When stealing code, you should at least be able to discern whether it's good code or not. Seriously.
Most undergrad-type computing courses tend to have homework or test questions that have one really super obvious working answer. "Obvious" at least after you know it! There often really is a single best way to do something. Obviously local variables and order of initialization don't always matter.
But there are lots of suboptimal approaches and some really wrong ways to do things too. You have to give them some credit for trying. But if half the class tries to do a suboptimal approach and they all used the same local variable names and forgot to initialize the same thing that should've been initialized, it really is painfully obvious to the graders.
Stealing good code or at least learning from good code should be encouraged. But stealing bad code, or even worse code that doesn't actually work, really is a crime. Not just from the academic-honor system standpoint but from the "Crimes against nature" standpoint.
In the mid-90's, when the Web was becoming Wide, even World-Wide (Wow!), Microsoft decided that the web was entirely inadequate for the real needs of computer users. Instead, MS came up with its paradigm for how it would dominate the future of computing in hope of displacing the www. What did they come up with?
Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else.
But I, as a just random user of some commercial (read: mail-order, telephone company, etc.) websites have several times over the years requested information about my account and orders - and seen instead somebody else's information. In these cases the cause seems to have been non-unique cookies although that is purely a guess, maybe indeed there was some hijacking going on at the network level.
Some of these websites were supposedly "https" but some inspection of HTML source revealed this was just the frame, the actual information was frequently in non-secure inner frames. Poked around a tiny little bit and found that by altering the URL's in those frames I could see arbitrary customer's account info.
I didn't have the courage to tell anyone - after all, accessing somebody else's account information is a federal crime.
When I got started, 20+ years ago, a few large universities had T1's. That was by definition broadband - 1.5 mbps. Smaller schools often only had 2400 baud or in some cases faster telebit modems to hook up to the backbones.
In the 90's things started taking off and it was expected that every institution, except the very smallest, would have a T1. The biggest ones were hooked up by a T3. By the late 90's a few wealthy, well-connected individuals had their own private T1 at home.
And today? 1.5mbps does not meet most definitions of broadband. It's the backwaters. Isn't that amazing?
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Content management without content
on
Front End Drupal
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What's most intriguing, is that 90% of the sites fronted by content management systems actually have no content!
For the vast majority of web applications, the "key-value pair" class of databases work fine.
I think the real problem is that the "relational database weenies" look down on the key-value pair databases, and there are a lot of non-DB-weenies out there who like using true relational databases as nothing more than key-value pair. It degenerates into name calling, instead of getting the job done, pretty fast.
Most 78's (there are exceptions, including the very famous and historically important V-discs) are not vinyl.
They are shellac, or rather a mixture of shellac, wax, slate, and a cotton or paper filler.
I personally believe that the decline of the music industry is directly related to the replacement of shellac with vinyl, and that the RIAA must remedy this decline immediately.
Interesting that by this new law, for the first time a T1 would be considered to be NOT BROADBAND.
Folks complain about the "last mile" all they want, but the mindset that a T1 (which used to, not very long ago, be a big enough pipe for an entire college campus!) is not broadband will make me completely change my mindset!
Don't get me wrong, Suns were fine platforms, but McNealy didn't "create" the web or all those jobs in any way, shape, or form.
Neither did Microsoft or Windows.
Of course, the author of the article insists that either Microsoft created the web, or that Sun did, and doesn't even consider how it actually happened.
I thought the date on the box was the expiration date (just like milk). Certainly all experiences I've had with Win2K, etc. have left a sour rancid taste in my mouth.
Bloat? Don't talk to me about bloat...
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
vi is a bloated version of ex
EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping
Sometimes I just telnet to port 80 instead of using a browser
I have compiled OpenOffice from scratch... took a while!
My favorite part is the end where he references K.C. Sunshine for the song of the least complexity, "That's the way (uh-uh uh-uh) I like it".
