I don't forsee this initiative going too far. Most people barely know how to use their computers to send email or read Slashdot, much less secure their systems from attack.
Also, don't forget that many computer systems, from the users' point of view, will be totally broken after they are secured.
After seeing the high-quality configuration management tactics employed by Microsoft, Windows applications, and Windows users, I wonder if yet another recession would occur after applying such a wide-ranging security update. Even other operating systems like GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, etc. will appear broken once firewalls are put in place and/etc/services gets stripped.
Security, in many circumstances, may actaully be counterproductive, and, in those cases where it is necessary, it takes quite a bit of fine-tuning to get it right. Further, what happens when usage requirements change? For example, I keep a tight firewall at home but occasionally need to make a specific FTP allowance. Who, besides me, really wants to take several minutes to update the filter rules and interrupt the firewall before downloading killer-app-X?
Also, you don't want to set up your research hub too close to a big city. There is too much competition for comptuer talent.
With respect to SC:
1) There are no big cities. The biggest cities are Greenville, Columbia, Spartenburg, and Charleston, but they aren't too big for tech by any measure. I'm sure any of them and their congressmen would be kissing the feet of a big company looking for a new home.
2) There may be competition in places like Greenville/Spartenburg, but, elsewhere, I think your're okay for a job if you vaguely know what a "computer" is. Most of SC is pretty low-tech, meaning it is hard for a person to find really good employers in addition to it being hard for employers to find really good employees.
SC just lacks the technological "oomph" of places like New England, Texas, and California. On the upside, SC's cost-of-living index is nearly 1.0 (New York City, for example is 2.5+).
How long before this becomes a Time Warner targed advertising tool?
Targeted advertising is creepy. I made the mistake of allowing cookies to Amazon.com, and, now, their web pages greet me by name and there are useless lists of things I'm supposed to be interested in.
The thing that bothers me the most is that they are assuming I have money to burn. "Here, would you like to buy this, or this, or this? No? Oh, how about this, or this, or this? No? What about..." This frustrates me, because they really think I will make an impulsive decision and just buy everything at a whim. Is this really how most people behave?
I wonder if retailing sites will ever have a checkbox called "Yes, I'm a stupid impulsive consumer." At least, then, those who really want it can have it, and I can just cruise in and buy the one book I want in ten fewer mouse clicks.
I lived in SC briefly. Considering the poor infrastructure and poor education system, I just don't know why tech companies aren't flocking there. There has been some success luring heavier industry to the state, but the overall high-tech market there is just sub-par.
Now if they start funneling real money into the public schools, then things might start changing. And while they're at it they could start repaving and painting roads. Many SC roads are so bad that one would think they have hard winters or something.
Granted, the cost of living is average, and the beaches are nice. Get one of the million-doller beach houses on a private island, and it's even a nice place to retire.
Now is the perfect time for us to consider widespread adoption of Zeosync's [slashdot.org] miraculous 100-to-1 compression technology.
Darn, it looks like Zeosync has gone and compressed themselves out of existence. Or, more likely, they are just so small that the web server can't find them!
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there.
I find it interesting that untouched realism is frequently just not fun. There are aspects to games that require tweaking or simplifying the environment so it isn't frustrating or impossible to make progress.
Masters of game-making understand that fun isn't derived purely from realism and that some unrealistic elements are the only way to make a game interesting and playable. For example, do you really want a football to get lost in the sun, so the receiver screws up and you lose the game? Or do you want clues in a mystery game to be so well hidden that you have to have take the hours of a real forensic investigation to find that triply-ricocheted bullet embedded in the neighbors compost pile?
I really think that super-realism in games is a pipe-dream, and the only way to achieve it is in a Star Trek-style immersive holodeck...or, perhaps, just going outside.
It also seems to be harder to find the basic time-waster games, since, I guess, it is a waste to put classics like Tetris or Solitaire on gigaflop-class consoles. In a way, this really is not progress at all.
