My software is heavy on financial calculations, and needs to be 100% accurate and reliable. MySQL isn't even a remote consideration, as it will happily, and silently, alter calculation results. PostgreSQL has been 100% reliable and accurate. MySQL is also very slow, whereas PostgreSQL is very snappy. We tried MySQL when we were evaluating databases, and it was laughable.
My company has abandoned Oracle in favor of PostgreSQL for all new projects (and is rewriting a couple large projects to get off of Oracle), largely due to licensing, but also because Oracle lacks lots of basic functionality that we take for granted in PostgreSQL. We've also found Oracle to be very temperamental and fragile, whereas PostgreSQL is highly reliable and robust.
It's really not even a fair fight. PostgreSQL is phenomenal.
In the mid 1980's, I was writing a lot of BASIC-09 on OS/9 Level 2. At the time, I was the librarian for the local CoCo club, and had access to the club's Pascal compiler and C compiler. I decided to try Pascal, since a high school classmate raved about it, and installed the Pascal compiler. Or rather, I tried to install the Pascal compiler without success. It installed, but it wouldn't run.
So I then tried installing the C compiler, and succeeded. I then decided that I would learn C rather then Pascal. The rest of my career was then driven by C-like languages. Looking back, I chuckle at how such a profound life decision was decided by a random act of convenience.
Relatively? It's trivial to defend against (spoiler: use prepared statements), and anyone creating software that has even the potential for SQL injection is an incompetent moron.
Hiring a programmer who doesn't know how to eliminate SQL injection is like hiring a surgeon who doesn't know how to use a scalpel, or a bridge builder who doesn't understand weight distribution. It's the first thing that a programmer should learn when learning to write database aware software.
Pocket is a proprietary usage tracking system. You sign up for an account, which is how the tracking is performed. Then you can save Web pages, videos, etc. to your hard drive using the Pocket system to you can view the content offline later. All the while, Pocket is building a database of what you saved, which laws you've broken (to be handed over to law enforcement upon request), what your viewing preferences are, etc.
I'll also note that this is in the Midwest, where all you tech people from the coasts complaining about not finding jobs should move.
I think you're an H1-B Visa loving CEO of a midwest company looking to reduce your payroll expenses, because you've just invited a whole bunch of tech people to flood the midwest. If that were to happen, midwest tech wages would plummet.
If you're really who you claim to be in this posting, then you are actively sabotaging your ability to have a work/life balance.
Well, as much as I hate them I do have to admit that there is a plausible case for a small fraction of users degrading service for the rest of their paying customers (or necessitating costly upgrades that will be passed along to everyone).
No, there is not a plausible case. Comcast sold a service, and the paying customer is using that service. If Comcast cannot live up to its advertising, then it should not advertise. It really is that simple.
If I pay for X Mb/s, then I am well within my rights to keep my pipe running at X Mb/s for every single second of my subscription. If my Internet provider knows it can't keep up, while taking my money, then that is stealing from me.
This is following the obvious and predicted trajectory of "cloud" computing: get people dependent on the service, then slowly and inexorably raise prices. Anyone who was foolish enough to think this wouldn't happen should see this as the painfully obvious clue it is.
When, not if, you get bitten by this again and again and again (which is going to happen), you will have no one to blame but yourself.
Obligatory: I expect to be modded into oblivion by clueless moderators.
That's an illusion. While modern distributions require almost no effort, that ease of use comes at the traditional price: in the rare cases that things don't work, today's kids have no idea how to deal with it.
Why is your MySQL server directly on the internet?
The more important question is why the hell the compromised companies hadn't long ago fired the morons who are still using inline SQL. Using inline SQL is akin to a surgeon not wearing a mask. It's gross negligence.
Re:Why do you like KDE?
on
KDE Turns 19
·
· Score: 2
I can understand your confusion, since you're conflating applications with the desktop. I started out on GNOME, but moved to KDE back when it was at version 1.44. I found the desktop look and feel to be vastly more pleasing than GNOME, Konqueror to be tremendously more functional and polished than whatever GNOME was using at the time, and KDE's customizability to be worlds more advanced than GNOME.
