The issue I've seen with using foreign workers (we've hired plenty of them on H1b visa's, by the way) is you tend to get a large quantity of work but not always a large quality of work. Some of the software houses in India will churn out a plethora of code for cut rate prices but you're stuck with what you get.
I prefer to hire locally now, and pay a little more for someone who is concerned with their actual career, as opposed to someone who is simply shooting for a quick couple bucks and not at all concerned with the industry or the quality of their work.
This follows the classic theory taught by Mel Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" where he talks about how you cannot draw a linear conclusion on the quality of code based upon the diagonal matrix of time vs lines written.
Most low level coders are going to find this very useful and I for one, even though I use Gnu/FreeBSD (lower context switch latency and better pipelining performance when under heavy paging loads, etc), am certainly glad to see the Linux camp start to come around regarding the documentation issue.
Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" states that proper documentation should be given a 20% time slice of each project if you want to have a successful product and this is certainly THE one arena where Linux is lacking, stopping them from commercial success.
As a tip for best results I suggeest using the Extreme Documentation method when writing your docs, it's saved time on the order of Olog(n) for me and a proven time saving technique.
We've been doing some research in the Wagner Labs and we've seen many cases where an app is optimzed for hitting the level II cache and thus reducing the pipeling done by optimizing on modern day compilers and when you use these apps on a hyperthreaded proc you actually see a performance DECREASE by the order of Olog(n) due to the fact that the insctuction set is running parallel in the CPU and never leave the LII cache, thusly never getting a chance of utilizing the advantages of hyperthreading.
Once again this proves the point made by Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" that even if you increase the technical levels of optimiztion you can will only see actual real-world speed improvements in Olog(n)/4ac, on the average.
That said I do think there is quite a bit of potential for hyperthreading when the compilers are able to catch up, so to speak.
I was given an advanced copy of this book as I had done some work for Motorola and Sun Microsystems after Mitnick had broken into them and I thought it kind of glossed over some important info.
For instance he leaves out the famous ack flood attack which was used to break into Motorola by utilizing a well known hole in the TCP/IPv4 protocol simply because he doesn't want people to know about it and upgrade to IPv6. Of course if they did then he wouldn't be able to get consulting jobs by showing the exploit and them having these Fortune 500 companies pay him big bucks to fix them. Here's a freebie to all you from Wagner Consulting LLC., UPGRADE YOUR NETWORK LAYER TO IPv6!!!
Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" states that for every exploit you find in your code there are 3 that go un-found so this means that there are still lots of holes in IPv4, yet the ack flood is the easiest one to exploit.
I think the specs for HDTV call for about three times the RAM usage for storing data as opposed to their analog counterparts. I think you'll need to probably update your entire motherboard in that case because the current TiVo's memory bus speed isn't upgradable to the new FSB specs.
Bascially this means that all the current Tivo users will be forced to upgrade or either throw away the unit they already bought because it will be essentially useless.
I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws:
1) You are limited by the fact that this thing is built on legacy hardware, by the time it hits the stores you would be able to build one with better performance and much better specs.
2) I don't care for the activation aspect and think that most users will rebel against it. It's one thing to be forced to activate a PC OS, but an entertainment OS???? No thanks
3) The sound on this is going to be sub-optimal simply due to the limited bus speeds used by their analog to digital decoder.
4) As the article porbably states the price will be the major stumbling point, these are going to have to meet the typical "Best Buy" buyers price point and at their outrageous starting point they are way way over the top
5) Where is the USB2?? serial ATA66?? WiFi??? 802.11b??? Bluetooth??? I need to plug my other musica devices (iPod anyone) into this and make them work, lacking these things just don't cut it.
I think we will come full cycle on this and start to have success when we are able to peel away the abstract levels of encapsulation and stop attempting to hide the data away by using high level constructs.
I've seen that most of the high level languages (java, Visual Basic, c#) promote RAD via lack of formal trainging. Thus the real problems start to show up when someone who has learned the syntax but knows nothing about how IPv6 packets handle little endian sockets tries to debug a complext multi threaded app and spend all their time basically guessing instead of analytically and systematically debugging the application.
