Thank you troll-meister, but the point isn't that I can follow the links -- in fact I did follow the links and was still unclear on the situation. The point is that the article doesn't do anything to make clear why 1000s of Slashdot readers should care enough to want to waste time following the links.
But then hey, I'm wasting time feeding the trolls. Thrown stones, glass hourse, pot, kettle, yadda yadda yadda.
Starband is a satellite ISP. Ok, thank you. Now it makes sense to me. Those five words would have made the original article *much* clearer.
I know what squid is, but without filling the crucial blank about who Starband is or what they do, it's not at all clear what Squid has to do with this.
This story is not about the peripheral technolgy savvy users can apply with their computer & internet usage; it is about a service company who's financial situation will make it difficult or imposslble to deliver that service. Explain the story in terms of who they are & what they do, and the technological implications are obvious to anyone that cares; explain the story in terms of technological glitches, and it's still baffling as to why this matters.
I wasn't trolling, this is really just bad, confusing journalism. The important facts of the story -- who, what, where, when -- need to be covered first & foremost. Editorializing on how this sucks for your Squid setup can come later, if at all.
Guys, first rule of journalism (and for that matter, of getting an "A" on any paper you had to write after, say, the 4th grade): make sure you cover
who
what
where
when
[for bonus points] how & why
Before reading this, I had no idea who Starband was, what they did, where I might have known them from, etc. After reading it...I still don't know, but I know that they're out of money and that it messes up some guy's Cygwin/Squid setup. But I don't *care* about some guy's Cygwin/Squid setup. If you want to convince the reader that this is important, maybe it would make more sense to mention, I dunno, who the fuck Starband is and why the hell it would matter to anyone if they're broke.
And to think I once saw Slashdot as journalism's great shining democratic hope. Oh the disappointment of reality....:/
For the most part, they aren't *supposed* to bend. Yes, there will be a slight arc to it, but the stress on the cables is going to be much more from pulling than flexing. The metal used needs to be relatively stiff in terms of flexing, but more importantly it has to resist stretching as a load is applied to it.
I took a tour of Boston's Big Dig project a couple of weeks ago, including the Leonard Zakim cable-stayed bridge across the Charles River. The head engineer for the project went over the design
considerations, including the properties they
needed in the cables. He showed us a few different kinds of cable, including ones meant to flex, ones meant to be stiff, etc.
Ultimately, it seems like a fascinating materials science problem. You spec out what properties you want your bridge to have (amount of traffic, hence average & maximum weight load, resistance to winds & seismic activity, etc) and then find cables that can support that specification. For the Zakim bridge, the inner cables will be under a light load, and won't be twisting much, so the cable needed doesn't need to be as strong. The top/long cables have to be able to flex, resist 200+ mph winds, and will be bearing the greatest load, so the steel chosen for the purpose is picked to match these needs. It's all quantitative science, not guesswork, and I'm
sure the prople designing the Sicilian bridge are just as clueful.
The last gopher server I used to visit regularly shut down something like three years ago. As far as I know -- no, I haven't checked -- there are no active gopher servers anymore.
And Microsoft is just getting around to hunting down security holes *now*? What does this say about more current protocols?
I predict that by 2005, they'll start looking for holes in SOAP )
A lot of your analysis is interesting, if a bit off base from MS's point of view.
One point in particular highlights that: based on recent & long ago reports, MS *really* wants to pull a BeOS and have the successor filesystem after NTFS be a database oriented, journaled, transaction controlled, and [roughly] SQL-queryable storage platform. The grand vision for this -- which, I have to admit, I am impressed by -- is to not decrease reliance on SQL Server, but to increase it massively, and ultimately to embed it as the file system access engine. Unless they could trivially jettison the SQL Server work already done here, and replace it with PostgreSQL -- I doubt it -- that angle will just not happen any time soom, if ever.
