Speaking from personal experience, I can say that running as a non-admin is very annoying, mainly because switching to admin isn't easy.
This is mostly because configuration is all performed though GUI interfaces. So instead of just doing 'sudo something...', you have to do 'runas' a GUI program (e.g. 'control'), and it's not always clear which program you should run.
On top of this, the 'runas' program isn't always sufficient. For example if you need privileges for doing things in the 'explorer.exe' program, 'runas' probably can't help you. Add to this the fact that when you're in a domain, you can't login as two different users simultaneously (admin and non-admin), and you've got yourself a royal pain in the ass.
I received the following email. It appears to be an email sent to Blue customers. I cannot ascertain its validity, but it looks legit.
Blue Security Ceases Anti-Spam Operations
When we founded Blue Security in 2004, we believed that if we automated a way for users to rise up and exercise their rights under the CAN-SPAM Act and we could reduce the amount of spam on the Internet.
Over the past few months we were able to leverage the power of the Blue Community and convince top spammers responsible for sending over 25% of the world's spam to comply with our users' opt-out list. We were making real progress in eliminating spam from the lives of our users.
However, several leading spammers viewed this change as a strategic threat to their spam business. The week before last and these spammers launched a series of attacks against us and taking down hundreds of thousands of other websites via a massive Denial-of-Service attack and causing damage to ISPs and website owners and Internet users worldwide. They also began a relentless campaign of email intimidation against many members of the Blue Community.
After recovering from the attack and we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community and spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.
As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned and we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities on your behalf and are exploring other and non spam-related avenues for our technological developments. As much as IT saddens us and we believe this is the responsible thing to do.
You need not do anything as a result of this change. We will continue to protect your names and addresses and honor all privacy commitments we made to you.
We have concluded we should not take Blue Security to the full deployment stage we originally planned to achieve and but we are proud of what we have accomplished thus far as a young startup company.
We are extremely proud to have had the chance to work with such a devoted and dedicated community: thank you for the vote of confidence you gave us over the past few months as well as the particularly vocal support you have shown over the last two weeks.
We will be innovating and building our technology in new and other directions and will continue to give back to you and our Community.
I recently had to maintain a 200-line Python script I didn't write. More specifically, I had to wrap a couple of the classes defined therein in Java so they could be called from Java code.
I'll admit that I'm not an experienced Python programmer. Far from it. I read the tutorial and I wrote a couple of small programs, but that's it. Nonetheless, I don't think the conclusions I drew from this experience would've been any different otherwise.
I first tried to understand what accessible members these classes had. This was really difficult since the members aren't listed anywhere -- they're just dynamically brought in out of thin air. As there was no central place where they were all declared, I had to go over the entire class and pick them out..
The next problem was understanding what the members meant. Of course I had to know their type in order to wrap them in Java, but even if I needed to access them from another Python script I still would've needed to know what sort of objects they referred to. And of course there's no easy way of figuring this out either.. I had to rely on the scarce documentation and on variable names.
So my conclusion is that, while dynamic languages can boost productivity (I'm an avid Perl fan), it's very easy to write code that is really difficult to get into and maintain. And you don't have to be a particularly bad code to write such code.
the question is that Rockstar lied, plain and simple.
It is perhaps helpful to remember that Rockstar is a company made up of lots of people. If the execs lied about it then that's stupid, pure and simple. But it could also be the case that they didn't know about it. Think about it: The person or persons who put this stuff in don't want to lose their jobs. They lie to management, who (conveniently) believes them and lets out a PR.
I am #7 at a startup where everyone except for the CEO currently comes from a development background. We all agree it would be a complete waste of our time to build our own network: We are outsourcing the job to someone who has a lot of experience creating such networks. He will build and maintain our network for a reasonable fee.
We believe this is money well-spent, as the alternative is to have one of us learn all the issues from scratch (and there are a lot of issues, I promise you).
Just because you can program, it doesn't mean you should do everything that has to do with technology.
SOX404, which has very much a pyramid of responsibilities for many things, including "operational risk control" (of which this is a case) may change this...