Fred Brooks in the "Mythical Man Month" stated that unless a language is written in the same language that you increase the time to debug it by Olog(n) and that's true today when you look at java (not written in java) or perl or c# as opposed to languages like C and Fortran that are optimzed for debugging by being written in C and Fortran. Much of what Fred wrote about is not pertinat any more that this one still stands the test of time.
Basically it's a low level problem and not a "debugging tool" problem as I see it.
The main problem with open source coders is their lack of formal technical training/education.
While open source developers tend to have a lot of heart and desire they simply cannot overcome the technical deficiencies that come from lacking a formal education. I've consulted with many firms who were attempting to integrate OSS projects and I've seen heinous code and design decisions in most of them, anything from using a fast fourrier algorithm in a GUI application (Duh) to using an Olog(n) algorithm when you clearly need an Olog(1). Simple things like that which on the surface a layman has no knowledge about but a well trained professional can pick out in a second.
For instance Robert Brooks in the "Mythical Man Month" cautions against using too many loops in your code as they can cause excessive wear on a CPU (by constantly hitting the same LII registers you cause a "burn in" on the bus which can lead to erratic and undefined CPU bahaviour) yet you continue to see OSS projects laden with FOR and WHILE loops. I have to wonder if perhaps there were some open source coding classes offered on the web that taught basic things like that if you wouldn't see a serious improvement in the underlying shoddy code written by most young hotshot coders.
I'm of the idea that the whole premise that high-level tools and high level abstraction coupled with encasulation are the biggest bane of the software industry. We have these high level tools which most programmers really don't understand and are taught that they don't need to understand in order to build these sophisticated products.
Yet, when something goes wrong with the underlying technology they are unable to properly fix their product because all they know is some basic java or VB and they don't understand anything about sockets or big-endian/little endian byte alignment issues. It's no wonder todays software is huge and slow and doesn't work as advertised.
The one shining example of this is FreeBSD, which is based totally on low level C programs and they stress using legacy program methodologies in place of the fancy schmancy new ones which are faulty. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, when you look at the speed and quality if FreeBSD, as opposed to some of the slow ponderous OS's like Windows XP or Mac OSX.
My consulting business was struggling with trying to manage the overhead and maintain current on all the new methodologies and languages that come out like Smalltalk, and C# and we were having trouble meeting those demands. Then I made the company-wide decision to stop using Object Oriented techniques and move to 100% Extreme Programming methodologies. The results have been astounding.
We've seen our revenue stream increase on the order of Olog(n) and we with the word of mouth advertising we are actually turning away customers in an depressed economy where legacy shoftware shops are going out of business.
I know on slashdot there are many people who like to deal with theories but that's a real world tesromonial to XP.
Warmest regards, --Jack
NASA is actually doing the right thing
on
Redirecting NASA
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· Score: 4, Informative
I did some minor consulting work for them earlier in the year, in fact my contract ran out just a few months ago. I can't speak for the political climate as I was hunkered down in a cube with a few of their best coders, but I can tell you that they are certainly willing to move in the right direction technology wise.
I was part of a team that was migrating the majority of their C2 server farm away from old Unix's like SCO and HPUX and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSD. They were also bringing down lots of Linux boxes and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSd but that was another team.
It seems that one of the new tech leads has some power and is eventually planning on bringing a team on board to fork the Gnu/FreeBSD sources and develop a version specific to NASA. They are able to do this due to the fact that Gnu/FreeBSD uses a non-restrictive license, well, plus they simply love the stability and security offered by Gnu/FreeBSD. I'm trying to get hired on the transition team as I used to be part of the FreeBSD dev team a few years ago and this would be quite the feather in my cap, so to speak
Isn't this the silliest thing that they've ever thought about. Why would NASA feel the need to invest millions to rebuke the silly claims made by a few irresponsible socialist trolls?
Lets face it, free speech is supposed to be one of the cornerstones for Democracy and America but I have to wonder how much damage it really causes when I read stories like this. Perhaps the movement by Bush and Ashcroft to limit these rights will be a good thing long term and help to control some of the damage done by these nefarious post modern trolls.
Warmest regards, --Jack
Re:Sounds like a sweet little machine
on
Secure PDAs
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· Score: 1
Bogus.
