My two cents: It's one thing to charge ~$40 for a copy of the ISO9660 standard, but totally another thing to charge royalties on an implementation of the standard.
Um in virtually every app you just highlight text and click the middle [or both for 2 button] button.
I hate this method. If I accidently highlight any other text in any other application, I loose the items in the cut-n-paste buffer.
I agree that it can cause problems. Namely, when I cut something to the clipboard it is sometimes very important that it not be lost before being pasted somewhere else. Say I'm cutting code from one editor to another. I could make a backup, but then my productivity goes down if I have to do this many times. Plus, that would interfere with the flow of my work.
I have, though, that cut and paste in Linux is vastly improved nowadays. At least Ctrl-X/C/V finally work in GUI applications. And to those who would say "just because Windows does it that way, doesn't mean it's intuitive", what is the point in choosing a different way? Would you choose different default shortcut keys? How would it differ functionally that's better? And is it worth the steeper learning curve for new users?
Perhaps a good point to start would be asking: why was ASP chosen in the first place? And how would PHP provide a better solution?
hint: banking and insurance sector
I wouldn't expect financial companies to jump on the latest and greatest, though. If they have something that already works, I imagine it would be hard to make them change. Then again, if you can save them money..:)
I really enjoy using PHP for web development. I find that you can't beat scripting languages for ease of maintenance, quick turnaround time, and tweakability.
One of the big reasons I chose PHP was the availability of "LAMP": Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I know these technologies have been around for years and will be around for many more years, so it's an easy sell to management. There's plenty of talk on the newgroups if you ever get stuck and PHP's online documentation with user comments is priceless. I think more documentation should follow this example.
That aside, the pure performance and reliability of the above is excellent. These technologies were made to work together, and from what I hear the teams even collaborate to make sure their stuff stays working together. It really shows.
Years ago I worked on ASP/SQL Server solutions and where you had to go with native code for high-performance with ASP, I find that with PHP it is high performance on its own.
Great job to everyone who has helped put together these technology solutions. A shining example of the high quality that can come out of the collaborative efforts of many.
I would think that only reason why China would be interested in this is for military purposes.
Based on what little top level news I've heard in the last few months, I'd almost think that other countries' space programs "smell blood" in the water and now with the USA cutting back on its space program, now is a good time to get ahead and get in the game before the US government wakes up and smells the coffee. It may be a significant setback to America if they pause too long to consider the importance of space exploration.
You are thinking of service packs. Patches don't have EULA's. And if you are that paranoid you should switch to Linux and stop bitching.
Service Packs and Patches are the same thing: They provide updates to your software. Microsoft can call them whatever they want. They will always be patches.
To your last comment: I have switched, almost at 100% now with that as my goal.
I think its a crock of shit that patches to Windoze require you to agree to things that you didn't when you originally bought the operating system. Make it the same as a car recall, where the responsibility and liability falls squarely on Microsoft to fix a defective product at their expense, not ours.
What you're saying makes complete sense. The fact that it is legal for Microsoft to change the agreement they have with the end user just because the user is trying to keep their system up to date is outrageous.
I believe a number of the security flaws (including Blaster) can be averted by using firewall software to block all ports except those you need (eg. the RPC port).
I love it that all the Linux boxes I take care of haven't had a lick of problem since they've been set up. Blaster came and went and they didn't need any updates or reboots. Just glorious.
Re:Adjust your tinfoil hat, guy.
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
Free hint number four: the FBI protects its jurisdictional turf very zealously.
What about the Yahoo! part of the SBC Yahoo partnership? Reading Yahoo's EULA's, Yahoo doesn't seem nearly as concerned about privacy as SBC claims to be.
It seems that many spammers have already figured this out. I get a lot of spam which has purposely misspelled words in it to avoid spam filters. I don't know if that defeats Bayesian filters as well, but I would guess so. Eventually, the misspelled words will make it into my filter, but they do get more longevity through this technique.
Let's say one were to install a browser plugin which automatically rearranged words in this fashion. Over prolonged use, what would the effect be on the person's reading ability, if any?
