I have been wondering what happened to this stuff. I worked at motorola when the FCC reg was passed and we had to start planning how we were going to solve the 911 locating problem. Left before any of the code started getting written and switched industries.
So has anyone worked with this service yet? I am very interested in some uses for products I am developing.
An earlier poster makes a point of comparing a JVM to a whole OS and further (relatively) new methodologies to java, like spaces, RMI, web services, are just new implementations of OS level IPC methodologies. Where the Java thing starts to break down and things start to look more ugly is when you are not trying to abstract away the platform. Device and peripheral interfacing, integration with platform services (quota's,/etc stuff, blah blah, mail services, etc), and IPC with non-java apps. Once you start to build apps that are not so self-contained and you want to leverage the platform, you have to start working very hard in java.
Anyhoo, I am still not convinced that java really should be compared to languages like C, perl, python, etc. as they each have very different views of the world. The difference is that POSIX systems programming and languages have had about 30 years to mature and develop where as the Java approach has had little more then 10.
That is precisely the reason I do it. In a lot of cases my clients dont know and dont care, they just want it to work and dont want to have to remember something else. Visual mnemonics are important for people and easing their flow of operations is key. Too much disruption on something that is nothing more than a tool for them to do their real work is not a good thing.
Perhaps, you have to understand the view some of my customers have on technology and applications. Its not a matter of intelligence its a matter of an appliance working well. I respect their intelligence and also understand that they dont have the time or interest in learning about bells and whistles of software. So I take care of things for them. As they have time and as I learn more about how they operate I interject little things to help them be more effective.
As a side note you are welcome to compete for that type of business. I am usually giving that stuff away and only help those close to me. Not my focus. But good luck!
I have switched many of my clients to Firefox. A few clients I have switched them without knowing it by deselecting the "Show Internet Explorer on desktop" box in the Options > Advanced tab, then changing the icon for Firefox to the IE icon, and replacing the shortcuts on desktop, quick launch, and start menus. Along with setting Firefox as system default browser manages to keep users from using IE (although they can still execute it manually and some stupid Windows behaviour opens regardless of system settings).
Many users didnt realize the browser changed for quite a while and I eventually taught them how to use tabbed browsing. Lots of happy users and no security/spy/ad related problems.
As the owner of a small software company I have to agree with the reasoning.
Why would you trust a company, particularly a publicly traded company, when it comes to anything relating to profit and market share? Doing a few good deeds when the market is supportive of them (i.e. supporting OS now that its cool) should do little to erase bad deeds of the past.
As this issue is less giving to a community and more trying to steal pieces of that community from another (proprietary) company I would be doubly untrusting.
In the intelligence community there is a kind of matrixed grading system for evaluating intelligence and it takes into account these types of factors.
But since we are dealing with the real world and it rarely fits nicely into any categorized systems, there is still a fair amount of contextual, subjective, and intuitive judgements that have to be made.
If this information were supported by other information gathered by other means and the seemed probable given whats known it would be taken seriously.
How about to continue developing the technology that would be needed to make use of that which our (assumed) robots would find. Unless we want to find nice planets for robots to live we would need to get there ourselves. And if you are asking why we would want to spread to another planet lets just say redundency is usually considered A Good Thing. Errant asteroids and other unpredicitaed system failures aside.. just a though on other possible motivations.
The US government has seen the source to winblows. It is standard for source to be presented (and reviewed) to agencies _before_ a system is put into production. Obviously this isnt the whole government but that is very much the case for systems that handle classified data or do critical tasks like blowing things up.
Actually yes, they do that for proprietary packages. Part of the terms of selling to the government, at least in the national security world, is that source is presented and reviewed by the government. That work is often farmed out to another contracter but the point is its double checked, weapons systems, sattelite systems, and others aren't even farmed out, they are handled by government employees.
And no, it is not more cost effective to review code before using, even corporates do it. At motorola there would be an entire team, different and often more senior then the developer, to review code before it went into production.
It is two fold, corporate support and adoption is very easily chilled with a few law suits, and once that is dropped then sue a few OSS developers, and then a few end users a la RIAA. Its a bit of an exageration, perhaps, but quite plausible.
Certainly that holds true for many software patents, but still not all. I do think, however, that patents can have a positive effect on invention and innovation. The problem is finding the balance and the structure of the USPTO and the laws are not positioned well to strike that balance with software patents.