This thing can never be secure for one reason.
Have a look at the Bluetooth spec. The Bluetooth data transfer rate is on the order of Olog(n) and any generic scanner which can be picked up at WalMart can be modded to read data at Olog(n/2).
This means you can connect up any old PC running Gnu/RedHat via the serial port to the scanner and suck the data right in. Sourceforge has several open source programs which capture data from scanners which could be used.
Doesn't anyone do any research on this stuff before making it public?
Most respected IT professionals will state in private that they are hindered by their über vendor lock-in to the Microsoft Windows operating system and its draconian EULA. I don't have to point out to you that the software that runs these Fortune 500 companies is the backbone that holds American together. By making the move to Gnu/RedHat which is a non oppressive backbone, the Chineese government has jumped by leaps and bounds ahead in the race for global control.
I did some consulting work for the current Chinese regime and I can tell you with great certainty that the anti-American Zeitgiest is in full force and they have actually started a new political party, the GNU party, (inspired by the GNU software license) which claims to be for all things anti-American and pro socialism. The membership growth of the GNU party is Olog(n) which is several orders of magnitude higher than the population growth rate. I don't have to tell you what this, coupled with their freedom to innovate with the Linux operating system, means to democracy. The end is near. The paradigm shift should have all American Congressmen shaking in their plush leather chairs right now.
The only hope I see for America is for them to act quickly and make a government wide move to freeBSD or openBSD. It will surely take the Chinese several months to configure their Linux copmuters (remember, you still have to hand edit the resolv.conf file by hand to get them to work and it's a well known fact that Chinese are not very intelligent) so the US has a couple months before they start to feel the heat from the new Chinese regime. We can still save Democracy if we as a country act now!!
If security matters to the US then they will address this immediatly.
Sure Mozilla may offer some neat "underground" type features but the one thing it doesn't do is offer the ability to talk to a support technician on the phone when it won't work properly.
Todays market, more than ever, relies on support for a product and this is where Microsoft wins all the big corporate clients while Mozilla and other non coporapte sponsored rpoducts remain as basically toys used by tech saavy teens.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Quite frankly since the PC is a commodity and and priced at very low levels so anyone with any technical saavy can build their own TiVo with a copy of Gnu/RedHat, some Radio Shack cabling and some common open source software tools. I've personally built prototypes of these units for a large client who shall remain nameless and I was able to come in under $200. Plus it's all open and non-propretary and thus I can charge my client to go back and make any mods they want as they go forward to the next level in the future.
I'm generally not a big fan of open source and anit-capitalist solutions but this is the perfect one where "The Shoe Fits" as it were.
Does anyone know if they have the threading issues resolved with the kernel scheduler yet?
Tha last time I worked on any BSD code they were still having some low level race conditions occuring where the kernel scheduler would actually hit two proccesses at the same time which made it look like the program had some mutex corruption when it was actually a problem with the kernel and the semaphores they use to map memory for threads.
Granted if you're only using it as a workstation you'll never see it happen as it only happened under load but I found my clients were forced to move to a commercial Unix (I still recommend Sun) as they were the only products on the market able to handle enterprise type server loads with non-trivial applications. (okay, wer're talking n-tier Olog(n) cluster nodes which is very demanding but still...)
It's too bad they don't try to make some patents on personal privacy. I was over there doing some low level databse consulting work for Lloyds of London last year and I was totally freaked out by all the video cameras everywhere. You can't blow your nose without the Queen getting you on video doing so.
Still, it still didn't stop me from tossing some bland half-cold fish-n-chips into the street. The Brits may be good at inventing stuff but they need to spend a little more time learning how to season their food in my opinion.
I have spent over $100,000 on my education which I payed for entirely out of my pocket. I have spent untold hours networking with mutant bozos who I normally wouldn't give the time of day to in order to help my business. I spend about 15% of my time learning new methodologies and honing my skills on a weekly basis to maintain my cutting edge portfolio.
With that in mind would anyone care to tell me why I should then turn around and offer up my services at no charge to some lazy organization that is unable to pull itself up by it's own bootstraps and support paying money for quality coders? Nobody offers me chaity in the real world and I don't offer any in return.