Also, on another note, I have a hunch that this effect is what causes me to misread numbers on a fairly frequent basis. In my learned haste to skim through text, I try and skim numbers and read them wrong. Hmm.
Perhaps today, but I believe P2P will play a much more important role in the future of the Internet. We may someday rely on it for freedom of expression. Open source projects can use it for low-cost hosting of ISO images. Instant messaging should go purely P2P and not be piped through the conglomerates. There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P technology. Questioning that is just trolling.
How about a graduate who can tell me the difference between a development environment and a production environment?
Also:
- the importance of taking the time to do something right the first time as much as possible, instead of always the tiresome updates and tweaks.
- what version control software is and how it is essential to team development (hell, you'd be surprised how many senior programmers don't know about it or use it).
- how to take ownership of a task and see it through, not blaming someone else.
- how to keep busy when the current task is blocked. Find another task, stay busy.
- how to use your own head, and not ask questions about every single thing. If I have to give guidance on what colour your label should be, I might as well do the task myself.
- common design patterns and practical applications of them.
- performance optimization techniques, and why developing everything on a quad Xeon with gigabit ethernet is not always a good idea.
- how calling in sick every week is not acceptable in the real world (not at most places, anyway).
- how good organization techniques can save you a lot of time and keep you on target.
- error handling code should be hilighted more. Books always seem to omit error handling, and that's what students learn from. That leads to really buggy code.
The most annoying thing about switching software - this is not OSS specific - is that it breaks in places you are accustomed to having in working order. On the other hand, it works in places your old software didn't. That's just the way it goes.
If you want to be proactive, file a bug. It's easy. Maybe someone will look at it and fix it. Or maybe you could pay someone to fix it. Hmm, I'm betting you could lump your annoyances together and pay someone $500 to fix them all, instead of paying $500 for each copy of MSOffice and more for future upgrades.
An example I can provide that just happened today - I switched to from Win2k to Red Hat 9 on one of my boxes and instead of only being able to burn at 12x reliably, I can burn at 24x and still have 100% buffer continuously full (eg. I can probably go even higher!). That's going to save me a lot of time.
hmm... I question your 90% number. Proprietary software tends to drive focus where the money is. OSS tends to drive focus where the work is interesting.
Who says development of free software has to be free? Money can potentially be made developing open source software, as long as the source code is then distributed under open source license terms.
Say a government which has mandated OSS needs a certain application written for which there is not existing project. They pay someone to write it, and release it to the open source community. Or, ventures between governments could split the cost and share the results.
A common mistake is that archives (digital or otherwise) require no maintenance. In the case of digital archives you should be checking them, on an annual basis, not just for physical degradation.
That's why I'm really looking forward to archival quality CDR media. I'm tempted to use CDRW for long term storage because they are made better than their write-once cousins, but the fact that they are rewritable is holding me back for fear that that just might happen by accident, someday, for some reason.
A more common problem is that the applications used to create the data and/or their documentation do not exist any more, rendering the data as useless as if the physical media had been destroyed.
After several bad experiences, I don't trust any proprietary backup formats with my archives. I just burn files as-is to CDR and that's that. No sector-by-sector backups, no niche compression schemes, no special file systems to worry about.
Any discussion about "What if the internet was free for everybody?" is pointless.
No, it's not pointless. It forces you to think about *why* spam should be illegal, or not be covered by free speech. Is it only because somebody has to pay, or not?
The cost is similar, though much greater for most people? Brilliant analysis, though I don't seem to understand what you're trying to get at.
Insult me, and expect me to elaborate? Whatever. Brilliant.
Both spam and junk mail incur costs to the "end user" to sort through and delete or keep what they [dont] want. Spam is much more volumous, so it incurs a much greater cost.
In the real-world examples you give, the cost is paid by the advertiser. In the case of email spam, the cost is paid by the recipient.
What about people who pay nothing for their Internet connection - they only have to look at banner ads to support the service? Does spam cost them anything? What if the Internet became free for everyone. Would the spammers then have a right to send their junk?
Also, the cost of deleting the spam is similar to the cost of sorting through physical junk mail and flyers (though much greater for most people).