Yet another reason I'll never look at Yahoo
on
YahooTV
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The instant that Yahoo went from being a fairly vanilla search engine to a "web destination" I stopped using it. (Not that I used it much before, but I would occasionally sample the different search engines. At the time it was yahoo, altavista, northernlights, probably some others that I forget.)
Google still rules in terms of places I start at - Incredibly lightweight in terms of "splash" but incredibly heavy in terms of "usability".
Not much else to say otherwise. If I want random examples of what somebody else thinks is important I'll still go to slashdot:-).
I automatically will question anyone serving as a middleman on the way of getting money to a real charity.
I even more will question the middleman who offers gifts/prizes to givers.
Maybe it's good old-fashioned midwesternism or something, but money should go directly as possible to those who need it. I barely trust organizations like Red Cross or United Way to do this. Any merchant between me and them, especially one offering prizes for giving, raises all sorts of red flags in my head.
I remember when 400MB hard drives cost $400 for the first time. That's $1 per MB, or $1000 per GB. And I thought that was so incredibly cheap at the time that further reductions in price were irrelevant.
When I got started, a 60MB drive cost circa $10000 and removable packs were $200 each.
But OSI killed Decnet
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The coming of OSI and it's asinine 7-layer model stiltified DECnet in the 90's. I'm sure that being OSI-compliant was a big deal at the time, but nobody cares anymore. And other than crossing the t's and dotting the i's to meet some government spec at the time, nobody really wanted it.
Before OSI, DECnet was sleek, widespread, easy, and portable across many platforms.
After OSI compliance, it was sluggish, cantankerous, difficult, and verbose.
Slashdot Mirror
When stealing code, you should at least be able to discern whether it's good code or not. Seriously.
Most undergrad-type computing courses tend to have homework or test questions that have one really super obvious working answer. "Obvious" at least after you know it! There often really is a single best way to do something. Obviously local variables and order of initialization don't always matter.
But there are lots of suboptimal approaches and some really wrong ways to do things too. You have to give them some credit for trying. But if half the class tries to do a suboptimal approach and they all used the same local variable names and forgot to initialize the same thing that should've been initialized, it really is painfully obvious to the graders.
Stealing good code or at least learning from good code should be encouraged. But stealing bad code, or even worse code that doesn't actually work, really is a crime. Not just from the academic-honor system standpoint but from the "Crimes against nature" standpoint.
In the mid-90's, when the Web was becoming Wide, even World-Wide (Wow!), Microsoft decided that the web was entirely inadequate for the real needs of computer users. Instead, MS came up with its paradigm for how it would dominate the future of computing in hope of displacing the www. What did they come up with?
Microsoft Bob
And this company is lecturing the world on how to come up with good protocols?
To be fair, Comic Sans MS was a font developed for Microsoft Bob, and seems somehow to have become one of the more commonly used font on the web.
Tim.
I personally use Lynx and for 99% of my Google use, it works just as well as it did 14 years ago.
I know that for some, Google = Google Docs or Google Site, but honestly I don't even know what those are.
Google, to me, is just Google search.
The article says:
But I, as a just random user of some commercial (read: mail-order, telephone company, etc.) websites have several times over the years requested information about my account and orders - and seen instead somebody else's information. In these cases the cause seems to have been non-unique cookies although that is purely a guess, maybe indeed there was some hijacking going on at the network level.
Some of these websites were supposedly "https" but some inspection of HTML source revealed this was just the frame, the actual information was frequently in non-secure inner frames. Poked around a tiny little bit and found that by altering the URL's in those frames I could see arbitrary customer's account info.
I didn't have the courage to tell anyone - after all, accessing somebody else's account information is a federal crime.
When I learned to type we didn't have these extra "one" and "zero" keys. We used lower case "ell" and upper case "Oh" and we were happy, dang it!
When I got started, 20+ years ago, a few large universities had T1's. That was by definition broadband - 1.5 mbps. Smaller schools often only had 2400 baud or in some cases faster telebit modems to hook up to the backbones.