For all those, like myself, who initially tried to interpret SOX404 using 133t-h4><0r-speak, turns out this is part of an act that determines how companies must internally control and review themselves. From the site:
Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404
There is one section of the Act that serves as a common denominator to all of the aforementioned sections - Section 404, Internal Control Review and Auditor Attestation that requires public companies to thoroughly investigate and take responsibility for all of their internal operational and financial controls:
SOX 404 poses four key requirements:
1 - Establishing and maintaining and internal control structure
2 - Assessing the effectiveness of the controls and structure
3 - Preparation of a management report on the structure and its effectiveness
4 - Securing an attestation from an external auditor on the effectiveness of your controls
From TFA: "New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer"
A closer inspection reveals: "The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, "on or off""
There's a pretty huge gap between saying something doesn't work like a computer, and saying it goes through continuous states. As we all know, computers can model continuous states: Just take floating point numbers, or as a broader example, consider approximately solving differential equations that describe continuous processes. Computers do this all the time.
So, looking at humans and computers as black boxes, they both seem to process things continuously and to be able to have these "shades of grey". The difference is that we only know how computers work. Nothing in the article suggests anything beyond this.
As a side note, I must say that drawing such far-reaching conclusions from the way a person moves her mouse seems to me quite amateurish.
I wonder how many of the x86 family of Unix will run in this Windows-based virtualization product.
I am currently using Virtual PC, which is Microsoft's VM product (similar to VMWare workstation). I managed to get both Knoppix and Fedora Core 3 up and running.
As a general rule the strength or weakness of the distributions packages has less to do with the package file format, and more to do with the tender loving care devoted to each package in terms of specifing all of it'd dependencies, what it obsoletes, what functionality it provides.
I second that. I've been using PLD Linux for a while now. It's RPM-based, but it takes RPM to a whole new level. The package management tool, poldek, is nothing short of amazing: Regexp searches, trivial package installation, extreme modularity (programs are broken down into multiple packages), consistent dependences. Best of all, it just works.
Have you actually tried doing this with a relational database? Which ones?
Based on my (relatively basic) knowledge of how databases work these days, using large in-memory caches and fast commits, I wouldn't be surprised if a good enterprise database could handle this rate of commits.
You should remember that 2000 commits != 2000 random disk accesses!
I think having all your bookmarks on some server is a bad idea. What if I'm offline and.. oh, now I get it.
Re:I code C# for a living
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
C# is better than Java in almost every way. Java has better enums and support for covariant and contravariant generic type parameters, but that's about it.
IMHO the most important difference between the two languages is checked vs. unchecked exceptions. In my experience (from C++), unchecked exceptions are completely unusable in large projects. That's because it makes relying on documentation a necessity, which is of course a Bad Thing. This alone makes C# vastly inferior to Java in my book.
It doesn't really matter what the column width is as long as
1) Everyone sticks to it
2) You don't have to scroll to see the end of the line.
I disagree. Reading short lines is less tiresome than reading long lines. This is the reason why most newspapers use rather narrow columns in print.
When lines are logically longer than 80 chars, I use line breaks to make them fit.. not too difficult, and I find that several short lines of method calls are much easier to read than a single long line.
I for one actually wouldn't mind being held liable for the software I develop.
I do think there needs to be some type of software liability laws, but they are going to have to be like nothing else out there, basically a totally new concept.
Don't think so. For example, I think its enough that liability be limited to what you are paid (a practice which already exists elsewhere). Software isn't all that different from other industries..
Just remeber, if Microsoft is held liable for it's products in spite of the EULA, it's only a matter of time before other software comapanies and eventually open source authors will be sued for the same.
Not so sure about open source: When you use a Microsoft product, you pay them for it. With this in mind, you can discuss what sort of liability they have. OTOH using open source products is free, so using them is like using a knife someone gave you for free: If you cut yourself, it's your problem.
Of course it's a bit more complicated when you pay a programmer to do open source development for you. But I don't think it's su
ch a bad idea that such a developer be held liable for her code.