Why isn't spam free speech? What is free speech, anyway? Check this out:
http://www.spectacle.org/899/free.html
It is important not to make the common error of assuming that speech is "unfree" because disfavored....
"Free speech" in fact is a phrase like "free gift". There is only speech, and government opposition to it. Speech lies on a spectrum, and government is only good at binary determinations--the law is so often a sledgehammer where a scalpel is required. The more useful lens is our second category: lets not speak of "free speech" but of "freedom of speech"-- the desirability or not of various proposed rulebooks for determining government responses to speech. The nature of government and law as a sledgehammer influences the outcome of this discussion: it implies we must either smash speech or tolerate it, and that there are few nuances or choices in between.
By definition:
Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.
No, unsolicited commercial email (aka "spam") is NOT free speech.
Hey, even if it is free speech, sometimes there are consequences to face for doing and saying what you want. I have the freedom to go and mouth off somebody in the grocery store, but they just might kick my ass. I have the freedom to send spam, but there are consequences for that, too. Free speech is not a free ride or an excuse. I think too many people hide behind that. And that is partly why my tagline says "Tolerance != Advocacy". I can accept your right to free speech, but by damn I don't have to react kindly to what you say.
No you're not. You're talking about illegal pornographers. Who said anything about pedophiles?
A pedophile doesn't necessarily break any law. Pickpockets, by definition, do.
I stand corrected - I was just trying to vary my word usage to avoid the grammar police. So I get nailed anyway.:)
Moving on, just replace "pedophile" in my message with "illegal pornographer". My point is that these are real scumbags who need to face the music, even if there is some possible risk to innocents which can be justified and in this case easily remedied.
[I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable.]
Brilliant! As the region's Office of DoubleTruth Information, I would like to thank you for your clever idea. We will now being the campaign to populate the 10% misinformation buffer. "Oh, I'm sorry, we heard that that Democratic Party page was child porn.". Or even better "accept it or imply that you support child porn".
If we aimed for absolute accuracy, no innocent people would've been killed in the war on terror. No guilty people would've been killed either.
Whatever means fit the end. We're not talking about pickpockets here, we're talking about pedophiles.
Slashdot Mirror
MySQL sucks ass!
Got a link to support your claim? Read'em and weep.
http://www.mysql.com/eweek/
My two cents:
It's one thing to charge ~$40 for a copy of the ISO9660 standard, but totally another thing to charge royalties on an implementation of the standard.
Um in virtually every app you just highlight text and click the middle [or both for 2 button] button.
I hate this method. If I accidently highlight any other text in any other application, I loose the items in the cut-n-paste buffer.
I agree that it can cause problems. Namely, when I cut something to the clipboard it is sometimes very important that it not be lost before being pasted somewhere else. Say I'm cutting code from one editor to another. I could make a backup, but then my productivity goes down if I have to do this many times. Plus, that would interfere with the flow of my work.
I have, though, that cut and paste in Linux is vastly improved nowadays. At least Ctrl-X/C/V finally work in GUI applications. And to those who would say "just because Windows does it that way, doesn't mean it's intuitive", what is the point in choosing a different way? Would you choose different default shortcut keys? How would it differ functionally that's better? And is it worth the steeper learning curve for new users?
How would you sell php to your boss?
:)
Perhaps a good point to start would be asking: why was ASP chosen in the first place? And how would PHP provide a better solution?
hint: banking and insurance sector
I wouldn't expect financial companies to jump on the latest and greatest, though. If they have something that already works, I imagine it would be hard to make them change. Then again, if you can save them money..
I really enjoy using PHP for web development. I find that you can't beat scripting languages for ease of maintenance, quick turnaround time, and tweakability.
One of the big reasons I chose PHP was the availability of "LAMP": Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I know these technologies have been around for years and will be around for many more years, so it's an easy sell to management. There's plenty of talk on the newgroups if you ever get stuck and PHP's online documentation with user comments is priceless. I think more documentation should follow this example.
That aside, the pure performance and reliability of the above is excellent. These technologies were made to work together, and from what I hear the teams even collaborate to make sure their stuff stays working together. It really shows.
