Great idea!! If we outlaw hacker tools, only outlaws will have hacker tools!
Then we can just arrest everybody who has them, and we'll have our systems broken into by the black hats we missed, while those who would have protected us have their hands tied.
And that's while using the popular meaning of "hacker", rather than the correct one.
``Silverlight 1.1 is based on the.Net framework, that alone opens so many doors. The functionality that having the entire.Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
You gain all of the advantages of the.Net framework, the excellent toolsets provided in VS.Net 2008, the MM power of Flash, and the ease of web distribution.''
Not to spoil the fun, or maybe I do want to spoil the fun, but this doesn't really impress me at all. To me, it basically translates to "If you use Silverlight, you also have to use all the other technology that Microsoft is pushing. And that goes for both developers and users." To run Flash apps, you need a plugin that is just under 3 megabytes (and use Windows, Linux/x86, or OS X). To run Silverlight apps, I expect you need the plugin (which I've heard they'll keep really small), the.NET runtime (which I expect will be really large), and a supported platform (which I expect will be Windows and maybe OS X, despite Microsoft paying lip service to platform neutrality). Wait and see if I am right.
``Yeah. We moved from assembly, too. And COBOL/Fortran. But we don't move often, and the grandparent explains why. Companies only move to a new language when: - It's enough better that it's a Big Win(TM), or - It's got good enough marketing to persuade some pointy-haired bosses that it will solve all their problems.
I'd guess that companies move more often for the second reason''
I'm completely with you up to here.
``, because when you come right down to it, the first doesn't happen very often...''
And now I disagree. There are and have always been better languages than the ones that got widespread use. It frustrates me no end that technically inferior products that come later win out over superior ones that were there before.
``Either way, I bet he wasn't expecting to see it linked from Slashdot the next morning. You can't really count on slashdot editors acting responsibly, though.''
I appreciate your effort to look at this sensibly and not call the guy names. But if he didn't want the world to know this, he shouldn't have put it on the Internet. It's that simple.
So let me get this straight. They were afraid of the sodium getting wet, supposedly because the submarines could leak. But the fact that they had poisonous radiactive isotopes aboard didn't bother them? I mean, if they could prevent the radioactives from leaking out, they could prevent the sodium from getting wet. If they couldn't prevent the sodium from getting wet...
``There are massive costs associated with moving to a new language in any decently sized company, from lack of developers who know it, lack of developers in the company who know it, lack of internal libraries for it, lack of internal company support and so on. So yeah you either get a working product in Java or a half assed product in language X written by people who have no idea how to use language X bad have to remake the wheel 55 thousand times due to lack of pre-existing libraries.''...and yet, the world at large managed to move to Java. And PHP. So I really don't think your explanation holds up to scrutiny, sensible as it sounds.
C++
You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me over there."
FORTRAN
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception handling ability.
``With dozens of programming languages emerging every year, how can people still get riled up about any of them? I'm not even saying that people shouldn't argue which is better, but the fervor behind it strikes me as odd, given that there are so many essentially identical options to choose from.''
I think:
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
2. Many people get excited about things they _think_ are new and cool, even if these things aren't.
3. Some programming languages actually are worth getting excited about.
4. Compared to mainstream languages, many alternative languages have a lot to offer.
``Which language you're going to use is often just a matter of installed base and what someone else started a project with. How can anyone be emotional about that anymore?''
Just because your hands are tied doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to argue about what the best choice had been if you had had the freedom to choose. In fact, it probably makes such debate more important, because you could win by losing your shackles and choosing a better language anyway, or by doing the _next_ project in a better language.
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
``I'm confused. Is this an attempt to knock down Ruby or Rails (Two things I know next to nothing about)? Because if it is, this is the worst argument against anything I've ever read.''
And now, watch the anti-Ruby and anti-Rails trolls jump on the opportunity to claim that "see! I was right all along!!"
Holy cow! I started reading TFA with the idea that there would be some good points in there, but never got to them. What a load of verbal abuse! Excuse me, but I don't fancy reading through that.
I understand that things have really hurt this guy and made him angry, but I don't think this is the way to go about improving things. It may be a good way for him to vent his frustration, but I would say that if you want people to take you seriously, it's better to write down your criticism in a civil manner, with examples of what you are criticizing and, for even better results, suggestions for how to improve things.