I absolutely love all of Plasma's bells and whistles, and get quite annoyed when they crash. One of my favorite little plasmoids is the calculator in krunner. It's so handy to have a line-based calculator a simple Alt-F2 away. And KWin's desktop effects are so well integrated into the desktop that it's painful to sit down at any desktop that doesn't have them.
As far as applications, I run Konqueror for my file manager but not as a Web browser; as a Web browser, it is far behind Firefox and Chrome. But as a file manager, it's top-notch. It's castrated cousin, Dolphin, is an abomination that should have been stillborn.
I run LibreOffice, as it is the crown jewel of office suites for Linux, obviously.
K9 was the best, simplest DVD copying utility I've ever used; it's a shame it was abandoned. I have yet to find anything to fill its shoes.
KTorrent is a fantastic bit torrent client.
I could go on, but I won't. For me, KDE's customizability is a huge plus that puts everything else to shame. And it has many applications that I consider to be best-of-class. It fits my workflow better than any other desktop, bar none.
I've never dealt with a mainframe, so I'll take your word that they are very hard to get off of. What that tells me is to, "just say no" to any mainframe salesman. Stay on commodity hardware and Linux to preserve my autonomy.
It's a long-shot, but maybe WINE will run Adobe Creative Suite (but probably not).
That being said, Richard Stallman saw this coming a long time ago. After years of thinking he was a crackpot, I eventually understood his perspective when he said that it's better to use a Free program with fewer features than a proprietary one with more features. After getting the rug pulled out from under me too many times by proprietary software, I went purely FOSS in 1999. I sometimes have to be creative in my solutions, but I don't consider that to be a bad thing. And my freedom is worth it.
Windows 10/Adobe Creative Suite is a case study in what I have come to accept as Stallman's fundamental truth on the matter, and is the rule of proprietary software rather than the exception.
One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?
No.
I've been writing software for 30 years, and I have never calculated an estimate that was even remotely accurate. Every project is unique, and must be treated as if it has never been done before (which it hasn't). Time estimates are snake oil sales.
[unrelated rant]
I hate, Hate, HATE, HATE!!!!! Slashdot's forum rules. Who has the time to wait a billion years between postings?! Who's the moron who comes up with this shit?! I registered at soylentnews.org a few days ago, and this stupid Slashdot notice:
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
is the last straw. I've been on Slashdot for about 18 years now, I think, and I've had it with all the stupid site decisions of the last couple years. I'm done with Slashdot. This is my last posting to Slashdot. Hello, Soylent News!
And [Microsoft has] done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,[sic]
Only until they can find a way to subvert it. Don't let Microsoft's current worries confuse you into thinking that that company has changed in any way, shape, or form. The moment Microsoft management think the coast is clear, they will drive their hidden knives into your back. It's one of the few things Microsoft does well.
How is this in contradiction of the age old advice?
Is that representative of who you are? Are those things that represent your personality, or are you just doing those things because someone told you to do them? What happens when you are on your own? Or are you going to look on the Internet hoping to find an answer to every one of your life choices?
If it's not how you would have portrayed yourself, you're going to lose when you're on your own and have to stand on your own personality. You will eventually expose yourself as a fraud.
Make your own decisions about how to show who you really are, and be true to who you are and what you want in a lifelong mate. This article is a "Getting Started In Gaming The System" guide, which is the same as projecting yourself as a liar. I wouldn't have wanted any woman who was attracted to that, regardless of how much I thought I would have been happy with a woman who was attracted to that.
Anyone who follows this advice deserves what they get.
The age old advice still stands: be yourself.
If someone wants you for who you're not, rather than who you are, you are better off just moving on. Here's what I posted on my blog years ago after marrying a wonderful woman I met on Plenty of Fish:
I was recently reading the front page of plentyoffish.com, a dating web site where my wife and I first met (we recreated a joint account to submit a testimonial), that provided a very long, detailed opinion piece to a young man about how to behave in order to win a girl that he was very attracted to. It was from a so-called dating expert, and contained some of the worst drivel that men cling to in hopes of landing a wife.