This isn't true. At one place where I worked, there were two networks, where one was UNIX-based and one was Windows-based. Both were of similar size..but the Windows network was managed by eight people and the UNIX network was managed by one--sometimes two--people. Needless to say, the UNIX network had better uptime as was nearly invisible to its users, while the Windows network was consistently getting in the way for various reasons.
So, what is 8*MCSE_salary?
And, what is 1.5*UNIX_Admin_salary?
Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
This isn't really true, any more. Modern Linux distributions are comparible in effort required to many commercial UNIX distributions, and hardening a Linux box requires similar effort to hardening a UNIX box. I really feel that Linux and UNIX are complementary, as they really shine in different applications.
...you can pull it out of your pocket (NO! I meant the phone!) and start playing (yes, I really, really meant the phone!).
If the musical ringers aren't already the worst thing invented, imagine five people on the bus playing games with the volume all the way up. And yes, I guarantee that there will be people on the bus who don't give a damn about your right to peace and quiet.
I'm almost positive that there will be, one day, a public place where so many random bastardized classical music ringers will be going off every two seconds that someone in the crowd will snap and do natural selection a favor.
So if you want to change variable x to y, you will also change all exists to eyists, right?
Nope. Regular expressions are very useful.
I have no idea what "raw complexity of a GUI-based system" is supposed to be.
How about tens of thousands of lines of code where there need not be. Look at the size of the programs in/usr/bin and compare that to the size of the standard IDE distribution. IDEs are complex.
Two of our developers just came back from a.NET training session and were wowed beyond belief.
That wasn't a training session, it was a marketing session. Usually, people get these warm fuzzy first impressions, and the enthusiasm wears off after actually using the tools for a few weeks.
And, how much of all those nifty features actually work as expected. With compexity comes bugs bugs bugs!
This has happened with every major IDE to date. This is also why I still use vi and make.
I wish you Microsoft-marketing-drones would stop polluting Slashdot with lies. Not worrying about porting is a pipe dream. "Write once, test everywhere" applies to.NET just as much as anything else.
.NET has an almost zero learning curve for existing VB, C++, and ASP developers since the framework allows you to use any of several languages.
This is untrue. Since when did new application frameworks have a zero learning curve?.NET, once you brush aside the marketing drivel from Microsoft, is no less complex than anything else, including J2EE. Complexity just comes with the territory.
Also, advantages for.NET: hmmmmm, you can program the same thing in one of 50 gazillion different languages.
Yes, when they are really all the same language. The language support in.NET is really just marketing spin.
my Linux mono programs will work exactly the same way, no modification, with network calls and all, on a Windows.Net machine.
You may be very enthusiastic, now, but you will become wiser in time. Underlying the different.NET implementations will be all the same platform-dependent crap that never went away. Do you really really think that something that works one way under Linux will really truly work identically under Windows?
Well, aside from the fact that 12.5MB/sec is probably what people actually get from UDMA133, such a terabyte disk could be a very good application for WORM drives in systems that need permanant on-line storage of everything. Isn't this a feature of Plan 9?
Memorizing method and property names is really a waste of mental activity that could be better used by designing algorithms, architecture, etc.
This is why window managers allow you to open multiple windows, one of which may contain API documentation. Eventually, one learns the method and property names, anyway, which can make auto-completion seem like excess baggage. The resulting knowledge of the API is then crucial to designing future algorithms and architectures that use that API.
My IDE can -- rename a variable or class, and have the changes propagate through every file in the project
find + sed
-- Flag most syntax errors or mismatched parameters I produce while I write them
I saw Visual C++ do this. I could type faster than the machine would let me. Even worse, it prompted me for mouse clicks on the fly. Basically, auto-checking is a kludge and gets in the way. Syntax checking is what good eyes and good compilers are for.
-- press a key and have every use of the variable the cursor is on highlighted in purple.
find + egrep
And dozens of other things.
And dozens of other general tools in/usr/bin.
Sure, you can do them all by hand, but much slower and more error prone.