In the 90's things started taking off and it was expected that every institution, except the very smallest, would have a T1. The biggest ones were hooked up by a T3. By the late 90's a few wealthy, well-connected individuals had their own private T1 at home.
And today? 1.5mbps does not meet most definitions of broadband. It's the backwaters. Isn't that amazing?
On several occasions I've been able to convince customers that MySQL was good enough but only because Oracle owned it:
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
What's most intriguing, is that 90% of the sites fronted by content management systems actually have no content!
Rogomatic was the coolest thing in the world. Circa nineteeneighty-whatever when I saw it.
It only worked with one particular version of Rogue IIRC.
What was really cool is we'd let it run overnight on the Unix boxes, then come in the next day and see how much fun the computer had had :-).
My nomination: A PHD (Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher) in Google's TiSP Program.
For the vast majority of web applications, the "key-value pair" class of databases work fine.
I think the real problem is that the "relational database weenies" look down on the key-value pair databases, and there are a lot of non-DB-weenies out there who like using true relational databases as nothing more than key-value pair. It degenerates into name calling, instead of getting the job done, pretty fast.
I for one welcome our new Chief Information Overlord.
Isn't having a Chief Technology Officer like having a Chief Refrigeration Officer or a Chief Vending Machine Officer?
Most 78's (there are exceptions, including the very famous and historically important V-discs) are not vinyl.
They are shellac, or rather a mixture of shellac, wax, slate, and a cotton or paper filler.
I personally believe that the decline of the music industry is directly related to the replacement of shellac with vinyl, and that the RIAA must remedy this decline immediately.
Interesting that by this new law, for the first time a T1 would be considered to be NOT BROADBAND.
Folks complain about the "last mile" all they want, but the mindset that a T1 (which used to, not very long ago, be a big enough pipe for an entire college campus!) is not broadband will make me completely change my mindset!
Don't get me wrong, Suns were fine platforms, but McNealy didn't "create" the web or all those jobs in any way, shape, or form.
Neither did Microsoft or Windows.
Of course, the author of the article insists that either Microsoft created the web, or that Sun did, and doesn't even consider how it actually happened.
I thought the date on the box was the expiration date (just like milk). Certainly all experiences I've had with Win2K, etc. have left a sour rancid taste in my mouth.
- vi is a bloated version of ex
- EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping
- Sometimes I just telnet to port 80 instead of using a browser
I have compiled OpenOffice from scratch... took a while!My favorite part is the end where he references K.C. Sunshine for the song of the least complexity, "That's the way (uh-uh uh-uh) I like it".
Google still rules in terms of places I start at - Incredibly lightweight in terms of "splash" but incredibly heavy in terms of "usability".
Not much else to say otherwise. If I want random examples of what somebody else thinks is important I'll still go to slashdot :-).
I automatically will question anyone serving as a middleman on the way of getting money to a real charity.
I even more will question the middleman who offers gifts/prizes to givers.
Maybe it's good old-fashioned midwesternism or something, but money should go directly as possible to those who need it. I barely trust organizations like Red Cross or United Way to do this. Any merchant between me and them, especially one offering prizes for giving, raises all sorts of red flags in my head.
As any Ultima I player will tell you, it's easy: just steal a space shuttle and then outrun the guards.
As long as this is so easy, nobody will pay for space flight.
When I got started, a 60MB drive cost circa $10000 and removable packs were $200 each.
The coming of OSI and it's asinine 7-layer model stiltified DECnet in the 90's. I'm sure that being OSI-compliant was a big deal at the time, but nobody cares anymore. And other than crossing the t's and dotting the i's to meet some government spec at the time, nobody really wanted it.
Before OSI, DECnet was sleek, widespread, easy, and portable across many platforms.
After OSI compliance, it was sluggish, cantankerous, difficult, and verbose.