It depends on how loosely you term "an idea" and how likely the USPTO is to recognize the prior art. After a petent is awraded to a company, no matter how ridiculous (one-click purchase?), if an OS package comes along that emulates the same general idea people can be sued for using it. The company doesnt even need to win, just to scare and sue people to keep end-users locked in to their solution.
Its the fear factor to stop adoption (stop market loss not profit). I dont think MS wants royalties from OpenOffice, they want people to be too afraid to use it.
hehehe.. yeah, I remember my counter-intel classes going over that stuff. It gives you an idea of just how unsecure things are if smart people with resources decide to make things otherwise.
MASINT was another really cool area if you are interested in exploring the uses of technology.
In a previous life, we had to leave _all_ electronics at the gate despite tempest shielding, jamming, and many other measures taken. The technical reasons for this should be obvious to most but it was by no means overkill.
I would say, however, that most companies are not in the same boat. If you have access, even through a proxy, to the internet from a machine where sensitive company data is then a USB storage device is no big deal. Not as easy to log and get an audit trail (all packets could be recorded on a network) but most companies dont have that level of logging in place ($$$).
To make these stats relevant you also need to add: 1) percent activated by default 2) percent that could not be be deactivated or removed, 3) percent that related to core services that are commonly used (HTTP,SMTP,FTP,DNS, i.e. that would likely not be blocked by standard default firewall rules) 4) difficulty of exploit (can it really be scripted for the kiddies?).
Those numbers by themselves are more misleading than meaningless.
As another poster commented it would also be good to define what an OS is, MS binds IE and MediaPlayer to its OS but WordPad and Solitaire can be considered non-OS apps that happen to ship with it. For linux and MacOSX?
Actually that is my hope with the tools I am building for my company. A hosted application framework and set of tools that would let you create business in about 24 hours.
My company, hostedlabs.com, is building the first few apps to help mature the technology and then we plan on opening thye system up.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been wondering what happened to this stuff. I worked at motorola when the FCC reg was passed and we had to start planning how we were going to solve the 911 locating problem. Left before any of the code started getting written and switched industries.
So has anyone worked with this service yet? I am very interested in some uses for products I am developing.
An earlier poster makes a point of comparing a JVM to a whole OS and further (relatively) new methodologies to java, like spaces, RMI, web services, are just new implementations of OS level IPC methodologies. Where the Java thing starts to break down and things start to look more ugly is when you are not trying to abstract away the platform. Device and peripheral interfacing, integration with platform services (quota's, /etc stuff, blah blah, mail services, etc), and IPC with non-java apps. Once you start to build apps that are not so self-contained and you want to leverage the platform, you have to start working very hard in java.
Anyhoo, I am still not convinced that java really should be compared to languages like C, perl, python, etc. as they each have very different views of the world. The difference is that POSIX systems programming and languages have had about 30 years to mature and develop where as the Java approach has had little more then 10.
That is precisely the reason I do it. In a lot of cases my clients dont know and dont care, they just want it to work and dont want to have to remember something else. Visual mnemonics are important for people and easing their flow of operations is key. Too much disruption on something that is nothing more than a tool for them to do their real work is not a good thing.
Perhaps, you have to understand the view some of my customers have on technology and applications. Its not a matter of intelligence its a matter of an appliance working well. I respect their intelligence and also understand that they dont have the time or interest in learning about bells and whistles of software. So I take care of things for them. As they have time and as I learn more about how they operate I interject little things to help them be more effective.
As a side note you are welcome to compete for that type of business. I am usually giving that stuff away and only help those close to me. Not my focus. But good luck!
I have switched many of my clients to Firefox. A few clients I have switched them without knowing it by deselecting the "Show Internet Explorer on desktop" box in the Options > Advanced tab, then changing the icon for Firefox to the IE icon, and replacing the shortcuts on desktop, quick launch, and start menus. Along with setting Firefox as system default browser manages to keep users from using IE (although they can still execute it manually and some stupid Windows behaviour opens regardless of system settings).
Many users didnt realize the browser changed for quite a while and I eventually taught them how to use tabbed browsing. Lots of happy users and no security/spy/ad related problems.
As the owner of a small software company I have to agree with the reasoning.
Why would you trust a company, particularly a publicly traded company, when it comes to anything relating to profit and market share? Doing a few good deeds when the market is supportive of them (i.e. supporting OS now that its cool) should do little to erase bad deeds of the past.