This is just the one aspect of MS/.NET/whatever that is publically available and that I'm roughly familiar with. Chances are your other suggests get similarly tangled up in their long term strategies, and so will be just as unworkable. The interesting thing in the article question is the idea that MS could gain -- in a win for Microsoft and a win for open source community way -- by adopting more open behaviors. To answer that question, one has to get into their heads a little & suggest why they would want to make such a drastic move. Just parroting the Free Software party line, as most posters seem to have done [not this one really, but a lot of the others] doesn't really answer the question. Unfortunately, I can't answer it either. Hopefully someone can though, or -- by default -- MS will effectively be vindicated in their approproach, no matter how much we might want them to change.:/
I see your point, and disagree with it. It used to be an Asian thing, but no longer. My neighborhood is full of those souped up cars, but most of my neighbors seem to be Brazilian &/or Portugese -- the only Asian I've really noticed is my fiance:).
And driving around, I see Asians driving those cars, but also Africans [actually, I think people from Caribbean countries mostly], Latinos, and Europeans. It may have once been true that this stereotype was accurate -- maybe -- but at least in my area that seems not to be the case now.
I didn't say it directly, but my original post basically agreed with what you're saying now: if there's a pattern, it's not racial, it's cultural and, if anything, perhaps related to male hormones -- related to the urge to tweak out a PC case or dress like a punk / hiphop / hippie or buy toys from places like Sharper Image. Culture culture culture:)
And I don't know who you are or where you are, but here the observation that this hot rod tweaking isn't particularly Asian is not "pretending" and it matters little if it's PC or not. I see a slight tendency towards being an immigrant thing, but then I've seen it in people born & raised in the US so even that is pretty flimsy. Around here [i.e. my mind], drawing a stereotypical pattern where there is little or no pattern in real life is what's really stupid.:)
I don't know if you're Asian. You don't know if I'm Asian. Oops, your point just evaporated.
And again, your joke (and the parent for that matter) was unfunny & IMO inappropriate. Not that it's up to me to set taste or anything, but it was playing on an [inaccurate] stereotype in a mocking way, which fits my definition of racism pretty well. But hey, you wanna troll, go right ahead.
NB: I don't like those stupid souped up hotrods either, but at least where I live [Boston], it's hardly an Asian-specific thing: I've seen plenty of people of all races doing ridiculous things to their cars.
But then, as an IT person, I've also seen people do ridiculous things to their PC cases, software interfaces, web pages, etc. Pretty much *all* use of Flash on web sites is as bad as these tricked out Hondas you're hinting at.
Maybe it's just a male thing to be fascinated by tacky chrome trim on our tools. In any case, I can't see much evidence of women doing this sort of stuff, but I see plenty of guys -- of all races -- doing it.
One note: the headline used isn't the one I was expecting. It's not that Ximian has ported Connector, but that I feel people would like to see the company offer a port in the future, and would be willing to pay for it if such a port were to become available. The way the headline is written makes it seem as if it's already happened, but that's not the case.
Set up an LDAP server. I'm just learning about it myself, but it seems to be designed for just this sort of thing. (Well actually no, it looks like it might be designed for phonebook / addressbook type applications, but this sounds like a close corollary to that model.) There are lots of tools available for running LDAP in conjunction with web servers, database servers, command line interaction, GUI interfaces, programming APIs, etc.
Look, the people that write screenplays got their jobs because, more than anything else, they want to be storytellers. Not physicists, not programmers, nor most any other field of expertise that you can think of. This should be intuitively obvious.
So, given that these people are trying to tell stories, and that stories are always About Things, and that the people telling these stories are more interested in Telling than the Getting Details Right, there is always going to be glitches like this.
I would suggest that every movie ever made -- and for that matter, every other work of fiction ever told -- is going to have technical glitches that pisses off some Expert In The Field.
Hell, look hard enough and you can even fine people that think cinematic typography is offensive.:)
Anyway, there are two solutions to this. You can either enforce that storytellers have to get the details right, keeping in mind that this involves myriad areas of learning, that most people won't notice or care, and that hell its can get pretty damned subjective anyway. Not too many stories get told that way -- Kubrick and who else? (And look how long it took him to finish off each film...). The alternative is a little literary device we like to call "suspension of disbelief." The point is, ignore the details, the story isn't about those details, and you're not going to see the forest if you keep focusing on the fact that the trees are just cardboard cutouts. We know that already, please keep moving along with us anyway.
