Why is it that the users are blamed for all of this.
If someone wants to have a box on their desk that lets them chat w/friends, read mail, check the weather, etc. why does that person have to understand open ports, trojans, viruses, firewalls, etc?
Something smells funny then again programmers are great for forgetting that someone actually has to use the stuff that they write. I'll give you a hint - when you blame a user for repeatedly falling into the same trap you are missing the real problem: the software doesn't meet the user's needs.
Why should someone either be forced to become an MCSE or RHCE to maintain their system? Why should someone be forced to outsource their system maintenence to a 3rd party? Why do we even need virus scanners for email? Who the hell needs macros and scripting in a freaking email client? Why can't the box the user's desk just do the things the company advertises without taking out infrastructure and attacking other machines?
Because software is created/tested in a half-assed way.
Don't think so? Why do buffer overrun attacks still happen today? Is this something an end user should be responsible for? To take the car analogy above further this would be like selling someone a car with brakes that fail every 2-3 weeks. This is now the owner's fault? WTF?
Windows Update, and Up2Date are 2 examples of offerings that make it possilbe for non-tech users to stay patched. The industry is (somewhat slowly) moving to address the problem of unpatched systems.
Corporations do feel the heat from the ever increasing number of attacks and you can bet that some of the larger customers are giving MS an earful w/regards to what a virus attack does to their TCO. Microsoft is in turn reacting to this, though the lack of competition on the desktop is probably slowing progress here.
Market forces seem to be taking care of this issue gradually. I hope that things can be improved without lameass legislation put together by a group of people that make luddites look like early-adopters. The scary thing is that large corporations are whispering in ears saying things like: "Don't hold us liable, it will be bad for the economy". Is there anyone that is letting our elected officials know what a screw-job it would be to blame end users for problems whose technical solutions are beyond their understanding?
So what about using dlopen() with a factory method to exectute code from a shared library based on the type of object to be created. I thought there was mention of this type of thing in C++ texts (Design Patterns, gamma et. al.?)
Although they weren't talking about 'hypermedia' it may be possible to argue that plugins are just an incremental extension of this approach.
I hate to be rooting for MS but patents are starting to suck just a bit too much. This type of thing encourages investment in invention how again?
Really? And if a very well paid programmer in India makes 20K/year how much American made product is he going to buy? What is he going to be able to afford, the bumper from a '96 Taurus?
We really don't manufacture as much in the states as we used to. If you are purchasing cheap to average priced goods you are supporting manufacturing somewhere else.
Telcos were granted access rights to private property to install/maintain lines.
As a property owner I don't get a cut of their profits even though they use my property to run their comm lines.
Telcos were given what was at the time a monopoly and were allowed to charge for the services they provided through their monopoly. In exchange for this consumers gained the ability to communicate with each other in an increasingly cost-effective way. The economy also flourished as a result.
Eventually, once technology and the mature telco operating landscape allowed it, the monopoly was broken and competition was encouraged to develop.
Should they have been allowed to charge whatever the 'free market' would have let them at the outset when they had no competitors and could have none by the nature of the monopoly they were granted.
The analogy is crap. Feel free to use it.
It seems that a lot of posters have gotten their sum total of econ knowledge from a 'Dick and Jane' book. See Dick sell. Sell Dick, sell. See Jane buy. Buy Jane, buy. Dick and Jane are happy in their free market economy!
In case you have forgotten, MS was ruled a monopoly. This means that they are subject to more stringent oversight than your average business that doesn't exert monopoly control. Their behaviour is considered in a different light.
Note how they bundle their free client with their OS. Just like they had bundled their free browser in the past. Smell the lock-in.
In many things, there is no pure free market and as such the overly simplistic econ you spout is going to work out great for the dominant players but not so great for anyone else, including consumers and other would-be competitors.
I appreciate the concerns that MS spends money to run their network and as such they should have some control. Because of their monopoly status I would suggest that the issue is not as cut and dried as some would have you believe.
If you want to encourage competition, a possible solution would be to force w3c common messaging protocols into place, force MS (they are a monopoly, remember) to allow their clent software to be pointed at alternate messaging servers and see what develops. If this rankles then remember that telecom has historically been a heavily-regulated industry and stop thinking that muli-billion dollar monopolies should be subject to the same (lack of) regulation as your kid's lemonade stand.
WTF? Who needs the KKK when members of the 2 largest religious groups in the country are happy to alternately bar-b-q people on trains or butcher them in the villages in which they live.
During a few weeks of (relatively recent) violence they racked up an impressive death toll. Not a hate group in sight though so this must be love.
I do agree with some of the point you made but the first part is crap.
The point is that by building a cleaner abstraction to manage attributes/metadata you get a lot of benefits.