Not necessarily slower nor more error prone, and general tools, such as grep, sed, and awk, can be used in generating reports about source code that are extremely useful in gaining understanding about where to go next. For example, in a matter of minutes, I was able to pick out every function call that relied on a certain 3rd party API and send that list to the vendor for a support request.
In short, hard-wired GUIs inhibit the system rather than help, and the extra bugs introduced by the raw complexity of a GUI-based system can be haunting. Also, text-based tools are programming-language independent and provide seamless reuse across projects.
The problem I have with Liberty is that Sun appear to be more focused on stopping Microsoft than on developing a product that is going to succeed on its own merits.
This is unfounded. The Liberty Alliance is an association of companies who are looking for the most pragmatic (simplest) solution to dealing with on-line identities. There was an interview the chairman of the alliance, where he said that they would all pack up and go home if there were already a suitable technology. They just want something useful and not controlled by any single entity, so they can get on with their lives on the WWW.
Other than adding a great deal of complexity to an already complex system, do graphical IDEs really contribute anything useful?
The time spent learning an IDE whose scope is pretty narrow is time that could have been spent learning general widely-useful tools, such as vi or emacs, make, and sh.
Why shoot yourself in the foot just on the basis of "we don't like them"?
Not choosing Microsoft's products is not a shot in one's own foot. It is a shot in theirs.
History repeats itself, and the versioning in.NET will probably be unsupported in a few years and you'll be recommending Microsoft's next biggest and smelliest system, whatever that may be.
For something so fundamental as version control, it is best to go with proven things: SCCS and CVS are decent and free, and there are companies such as Rational and BitKeeper when you need something decent and not free. Honestly, even something as simple as SCCS and shell scripts can go a long way for small to medium-sized projects with almost no risk that SCCS will suddenly go out of fasion (it's probably 15 to 20 years old by now and still useful).
Look into Qt as one of your options. It is very mature, widely used, intuitive, and now supports Mac OS along with MS Windows and X-Windows. From a Free Software perspective, one downside is that you have to purchase a license for Windows development and/or commercial development (upside: it remains free for Free Software). If you have no budget and are set on the Windows platform, then Qt is not the best option.
In any case, I wholeheartedly recommend that you do not use MFC. My argument is that developing software around proprietary APIs is very risky. I've witnessed serious problems arise in long-term projects when API vendors go under or stop supporting their products. The fact that Microsoft is #1, etc., does not reduce the long-term risk, since all companies is mortal (and more than a few people argue that MS' days are numbered). If you want to make sure the long hours you put in now don't go to waste later on, choose your APIs wisely, and, no matter the API, find ways to compartmentalize your program to isolate risks.
Bacause you don't want to pay 28-50% income tax. 8)
Are the taxes genuinely higher for a given income level than in the USA? In the US, combining federal, state, and local taxes can easily eat 50% of a some people's income.
It will always be as it was. Wizards love Unix, Joe Worker likes whatever is simple to use (Windows, Mac, whatever).
There is a lot of truth in this. However, I have seen "Joe Worker"s who can work comfortably with Solaris and CDE after our thoughtful sysadmin customized CDE to their workflow. Extra icons on the desktop and consistent directory structures can go a long way towards making UNIX more intuitive.
Today, there's nothing nearly as cost competive and fast as Pro/E on dual P4 2.2's, Nvidia Quad4 and win2k.
There is some truth to this, too, which is good for Sun. It forces them to build workstations like the Blade 2000 and continually refine Solaris, so they remain competitive. Even after 20 years, new SunOS/Solaris releases still have worthwhile improvements, and their new hardware can still set world-records. Admittedly, Sun lagged the competition for a year or so before the UltraSPARC III came out, but they have made up for that, now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't forsee this initiative going too far. Most people barely know how to use their computers to send email or read Slashdot, much less secure their systems from attack.
/etc/services gets stripped.
Also, don't forget that many computer systems, from the users' point of view, will be totally broken after they are secured.
