I totally agree. I do feel sorry for the dumb customers that let Microsoft lead them into this, because they will have to pay for their error now. I am not willing to allow that to hold up correcting the error though, because I think this is a far overdue correction.
Joe user, with his shiny new Windows box, won't be able to buy a product from some company on the web. He could with his old computer, but he can't use their web page now.He is mad! He writes angry emails. He complains in news groups about how bad the company is. The company finds out when it shows up on the nightly news. It takes weeks, maybe months, to fix the web page. The company loses customers.
The web application didn't change. The company suffers the loss of a sale, and lots of bad publicity, not knowing they were doing anything wrong. They probably contracted out the web page design, which was really slick looking, without knowing that they were tied to any particular version of web browser, or even knowing that Java was involved.
Microsoft generally carries along lots of baggage, and a new version of Windows works with most of the older software for Windows. The change to a Windows NT code base (NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP) did break some software, but you would know, since you were the user. This will break your web application for your users, and you may not know it until the complaints start coming in, since you already tested it with every version of Windows and IE.
All that aside, I agree that Microsoft has been known to release new version of their applications, and even product service packs, that broke things badly. You could always stick with the old version until all the problems were worked out. Try telling your online customers they have to uninstall the Sun VM that shipped with their copy of Windows, download the Microsoft VM (if they are allowed to still provide it), and install the Microsoft VM. All this just to use my web site. I predict unhappy customers.
There are many Java applets on company web pages out there. I just bought a headboard for a bed from a place that has a web page that is unusable without java, since all page navigation is done by the applet.
One of the big problems with replacing the Microsoft VM is the ties they provide between Java and Javascript. They did things their own way, which means that any code relying on those ties between their Javascript and Java will be broken.
The issue here is web applications, not desktop applications, since you can always make a desktop app use whatever VM you want. No one is writing desktop applications for the Microsoft VM, since you are writing a Java application for portability, which means a Sun certified VM.
Talking about sorry shape, have you tried using Microsoft COM in an application. What a mess!
Installing Java is not the issue. They provided tools to their customers that rely on their VM being present for their corporate web pages to function. I know this because the company I am currently doing contract work for has a web application they purchased for content management of their shared project/business documents. It is written using Microsoft tools, and won't work if you have the Sun VM activated for your browser.
Their argument is valid, that this will cause problems for their corporate clients. It will cause problems whenever it comes out, because some of their corporate clients (or their customers) will not be able to view their web pages properly.
Delaying this rollout is not really going to help much, because most web application get updated when the application changes, not when the client changes. Their corporate customers are going to be very angry with them about this kind of problem.
I don't feel sorry for Microsoft, because they got themselves into this mess by trying to spin Java out of Suns control, and make it into a Microsoft specific version. Now they have been told to live up to their contract with Sun, and must pay the price for their behavior. I do feel sorry for their corporate customers who bought into systems designed around the Microsoft VM, because they were dumb, not culpable. They will end up paying part of the price for Microsoft's past errors.
Most corporate clients will have control of their desktops, and can make their internal users use the Microsoft VM until they can fix things. They can't make joe user on the internet do that, which is where things will break down.
Let me understand this.... Microsoft didn't decide to price fix with the MPEG4 group, which would be an illegal practice, but instead decided to use their marker position to undercut them, which is also probably an illegal practice. This is the complaint?
Many people in our business don't have a computer science degree, but make their living as programmers. They can do the work. Some people with computer science degrees can't program their way out of a paper bag. You don't want one of them on your project.
Having a certification tells me you cared enough to get it, probably because you thought it would make you more money. It says nothing about how good you are. Having a license, which requires a certification and some money, tells me nothing more about how well you can do the job, or how much I can really trust you.
Ok, I guess that's enough ranting about pieces of paper. They prove you could get the piece of paper, not that you can be trusted to do the work, that you have to prove the hard way.
It also costs quite a lot more per page, in ink cartiges / dye ribbons / paper.
Have you looked at prints made on the Sony printer? You can't tell them from conventional photographs. Those prints are also much more permanent than ones you make on most ink jet printers, as well as being very water resistant. When you compare costs, do it between printers that produce comparable results, not with your garden variety ink jet printer.
If you compare it to some ink jet printers that have archival quality ink, need special paper, and cost almost $1000 for just the printer, then the overall costs seem much better. It may cost 50% more per print than those printers, but the extra $800 I saved can pay for a lot of prints, probably more than I'll ever make on it. It never produces a bad print because the print head needs to be cleaned (and waste my money), and it doesn't spend several minutes getting ready to make the first print.
