Well, you're right that it's not a religion issue. Its a "lots of unvaccinated humans gathering in one place" issue. In this case, it appears that that population was a church. Here in Australia, the unvaccinated population generally isn't the religious, but the vegetarian-but-I-eat-chicken, organic, wheatgrass-shot-taking hipster crowd.
pretend it was the FAA having a big chunk of airspace loose all ability to track aircraft, or NOAA loosing data collection so that weather forecasts are disrupted...The right wing talking heads on TV would be squealing like stuck pigs. They would be screaming about "gubment" waste and incompetence.
Because its their money being wasted.
Meanwhile in real life AWS, Google, and NASDAQ have all had dramatic failures in recent weeks. Although NASDAQ got a fair amount of coverage, and Google got some mention, AWS has been pretty much below the radar for the mainstream media. No one is making dramatic statements on TV about how Google is run by a bunch of idiots, or NASDAQ, a quasi-governmental entity, should be nationalized, because when it fails the entire economy is as risk.
The people who care (i.e. people who were hosting at US-East-1) know, and they have the opportunity to withdraw their custom from AWS. They can employ another provider, or bring it in-house and do it themselves.
Clearly, there is a double standard.
No, you are just comparing apples and oranges - people don't bitch about private companies because, worst comes to worst, they can take their custom elsewhere. Government needs to be held to a higher standard precisely because that freedom is lacking.
We have nukes. Chemical weapons are trivial to manufacture Why would anyone be concerned over the weaponization of a solar satellite when we have so much more efficient methods of mass murder hanging around on terra firma?
Not at all - it just shows the person's been around for a long time. I'm not sure when the last 6-digit slashdot ID was issued, but for an astroturfer to have hung around for that long would indicate remarkable persistence.
Having a low ID doesn't indicate you're right, but it, along with the concommitant posting history, does suggest you didn't just register for the purpose of astrotufing
I don't find him either a hero or a villian, just a young troop with serious personal issues who went attention-whoring without thinking it through despite his training.
Uh-huh. Because that categorization doesn't paint him as a villain at all.
Reactions to Manning seem to be dictated by the ideology of the beholder
They're to the political right, and the submitter obviously leans left.
If you read the article, it seems the people Wikileaks are "coming under fire" from are the Greens (who are pretty much the Australian left-wing these days), because they wanted Wikileaks preferences and didn't get them.
No, capitalism taps into competitive, selfish activity. With or without capitalism, humans are by nature competitive and selfish. With capitalism, that selfishness is directed into productive ends.
The only effective society is one which overtly and deliberately puts a cap on power, both of the government and of private individuals
And who caps the power of those who decide who has too much power and need to be capped? The nail that sticks up will be hammered down - sounds like a wonderful way to live.
allowing enterprise to flourish
Up until the point where it flourishes too much, and gets "capped"
What we have is a powerful industry, and a large, weak government incapable of restraining it. What you propose is a small, weak industry and a powerful government. What we need is a powerful industry, counterveiled by a powerful government.
Ok, I'll refine my definitions: Application, before the iPhone, referred to software specifically compiled for an operating system. App, as defined by modern innovation, refers to anything you can do with a web browser and/or mobile phone (if I'm not mistaken).
App is a contraction of application; they're synonyms, different terms for the same thing. Your definition defines a piece of software by the form factor of the device it runs on. That means that, for instance, Microsoft Word is both an application (because it is compiled) and an app (because it runs on a mobile device - Microsoft Surface). I ran ProFTP on my Nokia N900 - which would make it an "app" under your definition, and therefore, somehow qualitatively different from an "application" (which it also is, under your definition).
You say that it "boggles the mind" that people are spending time developing "apps" instead of developing new protocols. A new protocol is only useful inasmuch as it helps two distinct systems communicate. If HTTP suits your needs, why would you develop a new protocol instead of developing something that solves a problem (an application)? We have many well-developed, time-tested, general purpose protocols for communication these days. The situation where you legitimately need to roll your own for some reason is an incredibly small niche. Creating a new protocol introduces incompatibilities, because nothing else will use your new protocol - it should only be done if there is a specific reason why an existing protocol is not useful.
Seriously, to add some content to my snark. Until internet speeds reach parity with access to local resources, web apps will always be second class compared to a similar application running locally.
Not necessarily. You can write a web application that, once it's initially downloaded, need not communicate with a remote service at all. Contrariwise, there are plenty of native applications that are useless without internet access, and rely just as much on network speeds as a web app with the same functionality would.
