much better than lower level counter-parts.
NOTE: This is not a discussion of the relative merits of C++ vs. C. Before people start blasting into this saying 'I can design any system in C that you can in C++..' and I would agree. It's certainly more cumbersome, but at some point expressive languages (like C) are able to be utilized using new paradigms (like OO). In other words, C CAN be a OO language if you use it like one.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet (and this is just a guess) that the amount of respect they pay to 'off the record' comments is directly related to the chance that they'll need quotes/interviews from you in the future.
Some guy who plays computer games likely has no off the record priviliges. On the other hand, someone like President Bush likely has all of the leeway that he could possibly want. It's simple economics really... they can afford to piss off the gamer.
Uhm, I think he was emphasizing the UTAH not the R-. I feel confident in saying this because, well the R- wasn't bold in the original comment.
Utah of course being the home of SCO.
A more interesting case study is something like a dentist. My father is a dentist, and as such I've been around that profession for the first 18 years of my life.
The first time I ever thought about it, I was convinced that a young dentist was the best. They where fresh out of school with all of the latest and greatest techniques, tools, and training. Obviously (to me) current knowledge is way better than the antiquated knowledge of your older dentist.
Experience has taught me otherwise. I actually much prefer older and more experienced dentists. A good professional stays current on their profession (and most dentists are good professionals it seems) and as such they supplement their very pratical knowledge with their very practical experience. That's a very good combination of skill (Developed over time), instincts (developed over time), and knowledge that most young dentists simply can't compete with.
I'm sorry, but if in fact the COMMENTS are identical.. that's pretty compelling and easily spotted by a non-programmer.
There are interesting questions to answer.. like WHO introduced the code, but in terms of credibility, identical comments are the surest sign of copy/paste that I can think of.
Your telling me that this is different than an electronically distributed romance novel? How does that have any more value (beyond entertainment value, which both clearly have) than the house online?
You've obviously never actually TALKED to a Microsoft systems engineer.
The ones that I have met have been looking at ways to incorporate the things that really 'work' in Unix into the Windows codebase. I spent over 2 hours talking to one guy in particular who was desperately trying to get a full permissions based file system into the Windows code base. There are numerous ongoing R&D efforts at Redmond completely aimed at making Unix style security, scalabity, and stability available in a user friendly fashion inside of Windows.
I beleive that the culture at Redmond stresses revenue, not particular ties to even their own products. They recognize that they are losing the server battle.. They are winning the useability/administration battle. They are losing (badly) in terms of reliability and security. This company understands (better than any other) the importance of customer perception. Customers associate Unix with all of the things that Microsoft fails at. By building a SERVER product that is based on a Unix foundation, with a windows style UI and admin tools they gain the perception of a server platform that IS secure and stable. That's what Microsoft cares about.. and it makes perfect sense.
Wouldn't THAT be the biggest piece of Karma ever.. the much maligned Linux distribution (particuarly hated on Slashdot) actually saves the day..
I bet they've profited from this, greatly.
AOL has the luxury of being both part of the problem (huge customer list) and part of the solution (spam fighting tools). They sell both.
To the user they offer 'advanced' spam fighting tools. The users see the problem as external to AOL (EVERYONE gets spam after all), and continue to use AOL because they offer at least some kind of protection. This creates, in the users mind, value.
It is not in AOL's best interest for Spam to simply go away. Much like telemarketing is in the best interests of the phone companies (they CREATE the problem by selling phone numbers, and also sell the tools to fight the callers). AOL merely wants to propogate the perception that they are on 'our' side of the spam battle.
The Remote stuff is more a nice additional feature that the manufacturers get almost for free. IR is a very important feature for transferring data between the PDA and everything else (other PDA's, Desktops, Laptops, and even printers). It just so happens that your TV remote works on the same basic technology, and they where able to add this feature almost for free.
What's wrong with that?
Your missing the actual point. This does not describe a method for reading private implementation details, but a method for directly ACCESSING them.
//Can be accessed in .NET
class
{
private:
myMethod();
}
This means that not only can I discover the private implementation of a class, but then I can turn around and make direct calls on it.
This IS Microsofts fault, and it IS potentially quite dangerous. It means that interface code that performs sanity checks/permission checks/etc.. can be bypassed at the whim of a programmer. It means that security mechanisms built into the class can actually be bypassed by directly calling the underlying functions. This isn't a pretty scenario.