The ink jet can make bigger prints, but that's not an issue for most people in replacing a regular camera. They want to be able to give mom a copy of a picture for the family album, and 4X6 is fine for their purposes.
Sony makes some really nice ones, with a number of them under $300.
I have a DPP-SV55, which will only do 4X6 max, but the picture quality is amazing. Currently it is selling under $200 on some web sites. The bad news is, they only support Windows drivers for it, and the price per print is high. That printer is one of the reasons that my computer boots both Windows XP and Mandrake Linux.
Re:Great, except the crash rate is high...
on
Droning On
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is all great, except that during the Kosovo conflict, 10 times as many drones were lost as manned vehicles. Isn't that the point. We use them for things that are either risky, or make demands (like many hours on station) that we wouldn't attemp with a crew on board.
Three of the Air Force's six Global Hawks, which cost about $35 million a piece, have crashed. In the same amount of time as those Global Hawks you are talking about, the Air Force had a number of fighter aircraft go down during training missions. Those aircraft cost more than the Global Hawks do, cost way more to run, and involved the loss of some pilots. Aircraft are not risk free, gravity always wins, and sometimes not very nicely.
About half of the 50 much smaller, $4.5 million Predators have been lost, including some that were shot down, according to the Air Force's own data. We send up drones in conditions that we wouldn't send normal aircraft and pilots. The Predators have a limited flying altitude, limited flying speed, limited visibility for the remote pilot, and can't fly above some kinds of weather, which resulted in some of them coming down the hard way. If you need information, you don't want to risk a pilot, or you need on station capabilities that manned aircraft can't give you (like shifts of controllers), you send in a drone. Naturally more of them are lost than piloted aircraft. That's one of the reasons we use them. Remember, in a war situation, someone has to fly in with a helecopter to rescue the downed pilots, risking another multi-million dollar aircraft, and many more soldiers. The drone can be abandoned, people can't be.
But most consumers do follow the rules. Forgive me for making this admission here, but I don't download music. I do play CDs on my computer. They aren't asking me to follow the rules, they are changing the rules to make it impossible for me to use their product in the way I am accustomed to using it. They are making me not want to buy anything from them. I would rather enjoy my current CD collection, which would take me many days to play in it's entirety, than support these crooks. At one point I would buy 1-2 CDs per month, when they were releasing music I liked. I think I purchased 1-2 commercial CDs this year. I purchase many from independent artists that I like, especially when they actually get all or most of the profits from the CD, rather than a few percent.
You are the one making the mistake, since it only takes one person willing to break the security, and put the file online to break it. The people who download that music don't have to go to any effort, which rather defeats the whole idea of trying to make it hard for them to copy the CD, which they don't even have.
Just my thoughts on the matter, having written many thousands of lines of Forth in the 80s. The current language trends are towards strongly typed languages, with good compile time static verification. Examples of this would be Java or C++.
Forth, like assembler, requires the programmer to manage the stack explicitly. This gives you tremendous power, especially when it comes to shooting yourself in the foot. The level of discipline needed in a multi-programmer team to generate a large project in Forth is much greater than it is with most languages.
Example: A minor change to a word (a subroutine or compiler definition in Forth) can easily cause a stack effect error, by either consuming too many items from the stack, or too few. This probably won't break the code (crash) at the point the error was made, but generates bad parameters for all of the code that executes from that point forward, potentially causing an actual crash at a point in the code far removed from where the error is. Debugging this kind of stack problem is a real nightmare.
Having said all that, I loved writing routines to test new hardware in Forth, because I could interactively code and test. This made me very productive in this limited case.
As you can tell from my handle, I do mainly Java now, and feel it is a much better choice for most projects.
I disagree completely about the source of the URL being the issue. If it is in a folder the web server has been told to publish, anyone could call the information up, perhaps by mis-typing a URL that has been published, say when trying to look at the information for last year (which did have a published URL).
If your web server hands something out to the public, it is because you made it available. If I fat finger an entry into my browser, am I hacking, or just a bad typist? This all goes back to due diligence on the part of the company. If you are careless with your information, like not shredding it, and someone finds it in a dumpster, you are at fault. This is a key notion of trade secret law, and something similar should apply here. Security by obscurity doesn't work.
Re:roadmap?
on
Linux 3.0
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· Score: 2, Informative
The 2.5 builds were development builds, they are supposed to be unstable, because they are full of code that is being tested.
Everyone, especially Linus, hopes that the 2.6 (or 3.0) series has a more stable start than the 2.4 series did.