This smells like some underworld socialist program if you ask me.
In a capatilistc society we deal with these dichotomies on a daily basis. The consumer wants to get the best value for his/her dollar and the Businessman wants to get the most profits for his/her goods. This is simply the way things work and actually quite proven as the best way for a society to function.
In a real-world model you will see supply and demand come into play which affects the price of the products. When a product is in low demand the businessman will raise the price and when we see high demand the price comes down. Again, simple micro-economics from your freshman year at the Uni.
The real problem comes into play when people start stealing products. In the traditional sense of the word we have to view downloading copywritten music off the web as stealing as you are receiving goods that you didn't pay for against the wishes of the person/company who owns those rights. I'm not talking about the moral issue of right or wrong here.
So basically we lose the whole supply/demand controls which are the underlying foundation because you have an unlimted supply of "free" music to download which gives many false positives on the demand. It's no wonder the RIAA has trouble showing an accurate profit/loss report from the past few years with all this going on.
We need some Internet auditing controls to be put into place before we villify the RIAA as being this evil entity.
We should see some major improvements in LCD screens mid part of next year as the new USBII.v video I/O bus comes out. It' not commonly known but the LCD monitors are actually limited by the throughput coming off the video card bus as the speeds are limited by the half-duplex nature of the connection into the monitor. They use a pretty sophisitaced full-duplex emulation which works pretty good, but you can see the colors are not quite as sharp and the vertial scan rates are limited which makes the whole LCD experience look a little washed out.
This will change next summer when the new spec gets implemented and we see a true full-duplex communication between the monitor and your video card. Of course the monitor people are advertising this as they won't sell any monitors until it's released but I can assure you Aug. at the latest you'll be seeing the big press releases start to come out.
It's been my experience that Mac zealots are the worst zealots, only rivaled my the old amiga users, although the Linux camp gave it a good run a few years ago.
I'm convinced the reason behind it is that the typical Mac user is someone who is not very technical and was perhaps intimidated by using a computer, so when they figured out how to use their Mac they get a certain sense of pride and accomplishment which they in turn morph into zealotry.
Thankfully this is changeing with more affluent Unix people migrating over to try OSX, but the core zealot remains the same.
The funny thing is that while I was working with the *BSD dev team to straighten out their internal shceduling problems with the threading code in the kernel I noticed that the dev guys were very calm and rational people, pretty much just the opposite of the Mac user. Interesting indeed.
Isn't so much about standards, it's more about de-facto standards and their general tendancy to change. I couldn't see devoting 5 or 6 months to develop a custom application specifically for Gnu/Mozilla when one year down the road they may decide to alter the XUL "standard" and totally screw me.
This is why stuff like TCP/IP and "C" took off, because they were in the hands of a standards body who were responsible and considerate of issues like this.
The Gnu/Open Source community needs to take into consideration that since they are working their way into the mainstream they *must* begin to be more proffesional and intelligent in matters of "standards" or they risk alianating the commercial development community.
That would be a serious mistake on their end, serious indeed.
How do you address the issues that Gnu/Linux suffer from by sticking with legacy programming methodologies and legacy (sad but true) programming languagues? Namely, lack of modern programming methodologies like eXtreme Programming and C++ or Java on the language issue.
Windows applications will always be less secure than OSS because it's much more complex and used by millions more users. This is the fact that tends to get missed by people who blindly quote stats that they don't comprehend.
Actually this is yet more hardcore evidence that the FSF and open source proponents need to shift to a more modern Extreme Programming model of development and away from their legacy "hacker working alone in a basement" methodologies. I've done this using a modified P2P client for real-time distribution of code amongst a team of 3 other coders over high bandwidth connections and it works out very nicely-even though we were all in different states at the time. It's generally known that studies have shown that teams of four can develop code one order of magnitude faster than 4 coders working separately and my experience backs that up.
This hits at the very heart of the Achilles heel of open source as it tends to be rather unprofessional and willy-nilly in it's approach to development and project management which was fine back in the early 90's but suffers from severe limitations in todays modern and complex software development paradigm. Sure they make more secure software becasue it's easy to make an Xterm secure and not so easy to make an giant enterprise ERP package secure. Lets see these "experts" comapare apples to apples sometime.