The given advice was to act distant, indifferent, and aloof; that showering her with affection made him look desperate and goofy. We men turn to this kind of garbage when we're not having much luck with women. We turn to this crap when we actually do become desperate.
It took me a long time to realize what should have been self-evident all along: the old advice of just being yourself is, by far, the best advice you could possibly get. Being yourself isn't intended to improve upon the quantity of women you attract. It is intended to improve upon the quality of women you attract. Not surprisingly, the exact same advice applies equally to women. Don't follow those stupid "rules" such as not making the first move. All those rules are complete and utter crap, and will just make you even more miserable than you already are.
All the little head games and misdirections that you have learned are intended to achieve one thing: a brief relationship. They are not the doorway to a lasting marriage, but rather just the path to multiple meaningless disappointments. You will not be able to maintain the charade you have built, and will always fail in the long run. She will always see through you eventually. You will eventually slip up and expose yourself for the fraud you are, and you will be back to square one.
If she is not interested in who you really are, then you do not want her (regardless of what your hormones may tell you). It doesn't matter how pretty, gorgeous, sexy, or otherwise desirable she may seem. If she is not attracted to who and what you are, then any meaningful relationship with her is doomed. She will eventually (but usually quickly) tire of you, and move on to the next guy.
I am a software developer, and spend most of my time in front of a computer. When I was dating, I tried hard to hide that from my dates. All the advice I had been given was that women were turned off by the kind of geeky guy who spent that much time with his computer. I tried to list other interests on the dating site (tenuous as those interests were), tried focusing on what I thought women wanted, and every other trick I could think of that was even remotely true (and some that were very much not true when I reached a certain point of disillusion). Maintaining the illusion was very difficult, as that isn't who I am.
In the end, it was those very traits that my wife tells me were the most attractive to her. It turns out that her life had been full of too much stress, anxiety, and drama. An easy-going, caring, intelligent, homebody of a man is exactly what she had been looking for, and couldn't find, for a very long time (we were both in our late 30's). She would not have been at all interested in the man I had tried pretending to be, but was hopelessly in love with the man I actually am. Who we really are is what allows us to connect on a very deep, lasting level.
It took us both a very long time to find each other (strictly speaking, she found me), and we both suffered some horrible emotional scarring in our prior lives apart, but that scarring is what allowed us to appreciate what we have together.
So although it may hurt in the short term, it's better to be rejected by women for who you are than to be accepted by women for who you are not. You will eventually find that woman who will love you for who you are, even if you have to go through many painful rejections along the way. The women who accept you for who they want you to be will always desert you. No exceptions.
That said, open source is probably the closest the world has ever gotten to true communism.
Communism is centralized control of production. Free Software and Open Source are exactly the opposite. Patents and copyrights are much closer to Communism, as the Government issues directions for who gets to produce stuff.
I still have visions of layers of adapter classes, which serve absolutely no purpose other than to appease Java.
Those adapter classes exist to make interfaces with lots of methods easier to manage. I've learned and forgotten many languages over my 30 years of programming, but Java is one of those elegant languages that makes programming pleasant. The only thing I truly hate about it is the stupid memory limits imposed by its early life for applets. That one thing makes desktop programming more irritating than it needs to be.
Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.
It boggles my mind that people still haven't caught on to this. I'm going to expand on your message just a little bit:
Once you give your data to "the cloud", it becomes the property of government snooping agencies. It doesn't even matter if you're in a country that doesn't actively snoop (if you believe that such a thing exists anymore). Companies change hands, and they do so across political boundaries. Companies cannot be trusted with your data. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
My software is heavy on financial calculations, and needs to be 100% accurate and reliable. MySQL isn't even a remote consideration, as it will happily, and silently, alter calculation results. PostgreSQL has been 100% reliable and accurate. MySQL is also very slow, whereas PostgreSQL is very snappy. We tried MySQL when we were evaluating databases, and it was laughable.