The real answer is when Linus and the core kernel developers believe it is ready, and there is no schedule, because they don't know when that will be. The answer I believe everyone is hoping for, is by the end of the year, since that will let it be included in the next release cycle by the major distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake), who are probably targeting releases late in the first quarter of the year.
Really, I think you miss the point. Most computers sold with Windows are also distributed with Office, and Outlook or Outlook Express. These are the biggest security risks on a Windows system. Sure, those things don't normally come on servers (although IIS does, big trouble), but most Windows installs are desktops, and are very vulnerable to email attacks. Most Windows systems are poorly set up, because they default to poor settings, which is part of the problem.
Very likely the security reports mentioned about Linux also included any that were present on the applications that came with Linux, so how can you exclude security problems with pre-installed Microsoft applications. You can't have it both ways.
Something that doesn't require KDE or Gnome to patch it's many shortcomings I know this is the mandatory blast directed towards the desktop as currently implemented on Linux. I see it happening here fairly often, maybe even from you, I haven't tracked who generates them.
The combination of X and a window manager (like KDE or GNOME) is the user interface. KDE doesn't "patch" X any more than the window manager in windows patches the GDI, they perform different functions, at different levels, in the user interface.
I believe you are really saying that you wish the setup process for the user interface was simpler. That is a matter of the software used to configure it, more than a function X and KDE. If you look at the current versions of Linux that are about to be released, I think you will find things are rapidly improving.
As far as X, there are reasons why many people like having X around. Corporate support people probably like being able to open X on their desktop and bring up what's happening on a server at the other side of the country, just like they were there. The next big expansion of Linux is going to be on Corporate desktops, rather than on home users machines. Linux, with X, KDE, GNOME, and everything else included, is a relatively easy system for the support people to deal with, even remotely. This is what will sell Linux on the corporate level, not yet another GUI interface.
If you don't like things the way they are now, go organize a project to create a new Linux desktop. If all you have to say is the current one is bad, with no reasons as to why it is, then maybe you should keep quiet.
Red Hat is probably the best choice for new Linux users That runs contrary to my experience. Mandrake is far easier on the newbie than Red Hat, which is targeted more at the experienced crowd. SuSe is in between Mandrake and Red Hat in ease of setup/use for the newbie. Red Hat is targeted towards the programmer/hackers out there.
I do agree that most of the complaints were a bit premature, given that the reviewer never used YaST2, even the older versions of it (5.0 came with YaST1).
Anyone who thinks that Windows has it all nailed on DLL (library under Linux) versioning has never done much with Windows. Windows does hide everything under the covers about versioning, which makes thing seem simple. Just wait until something goes wrong and you have no easy way of telling who changed which DLL, and when. Microsoft has been adding features to track this kind of thing, because even they couldn't debug many DLL conflicts, since they involved non-Microsoft products. This results in many (or most) re-installs of Windows.
Mandrake, SuSe, and Red Hat, in order from newbie to expert, are the distros that are readily available on the shelf, at least in the USA. Red Hat in particular, with their pricing policy for support and updates, targets corporate accounts more than the newbie crowd, who are often just trying things out.
Do we really care? By that I'm saying, whatever MS comes up with can be hacked, especially given their wonderful security record. If not, then we can start our own hardware platform, running Linux, with a processor that doesn't lock us out.
Does anyone really think that Microsoft, even with hardware help built into the processor, will be able to keep a virus from running on their systems? Whatever a program needs to have in order to run (signature, key,...) can be generated, faked, or stolen by someone else. They will violate the DMCA in the process, but stupid laws have a tendency to be ignored (see prohibition) when the public doesn't feel like it serves their interests.
I once worked on a hardware security board for the IBM PC. Knowing what I do about that type of system, I know that any really secure setup they can generate will probably result in unacceptable slowing of the program execution, or it won't be secure. Even if they do it in the best possible way for security, they need to keep knowledge about how it worked, and about how to configure software to run on it, TOTALLY secret. One leak, one copy of the program configuration software gets out, a copy of the spec gets out, and it's all over, your security is about to vanish.
Don't they get it yet? If they can create it, someone else can break it. There is no magic solution to their problems, they have to live in the real world with the rest of us.
Designing a product like Outlook, that is intended to run code sent to you by unknown parties (for office automation), is an invitation to crackers, and about as far from secure as you can get.
Microsoft designed what security they had for sharing a computer between multiple people on a desktop. I can make sure you can't see my data if I use their access controls. They didn't take network access security into account, and certainly never took the possibility of unfriendly network access into account. Welcome to the real world guys!
...advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law.'
They just want to fight the DMCA, and the extension of the length of copyright, not remove all copyright law.
Without copyright and patent laws that make the GPL enforceable, Linux would be no better off than *BSD
Patent laws have nothing to do with the success of GPL, which is based in copyright law. Linus didn't patent Linux, because he doesn't believe in software patents, given his recent statements on LKML about patents.
Thos two things are very separate, even though people lump them together under "intellectual property". Copyright, which it appears you don't have much respect for, was traditionally used for printed or textual information. No one had a problem saying I can't sell someone elses book as my own work. If I want to copy it for my own use, that has been declared legal long ago. The DMCA goes way beyond the traditional copyright protection for an author, and that is the issue. The other issue is the extension of the length of time a copyright is good for. The original duration gave an author a chance to make some money from his work before it became public domain. It is now being extended to allow huge corporations to make money for decades after the original author is dead and gone (like Walt Disney). This was arguably not the original intent.
Now we need someone to help finance the efforts break the software and business process patents, which are probably much worse for society than the idiocy of the DMCA.
They didn't abuse their power, at least that's not what has them in trouble with ICANN. They aren't doing their job, part of which is maintaining a connection between the domain name and the domain name's owner.
The abuse of their position and power is an entirely different matter, although it also is a way they are not doing their job properly. Because they haven't tracked the ownership of some domains properly, they are unable to transfer them to another domain registrar. Convenient for them because they get to keep charging the domain owner, but bad because they are getting called out by ICANN on it. Of course there is the matter of the pot (ICANN) calling the kettle black.
The right question is: why is my boos talking about long hours?
The answer: Because the company made commitments that it can't meet, and you are being asked to make up the difference.
My experience with companies that think you should be working that kind of schedule, is that they are staying afloat by the proverbial skin on their teeth, and they need your help to keep from going under. Usually it takes several years for a company to really go down the tube, so the management knows that things are going bad well before the normal worker does.
Sometimes the company can stay in business by burning up developers and throwing them away when they can't handle it any more. You don't want to be one of the cast outs, because your attitude towards work will be altered for years by the experience. Someone else was saying the same thing, get out while you can, while you still like your chosen career.
But OO and databases tend to fight over the same territory. If you want to properly factor responsibilities and roles of the various technologies to reduce duplication and/or overlap, then one or the other must go.
OO is good for working with database items on an item at a time basis. If you need a database join, then you should do one. I know no good developers who want to waste time coding something that they can do with a SQL statement.
I'm obviously not going to convince you that OOP is a good thing, and that is not my purpose. You are saying many things about OOP that I feel are incorrect or undeserved, and my purpose here was to say that what you have seen is not necessariy the whole story.
You aren't going to convince me that it is bad, because I have seen otherwise. Like every system for accomplishing something, it can be misapplied, misunderstood, and just generally not applicable to some problems. I think that point has been made.
They are judged by their peers, the people who have to deal with the code they produced. They are judged by the results they produce, not by how well they advertise themselves. Either you, or the people you are talking about, are talking trash. I don't know enough to tell which for sure, but you talk like you didn't keep up with the last 10-15 years of software engineering, and don't care to learn it. I know your experiences with OOP are very different than mine, either because you aren't open to seeing the benefit of OOP, or because you worked with some really bad developers who said they knew (and used) OOP.
Databases are what gives procedural programming its real power, not mere functional decomposition by itself.
Believe it or not, OOP programmers use Databases! All you are saying is flexible software (whatever design methodology you use) is better than inflexible software. What an amazing observation! Tell us something we don't know. So you saw some bad OOP designs, probably created by people who didn't understand either OOP, or the problem domain they were trying to solve. Confusion processed by crap is crap, there is no other possible result. That says nothing about OOP, and everything about the people and processes involved.
Would you rather order a bunch of bricks into place, or lay them yourself brick by brick?
If I want a house, I'd rather have the house than the parts of a house (bricks), and I'd rather have bricks than the components of a brick. If you have to solve a problem, the solution takes about the same amount of work to develop, no matter what system you use.
The "noun modeling" is in code instead of via relational formulas
What on earth are you talking about? If the code has to perform certain operations, they need to be coded somewhere, don't they? Someone has to write them, in whatever form they may be in. Somewhere, either in your "formula", or in code, they need to be implemented. A bad implementation is just that, a bad implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree. I do feel sorry for the dumb customers that let Microsoft lead them into this, because they will have to pay for their error now. I am not willing to allow that to hold up correcting the error though, because I think this is a far overdue correction.