For most practical purposes, water is considered incompressible. This also means that temprature variations don't affect density (and so volume), unless you're going for extremes.
Perl is very good at certain things, and terrible at others. CPAN is an excellent example of what Perl is incredibly good at: A huge collection of relatively small components that perform very specific tasks.
Perl fails, however, when it comes to scalability: Lack of compile-time type-safety, encapsulation and other mechanisms. It generally has a very exposed and ad-hoc OO model make creating large, complex structures exceedingly difficult. Not to mention the nightmare of trying to maintain an existing piece of code that is longer than a couple of tens of thousands of lines.
Don't get me wrong: I love Perl. It is my first choice when writing tools that aid me in development or tie up some loose ends from several systems. But it pales when compared with Java for creating large systems.
this is a perfect example of why NOT to ask/. how to do technical things...
Judging by your obviously knowledgeable answer, I'd say you just proved yourself wrong.
You provided the original poster with some pretty good technical advice..
Slashdot Mirror
I tried using a VM as my main desktop at home, running Ubuntu. I ditched it because of speed issues -- it wasn't even close to 'near-native speed'.
This is mostly because configuration is all performed though GUI interfaces. So instead of just doing 'sudo something ...', you have to do 'runas' a GUI program (e.g. 'control'), and it's not always clear which program you should run.
On top of this, the 'runas' program isn't always sufficient. For example if you need privileges for doing things in the 'explorer.exe' program, 'runas' probably can't help you. Add to this the fact that when you're in a domain, you can't login as two different users simultaneously (admin and non-admin), and you've got yourself a royal pain in the ass.
I'll admit that I'm not an experienced Python programmer. Far from it. I read the tutorial and I wrote a couple of small programs, but that's it. Nonetheless, I don't think the conclusions I drew from this experience would've been any different otherwise.
I first tried to understand what accessible members these classes had. This was really difficult since the members aren't listed anywhere -- they're just dynamically brought in out of thin air. As there was no central place where they were all declared, I had to go over the entire class and pick them out..
The next problem was understanding what the members meant. Of course I had to know their type in order to wrap them in Java, but even if I needed to access them from another Python script I still would've needed to know what sort of objects they referred to. And of course there's no easy way of figuring this out either.. I had to rely on the scarce documentation and on variable names.
So my conclusion is that, while dynamic languages can boost productivity (I'm an avid Perl fan), it's very easy to write code that is really difficult to get into and maintain. And you don't have to be a particularly bad code to write such code.
It is perhaps helpful to remember that Rockstar is a company made up of lots of people. If the execs lied about it then that's stupid, pure and simple. But it could also be the case that they didn't know about it. Think about it: The person or persons who put this stuff in don't want to lose their jobs. They lie to management, who (conveniently) believes them and lets out a PR.
We believe this is money well-spent, as the alternative is to have one of us learn all the issues from scratch (and there are a lot of issues, I promise you).
Just because you can program, it doesn't mean you should do everything that has to do with technology.
It seems like this is what they're doing. On their site, below the pretty images, it says Patents pending.
For all those, like myself, who initially tried to interpret SOX404 using 133t-h4><0r-speak, turns out this is part of an act that determines how companies must internally control and review themselves. From the site:
Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404
There is one section of the Act that serves as a common denominator to all of the aforementioned sections - Section 404, Internal Control Review and Auditor Attestation that requires public companies to thoroughly investigate and take responsibility for all of their internal operational and financial controls:
SOX 404 poses four key requirements:
1 - Establishing and maintaining and internal control structure 2 - Assessing the effectiveness of the controls and structure 3 - Preparation of a management report on the structure and its effectiveness 4 - Securing an attestation from an external auditor on the effectiveness of your controls
A closer inspection reveals: "The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, "on or off""
There's a pretty huge gap between saying something doesn't work like a computer, and saying it goes through continuous states. As we all know, computers can model continuous states: Just take floating point numbers, or as a broader example, consider approximately solving differential equations that describe continuous processes. Computers do this all the time.