Not that this kind of deconstruction can't be fun or anything -- that fontography site cracks me up, and half the fun in damn near all scifi movies is the fundamental implausibility of it all. As another commenter noted, you don't have a problem with spiders granting superhuman powers, but you want to quibble over aerodynamics? Come on....:)
Well, exactly. This is really where things should be going. Think about it. If a user can express exactly what they want from an online resource in a terse but complete way, then both the user and the resource provider come out ahead. Neither side wants to deal with the extra overhead of serving whole pages of HTML formatting when [a] you just want the hits on a given search query and [b] Google doesn't want to pay the extra bandwidth charges.
Allowing power users to target requests more efficiently is a boost to both sides here -- even if Google doesn't charge a nominal fee for this, the bandwidth savings could still put them ahead of where they would have been under a more traditional HTTP/HTML transaction. You phrase your comment in a very cynical way, but really this seems like a great thing to me. One of the biggest burdens in getting info from the web is having to manually scrape it out of a web browser (or muck around with say LWP and HTML parsers). With an API like this, we can see more applications such as Watson, that aggregate the data & cut through all the web crap that makes finding information tedious. This is where everything is going with SOAP,.NET, MONO, XML-RPC, and so on, and I for one am glad to see a great company like Google leading the way.
Ahh, but you *are* visiting their site. Think about it. People are already writing scripts to harvest data from search engines, news sites, Amazon, IMDB, Weather.com, etc. This is a useful enough idea that people are coming up with programs to do it even if subtle changes to the page layout breaks things & they have to rewrite the parsers. You can either deny this is happening -- and fight this silly little war of attrition against clever developers doing Interesting Things -- or you can give in, nurture this emerging technology, and oh yeah cut way down on your bandwidth costs because you're letting them slurp up only the content that they want. Win-win.
Yeah, it makes it hard/impossible to make money on it with current models (no ads etc), but it could evolve into a system where sites can exchange data for mutual benefit, giving them all data they need while cutting back on transmission overheads.
Think of it as being ahead of the curve. This is where MS is pushing with SOAP, and others are going with XML-RPC. It can lead us to the point where the "noosphere" of web info can be universally accessed without having to run a clunky old web browser to do it (cell phone, palm pilot, and other alternative access users of the world, rejoice!:).
Google is clever. They're trying to set themselves up as all purpose, all access information scroungers, and they're doing a hell of a good job at it while making a nice profit besides. I don't doubt that they'll be able to parlay this into a revenue stream if it takes off -- just give it a chance to flourish...
Re:New cars look the same too
on
Exegesis 4 Out
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· Score: 5, Informative
You can use a telephone / car / toaster in any country (that has wires / roads / bread), why not have a common core for computer languages?
It's a mapping problem. At the core of all these common languages are some implicit ideas about what should be possible, what should be easy, and what just can't be done. Any interface/language built on top of this core has to reflect those assumptions. As long as the core assumptions are sufficiently broad, and map well enough onto your way of thinking and solving problems, then there is no problem here. Sooner or later though, the more you use this system, the more you realize that it does have boundaries and that they will come to restrict you.
The same idea holds in lots of areas. Compare & contrast the tasks you can solve -- and how easily they can be solved -- when using DOS/cmd.exe on one hand and one of the Unix shells on the other. Even plain old/bin/sh is more versatile than modern NT command shells. On the other hand, compare the graphical environments for Windows and X11, and for that matter MacOS. Each of them has different "easy" situations and "hard" situations. I won't get into which of them is better (well ok I will, MacOS9 was best), but suffice to say that they implicitly force a certain mindset.
And again this holds up with more traditional human cultural situations. The French phrases "il y a" and "je ne c'est quoi" [surely that's spelled wrong] just don't translate fully into English. English cars don't 'translate' well onto European or American roadways, and vice versa. Not every piece of bread fits into every toaster (try putting a nice big slab of foccaccia into one), and that's a good thing. A lot of people feel that these little cultural rough edges are what make culture interesting in the first place.
And in a general way, that all comes up again in computer languages. VB is highly optimized for writing Windows applications, and I'd suffer if I tried to do the same things in Perl. On the other hand I can do sophisticated text analysis in a Perl one liner that would be almost impossible to do in VB. Likewise, it might be possible to run a wide variety of dynamic scripting languages on top of Parrot, but it looks like they won't necessarily be able to run on Microsoft's CLI (and thus won't necessarily be able to do.NET or Windows GUI stuff); and at the same time code written in relatively static, compile languages for the CLI might not perform so well on top of Parrot and might not run well on Free Software platforms.