Joe user, with his shiny new Windows box, won't be able to buy a product from some company on the web. He could with his old computer, but he can't use their web page now. He is mad! He writes angry emails. He complains in news groups about how bad the company is. The company finds out when it shows up on the nightly news. It takes weeks, maybe months, to fix the web page. The company loses customers.
The web application didn't change. The company suffers the loss of a sale, and lots of bad publicity, not knowing they were doing anything wrong. They probably contracted out the web page design, which was really slick looking, without knowing that they were tied to any particular version of web browser, or even knowing that Java was involved.
Microsoft generally carries along lots of baggage, and a new version of Windows works with most of the older software for Windows. The change to a Windows NT code base (NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP) did break some software, but you would know, since you were the user. This will break your web application for your users, and you may not know it until the complaints start coming in, since you already tested it with every version of Windows and IE.
All that aside, I agree that Microsoft has been known to release new version of their applications, and even product service packs, that broke things badly. You could always stick with the old version until all the problems were worked out. Try telling your online customers they have to uninstall the Sun VM that shipped with their copy of Windows, download the Microsoft VM (if they are allowed to still provide it), and install the Microsoft VM. All this just to use my web site. I predict unhappy customers.
Paul
There are many Java applets on company web pages out there. I just bought a headboard for a bed from a place that has a web page that is unusable without java, since all page navigation is done by the applet.
One of the big problems with replacing the Microsoft VM is the ties they provide between Java and Javascript. They did things their own way, which means that any code relying on those ties between their Javascript and Java will be broken.
The issue here is web applications, not desktop applications, since you can always make a desktop app use whatever VM you want. No one is writing desktop applications for the Microsoft VM, since you are writing a Java application for portability, which means a Sun certified VM.
Talking about sorry shape, have you tried using Microsoft COM in an application. What a mess!
Paul
Installing Java is not the issue. They provided tools to their customers that rely on their VM being present for their corporate web pages to function. I know this because the company I am currently doing contract work for has a web application they purchased for content management of their shared project/business documents. It is written using Microsoft tools, and won't work if you have the Sun VM activated for your browser.
Their argument is valid, that this will cause problems for their corporate clients. It will cause problems whenever it comes out, because some of their corporate clients (or their customers) will not be able to view their web pages properly.
Delaying this rollout is not really going to help much, because most web application get updated when the application changes, not when the client changes. Their corporate customers are going to be very angry with them about this kind of problem.
I don't feel sorry for Microsoft, because they got themselves into this mess by trying to spin Java out of Suns control, and make it into a Microsoft specific version. Now they have been told to live up to their contract with Sun, and must pay the price for their behavior. I do feel sorry for their corporate customers who bought into systems designed around the Microsoft VM, because they were dumb, not culpable. They will end up paying part of the price for Microsoft's past errors.
Most corporate clients will have control of their desktops, and can make their internal users use the Microsoft VM until they can fix things. They can't make joe user on the internet do that, which is where things will break down.
Let me understand this.... Microsoft didn't decide to price fix with the MPEG4 group, which would be an illegal practice, but instead decided to use their marker position to undercut them, which is also probably an illegal practice. This is the complaint?
Many people in our business don't have a computer science degree, but make their living as programmers. They can do the work. Some people with computer science degrees can't program their way out of a paper bag. You don't want one of them on your project.
Having a certification tells me you cared enough to get it, probably because you thought it would make you more money. It says nothing about how good you are. Having a license, which requires a certification and some money, tells me nothing more about how well you can do the job, or how much I can really trust you.
Ok, I guess that's enough ranting about pieces of paper. They prove you could get the piece of paper, not that you can be trusted to do the work, that you have to prove the hard way.
Damn, where did that soap box come from!
It also costs quite a lot more per page, in ink cartiges / dye ribbons / paper.
Have you looked at prints made on the Sony printer? You can't tell them from conventional photographs. Those prints are also much more permanent than ones you make on most ink jet printers, as well as being very water resistant. When you compare costs, do it between printers that produce comparable results, not with your garden variety ink jet printer.
If you compare it to some ink jet printers that have archival quality ink, need special paper, and cost almost $1000 for just the printer, then the overall costs seem much better. It may cost 50% more per print than those printers, but the extra $800 I saved can pay for a lot of prints, probably more than I'll ever make on it. It never produces a bad print because the print head needs to be cleaned (and waste my money), and it doesn't spend several minutes getting ready to make the first print.