A long rant that slings abuse at everything and everyone is bound to just hurt people, and that's rarely if ever a Good Thing. As for me, I won't be reading the article any further, so that's _one_ initially interested reader he has lost. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
``There was a lot of "toy" video stuff since 2000, but the 2006 youtube rush was a surprise to me.''
What wasn't a surprise, though, is that _they_ have been promising us good quality movies on demand over th Internet since at least 1994, but that promise has completely failed to deliver.
Seriously. Why is it that we can watch movies on TV for "free" (ad or public funding supported), but if you want to do the same on the Internet, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops (pay fees, install wacky proprietary software, etc. etc.)? It's not like there is any technical problem that I can see. We have the codecs, we have the bandwidth, we even have the content and the revenue model. So why isn't it there yet?
I found your predictions much more interesting than the ones of TFA. Yet TFA got posted to the front page of/.. Well, at least it's sparked good posts. Like yours. Well done!
``Who in their ripe minds would put Windows in control of launching fireworks at a big event???''
If I were to venture a guess, I would say "people who have been doing exactly that, successfully, for a number of years."
``A Linux system would work much better''
Yes, but would it actually run the show? You need applications for that, you know.
``Using a Windows machine was just asking for a "Hundreds hurt in fireworks accident, Windows to blame" headline in all major US newspapers.''
Unlikely. Windows has been to blame for a number of large problems in IT, but I don't see any headlines about that, least of all in major US newspapers. In this case, my guess is the problem isn't even with Windows.
``A corrupted file on which several pieces of hardware are going to coordinate something as complicated as a fireworks display is probably not caused by the operating system, as the operating system has no reason to modify the file at all, and will only be reading it.''
Yes, that's what you would expect. But if this really were a Windows glitch, it wouldn't be the first time. I remember something about a Windows file server system silently corrupting files...that was on Slashdot a few days back, IIRC.
``Microsoft has so much invested in reinventing the wheel to lock customers in that they dare not do anything truly innovative that would break the lockin.''
I don't think that's true. If you look at Microsoft Research, they are doing a lot of interesting projects, including some actually innovative things. The new generation of software (Windows Vista, Office 2007, etc.) is quite different from the old software from an end user point of view. User interfaces have been changed, and backward compatibility isn't as great as it could have been. Various older Microsoft technologies have been deprecated. MS DOS. Visual Basic (without the.NET).
``One more thing, where is the source for gmail? Or google maps (not the API), or many other google projects. If they're so into the foss, why are so many of their 'free' offerings all but proprietary in nature?''
All but proprietary? How is Google implementing an appliaction they don't provide source for, but do publish an API for, different from, say, Microsoft implementing something they don't provide source for, but do publish an API for? Wait! I'll tell you how it's different. With Microsoft, you run the software and you store your data. With Google, they run the software and they store your data.
I am not so sure Microsoft Office is the killer app so much as Microsoft Exchange is. I used to think of Exchange as Microsoft's horribly email server, but I've since discovered that it's not only that, but also a tool companies use to plan appointments and meetings. _This_ is the feature that companies love and why they won't ditch Exchange. They pay through the nose for it and it's unreliable as an email server, but the calendaring functionality apparently makes up for that.
``The problem with most modern code generators and VMs is that they are tied to a specific way of doing garbage collection and exceptions that might suit some but not all languages.... I looked at the TuboVM pages but found no design goals or principles that would explain this but also did not want to dig trough the code. Would you mind to explain them here?''
I explicitly want TurboVM to be generic enough to accomodate any programming language. Therefore, I am not including any support for garbage collection or exceptions or object-orientation or anything of the sort in the VM. Instead, I am keeping the VM close to a real machine. That way, I won't be raising any barriers that do not exist with real hardware, and existing techniques developed for real hardware can be used for compiling to TurboVM.
``Note that the European Union seems to have protected its citizens (from terrorism) without abridging basic civil rights.''
Seems, perhaps, but hasn't. We (I live in the EU) weren't very much of a target until we went along with the USA invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But we did go along, and we got train bombings in Madrid. Perhaps the bombings in London are related, too. So I wouldn't really say the EU has protected its citizens (but it's good to note here that the EU had little to do with anything; everything I'm talking about in this post was actually decided by individual member states).