There are good & bad & deep & subtle reasons for all this, but the end lesson is that a certain degree of non-conformity makes the software "ecosystem" richer and healthier. The benefits of a one core engine runs all approach are eventually offset by the restrictions in the types of problems that can be solved by such a system in the long run. Those non-mainstream languages are a valuable source of ideas & direction for the more standard languages to move in. A lot of Perl's best ideas are brazenly stolen from SmallTalk, APL, Scheme, and other obscure but clever languages. I might not use those others -- hell I don't even know how to code in any of them at this point -- but the fact that they're able to demonstrate new ideas in practice propels the development of the languages that I am interested in. I have little doubt that that development would stagnate without this kind of cross-pollination, and I worry that increased language homogenization & core-engine-standardization could strangle this sort of evolution in the future.
Re:Perl 6 will be a painful, but necessary move ah
on
Exegesis 4 Out
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well if it makes you feel better, one of the hopes for Perl6 is that it should be able to process Perl5. With Parrot as an abstract backend, Perl6 is just going to be one of several available frontends for the Parrot engine. In principle, there's no reason why a Perl5 frontend can't also be written, just as there is interest in Python frontends, PHP frontends, Scheme, Forth, Tcl, etc.
This may be painful, yes, but it had to be done because the existing Perl codebase was such a mess that a reimplementation was seen as the only way for the language to keep evolving. In return from starting from scratch like this, the Perl community gets a lot of benefits: there will be lots of tasty new syntactic sugar (which you're welcome to ignore by writing Perl5 style code, but which will make a lot of tasks easier if you get used to the syntax), it should be easier to develop extension libraries (no more evil XS hackery, and PDL becomes much less necessary), it will be easier to port Perl to new platforms (like say Palm Pilots), and you get this great language engine out of Parrot.
Plus, the only reference implementation of Perl the language has been Perl the interpreter, and this bothers a lot of people for a lot of reasons. With this reworking, the language specification will be fleshed out in much better detail than has ever existed before, and the official reference implementation should be much easier to understand & work with, with actual abstraction of different working layers that should be replaced just as TCP/IP layers can be replaced. Ideally, this will allow others to come in and develop their own implementations of Perl the language, and that competition could stand to benefit us all.
Still, the funny thing to me is that all this Parrot work was born out of an April Fools Joke last year. Not only was it a funny joke -- unlike say everything that was posted here the other day -- but it has evolved into quite an interesting piece of software architecture. Be careful what you joke about, you just might get it...:)
Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 1
I wasn't trying to say that it's not kitschy. On the contrary, even if the methods are crude, the technique is still pretty clever. Regular shows usually just use "normal" coloration, camera angles, etc. Commercials use color, pacing, framing, etc to set a mood (normally some variation of "warm & friendly & happy" of course). They're pulling psychological strings the same way political ads do, and you're right that it's plainly obvious when you watch for it.
You could argue that regular shows could do this stuff too, and I wouldn't disagree except to say that they don't. You see a little bit of surrealism & imagination in shows like Ally McBeal, but these are the quirky exceptions. Mostly it's all just cookie cutter, paint by numbers stuff like, well, almost every sitcom, talk show, and drama I can think of. Commercials (and, now that I think about it, music videos) seem to be much more free to be experimental & creative than regular shows, for a wagonload of reasons.
Of the books on my shelf in front of me right now, most did not come with CDs, and of the ones that did I actually have used all of them: The Complete FreeBSD, Unix Power Tools and The Perl CD Bookshelf. In two cases, I bought the book specifically for the media, and for the Power Tools book it was just loaded with sorta-but-not-critically useful stuff scattered all over the internet in one useful bundle. Of the books not right on my desk shelf, the portion with CDs is somewhat higher, but of those other books I've barely used the CDs that came with them.
Why? Well, what use is a four year old copy of Python when I can download a current version just as easily? I'd have been happier if that one was a couple bucks cheaper, just as I was happy about the blurbs on the back of Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and Mac OS9 Missing Manual saying that avoiding the cd keeps costs down while allowing you to get more up to date software. As a paying customer, I appreciate that sort of consideration for my needs and my wallet. So to me, it's kind of a tradeoff among several factors. In no particular order:
Having the media for a large set of software like FreeBSD is good, because it can avoid a huge download and I can live with a complete but outdated version of things, for a while anyway.