The ink jet can make bigger prints, but that's not an issue for most people in replacing a regular camera. They want to be able to give mom a copy of a picture for the family album, and 4X6 is fine for their purposes.
Sony makes some really nice ones, with a number of them under $300.
I have a DPP-SV55, which will only do 4X6 max, but the picture quality is amazing. Currently it is selling under $200 on some web sites. The bad news is, they only support Windows drivers for it, and the price per print is high. That printer is one of the reasons that my computer boots both Windows XP and Mandrake Linux.
This is all great, except that during the Kosovo conflict, 10 times as many drones were lost as manned vehicles.
Isn't that the point. We use them for things that are either risky, or make demands (like many hours on station) that we wouldn't attemp with a crew on board.
Three of the Air Force's six Global Hawks, which cost about $35 million a piece, have crashed.
In the same amount of time as those Global Hawks you are talking about, the Air Force had a number of fighter aircraft go down during training missions. Those aircraft cost more than the Global Hawks do, cost way more to run, and involved the loss of some pilots. Aircraft are not risk free, gravity always wins, and sometimes not very nicely.
About half of the 50 much smaller, $4.5 million Predators have been lost, including some that were shot down, according to the Air Force's own data.
We send up drones in conditions that we wouldn't send normal aircraft and pilots. The Predators have a limited flying altitude, limited flying speed, limited visibility for the remote pilot, and can't fly above some kinds of weather, which resulted in some of them coming down the hard way. If you need information, you don't want to risk a pilot, or you need on station capabilities that manned aircraft can't give you (like shifts of controllers), you send in a drone. Naturally more of them are lost than piloted aircraft. That's one of the reasons we use them. Remember, in a war situation, someone has to fly in with a helecopter to rescue the downed pilots, risking another multi-million dollar aircraft, and many more soldiers. The drone can be abandoned, people can't be.
They can still sell to everyone who doesn't opt out, so what are they complaining about?
Oh yeah, that means they are out of business, doesn't it?
I think they need to find a new business model.
But most consumers do follow the rules. Forgive me for making this admission here, but I don't download music. I do play CDs on my computer. They aren't asking me to follow the rules, they are changing the rules to make it impossible for me to use their product in the way I am accustomed to using it. They are making me not want to buy anything from them. I would rather enjoy my current CD collection, which would take me many days to play in it's entirety, than support these crooks. At one point I would buy 1-2 CDs per month, when they were releasing music I liked. I think I purchased 1-2 commercial CDs this year. I purchase many from independent artists that I like, especially when they actually get all or most of the profits from the CD, rather than a few percent.
You are the one making the mistake, since it only takes one person willing to break the security, and put the file online to break it. The people who download that music don't have to go to any effort, which rather defeats the whole idea of trying to make it hard for them to copy the CD, which they don't even have.
Just my thoughts on the matter, having written many thousands of lines of Forth in the 80s. The current language trends are towards strongly typed languages, with good compile time static verification. Examples of this would be Java or C++.
Forth, like assembler, requires the programmer to manage the stack explicitly. This gives you tremendous power, especially when it comes to shooting yourself in the foot. The level of discipline needed in a multi-programmer team to generate a large project in Forth is much greater than it is with most languages.
Example: A minor change to a word (a subroutine or compiler definition in Forth) can easily cause a stack effect error, by either consuming too many items from the stack, or too few. This probably won't break the code (crash) at the point the error was made, but generates bad parameters for all of the code that executes from that point forward, potentially causing an actual crash at a point in the code far removed from where the error is. Debugging this kind of stack problem is a real nightmare.
Having said all that, I loved writing routines to test new hardware in Forth, because I could interactively code and test. This made me very productive in this limited case.
As you can tell from my handle, I do mainly Java now, and feel it is a much better choice for most projects.
I disagree completely about the source of the URL being the issue. If it is in a folder the web server has been told to publish, anyone could call the information up, perhaps by mis-typing a URL that has been published, say when trying to look at the information for last year (which did have a published URL).
If your web server hands something out to the public, it is because you made it available. If I fat finger an entry into my browser, am I hacking, or just a bad typist? This all goes back to due diligence on the part of the company. If you are careless with your information, like not shredding it, and someone finds it in a dumpster, you are at fault. This is a key notion of trade secret law, and something similar should apply here. Security by obscurity doesn't work.
The 2.5 builds were development builds, they are supposed to be unstable, because they are full of code that is being tested.
Everyone, especially Linus, hopes that the 2.6 (or 3.0) series has a more stable start than the 2.4 series did.