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The issue I've seen with using foreign workers (we've hired plenty of them on H1b visa's, by the way) is you tend to get a large quantity of work but not always a large quality of work. Some of the software houses in India will churn out a plethora of code for cut rate prices but you're stuck with what you get.
I prefer to hire locally now, and pay a little more for someone who is concerned with their actual career, as opposed to someone who is simply shooting for a quick couple bucks and not at all concerned with the industry or the quality of their work.
This follows the classic theory taught by Mel Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" where he talks about how you cannot draw a linear conclusion on the quality of code based upon the diagonal matrix of time vs lines written.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Most low level coders are going to find this very useful and I for one, even though I use Gnu/FreeBSD (lower context switch latency and better pipelining performance when under heavy paging loads, etc), am certainly glad to see the Linux camp start to come around regarding the documentation issue.
Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" states that proper documentation should be given a 20% time slice of each project if you want to have a successful product and this is certainly THE one arena where Linux is lacking, stopping them from commercial success.
As a tip for best results I suggeest using the Extreme Documentation method when writing your docs, it's saved time on the order of Olog(n) for me and a proven time saving technique.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
We've been doing some research in the Wagner Labs and we've seen many cases where an app is optimzed for hitting the level II cache and thus reducing the pipeling done by optimizing on modern day compilers and when you use these apps on a hyperthreaded proc you actually see a performance DECREASE by the order of Olog(n) due to the fact that the insctuction set is running parallel in the CPU and never leave the LII cache, thusly never getting a chance of utilizing the advantages of hyperthreading.
Once again this proves the point made by Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" that even if you increase the technical levels of optimiztion you can will only see actual real-world speed improvements in Olog(n)/4ac, on the average.
That said I do think there is quite a bit of potential for hyperthreading when the compilers are able to catch up, so to speak.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I was given an advanced copy of this book as I had done some work for Motorola and Sun Microsystems after Mitnick had broken into them and I thought it kind of glossed over some important info.
For instance he leaves out the famous ack flood attack which was used to break into Motorola by utilizing a well known hole in the TCP/IPv4 protocol simply because he doesn't want people to know about it and upgrade to IPv6. Of course if they did then he wouldn't be able to get consulting jobs by showing the exploit and them having these Fortune 500 companies pay him big bucks to fix them. Here's a freebie to all you from Wagner Consulting LLC., UPGRADE YOUR NETWORK LAYER TO IPv6!!!
Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" states that for every exploit you find in your code there are 3 that go un-found so this means that there are still lots of holes in IPv4, yet the ack flood is the easiest one to exploit.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I think the specs for HDTV call for about three times the RAM usage for storing data as opposed to their analog counterparts. I think you'll need to probably update your entire motherboard in that case because the current TiVo's memory bus speed isn't upgradable to the new FSB specs.
Bascially this means that all the current Tivo users will be forced to upgrade or either throw away the unit they already bought because it will be essentially useless.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws:
1) You are limited by the fact that this thing is built on legacy hardware, by the time it hits the stores you would be able to build one with better performance and much better specs.
2) I don't care for the activation aspect and think that most users will rebel against it. It's one thing to be forced to activate a PC OS, but an entertainment OS???? No thanks
3) The sound on this is going to be sub-optimal simply due to the limited bus speeds used by their analog to digital decoder.
4) As the article porbably states the price will be the major stumbling point, these are going to have to meet the typical "Best Buy" buyers price point and at their outrageous starting point they are way way over the top
5) Where is the USB2?? serial ATA66?? WiFi??? 802.11b??? Bluetooth??? I need to plug my other musica devices (iPod anyone) into this and make them work, lacking these things just don't cut it.
To summarize, no thanks.
I think we will come full cycle on this and start to have success when we are able to peel away the abstract levels of encapsulation and stop attempting to hide the data away by using high level constructs.
I've seen that most of the high level languages (java, Visual Basic, c#) promote RAD via lack of formal trainging. Thus the real problems start to show up when someone who has learned the syntax but knows nothing about how IPv6 packets handle little endian sockets tries to debug a complext multi threaded app and spend all their time basically guessing instead of analytically and systematically debugging the application.