Having the media for the CD bookshelf is good because it gives you the text -- in this case, of several books -- in searchable digital format.
Providing the media for smaller, rapidly evolving material like a programming language or major application is less appealing when downloading is a viable alternative.
Providing a central website is a great way to keep updated while saving some of the publishing costs, but the risk there is that you could lose ready access to the material if the site disappears or moves (like for example the FreeBSD book, though of course that's available elsewhere too; that isn't always the case of course).
Obviously, the shelf life of a lot of CD-ROMs is limited, and people aren't going to be happy about paying for something out of date. Even if the material happens to be current, if it can be downloaded for free then there's little benefit in having the disc.
On the other hand, sites obviously aren't eternal but discs come close enough for most purposes (even if their contents don't hold up as well), and download size is a factor to consider.
Copyright is another angle that your publisher will probably want to have some control over, and no one likes having to go through arcane, tedious hoops to download some tools [I'm looking at you, Apple -- your Developer's site is a royal pain in the ass...], and no one wants to be the victim of an abandoned product
If you're going to include a CD then you might as well fill up all 600mb or so of available space: if there's room for it and you're not afraid of copyright infrigement, include the text of the book, otherwise throw in a Linux distribution, tools like Perl & Apache [for Unix, Windows, and Mac], pad it out with DeCSS code, etc. In short, make it worth the customer's extra cash. (Slight counterargument: you probably don't want to take on support liability for anything you include, so don't forget whatever legalese would be appropriate there.)
Deciding what way to go is a matter of looking at factors like these & others, and evaluating what you're trying to provide for your customer and what their expectations are likely to be over time. If the digital material is just a supplement to the book, and can be easily downloaded, then most customers will probably appreciate it if you save them a few bucks & don't include the CD. On the other hand, if the book is really a supplement to the discs, and the digital material is difficult or impossible to download (for bandwidth, copyright, or other reasons) then including the CD media is a good idea. Find out where things seem to balance and make your decision from there.
It was FreeBSD with FrontPage extensions through yesterday evening, but must have been moved to a different machine (or masked with fake server headers) over the night.
Why must the internet become useless for me on April 2nd?
If it makes you feel better, it's useless for us on April 1st. Same shit, different day.:-/
Re:This is what'll screw us all in the end
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The Root of All E-Mail
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Security through obscurity will never solve anything when used as the first line of defense.
Oh, I don't know about that. Sure, it's bad when it's the only line of defence, but as a mere "first" line I think it's perfectly reasonable. (Just as it's a reasonable defence to, say, have your web server misidentify itself, or to have an unlisted phone number, or what have you.) As long as the layers of security behind this first one are robust, obscurity is perfectly reasonable as a front line defense.
If I was them...
No offence, but thank god you're not, buddy...:)
Secrets have never worked in security before
Oh baloney, they work all the time. Maybe you should consider putting down the standard/. party line and try putting some of this hyperbole into perspective. If secrets have never worked then why is the story of the Trojan Horse so famous? If secrets have never mattered then why is the element of surprise considered to be so tactically valuable? If secrets didn't matter to security then why did Nixon have those 18 minutes of blank tape, and why did Cheney turn in thousands of blank documents, and why do all governments bother classifying things as top secret?
If you're in a position of just stupendously overwhelming strength -- like say if the US were to invade Bermuda tomorrow -- then no I don't suppose you need to be all that secretive about things. For everyone else, in every other situation, secrets can have an important role to play. Even if trolls would suggest otherwise.
Ok, but [a] that's still third party, not Apple (but it's still interesting to learn -- thanks), and [b] there's still a big difference between a G4 that might have a couple of CPUs on one hand, and the 16, 32, and 64 way high-end systems that this FUD campaign seems to really be about. As far as I know, OSX hasn't been ported to anything at all like this kind of hardware, and though it can do nice clean SMP across a couple of processors, I don't know if that translates to the ability to scale up to these much larger systems. Even beyond what the actual case looks like, *that* is what I'm saying is minimally a couple of years away...