The real answer is when Linus and the core kernel developers believe it is ready, and there is no schedule, because they don't know when that will be. The answer I believe everyone is hoping for, is by the end of the year, since that will let it be included in the next release cycle by the major distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake), who are probably targeting releases late in the first quarter of the year.
Let me guess, they can't can't get a Visa to enter the country for their trial, because they are charged with crimes in the US?
Really, I think you miss the point. Most computers sold with Windows are also distributed with Office, and Outlook or Outlook Express. These are the biggest security risks on a Windows system. Sure, those things don't normally come on servers (although IIS does, big trouble), but most Windows installs are desktops, and are very vulnerable to email attacks. Most Windows systems are poorly set up, because they default to poor settings, which is part of the problem.
Very likely the security reports mentioned about Linux also included any that were present on the applications that came with Linux, so how can you exclude security problems with pre-installed Microsoft applications. You can't have it both ways.
Something that doesn't require KDE or Gnome to patch it's many shortcomings
I know this is the mandatory blast directed towards the desktop as currently implemented on Linux. I see it happening here fairly often, maybe even from you, I haven't tracked who generates them.
The combination of X and a window manager (like KDE or GNOME) is the user interface. KDE doesn't "patch" X any more than the window manager in windows patches the GDI, they perform different functions, at different levels, in the user interface.
I believe you are really saying that you wish the setup process for the user interface was simpler. That is a matter of the software used to configure it, more than a function X and KDE. If you look at the current versions of Linux that are about to be released, I think you will find things are rapidly improving.
As far as X, there are reasons why many people like having X around. Corporate support people probably like being able to open X on their desktop and bring up what's happening on a server at the other side of the country, just like they were there. The next big expansion of Linux is going to be on Corporate desktops, rather than on home users machines. Linux, with X, KDE, GNOME, and everything else included, is a relatively easy system for the support people to deal with, even remotely. This is what will sell Linux on the corporate level, not yet another GUI interface.
If you don't like things the way they are now, go organize a project to create a new Linux desktop. If all you have to say is the current one is bad, with no reasons as to why it is, then maybe you should keep quiet.
Red Hat is probably the best choice for new Linux users
That runs contrary to my experience. Mandrake is far easier on the newbie than Red Hat, which is targeted more at the experienced crowd. SuSe is in between Mandrake and Red Hat in ease of setup/use for the newbie. Red Hat is targeted towards the programmer/hackers out there.
I do agree that most of the complaints were a bit premature, given that the reviewer never used YaST2, even the older versions of it (5.0 came with YaST1).
Anyone who thinks that Windows has it all nailed on DLL (library under Linux) versioning has never done much with Windows. Windows does hide everything under the covers about versioning, which makes thing seem simple. Just wait until something goes wrong and you have no easy way of telling who changed which DLL, and when. Microsoft has been adding features to track this kind of thing, because even they couldn't debug many DLL conflicts, since they involved non-Microsoft products. This results in many (or most) re-installs of Windows.
Mandrake, SuSe, and Red Hat, in order from newbie to expert, are the distros that are readily available on the shelf, at least in the USA. Red Hat in particular, with their pricing policy for support and updates, targets corporate accounts more than the newbie crowd, who are often just trying things out.
Do we really care? By that I'm saying, whatever MS comes up with can be hacked, especially given their wonderful security record. If not, then we can start our own hardware platform, running Linux, with a processor that doesn't lock us out.
...) can be generated, faked, or stolen by someone else. They will violate the DMCA in the process, but stupid laws have a tendency to be ignored (see prohibition) when the public doesn't feel like it serves their interests.
Does anyone really think that Microsoft, even with hardware help built into the processor, will be able to keep a virus from running on their systems? Whatever a program needs to have in order to run (signature, key,
I once worked on a hardware security board for the IBM PC. Knowing what I do about that type of system, I know that any really secure setup they can generate will probably result in unacceptable slowing of the program execution, or it won't be secure. Even if they do it in the best possible way for security, they need to keep knowledge about how it worked, and about how to configure software to run on it, TOTALLY secret. One leak, one copy of the program configuration software gets out, a copy of the spec gets out, and it's all over, your security is about to vanish.
Don't they get it yet? If they can create it, someone else can break it. There is no magic solution to their problems, they have to live in the real world with the rest of us.
Designing a product like Outlook, that is intended to run code sent to you by unknown parties (for office automation), is an invitation to crackers, and about as far from secure as you can get.