Fred Brooks in the "Mythical Man Month" stated that unless a language is written in the same language that you increase the time to debug it by Olog(n) and that's true today when you look at java (not written in java) or perl or c# as opposed to languages like C and Fortran that are optimzed for debugging by being written in C and Fortran. Much of what Fred wrote about is not pertinat any more that this one still stands the test of time.
Basically it's a low level problem and not a "debugging tool" problem as I see it.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
The main problem with open source coders is their lack of formal technical training/education.
While open source developers tend to have a lot of heart and desire they simply cannot overcome the technical deficiencies that come from lacking a formal education. I've consulted with many firms who were attempting to integrate OSS projects and I've seen heinous code and design decisions in most of them, anything from using a fast fourrier algorithm in a GUI application (Duh) to using an Olog(n) algorithm when you clearly need an Olog(1). Simple things like that which on the surface a layman has no knowledge about but a well trained professional can pick out in a second.
For instance Robert Brooks in the "Mythical Man Month" cautions against using too many loops in your code as they can cause excessive wear on a CPU (by constantly hitting the same LII registers you cause a "burn in" on the bus which can lead to erratic and undefined CPU bahaviour) yet you continue to see OSS projects laden with FOR and WHILE loops. I have to wonder if perhaps there were some open source coding classes offered on the web that taught basic things like that if you wouldn't see a serious improvement in the underlying shoddy code written by most young hotshot coders.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I'm of the idea that the whole premise that high-level tools and high level abstraction coupled with encasulation are the biggest bane of the software industry. We have these high level tools which most programmers really don't understand and are taught that they don't need to understand in order to build these sophisticated products.
Yet, when something goes wrong with the underlying technology they are unable to properly fix their product because all they know is some basic java or VB and they don't understand anything about sockets or big-endian/little endian byte alignment issues. It's no wonder todays software is huge and slow and doesn't work as advertised.
The one shining example of this is FreeBSD, which is based totally on low level C programs and they stress using legacy program methodologies in place of the fancy schmancy new ones which are faulty. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, when you look at the speed and quality if FreeBSD, as opposed to some of the slow ponderous OS's like Windows XP or Mac OSX.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
My consulting business was struggling with trying to manage the overhead and maintain current on all the new methodologies and languages that come out like Smalltalk, and C# and we were having trouble meeting those demands. Then I made the company-wide decision to stop using Object Oriented techniques and move to 100% Extreme Programming methodologies. The results have been astounding.
We've seen our revenue stream increase on the order of Olog(n) and we with the word of mouth advertising we are actually turning away customers in an depressed economy where legacy shoftware shops are going out of business.
I know on slashdot there are many people who like to deal with theories but that's a real world tesromonial to XP.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I did some minor consulting work for them earlier in the year, in fact my contract ran out just a few months ago. I can't speak for the political climate as I was hunkered down in a cube with a few of their best coders, but I can tell you that they are certainly willing to move in the right direction technology wise.
I was part of a team that was migrating the majority of their C2 server farm away from old Unix's like SCO and HPUX and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSD. They were also bringing down lots of Linux boxes and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSd but that was another team.
It seems that one of the new tech leads has some power and is eventually planning on bringing a team on board to fork the Gnu/FreeBSD sources and develop a version specific to NASA. They are able to do this due to the fact that Gnu/FreeBSD uses a non-restrictive license, well, plus they simply love the stability and security offered by Gnu/FreeBSD. I'm trying to get hired on the transition team as I used to be part of the FreeBSD dev team a few years ago and this would be quite the feather in my cap, so to speak
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Isn't this the silliest thing that they've ever thought about. Why would NASA feel the need to invest millions to rebuke the silly claims made by a few irresponsible socialist trolls?
Lets face it, free speech is supposed to be one of the cornerstones for Democracy and America but I have to wonder how much damage it really causes when I read stories like this. Perhaps the movement by Bush and Ashcroft to limit these rights will be a good thing long term and help to control some of the damage done by these nefarious post modern trolls.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Bogus.
This thing can never be secure for one reason.