Years ago I worked on ASP/SQL Server solutions and where you had to go with native code for high-performance with ASP, I find that with PHP it is high performance on its own.
Great job to everyone who has helped put together these technology solutions. A shining example of the high quality that can come out of the collaborative efforts of many.
I would think that only reason why China would be interested in this is for military purposes.
Based on what little top level news I've heard in the last few months, I'd almost think that other countries' space programs "smell blood" in the water and now with the USA cutting back on its space program, now is a good time to get ahead and get in the game before the US government wakes up and smells the coffee. It may be a significant setback to America if they pause too long to consider the importance of space exploration.
You are thinking of service packs. Patches don't have EULA's. And if you are that paranoid you should switch to Linux and stop bitching.
Service Packs and Patches are the same thing: They provide updates to your software. Microsoft can call them whatever they want. They will always be patches.
To your last comment: I have switched, almost at 100% now with that as my goal.
* Someone mod this guy up - it's no troll.
I think its a crock of shit that patches to Windoze require you to agree to things that you didn't when you originally bought the operating system. Make it the same as a car recall, where the responsibility and liability falls squarely on Microsoft to fix a defective product at their expense, not ours.
What you're saying makes complete sense. The fact that it is legal for Microsoft to change the agreement they have with the end user just because the user is trying to keep their system up to date is outrageous.
I believe a number of the security flaws (including Blaster) can be averted by using firewall software to block all ports except those you need (eg. the RPC port).
I love it that all the Linux boxes I take care of haven't had a lick of problem since they've been set up. Blaster came and went and they didn't need any updates or reboots. Just glorious.
Free hint number four: the FBI protects its jurisdictional turf very zealously.
FBI zealots? I just *knew* they ran Linux!
What about the Yahoo! part of the SBC Yahoo partnership? Reading Yahoo's EULA's, Yahoo doesn't seem nearly as concerned about privacy as SBC claims to be.
It seems that many spammers have already figured this out. I get a lot of spam which has purposely misspelled words in it to avoid spam filters. I don't know if that defeats Bayesian filters as well, but I would guess so. Eventually, the misspelled words will make it into my filter, but they do get more longevity through this technique.
Let's say one were to install a browser plugin which automatically rearranged words in this fashion. Over prolonged use, what would the effect be on the person's reading ability, if any?
Also, on another note, I have a hunch that this effect is what causes me to misread numbers on a fairly frequent basis. In my learned haste to skim through text, I try and skim numbers and read them wrong. Hmm.
Perhaps today, but I believe P2P will play a much more important role in the future of the Internet. We may someday rely on it for freedom of expression. Open source projects can use it for low-cost hosting of ISO images. Instant messaging should go purely P2P and not be piped through the conglomerates. There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P technology. Questioning that is just trolling.
How about a graduate who can tell me the difference between a development environment and a production environment?
Also:
- the importance of taking the time to do something right the first time as much as possible, instead of always the tiresome updates and tweaks.
- what version control software is and how it is essential to team development (hell, you'd be surprised how many senior programmers don't know about it or use it).
- how to take ownership of a task and see it through, not blaming someone else.
- how to keep busy when the current task is blocked. Find another task, stay busy.
- how to use your own head, and not ask questions about every single thing. If I have to give guidance on what colour your label should be, I might as well do the task myself.
- common design patterns and practical applications of them.
- performance optimization techniques, and why developing everything on a quad Xeon with gigabit ethernet is not always a good idea.
- how calling in sick every week is not acceptable in the real world (not at most places, anyway).
- how good organization techniques can save you a lot of time and keep you on target.
- error handling code should be hilighted more. Books always seem to omit error handling, and that's what students learn from. That leads to really buggy code.
The most annoying thing about switching software - this is not OSS specific - is that it breaks in places you are accustomed to having in working order. On the other hand, it works in places your old software didn't. That's just the way it goes.
If you want to be proactive, file a bug. It's easy. Maybe someone will look at it and fix it. Or maybe you could pay someone to fix it. Hmm, I'm betting you could lump your annoyances together and pay someone $500 to fix them all, instead of paying $500 for each copy of MSOffice and more for future upgrades.