As this issue is less giving to a community and more trying to steal pieces of that community from another (proprietary) company I would be doubly untrusting.
In the intelligence community there is a kind of matrixed grading system for evaluating intelligence and it takes into account these types of factors.
But since we are dealing with the real world and it rarely fits nicely into any categorized systems, there is still a fair amount of contextual, subjective, and intuitive judgements that have to be made.
If this information were supported by other information gathered by other means and the seemed probable given whats known it would be taken seriously.
Although it is an obvious answer, I love web mail clients and I have used some that are just as functional as Outlook.
<shameless plug> hostedLABS is building a tools along these lines</shameless plug>
And I have played Flash Pacman and javascript Battleship.
waitress who you just screwed
;-)
hmm.. glee did you say
Not all ads are pay-per-click, some are pay-per-view and others are combination of methods.
How about to continue developing the technology that would be needed to make use of that which our (assumed) robots would find. Unless we want to find nice planets for robots to live we would need to get there ourselves. And if you are asking why we would want to spread to another planet lets just say redundency is usually considered A Good Thing. Errant asteroids and other unpredicitaed system failures aside.. just a though on other possible motivations.
as proven by this previous story...
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/02/0719247.sht
The US government has seen the source to winblows. It is standard for source to be presented (and reviewed) to agencies _before_ a system is put into production. Obviously this isnt the whole government but that is very much the case for systems that handle classified data or do critical tasks like blowing things up.
Actually yes, they do that for proprietary packages. Part of the terms of selling to the government, at least in the national security world, is that source is presented and reviewed by the government. That work is often farmed out to another contracter but the point is its double checked, weapons systems, sattelite systems, and others aren't even farmed out, they are handled by government employees.
And no, it is not more cost effective to review code before using, even corporates do it. At motorola there would be an entire team, different and often more senior then the developer, to review code before it went into production.
It is two fold, corporate support and adoption is very easily chilled with a few law suits, and once that is dropped then sue a few OSS developers, and then a few end users a la RIAA. Its a bit of an exageration, perhaps, but quite plausible.
Certainly that holds true for many software patents, but still not all. I do think, however, that patents can have a positive effect on invention and innovation. The problem is finding the balance and the structure of the USPTO and the laws are not positioned well to strike that balance with software patents.
It depends on how loosely you term "an idea" and how likely the USPTO is to recognize the prior art. After a petent is awraded to a company, no matter how ridiculous (one-click purchase?), if an OS package comes along that emulates the same general idea people can be sued for using it. The company doesnt even need to win, just to scare and sue people to keep end-users locked in to their solution.
Its the fear factor to stop adoption (stop market loss not profit). I dont think MS wants royalties from OpenOffice, they want people to be too afraid to use it.
"When RSS Feeders Attack".. news at 11:00..
hehehe.. yeah, I remember my counter-intel classes going over that stuff. It gives you an idea of just how unsecure things are if smart people with resources decide to make things otherwise.
MASINT was another really cool area if you are interested in exploring the uses of technology.
In a previous life, we had to leave _all_ electronics at the gate despite tempest shielding, jamming, and many other measures taken. The technical reasons for this should be obvious to most but it was by no means overkill.
I would say, however, that most companies are not in the same boat. If you have access, even through a proxy, to the internet from a machine where sensitive company data is then a USB storage device is no big deal. Not as easy to log and get an audit trail (all packets could be recorded on a network) but most companies dont have that level of logging in place ($$$).
To make these stats relevant you also need to add:
1) percent activated by default
2) percent that could not be be deactivated or removed,
3) percent that related to core services that are commonly used (HTTP,SMTP,FTP,DNS, i.e. that would likely not be blocked by standard default firewall rules)
4) difficulty of exploit (can it really be scripted for the kiddies?).
Those numbers by themselves are more misleading than meaningless.
As another poster commented it would also be good to define what an OS is, MS binds IE and MediaPlayer to its OS but WordPad and Solitaire can be considered non-OS apps that happen to ship with it. For linux and MacOSX?
Actually that is my hope with the tools I am building for my company. A hosted application framework and set of tools that would let you create business in about 24 hours.
;-)
My company, hostedlabs.com, is building the first few apps to help mature the technology and then we plan on opening thye system up.
Should be fun!
cheers to that. I was going to post the same response.
slashdot is both news and a community. if it was _just_ news then it would just be a nice RSS feed.
Oh common mods.. that was +1 _funny_ +1 true...