As for privacy, take into account that in many European countries, there wasn't much of that to begin with. I believe the Netherlands (where I live) is the country that spies on its citizens most, worldwide. This is not widely perceived as a problem, however. People here are far more trusting of the government than people in the USA. The government knows where I live. My Internet traffic is logged. Phones may be tracked and tapped; I don't think there is any need to get a warrant for that. Police can stop me and require me to show ID whenever they want to. There are cameras everywhere. Speeding on the highway? Picture taken; ticket is in the mail. Soon, they'll track cars to make us pay taxes depending on where we drove at what time.
Privacy? What's that? Oh, you mean these laws that companies have to adhere to, where they have to make sure data doesn't fall into other company's hands...but they have to keep it around in case the government needs it. Yeah, those laws might be enforced. There certainly seem to be fewer problems with identity fraud here than in the USA.
Don't get me wrong. Life in the EU is good. I am happy to live in the Netherlands. But let's not point and laugh at the USA before taking a look at ourselves.
``What it all really means, is "I can still buy a $5 latte and my favorite sit-com with the offensively stereo-typed ethnic characters is still on television and I can still follow my favorite commercial sports team,...''
Well, actually, if that's all you care about, isn't that all that matters? I mean, life can be good even without freedom and democracy.
I know, I know. Checks on the power of government are supposed to protect us against the government making our lives miserable. But how effective are they, really? If the government crosses the line, who is going to stop them? What if there is a coup? What if the country is at war? What if there is so much misinformation that almost nobody knows what is really happening? What if it's not the government making people's lives miserable, but other groups?
Do people actually tend to be happier in countries that have good privacy checks in place?
Slashdot Mirror
``Where's the Cheap Webpads?''
In the bin for ideas that are never going to be commercialized, because there isn't enough profit in it.
Great idea!! If we outlaw hacker tools, only outlaws will have hacker tools!
Then we can just arrest everybody who has them, and we'll have our systems broken into by the black hats we missed, while those who would have protected us have their hands tied.
And that's while using the popular meaning of "hacker", rather than the correct one.
``Basically, Flash is a ubiquitous open-standard with mature development tools and tons of 3rd-party partners.''
I wish. Open standard? Nah, I don't think so.
``Silverlight 1.1 is based on the .Net framework, that alone opens so many doors. The functionality that having the entire .Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
.Net framework, the excellent toolsets provided in VS.Net 2008, the MM power of Flash, and the ease of web distribution.''
.NET runtime (which I expect will be really large), and a supported platform (which I expect will be Windows and maybe OS X, despite Microsoft paying lip service to platform neutrality). Wait and see if I am right.
You gain all of the advantages of the
Not to spoil the fun, or maybe I do want to spoil the fun, but this doesn't really impress me at all. To me, it basically translates to "If you use Silverlight, you also have to use all the other technology that Microsoft is pushing. And that goes for both developers and users." To run Flash apps, you need a plugin that is just under 3 megabytes (and use Windows, Linux/x86, or OS X). To run Silverlight apps, I expect you need the plugin (which I've heard they'll keep really small), the
Ah, yes, that's completely right.
``Yeah. We moved from assembly, too. And COBOL/Fortran. But we don't move often, and the grandparent explains why. Companies only move to a new language when:
- It's enough better that it's a Big Win(TM), or
- It's got good enough marketing to persuade some pointy-haired bosses that it will solve all their problems.
I'd guess that companies move more often for the second reason''
I'm completely with you up to here.
``, because when you come right down to it, the first doesn't happen very often...''
And now I disagree. There are and have always been better languages than the ones that got widespread use. It frustrates me no end that technically inferior products that come later win out over superior ones that were there before.
``Either way, I bet he wasn't expecting to see it linked from Slashdot the next morning. You can't really count on slashdot editors acting responsibly, though.''
I appreciate your effort to look at this sensibly and not call the guy names. But if he didn't want the world to know this, he shouldn't have put it on the Internet. It's that simple.