An example I can provide that just happened today - I switched to from Win2k to Red Hat 9 on one of my boxes and instead of only being able to burn at 12x reliably, I can burn at 24x and still have 100% buffer continuously full (eg. I can probably go even higher!). That's going to save me a lot of time.
If you're into games, and unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days...
Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?
Speaking of living under a rock for a few decades. What an idealist, the poor soul.
hmm... I question your 90% number. Proprietary software tends to drive focus where the money is. OSS tends to drive focus where the work is interesting.
Who says development of free software has to be free? Money can potentially be made developing open source software, as long as the source code is then distributed under open source license terms.
Say a government which has mandated OSS needs a certain application written for which there is not existing project. They pay someone to write it, and release it to the open source community. Or, ventures between governments could split the cost and share the results.
A common mistake is that archives (digital or otherwise) require no maintenance. In the case of digital archives you should be checking them, on an annual basis, not just for physical degradation.
That's why I'm really looking forward to archival quality CDR media. I'm tempted to use CDRW for long term storage because they are made better than their write-once cousins, but the fact that they are rewritable is holding me back for fear that that just might happen by accident, someday, for some reason.
A more common problem is that the applications used to create the data and/or their documentation do not exist any more, rendering the data as useless as if the physical media had been destroyed.
After several bad experiences, I don't trust any proprietary backup formats with my archives. I just burn files as-is to CDR and that's that. No sector-by-sector backups, no niche compression schemes, no special file systems to worry about.
Any discussion about "What if the internet was free for everybody?" is pointless.
No, it's not pointless. It forces you to think about *why* spam should be illegal, or not be covered by free speech. Is it only because somebody has to pay, or not?
The cost is similar, though much greater for most people? Brilliant analysis, though I don't seem to understand what you're trying to get at.
Insult me, and expect me to elaborate? Whatever. Brilliant.
Both spam and junk mail incur costs to the "end user" to sort through and delete or keep what they [dont] want. Spam is much more volumous, so it incurs a much greater cost.
In the real-world examples you give, the cost is paid by the advertiser. In the case of email spam, the cost is paid by the recipient.
What about people who pay nothing for their Internet connection - they only have to look at banner ads to support the service? Does spam cost them anything? What if the Internet became free for everyone. Would the spammers then have a right to send their junk?
Also, the cost of deleting the spam is similar to the cost of sorting through physical junk mail and flyers (though much greater for most people).
Why isn't spam free speech? What is free speech, anyway? Check this out:
http://www.spectacle.org/899/free.html
By definition:
Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.
How 'bout China's evil because they censor the Internet *and* they're good because the block spam?
Put it this way, would you go see a movie rated thumbs up by Ebert and thumbs down by Roeper? It's kinda like that.
No, unsolicited commercial email (aka "spam") is NOT free speech.
Hey, even if it is free speech, sometimes there are consequences to face for doing and saying what you want. I have the freedom to go and mouth off somebody in the grocery store, but they just might kick my ass. I have the freedom to send spam, but there are consequences for that, too. Free speech is not a free ride or an excuse. I think too many people hide behind that. And that is partly why my tagline says "Tolerance != Advocacy". I can accept your right to free speech, but by damn I don't have to react kindly to what you say.
No you're not. You're talking about illegal pornographers. Who said anything about pedophiles?
:)
A pedophile doesn't necessarily break any law. Pickpockets, by definition, do.
I stand corrected - I was just trying to vary my word usage to avoid the grammar police. So I get nailed anyway.
Moving on, just replace "pedophile" in my message with "illegal pornographer". My point is that these are real scumbags who need to face the music, even if there is some possible risk to innocents which can be justified and in this case easily remedied.
[I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable.]
Brilliant! As the region's Office of DoubleTruth Information, I would like to thank you for your clever idea. We will now being the campaign to populate the 10% misinformation buffer. "Oh, I'm sorry, we heard that that Democratic Party page was child porn.". Or even better "accept it or imply that you support child porn".
If we aimed for absolute accuracy, no innocent people would've been killed in the war on terror. No guilty people would've been killed either.
Whatever means fit the end. We're not talking about pickpockets here, we're talking about pedophiles.