Microsoft designed what security they had for sharing a computer between multiple people on a desktop. I can make sure you can't see my data if I use their access controls. They didn't take network access security into account, and certainly never took the possibility of unfriendly network access into account. Welcome to the real world guys!
...advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law.'
They just want to fight the DMCA, and the extension of the length of copyright, not remove all copyright law.
Without copyright and patent laws that make the GPL enforceable, Linux would be no better off than *BSD
Patent laws have nothing to do with the success of GPL, which is based in copyright law. Linus didn't patent Linux, because he doesn't believe in software patents, given his recent statements on LKML about patents.
Thos two things are very separate, even though people lump them together under "intellectual property". Copyright, which it appears you don't have much respect for, was traditionally used for printed or textual information. No one had a problem saying I can't sell someone elses book as my own work. If I want to copy it for my own use, that has been declared legal long ago. The DMCA goes way beyond the traditional copyright protection for an author, and that is the issue. The other issue is the extension of the length of time a copyright is good for. The original duration gave an author a chance to make some money from his work before it became public domain. It is now being extended to allow huge corporations to make money for decades after the original author is dead and gone (like Walt Disney). This was arguably not the original intent.
Now we need someone to help finance the efforts break the software and business process patents, which are probably much worse for society than the idiocy of the DMCA.
They didn't abuse their power, at least that's not what has them in trouble with ICANN. They aren't doing their job, part of which is maintaining a connection between the domain name and the domain name's owner.
The abuse of their position and power is an entirely different matter, although it also is a way they are not doing their job properly. Because they haven't tracked the ownership of some domains properly, they are unable to transfer them to another domain registrar. Convenient for them because they get to keep charging the domain owner, but bad because they are getting called out by ICANN on it. Of course there is the matter of the pot (ICANN) calling the kettle black.
The right question is: why is my boos talking about long hours?
The answer: Because the company made commitments that it can't meet, and you are being asked to make up the difference.
My experience with companies that think you should be working that kind of schedule, is that they are staying afloat by the proverbial skin on their teeth, and they need your help to keep from going under. Usually it takes several years for a company to really go down the tube, so the management knows that things are going bad well before the normal worker does.
Sometimes the company can stay in business by burning up developers and throwing them away when they can't handle it any more. You don't want to be one of the cast outs, because your attitude towards work will be altered for years by the experience. Someone else was saying the same thing, get out while you can, while you still like your chosen career.
But OO and databases tend to fight over the same territory. If you want to properly factor responsibilities and roles of the various technologies to reduce duplication and/or overlap, then one or the other must go.
OO is good for working with database items on an item at a time basis. If you need a database join, then you should do one. I know no good developers who want to waste time coding something that they can do with a SQL statement.
I'm obviously not going to convince you that OOP is a good thing, and that is not my purpose. You are saying many things about OOP that I feel are incorrect or undeserved, and my purpose here was to say that what you have seen is not necessariy the whole story.
You aren't going to convince me that it is bad, because I have seen otherwise. Like every system for accomplishing something, it can be misapplied, misunderstood, and just generally not applicable to some problems. I think that point has been made.
How does one judge "good developers"?
They are judged by their peers, the people who have to deal with the code they produced. They are judged by the results they produce, not by how well they advertise themselves. Either you, or the people you are talking about, are talking trash. I don't know enough to tell which for sure, but you talk like you didn't keep up with the last 10-15 years of software engineering, and don't care to learn it. I know your experiences with OOP are very different than mine, either because you aren't open to seeing the benefit of OOP, or because you worked with some really bad developers who said they knew (and used) OOP.
Databases are what gives procedural programming its real power, not mere functional decomposition by itself.
Believe it or not, OOP programmers use Databases! All you are saying is flexible software (whatever design methodology you use) is better than inflexible software. What an amazing observation! Tell us something we don't know. So you saw some bad OOP designs, probably created by people who didn't understand either OOP, or the problem domain they were trying to solve. Confusion processed by crap is crap, there is no other possible result. That says nothing about OOP, and everything about the people and processes involved.
Would you rather order a bunch of bricks into place, or lay them yourself brick by brick?
If I want a house, I'd rather have the house than the parts of a house (bricks), and I'd rather have bricks than the components of a brick. If you have to solve a problem, the solution takes about the same amount of work to develop, no matter what system you use.
The "noun modeling" is in code instead of via relational formulas
What on earth are you talking about? If the code has to perform certain operations, they need to be coded somewhere, don't they? Someone has to write them, in whatever form they may be in. Somewhere, either in your "formula", or in code, they need to be implemented. A bad implementation is just that, a bad implementation.