My company has abandoned Oracle in favor of PostgreSQL for all new projects (and is rewriting a couple large projects to get off of Oracle), largely due to licensing, but also because Oracle lacks lots of basic functionality that we take for granted in PostgreSQL. We've also found Oracle to be very temperamental and fragile, whereas PostgreSQL is highly reliable and robust.
It's really not even a fair fight. PostgreSQL is phenomenal.
I did a lot of work in TurboPascal and Basic-09.
In the mid 1980's, I was writing a lot of BASIC-09 on OS/9 Level 2. At the time, I was the librarian for the local CoCo club, and had access to the club's Pascal compiler and C compiler. I decided to try Pascal, since a high school classmate raved about it, and installed the Pascal compiler. Or rather, I tried to install the Pascal compiler without success. It installed, but it wouldn't run.
So I then tried installing the C compiler, and succeeded. I then decided that I would learn C rather then Pascal. The rest of my career was then driven by C-like languages. Looking back, I chuckle at how such a profound life decision was decided by a random act of convenience.
I hope they get counter sued and lose hard.
My facts here might be wrong, but my understanding is that they have already lost hard: they are in Qatar.
...SQLi is relatively easy to defend against.
Relatively? It's trivial to defend against (spoiler: use prepared statements), and anyone creating software that has even the potential for SQL injection is an incompetent moron.
Hiring a programmer who doesn't know how to eliminate SQL injection is like hiring a surgeon who doesn't know how to use a scalpel, or a bridge builder who doesn't understand weight distribution. It's the first thing that a programmer should learn when learning to write database aware software.
Pocket is a proprietary usage tracking system. You sign up for an account, which is how the tracking is performed. Then you can save Web pages, videos, etc. to your hard drive using the Pocket system to you can view the content offline later. All the while, Pocket is building a database of what you saved, which laws you've broken (to be handed over to law enforcement upon request), what your viewing preferences are, etc.
I'll also note that this is in the Midwest, where all you tech people from the coasts complaining about not finding jobs should move.
I think you're an H1-B Visa loving CEO of a midwest company looking to reduce your payroll expenses, because you've just invited a whole bunch of tech people to flood the midwest. If that were to happen, midwest tech wages would plummet.
If you're really who you claim to be in this posting, then you are actively sabotaging your ability to have a work/life balance.
the only thing pay TV is good for is sports....
I complete agree that pay TV is 100% worthless.
Well, as much as I hate them I do have to admit that there is a plausible case for a small fraction of users degrading service for the rest of their paying customers (or necessitating costly upgrades that will be passed along to everyone).
No, there is not a plausible case. Comcast sold a service, and the paying customer is using that service. If Comcast cannot live up to its advertising, then it should not advertise. It really is that simple.
If I pay for X Mb/s, then I am well within my rights to keep my pipe running at X Mb/s for every single second of my subscription. If my Internet provider knows it can't keep up, while taking my money, then that is stealing from me.
This is following the obvious and predicted trajectory of "cloud" computing: get people dependent on the service, then slowly and inexorably raise prices. Anyone who was foolish enough to think this wouldn't happen should see this as the painfully obvious clue it is.
When, not if, you get bitten by this again and again and again (which is going to happen), you will have no one to blame but yourself.
Obligatory: I expect to be modded into oblivion by clueless moderators.
Today's kids have it too easy.
That's an illusion. While modern distributions require almost no effort, that ease of use comes at the traditional price: in the rare cases that things don't work, today's kids have no idea how to deal with it.
Why is your MySQL server directly on the internet?
The more important question is why the hell the compromised companies hadn't long ago fired the morons who are still using inline SQL. Using inline SQL is akin to a surgeon not wearing a mask. It's gross negligence.
I can understand your confusion, since you're conflating applications with the desktop. I started out on GNOME, but moved to KDE back when it was at version 1.44. I found the desktop look and feel to be vastly more pleasing than GNOME, Konqueror to be tremendously more functional and polished than whatever GNOME was using at the time, and KDE's customizability to be worlds more advanced than GNOME.