Obsfucation is helpful, as it will generally manipulate the actual names of the private methods. However, it still doesn't prevent those obsfucated method names from being called.
Java, on the other hand, DOES prevent this kind of acces. It qualifies scope (at RUNTIME) to ensure that no private methods or members can be actively called from outside of the class that contains them. That's the key difference here.
Unrealistic in Dallas. In order to afford (comfortably) a very average 1800 sq. foot house I live in Denton, which puts me 32 miles away from Work.
Every 5 miles closer to work I get house values increase dramatically. The same house (same builder and everything) is $20,000 more expensive just 15 miles down the road.
Another more pressing problem is that my wife and I both have careers. She is a PhD student at the University of North Texas, I work basically in Irving. It's not feasible for both of us to live close to our respective daily destinations. We can both live 15 miles away, but that doesn't really solve anything does it?
The answer really is functional mass transit. In Dallas (worst case city wise) there is a nice light rail system that runs through the central part of town (right down the central expressway). If you live in the north-central part of town, you can get to the downtown area with no effort.
The problem is that for those of us live in other parts of town the mass transit option is completely non-existent. It would take me 30 minutes to reach a transit station (by car) and then I could ride the rail to the same street as my work and then spend another 25-30 minutes on a Bus. Suddenly my commute has tripled in time if I choose the mass transit option... that's just not feasible.
We need an in-expensive retrofit transport solution. That computer controlled, elevated personal taxi system on slashdot awhile back seems like the most interesting solution I've seen. Monorail type systems have all of the same problems as current light rail, with the added bonus of extra cost. The hub and spoke model heaps inconvienence on the commuter, and is incredibly inefficient at actually getting people to work (although incredibly efficient at getting them all into one place).
I WANT to take mass transit. I hate driving. I'd rather read and drink coffee while someone else drives me... but I simply don't have that option right now. When my wife graduates, mass transit options are going to go a LONG ways in determining which city we live in next.
I disagree.. A very large number of Admins probably don't understand the actual implications of the open relay. To them it's just a more convienent method of running a webserver, or worse yet a default install option.
Your argument is much like saying that if you leave a window down and someones steals your car and runs over a kid, that you should go to jail. Lets make the people responsible(spammers and car thieves) responsible for their actions, not the relatively innocent middleman. Having an open relay just isn't criminal negligience, it's neither obvious nor well understood by most people (including those running small business webservers or OS's with built-in SMTP servers).
From another viewpoint, how do you combat people who are infected with a trojan that is itself a SMTP server? We've seen that this is a favorite trick of spammers.. are the people who had this happen to them responsible? After all, they should have secured their machine better (which raises the interesting proposition of it being actually negligient to be running Windows).
More interesting, that guy is simply wrong. He lists the page as being:
http://www.geocities.com/spkyupdate/upd1.jpg
when in FACT the page is:
http://www.geocities.com/updatesparky/sp1.7ls
Of course, the detective work I had to do to locate this information consisted of READING THE COMMENTS from the actual page you linked to.
I bet that this was more a statement to get the readership (anti-MS Slashdot crowd) on his side. By dismissing an important MS technology he hoped to actually establish his credibility in this forum.. and it probably worked.
We've had no trouble getting blue tooth working and communicating with both Desktop and other Nokia devices (including other N-Gages).
Wasn't this the very thinking that caused IBM to license the OS from Microsoft, instead of actually buying it?
Your an idiot.. It's not hard to emigrate, have fun.
I've actually lived abroad, and while I enjoyed my time (Australia and Italy) overseas.. I do know that most of the rest of the industrialized world has more or less the same amount of freedom that I do right now.
We all have our faults, the U.S. included (and you may not beleive it, but Canada as well). Yet we, as a people, ARE free. We can live where we want, say (most anything) we want, and live the life we want to live. Sure, we have our problems, and we as a people have long been working to fight through them. We (along with the rest of the world) are constantly evolving and trying to find the balanace between outright freedom and the order we need to continue to live the lives we do.
Am I always happy with the U.S. ? Nope.. yet I recognize that we as a people really are a free. If your to blinded by your 'enlightened nature' and your very large chip that resides on your shoulder to see it, well then I hope you spend a few years somewhere else so that you can see exactly how wrong you really are.
Unless these kids are far richer than me when I was in school, they need better legal representation.