Someone above mentioned that ACLs were recently added to a POSIX filesystem variant. A lot of time and effort went into a very specific type of metadata. With the abstractions described in the article it is possible to define new classes of metadata as you need them without reworking the guts of your fs every time.
As an example consider the chmod gripe above, yes you can change perms, uid , and the like w/chmod so of course it serves no purpose to rewrite the filesystem for the sake of implementing chmod as cp... but can you add an attribute that says 'retain this file for legal proceeding x' using chmod? Didn't think so. With the new abstraction you can define such a class of files and no changes to user space utils or the fs are needed.
I also can't see why everyone is so put off by the idea of providing a standard way to deal with configuration issues. Does every app developer need to spend time coding routines to extract data from a tree-like structure (if they are writing something flexible) or some mp3-esqe tagging scheme. As mentioned GConf is trying to take care of this specific (and very real) problem and the new fs abstraction would be able to solve the same problem as a result of the simplified abstraction. Bonus.
Unfortunately you will need to pay more if you need backward compatability. As has been pointed out already, just package the file in some way if you want to preserve the metadata (tar, jar, whatever). If the destination platform doesn't support the fs then you will need to do some translation - but the good news is when you implement it it will result in an api that can be used by any app to acquire attributes from a file in the new fs. If you are dealing w/legacy code then it shouldn't be hard to move the file with a standard set of POSIX attributes and unfortunatley the other attributes would be lost.
While they are safer for the occupants in a multiple-car crash
Yup that'll do it for me. I live in NYC and only drive once in a while on weekends and holidays at which point I am subjected to an astounding number of people on mobiles who apparently want to wreck themselves and/or me. I definitely feel better in a mid 90's full size body on frame "SUV".
Econoboxes also tend not do do as well when I'm going skiing with a bunch of friends and the weather turns rough. I guess I could get a roof rack and cram everyone in - or the skis and people could just fit.
If you are willing to go big ticket then you can even get an "SUV" that will out stop (and out-go) most of the junk out there. If you have the money why not?
Man am I a dunce for having an "SUV". Or maybe there is room for personal preference.
As if Barton's comparison of the shuttle to combat aircraft wasn't bad enough now you are comparing the shuttle to the pringles cans with wings that pass for commercial aircraft? Yup these things all fly but other than that you are comparing apples to oranges.
It is just a little more difficult to get the shuttle up into orbit than it is to get a conventional aircraft to its cruising altitude. The machinery is more complex and not suprisingly less reliable when taken as a whole.
I do think that a next generation platform should be aggresively developed but the hand waving and b.s. "stats" that are being thrown around don't really add any value to the discussion.
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If someone wants to have a box on their desk that lets them chat w/friends, read mail, check the weather, etc. why does that person have to understand open ports, trojans, viruses, firewalls, etc?
Something smells funny then again programmers are great for forgetting that someone actually has to use the stuff that they write. I'll give you a hint - when you blame a user for repeatedly falling into the same trap you are missing the real problem: the software doesn't meet the user's needs.
Why should someone either be forced to become an MCSE or RHCE to maintain their system? Why should someone be forced to outsource their system maintenence to a 3rd party? Why do we even need virus scanners for email? Who the hell needs macros and scripting in a freaking email client? Why can't the box the user's desk just do the things the company advertises without taking out infrastructure and attacking other machines?
Because software is created/tested in a half-assed way.
Don't think so? Why do buffer overrun attacks still happen today? Is this something an end user should be responsible for? To take the car analogy above further this would be like selling someone a car with brakes that fail every 2-3 weeks. This is now the owner's fault? WTF?
Windows Update, and Up2Date are 2 examples of offerings that make it possilbe for non-tech users to stay patched. The industry is (somewhat slowly) moving to address the problem of unpatched systems.
Corporations do feel the heat from the ever increasing number of attacks and you can bet that some of the larger customers are giving MS an earful w/regards to what a virus attack does to their TCO. Microsoft is in turn reacting to this, though the lack of competition on the desktop is probably slowing progress here.
Market forces seem to be taking care of this issue gradually. I hope that things can be improved without lameass legislation put together by a group of people that make luddites look like early-adopters. The scary thing is that large corporations are whispering in ears saying things like: "Don't hold us liable, it will be bad for the economy". Is there anyone that is letting our elected officials know what a screw-job it would be to blame end users for problems whose technical solutions are beyond their understanding?
Although they weren't talking about 'hypermedia' it may be possible to argue that plugins are just an incremental extension of this approach.
I hate to be rooting for MS but patents are starting to suck just a bit too much. This type of thing encourages investment in invention how again?
We really don't manufacture as much in the states as we used to. If you are purchasing cheap to average priced goods you are supporting manufacturing somewhere else.