After seeing the high-quality configuration management tactics employed by Microsoft, Windows applications, and Windows users, I wonder if yet another recession would occur after applying such a wide-ranging security update. Even other operating systems like GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, etc. will appear broken once firewalls are put in place and
Security, in many circumstances, may actaully be counterproductive, and, in those cases where it is necessary, it takes quite a bit of fine-tuning to get it right. Further, what happens when usage requirements change? For example, I keep a tight firewall at home but occasionally need to make a specific FTP allowance. Who, besides me, really wants to take several minutes to update the filter rules and interrupt the firewall before downloading killer-app-X?
Also, you don't want to set up your research hub too close to a big city. There is too much competition for comptuer talent.
With respect to SC:
1) There are no big cities. The biggest cities are Greenville, Columbia, Spartenburg, and Charleston, but they aren't too big for tech by any measure. I'm sure any of them and their congressmen would be kissing the feet of a big company looking for a new home.
2) There may be competition in places like Greenville/Spartenburg, but, elsewhere, I think your're okay for a job if you vaguely know what a "computer" is. Most of SC is pretty low-tech, meaning it is hard for a person to find really good employers in addition to it being hard for employers to find really good employees.
SC just lacks the technological "oomph" of places like New England, Texas, and California. On the upside, SC's cost-of-living index is nearly 1.0 (New York City, for example is 2.5+).
How long before this becomes a Time Warner targed advertising tool?
Targeted advertising is creepy. I made the mistake of allowing cookies to Amazon.com, and, now, their web pages greet me by name and there are useless lists of things I'm supposed to be interested in.
The thing that bothers me the most is that they are assuming I have money to burn. "Here, would you like to buy this, or this, or this? No? Oh, how about this, or this, or this? No? What about..." This frustrates me, because they really think I will make an impulsive decision and just buy everything at a whim. Is this really how most people behave?
I wonder if retailing sites will ever have a checkbox called "Yes, I'm a stupid impulsive consumer." At least, then, those who really want it can have it, and I can just cruise in and buy the one book I want in ten fewer mouse clicks.
James Island, SC
I lived in SC briefly. Considering the poor infrastructure and poor education system, I just don't know why tech companies aren't flocking there. There has been some success luring heavier industry to the state, but the overall high-tech market there is just sub-par.
Now if they start funneling real money into the public schools, then things might start changing. And while they're at it they could start repaving and painting roads. Many SC roads are so bad that one would think they have hard winters or something.
Granted, the cost of living is average, and the beaches are nice. Get one of the million-doller beach houses on a private island, and it's even a nice place to retire.
Now is the perfect time for us to consider widespread adoption of Zeosync's [slashdot.org] miraculous 100-to-1 compression technology.
Darn, it looks like Zeosync has gone and compressed themselves out of existence. Or, more likely, they are just so small that the web server can't find them!
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there.
I find it interesting that untouched realism is frequently just not fun. There are aspects to games that require tweaking or simplifying the environment so it isn't frustrating or impossible to make progress.
Masters of game-making understand that fun isn't derived purely from realism and that some unrealistic elements are the only way to make a game interesting and playable. For example, do you really want a football to get lost in the sun, so the receiver screws up and you lose the game? Or do you want clues in a mystery game to be so well hidden that you have to have take the hours of a real forensic investigation to find that triply-ricocheted bullet embedded in the neighbors compost pile?
I really think that super-realism in games is a pipe-dream, and the only way to achieve it is in a Star Trek-style immersive holodeck...or, perhaps, just going outside.
It also seems to be harder to find the basic time-waster games, since, I guess, it is a waste to put classics like Tetris or Solitaire on gigaflop-class consoles. In a way, this really is not progress at all.
It had a clock speed of 7.14 MHz, or 0.000714 GHz.
Actually, it's 0.00714 GHz.
Unix admins cost more than MCSEs, too.
This isn't true. At one place where I worked, there were two networks, where one was UNIX-based and one was Windows-based. Both were of similar size..but the Windows network was managed by eight people and the UNIX network was managed by one--sometimes two--people. Needless to say, the UNIX network had better uptime as was nearly invisible to its users, while the Windows network was consistently getting in the way for various reasons.