"Web app" versus "native app" is only peripherally about the internet - it's more about the ability of a web browser to provide a sufficiently flexible environment to create a user interface that can compete with a native application.
So, if I may answer the question posed in the title: Web Apps: the Future of the Internet?
No.
You're answering the wrong question. You argument is answering the question "Web Apps: the Future of Applications?". While computer usage might move in the cycle you've shown, the internet has always been about remote computation (centralized computing in your taxonomy, although it feels strange to me calling the internet centralized).
One of the worst culprits for this is trying to implement drop down choice boxes that adapt their contents to previously selected data, such as country-state interactions. The only way I know of to do that with a web interface is to refresh the whole page, which is obscenely slow compared to the repopulation of the choice box data itself done by a custom interface.
Then you don't really have much of a grasp on web development. It is trivial to create controls that update themselves with content based on a previous selection without round-tripping to the webserver - you just have to send the complete set of data with the initial pageload, and just operate on it - which, incidentally, is exactly the same way a native application does it: when you install a native application, it needs to either copy the entire dataset it's working on onto your local machine, or retrieve that dataset from a remote system during the course of operation, just like a web application.
You can also just shoot off a javascript request and retrieve just the data required to display in the widget. You haven't had to refresh the whole page since 1999, when Microsoft introduced the HttpRequest object. You could do it even before then with a clever use of iframes.
There is also no way to perform performance tuning and UI tricks like dynamically making widgets visible/invisible with a web app
Ok, I've just realised I'm talking to someone who has absolutely no clue about what they're talking about, and obviously hasn't used the internet in over a decade. How did you get your comment posted to Slashdot - morse code?
Great. So with a lot of work we're almost BACK TO WHERE WE WERE!
No - in this ONE NARROW CATEGORY we are almost back to where we were. In other categories (platform independence, remote patching, etc) we're far ahead.
How about some innovation and making better, more usable UI's rather than just trying to catch up with what we already have?
Um, go right ahead. You can create pretty much any interface you like, whether on native apps or web apps. You're not being held back by some inherently limiting feature of the ecosystem.
You know what would really suck? If we decided to drop backwards compatibility simply because what was originally intended as a document sourcing and navigation solution has ended up in the hands of profiteers who want this document-oriented system to be used for 3D rendering.
Oh no! Something has transcended the limits with which it was initially conceived! Quick, stuff it back in the bag! Only evil "profiteers" would ever want anything other than a text-only web.
There is much more to the Internet than what traverses ports 80 and 443, and it boggles my mind to think that instead of inventing new protocols and applications (not "apps") to get the job done in a better way - Steam is a great example of this - the popular idea is to say "well everyone has a web browser, let's find new ways to exploit it"
Because nothing says "innovation!" like a thousand incompatible proprietary protocols - apart from maybe drawing some nebulous, unarticulated distinction between "apps" and "applications".
Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system. Then some markup was added to make the documents look pretty. Then CGI and server-side processing were added to make the content more dynamic.
Ok, so far, so good.
Then tricks were applied (eg- cookies) to break the statelessness, albeit in a limited way.
Cookies don't break statelessness. Every transaction is still defined only by the state provided by the client. Cookies don't "break statelessness" any more than the query string does - anything you do with cookies, you can do with the query string.
Then the prettiness of documents were improved with CSS and liquid design. Things got slow.
Actually, things got faster because CSS let you abstract out a bunch of stuff into a file that was downloaded once, then cached, rather than bloating out your HTML with style instructions on every single page. The thing that "slowed" the web was the increase of rich media - images, sound and now video. But even then, those increases have been outperformed by available bandwidth.
Then the scalability of the server side was improved with various frameworks like JSP, Struts, Rails, etc.
Frameworks generally weren't created to increase scalability; they were created to reduce turn-around time for development. Because frameworks (supposedly, anyway) implement best-practices as part of their base install, it's frequently easier to make them scale than something hacked together entirely in-house, but scalability has been achieved by things like caching systems, load balancers and on-demand virtual machines, not frameworks.
Then JavaScript was extended and made to do all sorts of unsecure things.
Uh, like what? Javascript (or more accurately, the DOM model) doesn't really have that many more features than it had initially. It'd be more accurate to say that as development in javascript accelerated, and people did more complicated things with it, we found new vulnerabilities.
AJAX came along and broke the request/response document retrieval model for good.
How does requesting a document via javascript break the document retrieval model? HTTP doesn't care if you request a document by typing in the URL, clicking a link, or clicking a button that fires off a javascript request. You make the request, you get the document.
Things got slow again, especially on newer mobile platforms.