So let me get this straight. They were afraid of the sodium getting wet, supposedly because the submarines could leak. But the fact that they had poisonous radiactive isotopes aboard didn't bother them? I mean, if they could prevent the radioactives from leaking out, they could prevent the sodium from getting wet. If they couldn't prevent the sodium from getting wet...
``Is this be the post-hydrocarbon world finally knocking?''
I think it already was a matter of will, not technical ability.
``There are massive costs associated with moving to a new language in any decently sized company, from lack of developers who know it, lack of developers in the company who know it, lack of internal libraries for it, lack of internal company support and so on. So yeah you either get a working product in Java or a half assed product in language X written by people who have no idea how to use language X bad have to remake the wheel 55 thousand times due to lack of pre-existing libraries.'' ...and yet, the world at large managed to move to Java. And PHP. So I really don't think your explanation holds up to scrutiny, sensible as it sounds.
I think he has discovered the age-old algorithm:
C
You shoot yourself in the foot.
C++
You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me over there."
FORTRAN
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception handling ability.
And so on. More at http://howto-pages.org/shootfoot.php (among other places).
``With dozens of programming languages emerging every year, how can people still get riled up about any of them? I'm not even saying that people shouldn't argue which is better, but the fervor behind it strikes me as odd, given that there are so many essentially identical options to choose from.''
I think:
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
2. Many people get excited about things they _think_ are new and cool, even if these things aren't.
3. Some programming languages actually are worth getting excited about.
4. Compared to mainstream languages, many alternative languages have a lot to offer.
``Which language you're going to use is often just a matter of installed base and what someone else started a project with. How can anyone be emotional about that anymore?''
Just because your hands are tied doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to argue about what the best choice had been if you had had the freedom to choose. In fact, it probably makes such debate more important, because you could win by losing your shackles and choosing a better language anyway, or by doing the _next_ project in a better language.
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
``I'm confused. Is this an attempt to knock down Ruby or Rails (Two things I know next to nothing about)? Because if it is, this is the worst argument against anything I've ever read.''
And now, watch the anti-Ruby and anti-Rails trolls jump on the opportunity to claim that "see! I was right all along!!"
Holy cow! I started reading TFA with the idea that there would be some good points in there, but never got to them. What a load of verbal abuse! Excuse me, but I don't fancy reading through that.
I understand that things have really hurt this guy and made him angry, but I don't think this is the way to go about improving things. It may be a good way for him to vent his frustration, but I would say that if you want people to take you seriously, it's better to write down your criticism in a civil manner, with examples of what you are criticizing and, for even better results, suggestions for how to improve things.
A long rant that slings abuse at everything and everyone is bound to just hurt people, and that's rarely if ever a Good Thing. As for me, I won't be reading the article any further, so that's _one_ initially interested reader he has lost. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
``There was a lot of "toy" video stuff since 2000, but the 2006 youtube rush was a surprise to me.''
What wasn't a surprise, though, is that _they_ have been promising us good quality movies on demand over th Internet since at least 1994, but that promise has completely failed to deliver.
Seriously. Why is it that we can watch movies on TV for "free" (ad or public funding supported), but if you want to do the same on the Internet, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops (pay fees, install wacky proprietary software, etc. etc.)? It's not like there is any technical problem that I can see. We have the codecs, we have the bandwidth, we even have the content and the revenue model. So why isn't it there yet?
I found your predictions much more interesting than the ones of TFA. Yet TFA got posted to the front page of /.. Well, at least it's sparked good posts. Like yours. Well done!
"Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best."
You mean like: "Just try not to drink today"?
``Who in their ripe minds would put Windows in control of launching fireworks at a big event???''
If I were to venture a guess, I would say "people who have been doing exactly that, successfully, for a number of years."
``A Linux system would work much better''
Yes, but would it actually run the show? You need applications for that, you know.
``Using a Windows machine was just asking for a "Hundreds hurt in fireworks accident, Windows to blame" headline in all major US newspapers.''
Unlikely. Windows has been to blame for a number of large problems in IT, but I don't see any headlines about that, least of all in major US newspapers. In this case, my guess is the problem isn't even with Windows.
``A corrupted file on which several pieces of hardware are going to coordinate something as complicated as a fireworks display is probably not caused by the operating system, as the operating system has no reason to modify the file at all, and will only be reading it.''