So, what is 8*MCSE_salary?
And, what is 1.5*UNIX_Admin_salary?
Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
This isn't really true, any more. Modern Linux distributions are comparible in effort required to many commercial UNIX distributions, and hardening a Linux box requires similar effort to hardening a UNIX box. I really feel that Linux and UNIX are complementary, as they really shine in different applications.
...you can pull it out of your pocket (NO! I meant the phone!) and start playing (yes, I really, really meant the phone!).
If the musical ringers aren't already the worst thing invented, imagine five people on the bus playing games with the volume all the way up. And yes, I guarantee that there will be people on the bus who don't give a damn about your right to peace and quiet.
I'm almost positive that there will be, one day, a public place where so many random bastardized classical music ringers will be going off every two seconds that someone in the crowd will snap and do natural selection a favor.
So if you want to change variable x to y, you will also change all exists to eyists, right?
/usr/bin and compare that to the size of the standard IDE distribution. IDEs are complex.
Nope. Regular expressions are very useful.
I have no idea what "raw complexity of a GUI-based system" is supposed to be.
How about tens of thousands of lines of code where there need not be. Look at the size of the programs in
Why do I feel like many of the highly-moderated posts on this thread were written by people on Microsoft's payroll? Has Slashdot been highjacked?
Two of our developers just came back from a .NET training session and were wowed beyond belief.
That wasn't a training session, it was a marketing session. Usually, people get these warm fuzzy first impressions, and the enthusiasm wears off after actually using the tools for a few weeks.
And, how much of all those nifty features actually work as expected. With compexity comes bugs bugs bugs!
This has happened with every major IDE to date. This is also why I still use vi and make.
I wish you Microsoft-marketing-drones would stop polluting Slashdot with lies. Not worrying about porting is a pipe dream. "Write once, test everywhere" applies to .NET just as much as anything else.
.NET has an almost zero learning curve for existing VB, C++, and ASP developers since the framework allows you to use any of several languages.
.NET, once you brush aside the marketing drivel from Microsoft, is no less complex than anything else, including J2EE. Complexity just comes with the territory.
This is untrue. Since when did new application frameworks have a zero learning curve?
Also, advantages for .NET: hmmmmm, you can program the same thing in one of 50 gazillion different languages.
.NET is really just marketing spin.
.Net machine.
.NET implementations will be all the same platform-dependent crap that never went away. Do you really really think that something that works one way under Linux will really truly work identically under Windows?
Yes, when they are really all the same language. The language support in
my Linux mono programs will work exactly the same way, no modification, with network calls and all, on a Windows
You may be very enthusiastic, now, but you will become wiser in time. Underlying the different
I see a shitload of possibilities with this.
Yes, "shit" is pretty much accurate.
Well, aside from the fact that 12.5MB/sec is probably what people actually get from UDMA133, such a terabyte disk could be a very good application for WORM drives in systems that need permanant on-line storage of everything. Isn't this a feature of Plan 9?
Memorizing method and property names is really a waste of mental activity that could be better used by designing algorithms, architecture, etc.
This is why window managers allow you to open multiple windows, one of which may contain API documentation. Eventually, one learns the method and property names, anyway, which can make auto-completion seem like excess baggage. The resulting knowledge of the API is then crucial to designing future algorithms and architectures that use that API.
My IDE can
/usr/bin.
-- rename a variable or class, and have the changes propagate through every file in the project
find + sed
-- Flag most syntax errors or mismatched parameters I produce while I write them
I saw Visual C++ do this. I could type faster than the machine would let me. Even worse, it prompted me for mouse clicks on the fly. Basically, auto-checking is a kludge and gets in the way. Syntax checking is what good eyes and good compilers are for.
-- press a key and have every use of the variable the cursor is on highlighted in purple.
find + egrep
And dozens of other things.