Things got faster. AJAX means you don't have to reload an entire page for a minor content change. Things were slow on mobile platforms, but that's not because of AJAX, it's because they were (for a long while) underpowered machines connecting along crappy connections. That's not due to any issue with HTTP, HTML, Javascript, CSS or anything - it's purely an infrastructure issue.
Now the w3c wants to figure out how to run fat applications on this platform, ostensibly because it's shared in common across OSes.
What exactly is a "fat" application? And who cares what the W3C are figuring out - people are already running applications on the platform. W3C have, at best, only ever codified existing practice. They've never been the ones pushing the envelope.
Don't know about Europe, but here in Australia, the loans are zero-interest, but are indexed for inflation. Also, I don't think the loans are *forgiven* but if you never get a high-paying job, you'll never have to pay them back. Also, you get a tuition discount for paying yourself, or for early repayment of the loans.
My full tuition, with no discounts or scholarships, was $40k over 5 years for two degrees. I'm still paying it back, but my employer garnishes it from my wages, so I hardly even notice.
Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected
The entire crypto on the platform is vulnerable from the looks of it.
That's bad, but it sounds like there's an easy fix. It seems the issue isn't actually with the crypto implementation, but with the initial seed for the randomiser. There are plenty of PRNG libraries for most programming languages, and on a mobile device, there's likely to be other ways of generating entropy - sampling radio static or some such.
One of the reasons my company uses cloud systems is that we don't have to deal with all the hardware stuff anymore. Running our own cloud would be counter-productive, as it means that we get the worst of both worlds - we still have to deal with the hardware, and we get the added complication of dealing with a more complex system. We don't get the rapid scalability of cloud systems, because we lack the economies of scale that lets cloud providers have spare capacity ready to deploy at a moment's notice.
What benefit does OpenStack give us that a traditional system doesn't?
Miriam Kramer writes at Space.com that in the new movie Elysium, Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind to live in a large, rotating space station stocked with mansions, grass, trees, water and gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you're right that it's not a religion issue. Its a "lots of unvaccinated humans gathering in one place" issue. In this case, it appears that that population was a church. Here in Australia, the unvaccinated population generally isn't the religious, but the vegetarian-but-I-eat-chicken, organic, wheatgrass-shot-taking hipster crowd.
pretend it was the FAA having a big chunk of airspace loose all ability to track aircraft, or NOAA loosing data collection so that weather forecasts are disrupted...The right wing talking heads on TV would be squealing like stuck pigs. They would be screaming about "gubment" waste and incompetence.
Because its their money being wasted.
Meanwhile in real life AWS, Google, and NASDAQ have all had dramatic failures in recent weeks. Although NASDAQ got a fair amount of coverage, and Google got some mention, AWS has been pretty much below the radar for the mainstream media. No one is making dramatic statements on TV about how Google is run by a bunch of idiots, or NASDAQ, a quasi-governmental entity, should be nationalized, because when it fails the entire economy is as risk.
The people who care (i.e. people who were hosting at US-East-1) know, and they have the opportunity to withdraw their custom from AWS. They can employ another provider, or bring it in-house and do it themselves.
Clearly, there is a double standard.
No, you are just comparing apples and oranges - people don't bitch about private companies because, worst comes to worst, they can take their custom elsewhere. Government needs to be held to a higher standard precisely because that freedom is lacking.
We have nukes. Chemical weapons are trivial to manufacture Why would anyone be concerned over the weaponization of a solar satellite when we have so much more efficient methods of mass murder hanging around on terra firma?
Have you seen Kim Dotcom? Catering for a party of five would only just cover it.
Not at all - it just shows the person's been around for a long time. I'm not sure when the last 6-digit slashdot ID was issued, but for an astroturfer to have hung around for that long would indicate remarkable persistence.
Having a low ID doesn't indicate you're right, but it, along with the concommitant posting history, does suggest you didn't just register for the purpose of astrotufing
I don't find him either a hero or a villian, just a young troop with serious personal issues who went attention-whoring without thinking it through despite his training.
Uh-huh. Because that categorization doesn't paint him as a villain at all.
Reactions to Manning seem to be dictated by the ideology of the beholder
Yup
Obviously post-Snowden, they realise how much they need to catch up to the American standard.
They're to the political right, and the submitter obviously leans left.
If you read the article, it seems the people Wikileaks are "coming under fire" from are the Greens (who are pretty much the Australian left-wing these days), because they wanted Wikileaks preferences and didn't get them.
Preferences are public knowledge. It was out in the open - how do you think people know about it? Investigative reporting? In Australia? Heh.