No judge on earth is going to award million dollar penalties to the RIAA. I'm betting that this ~$4000 a year penalty represents something like 40% of these kids overall yearly income.
With the exception of some very bizzare child support cases, the courts would not have taken 40% of their income for 4 years. It just doesn't happen.
I did realize that, I was using that to make a point because it does hold true for the majority of Iraqi's. At this point, even those who DO have computers and CD burners are probably not terribly concerned with them.
The fact is that the vast majority of the Iraqi population (Shiites in particular) did not exactly prosper under Saddam. While the countries GDP was pretty good, it's overall distribution of that wealth was among the worst in the world.
Yes there was a pretty decent Sunni middle class, but the majority of Iraqi's live(d) in near third world conditions. Let's not forget that.
That's a large part of the point for the RIAA. While Iraq is busy rebuilding it's infrastructure they can effectively impose their brand of IP law on these people with very little in the way of actual resistance.
To your average Iraqi, who CARES if they have no concept of fair use.. after all they have no running water, much less a CD burner.
This is not without precedent. In the wake of WWII our media conglomerates also imposed similiar types of oppressive IP law in France and West Germany which basically shut down their film makers..
I disagree. What your proposing really skirts the line with fraud, and much of it would illegal in about 85% of the world.
I do think your on the right track. The key is to find a way to make Spam expensive. After all, the problem is that these people can send out 80 million e-mails and the total cost is the price of a list and a few dollars in bandwidth. We need to find a way to fight back and make the cost of transmission higher.
How? I have no idea.. but I'd love to hear some ideas.
Just to clarify. The Zire brand is not aimed at 'low end' devices, but rather is focused as the consumer brand for Palm. So Zire == Consumer oriented devices, while Tungsten == professional.
Or something like that.
Well.. it is.
Your missing the point.
One of the ideas behind Wine is to simplify the process of porting to Linux. In addition to it's library byte-level compatibility, one of the overriding goals is to give companies who write windows products the ability to port over large parts of their code relatively painlessly while only optimizing certain chunks for Linux.
This gives them a foothold in the Linux market with a reduced investment in terms of developer costs. As the market grows and revenue increases the hope would be that they would begin to see the Linux platform as a viable one encouraging MORE (not less) Linux support.
When given a choice between investing man hours in porting code from Windows to Linux or not having a Linux port at all, most companies will choose the latter. The perception (and it may be accurate) is that Linux is simply not a viable revenue producing platform. Wine (and friends) ease the process of porting. With less initial investment we have a much better chance of getting companies involved in Linux and fighting the perception that Linux is not a viable commercial operating system
Wrong wrong wrong.
What you are identifying is misuse of an OO language, not an inherent shortcoming in an OO system.
Your StrTok is an interesting example. StrTok is not part of any language (true, it's part of the C Standard Library but not an inherent part of the language itself). Thus, if you had to write the tokenizer yourself I would expect basically similiar amounts of C code when compared with the C++ equivalent. The properly modelled OO system would have slightly more code to deal with the class related 'stuff', but in the end they are basically equivalent.
Your initial example of 'students (who) objectize everything' is also flawed. Part of the trick to OO programming is that you must place more emphasis on arriving at proper abstractions. In general a properly abstracted system will require quite a bit less work than the equivalent procedural one. The resulting program MIGHT be slower, but that's more of a language reality than paradigm shortcoming. Properly designed and abstracted OO systems are easy to maintain and much more accomodating of change when compared with similiarly designed procedural systems.
I completely agree that we should always strive to use the tool that gives us the best results. One inherent problem is that we have to answer 2 questions, however. Is this the right tool for NOW... AND is this the right tool to help me design the system that I may need in the future.
Some times the answer is obvious. I'll generally write a shell script of some kind to deal with daily admin types of tasks (IE: Sed to split delimited files for other procesing), but most of my product development tasks require me to look to future flexibility. I find that higher level languages, and OO languages in particular, allow me to design proper systems that can handle the addition of new features and new concepts much better than lower level counter-parts.
NOTE: This is not a discussion of the relative merits of C++ vs. C. Before people start blasting into this saying 'I can design any system in C that you can in C++..' and I would agree. It's certainly more cumbersome, but at some point expressive languages (like C) are able to be utilized using new paradigms (like OO). In other words, C CAN be a OO language if you use it like one.