I absolutely love all of Plasma's bells and whistles, and get quite annoyed when they crash. One of my favorite little plasmoids is the calculator in krunner. It's so handy to have a line-based calculator a simple Alt-F2 away. And KWin's desktop effects are so well integrated into the desktop that it's painful to sit down at any desktop that doesn't have them.
As far as applications, I run Konqueror for my file manager but not as a Web browser; as a Web browser, it is far behind Firefox and Chrome. But as a file manager, it's top-notch. It's castrated cousin, Dolphin, is an abomination that should have been stillborn.
I run LibreOffice, as it is the crown jewel of office suites for Linux, obviously.
K9 was the best, simplest DVD copying utility I've ever used; it's a shame it was abandoned. I have yet to find anything to fill its shoes.
KTorrent is a fantastic bit torrent client.
I could go on, but I won't. For me, KDE's customizability is a huge plus that puts everything else to shame. And it has many applications that I consider to be best-of-class. It fits my workflow better than any other desktop, bar none.
I've never dealt with a mainframe, so I'll take your word that they are very hard to get off of. What that tells me is to, "just say no" to any mainframe salesman. Stay on commodity hardware and Linux to preserve my autonomy.
It's a long-shot, but maybe WINE will run Adobe Creative Suite (but probably not).
That being said, Richard Stallman saw this coming a long time ago. After years of thinking he was a crackpot, I eventually understood his perspective when he said that it's better to use a Free program with fewer features than a proprietary one with more features. After getting the rug pulled out from under me too many times by proprietary software, I went purely FOSS in 1999. I sometimes have to be creative in my solutions, but I don't consider that to be a bad thing. And my freedom is worth it.
Windows 10/Adobe Creative Suite is a case study in what I have come to accept as Stallman's fundamental truth on the matter, and is the rule of proprietary software rather than the exception.
It took me no more than 5 minutes on the phone for them to give me the counter-challenge for it.
I just installed a new copy of Kubuntu on five computers, and I didn't have to spend even one second asking for permission to do so.
One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?
No.
I've been writing software for 30 years, and I have never calculated an estimate that was even remotely accurate. Every project is unique, and must be treated as if it has never been done before (which it hasn't). Time estimates are snake oil sales.
[unrelated rant]
I hate, Hate, HATE, HATE!!!!! Slashdot's forum rules. Who has the time to wait a billion years between postings?! Who's the moron who comes up with this shit?! I registered at soylentnews.org a few days ago, and this stupid Slashdot notice:
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
is the last straw. I've been on Slashdot for about 18 years now, I think, and I've had it with all the stupid site decisions of the last couple years. I'm done with Slashdot. This is my last posting to Slashdot. Hello, Soylent News!
[/unrelated rant]
And [Microsoft has] done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,[sic]
Only until they can find a way to subvert it. Don't let Microsoft's current worries confuse you into thinking that that company has changed in any way, shape, or form. The moment Microsoft management think the coast is clear, they will drive their hidden knives into your back. It's one of the few things Microsoft does well.
But maybe some genius will eventually come up with a system that both scales well and looks cool.
Perhaps Microsoft has never heard of Scalable Vector Graphics?
How is this in contradiction of the age old advice?
Is that representative of who you are? Are those things that represent your personality, or are you just doing those things because someone told you to do them? What happens when you are on your own? Or are you going to look on the Internet hoping to find an answer to every one of your life choices?
If it's not how you would have portrayed yourself, you're going to lose when you're on your own and have to stand on your own personality. You will eventually expose yourself as a fraud.
Make your own decisions about how to show who you really are, and be true to who you are and what you want in a lifelong mate. This article is a "Getting Started In Gaming The System" guide, which is the same as projecting yourself as a liar. I wouldn't have wanted any woman who was attracted to that, regardless of how much I thought I would have been happy with a woman who was attracted to that.
Anyone who follows this advice deserves what they get.
The age old advice still stands: be yourself.