And dozens of other general tools in
Sure, you can do them all by hand, but much slower and more error prone.
Not necessarily slower nor more error prone, and general tools, such as grep, sed, and awk, can be used in generating reports about source code that are extremely useful in gaining understanding about where to go next. For example, in a matter of minutes, I was able to pick out every function call that relied on a certain 3rd party API and send that list to the vendor for a support request.
In short, hard-wired GUIs inhibit the system rather than help, and the extra bugs introduced by the raw complexity of a GUI-based system can be haunting. Also, text-based tools are programming-language independent and provide seamless reuse across projects.
The problem I have with Liberty is that Sun appear to be more focused on stopping Microsoft than on developing a product that is going to succeed on its own merits.
This is unfounded. The Liberty Alliance is an association of companies who are looking for the most pragmatic (simplest) solution to dealing with on-line identities. There was an interview the chairman of the alliance, where he said that they would all pack up and go home if there were already a suitable technology. They just want something useful and not controlled by any single entity, so they can get on with their lives on the WWW.
What other source control tool fit so well in Unix, and maintains the tradition of older Unix tools?
Since you mentioned UNIX, the answer to this question is SCCS. It is even simpler than CVS and lends itself greatly for use within shell scripts.
Other than adding a great deal of complexity to an already complex system, do graphical IDEs really contribute anything useful?
The time spent learning an IDE whose scope is pretty narrow is time that could have been spent learning general widely-useful tools, such as vi or emacs, make, and sh.
Why shoot yourself in the foot just on the basis of "we don't like them"?
.NET will probably be unsupported in a few years and you'll be recommending Microsoft's next biggest and smelliest system, whatever that may be.
Not choosing Microsoft's products is not a shot in one's own foot. It is a shot in theirs.
History repeats itself, and the versioning in
For something so fundamental as version control, it is best to go with proven things: SCCS and CVS are decent and free, and there are companies such as Rational and BitKeeper when you need something decent and not free. Honestly, even something as simple as SCCS and shell scripts can go a long way for small to medium-sized projects with almost no risk that SCCS will suddenly go out of fasion (it's probably 15 to 20 years old by now and still useful).
Look into Qt as one of your options. It is very mature, widely used, intuitive, and now supports Mac OS along with MS Windows and X-Windows. From a Free Software perspective, one downside is that you have to purchase a license for Windows development and/or commercial development (upside: it remains free for Free Software). If you have no budget and are set on the Windows platform, then Qt is not the best option.
In any case, I wholeheartedly recommend that you do not use MFC. My argument is that developing software around proprietary APIs is very risky. I've witnessed serious problems arise in long-term projects when API vendors go under or stop supporting their products. The fact that Microsoft is #1, etc., does not reduce the long-term risk, since all companies is mortal (and more than a few people argue that MS' days are numbered). If you want to make sure the long hours you put in now don't go to waste later on, choose your APIs wisely, and, no matter the API, find ways to compartmentalize your program to isolate risks.
Bacause you don't want to pay 28-50% income tax. 8)
Are the taxes genuinely higher for a given income level than in the USA? In the US, combining federal, state, and local taxes can easily eat 50% of a some people's income.
It will always be as it was. Wizards love Unix, Joe Worker likes whatever is simple to use (Windows, Mac, whatever).
There is a lot of truth in this. However, I have seen "Joe Worker"s who can work comfortably with Solaris and CDE after our thoughtful sysadmin customized CDE to their workflow. Extra icons on the desktop and consistent directory structures can go a long way towards making UNIX more intuitive.
Today, there's nothing nearly as cost competive and fast as Pro/E on dual P4 2.2's, Nvidia Quad4 and win2k.
There is some truth to this, too, which is good for Sun. It forces them to build workstations like the Blade 2000 and continually refine Solaris, so they remain competitive. Even after 20 years, new SunOS/Solaris releases still have worthwhile improvements, and their new hardware can still set world-records. Admittedly, Sun lagged the competition for a year or so before the UltraSPARC III came out, but they have made up for that, now.