Capitalism promotes competitive, selfish activity.
No, capitalism taps into competitive, selfish activity. With or without capitalism, humans are by nature competitive and selfish. With capitalism, that selfishness is directed into productive ends.
The only effective society is one which overtly and deliberately puts a cap on power, both of the government and of private individuals
And who caps the power of those who decide who has too much power and need to be capped? The nail that sticks up will be hammered down - sounds like a wonderful way to live.
allowing enterprise to flourish
Up until the point where it flourishes too much, and gets "capped"
What we have is a powerful industry, and a large, weak government incapable of restraining it. What you propose is a small, weak industry and a powerful government. What we need is a powerful industry, counterveiled by a powerful government.
Ok, I'll refine my definitions: Application, before the iPhone, referred to software specifically compiled for an operating system. App, as defined by modern innovation, refers to anything you can do with a web browser and/or mobile phone (if I'm not mistaken).
App is a contraction of application; they're synonyms, different terms for the same thing. Your definition defines a piece of software by the form factor of the device it runs on. That means that, for instance, Microsoft Word is both an application (because it is compiled) and an app (because it runs on a mobile device - Microsoft Surface). I ran ProFTP on my Nokia N900 - which would make it an "app" under your definition, and therefore, somehow qualitatively different from an "application" (which it also is, under your definition).
You say that it "boggles the mind" that people are spending time developing "apps" instead of developing new protocols. A new protocol is only useful inasmuch as it helps two distinct systems communicate. If HTTP suits your needs, why would you develop a new protocol instead of developing something that solves a problem (an application)? We have many well-developed, time-tested, general purpose protocols for communication these days. The situation where you legitimately need to roll your own for some reason is an incredibly small niche. Creating a new protocol introduces incompatibilities, because nothing else will use your new protocol - it should only be done if there is a specific reason why an existing protocol is not useful.
Seriously, to add some content to my snark. Until internet speeds reach parity with access to local resources, web apps will always be second class compared to a similar application running locally.
Not necessarily. You can write a web application that, once it's initially downloaded, need not communicate with a remote service at all. Contrariwise, there are plenty of native applications that are useless without internet access, and rely just as much on network speeds as a web app with the same functionality would.
"Web app" versus "native app" is only peripherally about the internet - it's more about the ability of a web browser to provide a sufficiently flexible environment to create a user interface that can compete with a native application.
So, if I may answer the question posed in the title: Web Apps: the Future of the Internet?
No.
You're answering the wrong question. You argument is answering the question "Web Apps: the Future of Applications?". While computer usage might move in the cycle you've shown, the internet has always been about remote computation (centralized computing in your taxonomy, although it feels strange to me calling the internet centralized).
One of the worst culprits for this is trying to implement drop down choice boxes that adapt their contents to previously selected data, such as country-state interactions. The only way I know of to do that with a web interface is to refresh the whole page, which is obscenely slow compared to the repopulation of the choice box data itself done by a custom interface.
Then you don't really have much of a grasp on web development. It is trivial to create controls that update themselves with content based on a previous selection without round-tripping to the webserver - you just have to send the complete set of data with the initial pageload, and just operate on it - which, incidentally, is exactly the same way a native application does it: when you install a native application, it needs to either copy the entire dataset it's working on onto your local machine, or retrieve that dataset from a remote system during the course of operation, just like a web application.
You can also just shoot off a javascript request and retrieve just the data required to display in the widget. You haven't had to refresh the whole page since 1999, when Microsoft introduced the HttpRequest object. You could do it even before then with a clever use of iframes.
There is also no way to perform performance tuning and UI tricks like dynamically making widgets visible/invisible with a web app
Ok, I've just realised I'm talking to someone who has absolutely no clue about what they're talking about, and obviously hasn't used the internet in over a decade. How did you get your comment posted to Slashdot - morse code?
Great. So with a lot of work we're almost BACK TO WHERE WE WERE!
No - in this ONE NARROW CATEGORY we are almost back to where we were. In other categories (platform independence, remote patching, etc) we're far ahead.
How about some innovation and making better, more usable UI's rather than just trying to catch up with what we already have?
Um, go right ahead. You can create pretty much any interface you like, whether on native apps or web apps. You're not being held back by some inherently limiting feature of the ecosystem.
You know what would really suck? If we decided to drop backwards compatibility simply because what was originally intended as a document sourcing and navigation solution has ended up in the hands of profiteers who want this document-oriented system to be used for 3D rendering.
Oh no! Something has transcended the limits with which it was initially conceived! Quick, stuff it back in the bag! Only evil "profiteers" would ever want anything other than a text-only web.