If someone wants you for who you're not, rather than who you are, you are better off just moving on. Here's what I posted on my blog years ago after marrying a wonderful woman I met on Plenty of Fish:
I was recently reading the front page of plentyoffish.com, a dating web site where my wife and I first met (we recreated a joint account to submit a testimonial), that provided a very long, detailed opinion piece to a young man about how to behave in order to win a girl that he was very attracted to. It was from a so-called dating expert, and contained some of the worst drivel that men cling to in hopes of landing a wife.
The given advice was to act distant, indifferent, and aloof; that showering her with affection made him look desperate and goofy. We men turn to this kind of garbage when we're not having much luck with women. We turn to this crap when we actually do become desperate.
It took me a long time to realize what should have been self-evident all along: the old advice of just being yourself is, by far, the best advice you could possibly get. Being yourself isn't intended to improve upon the quantity of women you attract. It is intended to improve upon the quality of women you attract. Not surprisingly, the exact same advice applies equally to women. Don't follow those stupid "rules" such as not making the first move. All those rules are complete and utter crap, and will just make you even more miserable than you already are.
All the little head games and misdirections that you have learned are intended to achieve one thing: a brief relationship. They are not the doorway to a lasting marriage, but rather just the path to multiple meaningless disappointments. You will not be able to maintain the charade you have built, and will always fail in the long run. She will always see through you eventually. You will eventually slip up and expose yourself for the fraud you are, and you will be back to square one.
If she is not interested in who you really are, then you do not want her (regardless of what your hormones may tell you). It doesn't matter how pretty, gorgeous, sexy, or otherwise desirable she may seem. If she is not attracted to who and what you are, then any meaningful relationship with her is doomed. She will eventually (but usually quickly) tire of you, and move on to the next guy.
I am a software developer, and spend most of my time in front of a computer. When I was dating, I tried hard to hide that from my dates. All the advice I had been given was that women were turned off by the kind of geeky guy who spent that much time with his computer. I tried to list other interests on the dating site (tenuous as those interests were), tried focusing on what I thought women wanted, and every other trick I could think of that was even remotely true (and some that were very much not true when I reached a certain point of disillusion). Maintaining the illusion was very difficult, as that isn't who I am.
In the end, it was those very traits that my wife tells me were the most attractive to her. It turns out that her life had been full of too much stress, anxiety, and drama. An easy-going, caring, intelligent, homebody of a man is exactly what she had been looking for, and couldn't find, for a very long time (we were both in our late 30's). She would not have been at all interested in the man I had tried pretending to be, but was hopelessly in love with the man I actually am. Who we really are is what allows us to connect on a very deep, lasting level.
It took us both a very long time to find each other (strictly speaking, she found me), and we both suffered some horrible emotional scarring in our prior lives apart, but that scarring is what allowed us to appreciate what we have together.
So although it may hurt in the short term, it's better to be rejected by women for who you are than to be accepted by women for who you are not. You will eventually find that woman who will love you for who you are, even if you have to go through many painful rejections along the way. The women who accept you for who they want you to be will always desert you. No exceptions.
That said, open source is probably the closest the world has ever gotten to true communism.
Communism is centralized control of production. Free Software and Open Source are exactly the opposite. Patents and copyrights are much closer to Communism, as the Government issues directions for who gets to produce stuff.
So if I understand the summary, google only grows with 20% each year and that is a bad thing?
I think everyone would be happy with a 20% yearly growth in their income.
I still have visions of layers of adapter classes, which serve absolutely no purpose other than to appease Java.
Those adapter classes exist to make interfaces with lots of methods easier to manage. I've learned and forgotten many languages over my 30 years of programming, but Java is one of those elegant languages that makes programming pleasant. The only thing I truly hate about it is the stupid memory limits imposed by its early life for applets. That one thing makes desktop programming more irritating than it needs to be.
I bet not one of these bankers does any non-neglible prison time.
Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.
It boggles my mind that people still haven't caught on to this. I'm going to expand on your message just a little bit:
Once you give your data to "the cloud", it becomes the property of government snooping agencies. It doesn't even matter if you're in a country that doesn't actively snoop (if you believe that such a thing exists anymore). Companies change hands, and they do so across political boundaries. Companies cannot be trusted with your data. Period.
Hopefully, this little incident opens some eyes.