So, looking at humans and computers as black boxes, they both seem to process things continuously and to be able to have these "shades of grey". The difference is that we only know how computers work. Nothing in the article suggests anything beyond this.
As a side note, I must say that drawing such far-reaching conclusions from the way a person moves her mouse seems to me quite amateurish.
I believe the product you suggest has an incredibly niche market (you and me, more or less :), which would make the price prohibitive.
I am currently using Virtual PC, which is Microsoft's VM product (similar to VMWare workstation). I managed to get both Knoppix and Fedora Core 3 up and running.
As a general rule the strength or weakness of the distributions packages has less to do with the package file format, and more to do with the tender loving care devoted to each package in terms of specifing all of it'd dependencies, what it obsoletes, what functionality it provides.
I second that. I've been using PLD Linux for a while now. It's RPM-based, but it takes RPM to a whole new level. The package management tool, poldek, is nothing short of amazing: Regexp searches, trivial package installation, extreme modularity (programs are broken down into multiple packages), consistent dependences. Best of all, it just works.
Based on my (relatively basic) knowledge of how databases work these days, using large in-memory caches and fast commits, I wouldn't be surprised if a good enterprise database could handle this rate of commits.
You should remember that 2000 commits != 2000 random disk accesses!
Do you really think the VB community has got what it takes to maintain VB?
I mean, they are whining about not even knowing any other languages.. What do you think VB is programmed in? VB?
It actually doesn't. From the site:
There is a link to a FireFox toolbar, but that only works on Windows as well.I think having all your bookmarks on some server is a bad idea. What if I'm offline and.. oh, now I get it.
IMHO the most important difference between the two languages is checked vs. unchecked exceptions. In my experience (from C++), unchecked exceptions are completely unusable in large projects. That's because it makes relying on documentation a necessity, which is of course a Bad Thing. This alone makes C# vastly inferior to Java in my book.
Hmm.. perhaps only some of the light is absorbed (e.g. UV which isn't visible anyway), and the rest is what you see coming through.
1) Everyone sticks to it
2) You don't have to scroll to see the end of the line.
I disagree. Reading short lines is less tiresome than reading long lines. This is the reason why most newspapers use rather narrow columns in print.
When lines are logically longer than 80 chars, I use line breaks to make them fit.. not too difficult, and I find that several short lines of method calls are much easier to read than a single long line.
I for one actually wouldn't mind being held liable for the software I develop.
I do think there needs to be some type of software liability laws, but they are going to have to be like nothing else out there, basically a totally new concept.
Don't think so. For example, I think its enough that liability be limited to what you are paid (a practice which already exists elsewhere). Software isn't all that different from other industries..
This seems like flaimbait to me, but I'll reply anyway. Two reasons why your argument fails:
1. There's a difference between adults and minors. Seems reasonable to me that this entire discussion concerns only adults.
2. Guns are regulated. Software isn't.
Not so sure about open source: When you use a Microsoft product, you pay them for it. With this in mind, you can discuss what sort of liability they have. OTOH using open source products is free, so using them is like using a knife someone gave you for free: If you cut yourself, it's your problem.
Of course it's a bit more complicated when you pay a programmer to do open source development for you. But I don't think it's su ch a bad idea that such a developer be held liable for her code.
For most practical purposes, water is considered incompressible. This also means that temprature variations don't affect density (and so volume), unless you're going for extremes.
Perl fails, however, when it comes to scalability: Lack of compile-time type-safety, encapsulation and other mechanisms. It generally has a very exposed and ad-hoc OO model make creating large, complex structures exceedingly difficult. Not to mention the nightmare of trying to maintain an existing piece of code that is longer than a couple of tens of thousands of lines.
Don't get me wrong: I love Perl. It is my first choice when writing tools that aid me in development or tie up some loose ends from several systems. But it pales when compared with Java for creating large systems.
Judging by your obviously knowledgeable answer, I'd say you just proved yourself wrong. You provided the original poster with some pretty good technical advice..