There is much more to the Internet than what traverses ports 80 and 443, and it boggles my mind to think that instead of inventing new protocols and applications (not "apps") to get the job done in a better way - Steam is a great example of this - the popular idea is to say "well everyone has a web browser, let's find new ways to exploit it"
Because nothing says "innovation!" like a thousand incompatible proprietary protocols - apart from maybe drawing some nebulous, unarticulated distinction between "apps" and "applications".
Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system. Then some markup was added to make the documents look pretty. Then CGI and server-side processing were added to make the content more dynamic.
Ok, so far, so good.
Then tricks were applied (eg- cookies) to break the statelessness, albeit in a limited way.
Cookies don't break statelessness. Every transaction is still defined only by the state provided by the client. Cookies don't "break statelessness" any more than the query string does - anything you do with cookies, you can do with the query string.
Then the prettiness of documents were improved with CSS and liquid design. Things got slow.
Actually, things got faster because CSS let you abstract out a bunch of stuff into a file that was downloaded once, then cached, rather than bloating out your HTML with style instructions on every single page. The thing that "slowed" the web was the increase of rich media - images, sound and now video. But even then, those increases have been outperformed by available bandwidth.
Then the scalability of the server side was improved with various frameworks like JSP, Struts, Rails, etc.
Frameworks generally weren't created to increase scalability; they were created to reduce turn-around time for development. Because frameworks (supposedly, anyway) implement best-practices as part of their base install, it's frequently easier to make them scale than something hacked together entirely in-house, but scalability has been achieved by things like caching systems, load balancers and on-demand virtual machines, not frameworks.
Then JavaScript was extended and made to do all sorts of unsecure things.
Uh, like what? Javascript (or more accurately, the DOM model) doesn't really have that many more features than it had initially. It'd be more accurate to say that as development in javascript accelerated, and people did more complicated things with it, we found new vulnerabilities.
AJAX came along and broke the request/response document retrieval model for good.
How does requesting a document via javascript break the document retrieval model? HTTP doesn't care if you request a document by typing in the URL, clicking a link, or clicking a button that fires off a javascript request. You make the request, you get the document.
Things got slow again, especially on newer mobile platforms.
Things got faster. AJAX means you don't have to reload an entire page for a minor content change. Things were slow on mobile platforms, but that's not because of AJAX, it's because they were (for a long while) underpowered machines connecting along crappy connections. That's not due to any issue with HTTP, HTML, Javascript, CSS or anything - it's purely an infrastructure issue.
Now the w3c wants to figure out how to run fat applications on this platform, ostensibly because it's shared in common across OSes.
What exactly is a "fat" application? And who cares what the W3C are figuring out - people are already running applications on the platform. W3C have, at best, only ever codified existing practice. They've never been the ones pushing the envelope.
Don't know about Europe, but here in Australia, the loans are zero-interest, but are indexed for inflation. Also, I don't think the loans are *forgiven* but if you never get a high-paying job, you'll never have to pay them back. Also, you get a tuition discount for paying yourself, or for early repayment of the loans.
My full tuition, with no discounts or scholarships, was $40k over 5 years for two degrees. I'm still paying it back, but my employer garnishes it from my wages, so I hardly even notice.
Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected
The entire crypto on the platform is vulnerable from the looks of it.
That's bad, but it sounds like there's an easy fix. It seems the issue isn't actually with the crypto implementation, but with the initial seed for the randomiser. There are plenty of PRNG libraries for most programming languages, and on a mobile device, there's likely to be other ways of generating entropy - sampling radio static or some such.
He did disclose information about locals working with allied forces. People are dead, sir.
Name one.
One of the reasons my company uses cloud systems is that we don't have to deal with all the hardware stuff anymore. Running our own cloud would be counter-productive, as it means that we get the worst of both worlds - we still have to deal with the hardware, and we get the added complication of dealing with a more complex system. We don't get the rapid scalability of cloud systems, because we lack the economies of scale that lets cloud providers have spare capacity ready to deploy at a moment's notice.
What benefit does OpenStack give us that a traditional system doesn't?
but the phallusy that all publicity is good, hardly.
I so hope that was deliberate
Seriously, is it too much to ask for a link?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/12/20_injured_at_lg_smartphone_giveaway_as_pr_stunt_turns_sour/
Miriam Kramer writes at Space.com that in the new movie Elysium, Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind to live in a large, rotating space station stocked with mansions, grass, trees, water and gravity.
So, Wall-E?
Which is why such methods are called PRNGs - Pseudo-Random Number Generators