MS can crow all they want that Unix is hard to use - and I might have thought so, until I used OS X.
Not that I disagree with this specific example or your point in general, but this isn't a particularly strong counterargument to the MS anti-unix campaign. Yes, OSX is nice, and yes it coul even be a good server, but I would be very reluctant to do that at this point. It's a young and still not quite polished OS, and it currently runs on hardware that excels as a workstation but might not be so competitive as a high end server (no rack-mount models now and I doubt there would be any on the horizon). And while you can start & stop these services with the click of a button, it's still valuable to know how to work with them at the command line / config file level.
As nice as Aqua is, I don't think I'd want to have it running (or even installed, maybe) on a dedicated server -- it takes too much CPU and it's an extra point of possible failure or system compromise. Darwin by itself might be okay, but I don't see the benefit of using it over any other BSD. And if you're going to run raw Darwin without Aqua, then why bother using OSX at all? Seen that way, it's just a young & as yet unproven BSD clone, and you might as well go with the originals there.
None of this is meant to knock OSX. I'm typing this from an OSX box, as I compile Mozilla in a different window and have an ssh/pine session open in another. I love OSX as a desktop Unix system (even if it doesn't have the "adduser" command, by the way;-). But from what I can tell of MS's anti-Unix campaign, high-end Unix is the target, not desktop-Unix. Of the two main desktop Unix variants -- Linux and OSX -- they're fighting the former on different fronts while embracing the latter as another bit revenue source for Office. The target is Sun, IBM, etc -- and that's just an area that Apple isn't even seriously trying to compete in right now. Maybe in two or three years they'll be experimenting with that market, but not today.
No no no, FreeBSD isn't the real enemy. Hell, Microsoft is a Unix company anyway. The problem isn't BSD/Unix, it's Linux & Solaris: the former can't be assimilated, while the latter is just in a higher league than NT.
Once you've divided your enemies and picked off or embraced the ones you can, you're left with the ones you can't buy or beat. And when all else fails and you find out that you really can't buy or beat your enemy, you might as well slander them, right?
Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I know there's some marginally better stuff on cable, but I'm in no way interested enough in watching teevee to shell out fifty bucks a month or more for the privilige. That much doesn't feel like "a little extra" to me -- it's thedifference between $0.00 per year and $500.00 per year or more. I've got a big stack of movies that I know that I like here, so if the urge to watch something comes over me I'll pull one off the shelf.
I'm really not trying to "look down my nose" at anyone here. Just because *I* think "Friends" is the most boring thirty minutes a week doesn't mean that the millions of others that enjoy the show have to change their minds, and I'm fine with that. Most of them would probably find my shelf full of O'Reilly books just as boring, and that's okay with me. But I'm not kidding when I say that I really *do* think that most of the stuff is just ambitiously awful, as if they're trying to outdo each other in terms of how bad these shows can be. I really do think that it's incredibly difficult to be an informed member of society when all you get is the slash & burn pap on broadcast news, and I really do think it's an insult to think that the infotainment on shows like "Dateline" is in any way insightful, investigative, or, well, relevant. Others disagree. That's okay. I don't want everyone to see things my way anyhow.
But my main point remains. Think what you will of the shows, but the commercials is where the real creativity seems to be these days. They have a lot more freedom to do innovative stuff within their "must sell in thirty seconds" format, than the regular shows get to do in 22 or 48 minutes of paint by numbers genre programming. Even if all they do is amuse, that in my opinion is a head start over their competition.....
Slashdot Mirror
But then hey, I'm wasting time feeding the trolls. Thrown stones, glass hourse, pot, kettle, yadda yadda yadda.
I know what squid is, but without filling the crucial blank about who Starband is or what they do, it's not at all clear what Squid has to do with this.
This story is not about the peripheral technolgy savvy users can apply with their computer & internet usage; it is about a service company who's financial situation will make it difficult or imposslble to deliver that service. Explain the story in terms of who they are & what they do, and the technological implications are obvious to anyone that cares; explain the story in terms of technological glitches, and it's still baffling as to why this matters.
I wasn't trolling, this is really just bad, confusing journalism. The important facts of the story -- who, what, where, when -- need to be covered first & foremost. Editorializing on how this sucks for your Squid setup can come later, if at all.