Have a look at the Bluetooth spec. The Bluetooth data transfer rate is on the order of Olog(n) and any generic scanner which can be picked up at WalMart can be modded to read data at Olog(n/2).
This means you can connect up any old PC running Gnu/RedHat via the serial port to the scanner and suck the data right in. Sourceforge has several open source programs which capture data from scanners which could be used.
Doesn't anyone do any research on this stuff before making it public?
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Most respected IT professionals will state in private that they are hindered by their über vendor lock-in to the Microsoft Windows operating system and its draconian EULA. I don't have to point out to you that the software that runs these Fortune 500 companies is the backbone that holds American together. By making the move to Gnu/RedHat which is a non oppressive backbone, the Chineese government has jumped by leaps and bounds ahead in the race for global control.
I did some consulting work for the current Chinese regime and I can tell you with great certainty that the anti-American Zeitgiest is in full force and they have actually started a new political party, the GNU party, (inspired by the GNU software license) which claims to be for all things anti-American and pro socialism. The membership growth of the GNU party is Olog(n) which is several orders of magnitude higher than the population growth rate. I don't have to tell you what this, coupled with their freedom to innovate with the Linux operating system, means to democracy. The end is near. The paradigm shift should have all American Congressmen shaking in their plush leather chairs right now.
The only hope I see for America is for them to act quickly and make a government wide move to freeBSD or openBSD. It will surely take the Chinese several months to configure their Linux copmuters (remember, you still have to hand edit the resolv.conf file by hand to get them to work and it's a well known fact that Chinese are not very intelligent) so the US has a couple months before they start to feel the heat from the new Chinese regime. We can still save Democracy if we as a country act now!!
If security matters to the US then they will address this immediatly.
Sure Mozilla may offer some neat "underground" type features but the one thing it doesn't do is offer the ability to talk to a support technician on the phone when it won't work properly.
Todays market, more than ever, relies on support for a product and this is where Microsoft wins all the big corporate clients while Mozilla and other non coporapte sponsored rpoducts remain as basically toys used by tech saavy teens.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
But not for the reasons they are pointing out.
Quite frankly since the PC is a commodity and and priced at very low levels so anyone with any technical saavy can build their own TiVo with a copy of Gnu/RedHat, some Radio Shack cabling and some common open source software tools. I've personally built prototypes of these units for a large client who shall remain nameless and I was able to come in under $200. Plus it's all open and non-propretary and thus I can charge my client to go back and make any mods they want as they go forward to the next level in the future.
I'm generally not a big fan of open source and anit-capitalist solutions but this is the perfect one where "The Shoe Fits" as it were.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Does anyone know if they have the threading issues resolved with the kernel scheduler yet?
Tha last time I worked on any BSD code they were still having some low level race conditions occuring where the kernel scheduler would actually hit two proccesses at the same time which made it look like the program had some mutex corruption when it was actually a problem with the kernel and the semaphores they use to map memory for threads.
Granted if you're only using it as a workstation you'll never see it happen as it only happened under load but I found my clients were forced to move to a commercial Unix (I still recommend Sun) as they were the only products on the market able to handle enterprise type server loads with non-trivial applications. (okay, wer're talking n-tier Olog(n) cluster nodes which is very demanding but still...)
Warmest regards,
--Jack
It's too bad they don't try to make some patents on personal privacy. I was over there doing some low level databse consulting work for Lloyds of London last year and I was totally freaked out by all the video cameras everywhere. You can't blow your nose without the Queen getting you on video doing so.
Still, it still didn't stop me from tossing some bland half-cold fish-n-chips into the street. The Brits may be good at inventing stuff but they need to spend a little more time learning how to season their food in my opinion.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
I have spent over $100,000 on my education which I payed for entirely out of my pocket. I have spent untold hours networking with mutant bozos who I normally wouldn't give the time of day to in order to help my business. I spend about 15% of my time learning new methodologies and honing my skills on a weekly basis to maintain my cutting edge portfolio.
With that in mind would anyone care to tell me why I should then turn around and offer up my services at no charge to some lazy organization that is unable to pull itself up by it's own bootstraps and support paying money for quality coders? Nobody offers me chaity in the real world and I don't offer any in return.
This smells like some underworld socialist program if you ask me.