Yes, that's what you would expect. But if this really were a Windows glitch, it wouldn't be the first time. I remember something about a Windows file server system silently corrupting files...that was on Slashdot a few days back, IIRC.
``Microsoft has so much invested in reinventing the wheel to lock customers in that they dare not do anything truly innovative that would break the lockin.''
.NET).
I don't think that's true. If you look at Microsoft Research, they are doing a lot of interesting projects, including some actually innovative things. The new generation of software (Windows Vista, Office 2007, etc.) is quite different from the old software from an end user point of view. User interfaces have been changed, and backward compatibility isn't as great as it could have been. Various older Microsoft technologies have been deprecated. MS DOS. Visual Basic (without the
There is progress.
``One more thing, where is the source for gmail? Or google maps (not the API), or many other google projects. If they're so into the foss, why are so many of their 'free' offerings all but proprietary in nature?''
All but proprietary? How is Google implementing an appliaction they don't provide source for, but do publish an API for, different from, say, Microsoft implementing something they don't provide source for, but do publish an API for? Wait! I'll tell you how it's different. With Microsoft, you run the software and you store your data. With Google, they run the software and they store your data.
I am not so sure Microsoft Office is the killer app so much as Microsoft Exchange is. I used to think of Exchange as Microsoft's horribly email server, but I've since discovered that it's not only that, but also a tool companies use to plan appointments and meetings. _This_ is the feature that companies love and why they won't ditch Exchange. They pay through the nose for it and it's unreliable as an email server, but the calendaring functionality apparently makes up for that.
``The problem with most modern code generators and VMs is that they are tied to a specific way of doing garbage collection and exceptions that might suit some but not all languages. ... I looked at the TuboVM pages but found no design goals or principles that would explain this but also did not want to dig trough the code. Would you mind to explain them here?''
I explicitly want TurboVM to be generic enough to accomodate any programming language. Therefore, I am not including any support for garbage collection or exceptions or object-orientation or anything of the sort in the VM. Instead, I am keeping the VM close to a real machine. That way, I won't be raising any barriers that do not exist with real hardware, and existing techniques developed for real hardware can be used for compiling to TurboVM.
``Note that the European Union seems to have protected its citizens (from terrorism) without abridging basic civil rights.''
Seems, perhaps, but hasn't. We (I live in the EU) weren't very much of a target until we went along with the USA invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But we did go along, and we got train bombings in Madrid. Perhaps the bombings in London are related, too. So I wouldn't really say the EU has protected its citizens (but it's good to note here that the EU had little to do with anything; everything I'm talking about in this post was actually decided by individual member states).
As for privacy, take into account that in many European countries, there wasn't much of that to begin with. I believe the Netherlands (where I live) is the country that spies on its citizens most, worldwide. This is not widely perceived as a problem, however. People here are far more trusting of the government than people in the USA. The government knows where I live. My Internet traffic is logged. Phones may be tracked and tapped; I don't think there is any need to get a warrant for that. Police can stop me and require me to show ID whenever they want to. There are cameras everywhere. Speeding on the highway? Picture taken; ticket is in the mail. Soon, they'll track cars to make us pay taxes depending on where we drove at what time.
Privacy? What's that? Oh, you mean these laws that companies have to adhere to, where they have to make sure data doesn't fall into other company's hands...but they have to keep it around in case the government needs it. Yeah, those laws might be enforced. There certainly seem to be fewer problems with identity fraud here than in the USA.
Don't get me wrong. Life in the EU is good. I am happy to live in the Netherlands. But let's not point and laugh at the USA before taking a look at ourselves.
``What it all really means, is "I can still buy a $5 latte and my favorite sit-com with the offensively stereo-typed ethnic characters is still on television and I can still follow my favorite commercial sports team, ...''
Well, actually, if that's all you care about, isn't that all that matters? I mean, life can be good even without freedom and democracy.
I know, I know. Checks on the power of government are supposed to protect us against the government making our lives miserable. But how effective are they, really? If the government crosses the line, who is going to stop them? What if there is a coup? What if the country is at war? What if there is so much misinformation that almost nobody knows what is really happening? What if it's not the government making people's lives miserable, but other groups?
Do people actually tend to be happier in countries that have good privacy checks in place?