As a property owner I don't get a cut of their profits even though they use my property to run their comm lines. Telcos were given what was at the time a monopoly and were allowed to charge for the services they provided through their monopoly. In exchange for this consumers gained the ability to communicate with each other in an increasingly cost-effective way. The economy also flourished as a result.
Eventually, once technology and the mature telco operating landscape allowed it, the monopoly was broken and competition was encouraged to develop.
Should they have been allowed to charge whatever the 'free market' would have let them at the outset when they had no competitors and could have none by the nature of the monopoly they were granted.
The analogy is crap. Feel free to use it.
It seems that a lot of posters have gotten their sum total of econ knowledge from a 'Dick and Jane' book. See Dick sell. Sell Dick, sell. See Jane buy. Buy Jane, buy. Dick and Jane are happy in their free market economy!
In case you have forgotten, MS was ruled a monopoly. This means that they are subject to more stringent oversight than your average business that doesn't exert monopoly control. Their behaviour is considered in a different light.
Note how they bundle their free client with their OS. Just like they had bundled their free browser in the past. Smell the lock-in.
In many things, there is no pure free market and as such the overly simplistic econ you spout is going to work out great for the dominant players but not so great for anyone else, including consumers and other would-be competitors. I appreciate the concerns that MS spends money to run their network and as such they should have some control. Because of their monopoly status I would suggest that the issue is not as cut and dried as some would have you believe.
If you want to encourage competition, a possible solution would be to force w3c common messaging protocols into place, force MS (they are a monopoly, remember) to allow their clent software to be pointed at alternate messaging servers and see what develops. If this rankles then remember that telecom has historically been a heavily-regulated industry and stop thinking that muli-billion dollar monopolies should be subject to the same (lack of) regulation as your kid's lemonade stand.
WTF? Who needs the KKK when members of the 2 largest religious groups in the country are happy to alternately bar-b-q people on trains or butcher them in the villages in which they live.
During a few weeks of (relatively recent) violence they racked up an impressive death toll. Not a hate group in sight though so this must be love.
I do agree with some of the point you made but the first part is crap.
Someone above mentioned that ACLs were recently added to a POSIX filesystem variant. A lot of time and effort went into a very specific type of metadata. With the abstractions described in the article it is possible to define new classes of metadata as you need them without reworking the guts of your fs every time.
As an example consider the chmod gripe above, yes you can change perms, uid , and the like w/chmod so of course it serves no purpose to rewrite the filesystem for the sake of implementing chmod as cp... but can you add an attribute that says 'retain this file for legal proceeding x' using chmod? Didn't think so. With the new abstraction you can define such a class of files and no changes to user space utils or the fs are needed.
I also can't see why everyone is so put off by the idea of providing a standard way to deal with configuration issues. Does every app developer need to spend time coding routines to extract data from a tree-like structure (if they are writing something flexible) or some mp3-esqe tagging scheme. As mentioned GConf is trying to take care of this specific (and very real) problem and the new fs abstraction would be able to solve the same problem as a result of the simplified abstraction. Bonus.
Unfortunately you will need to pay more if you need backward compatability. As has been pointed out already, just package the file in some way if you want to preserve the metadata (tar, jar, whatever). If the destination platform doesn't support the fs then you will need to do some translation - but the good news is when you implement it it will result in an api that can be used by any app to acquire attributes from a file in the new fs. If you are dealing w/legacy code then it shouldn't be hard to move the file with a standard set of POSIX attributes and unfortunatley the other attributes would be lost.
While they are safer for the occupants in a multiple-car crash
Yup that'll do it for me. I live in NYC and only drive once in a while on weekends and holidays at which point I am subjected to an astounding number of people on mobiles who apparently want to wreck themselves and/or me. I definitely feel better in a mid 90's full size body on frame "SUV".
Econoboxes also tend not do do as well when I'm going skiing with a bunch of friends and the weather turns rough. I guess I could get a roof rack and cram everyone in - or the skis and people could just fit.
If you are willing to go big ticket then you can even get an "SUV" that will out stop (and out-go) most of the junk out there. If you have the money why not?
Man am I a dunce for having an "SUV". Or maybe there is room for personal preference.
As if Barton's comparison of the shuttle to combat aircraft wasn't bad enough now you are comparing the shuttle to the pringles cans with wings that pass for commercial aircraft? Yup these things all fly but other than that you are comparing apples to oranges.
It is just a little more difficult to get the shuttle up into orbit than it is to get a conventional aircraft to its cruising altitude. The machinery is more complex and not suprisingly less reliable when taken as a whole. I do think that a next generation platform should be aggresively developed but the hand waving and b.s. "stats" that are being thrown around don't really add any value to the discussion.