In a capatilistc society we deal with these dichotomies on a daily basis. The consumer wants to get the best value for his/her dollar and the Businessman wants to get the most profits for his/her goods. This is simply the way things work and actually quite proven as the best way for a society to function.
In a real-world model you will see supply and demand come into play which affects the price of the products. When a product is in low demand the businessman will raise the price and when we see high demand the price comes down. Again, simple micro-economics from your freshman year at the Uni.
The real problem comes into play when people start stealing products. In the traditional sense of the word we have to view downloading copywritten music off the web as stealing as you are receiving goods that you didn't pay for against the wishes of the person/company who owns those rights. I'm not talking about the moral issue of right or wrong here.
So basically we lose the whole supply/demand controls which are the underlying foundation because you have an unlimted supply of "free" music to download which gives many false positives on the demand. It's no wonder the RIAA has trouble showing an accurate profit/loss report from the past few years with all this going on.
We need some Internet auditing controls to be put into place before we villify the RIAA as being this evil entity.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
We should see some major improvements in LCD screens mid part of next year as the new USBII.v video I/O bus comes out. It' not commonly known but the LCD monitors are actually limited by the throughput coming off the video card bus as the speeds are limited by the half-duplex nature of the connection into the monitor. They use a pretty sophisitaced full-duplex emulation which works pretty good, but you can see the colors are not quite as sharp and the vertial scan rates are limited which makes the whole LCD experience look a little washed out.
This will change next summer when the new spec gets implemented and we see a true full-duplex communication between the monitor and your video card. Of course the monitor people are advertising this as they won't sell any monitors until it's released but I can assure you Aug. at the latest you'll be seeing the big press releases start to come out.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
It's been my experience that Mac zealots are the worst zealots, only rivaled my the old amiga users, although the Linux camp gave it a good run a few years ago.
I'm convinced the reason behind it is that the typical Mac user is someone who is not very technical and was perhaps intimidated by using a computer, so when they figured out how to use their Mac they get a certain sense of pride and accomplishment which they in turn morph into zealotry.
Thankfully this is changeing with more affluent Unix people migrating over to try OSX, but the core zealot remains the same.
The funny thing is that while I was working with the *BSD dev team to straighten out their internal shceduling problems with the threading code in the kernel I noticed that the dev guys were very calm and rational people, pretty much just the opposite of the Mac user. Interesting indeed.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Isn't so much about standards, it's more about de-facto standards and their general tendancy to change. I couldn't see devoting 5 or 6 months to develop a custom application specifically for Gnu/Mozilla when one year down the road they may decide to alter the XUL "standard" and totally screw me.
This is why stuff like TCP/IP and "C" took off, because they were in the hands of a standards body who were responsible and considerate of issues like this.
The Gnu/Open Source community needs to take into consideration that since they are working their way into the mainstream they *must* begin to be more proffesional and intelligent in matters of "standards" or they risk alianating the commercial development community.
That would be a serious mistake on their end, serious indeed.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
How do you address the issues that Gnu/Linux suffer from by sticking with legacy programming methodologies and legacy (sad but true) programming languagues? Namely, lack of modern programming methodologies like eXtreme Programming and C++ or Java on the language issue.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Windows applications will always be less secure than OSS because it's much more complex and used by millions more users. This is the fact that tends to get missed by people who blindly quote stats that they don't comprehend.
Actually this is yet more hardcore evidence that the FSF and open source proponents need to shift to a more modern Extreme Programming model of development and away from their legacy "hacker working alone in a basement" methodologies. I've done this using a modified P2P client for real-time distribution of code amongst a team of 3 other coders over high bandwidth connections and it works out very nicely-even though we were all in different states at the time. It's generally known that studies have shown that teams of four can develop code one order of magnitude faster than 4 coders working separately and my experience backs that up.
This hits at the very heart of the Achilles heel of open source as it tends to be rather unprofessional and willy-nilly in it's approach to development and project management which was fine back in the early 90's but suffers from severe limitations in todays modern and complex software development paradigm. Sure they make more secure software becasue it's easy to make an Xterm secure and not so easy to make an giant enterprise ERP package secure. Lets see these "experts" comapare apples to apples sometime.