Before reading this, I had no idea who Starband was, what they did, where I might have known them from, etc. After reading it ...I still don't know, but I know that they're out of money and that it messes up some guy's Cygwin/Squid setup. But I don't *care* about some guy's Cygwin/Squid setup. If you want to convince the reader that this is important, maybe it would make more sense to mention, I dunno, who the fuck Starband is and why the hell it would matter to anyone if they're broke.
And to think I once saw Slashdot as journalism's great shining democratic hope. Oh the disappointment of reality.... :/
I took a tour of Boston's Big Dig project a couple of weeks ago, including the Leonard Zakim cable-stayed bridge across the Charles River. The head engineer for the project went over the design considerations, including the properties they needed in the cables. He showed us a few different kinds of cable, including ones meant to flex, ones meant to be stiff, etc.
Ultimately, it seems like a fascinating materials science problem. You spec out what properties you want your bridge to have (amount of traffic, hence average & maximum weight load, resistance to winds & seismic activity, etc) and then find cables that can support that specification. For the Zakim bridge, the inner cables will be under a light load, and won't be twisting much, so the cable needed doesn't need to be as strong. The top/long cables have to be able to flex, resist 200+ mph winds, and will be bearing the greatest load, so the steel chosen for the purpose is picked to match these needs. It's all quantitative science, not guesswork, and I'm sure the prople designing the Sicilian bridge are just as clueful.
And Microsoft is just getting around to hunting down security holes *now*? What does this say about more current protocols?
I predict that by 2005, they'll start looking for holes in SOAP )
One point in particular highlights that: based on recent & long ago reports, MS *really* wants to pull a BeOS and have the successor filesystem after NTFS be a database oriented, journaled, transaction controlled, and [roughly] SQL-queryable storage platform. The grand vision for this -- which, I have to admit, I am impressed by -- is to not decrease reliance on SQL Server, but to increase it massively, and ultimately to embed it as the file system access engine. Unless they could trivially jettison the SQL Server work already done here, and replace it with PostgreSQL -- I doubt it -- that angle will just not happen any time soom, if ever.
This is just the one aspect of MS/.NET/whatever that is publically available and that I'm roughly familiar with. Chances are your other suggests get similarly tangled up in their long term strategies, and so will be just as unworkable. The interesting thing in the article question is the idea that MS could gain -- in a win for Microsoft and a win for open source community way -- by adopting more open behaviors. To answer that question, one has to get into their heads a little & suggest why they would want to make such a drastic move. Just parroting the Free Software party line, as most posters seem to have done [not this one really, but a lot of the others] doesn't really answer the question. Unfortunately, I can't answer it either. Hopefully someone can though, or -- by default -- MS will effectively be vindicated in their approproach, no matter how much we might want them to change. :/
And driving around, I see Asians driving those cars, but also Africans [actually, I think people from Caribbean countries mostly], Latinos, and Europeans. It may have once been true that this stereotype was accurate -- maybe -- but at least in my area that seems not to be the case now.
I didn't say it directly, but my original post basically agreed with what you're saying now: if there's a pattern, it's not racial, it's cultural and, if anything, perhaps related to male hormones -- related to the urge to tweak out a PC case or dress like a punk / hiphop / hippie or buy toys from places like Sharper Image. Culture culture culture :)
And I don't know who you are or where you are, but here the observation that this hot rod tweaking isn't particularly Asian is not "pretending" and it matters little if it's PC or not. I see a slight tendency towards being an immigrant thing, but then I've seen it in people born & raised in the US so even that is pretty flimsy. Around here [i.e. my mind], drawing a stereotypical pattern where there is little or no pattern in real life is what's really stupid. :)
And again, your joke (and the parent for that matter) was unfunny & IMO inappropriate. Not that it's up to me to set taste or anything, but it was playing on an [inaccurate] stereotype in a mocking way, which fits my definition of racism pretty well. But hey, you wanna troll, go right ahead.
NB: I don't like those stupid souped up hotrods either, but at least where I live [Boston], it's hardly an Asian-specific thing: I've seen plenty of people of all races doing ridiculous things to their cars.
But then, as an IT person, I've also seen people do ridiculous things to their PC cases, software interfaces, web pages, etc. Pretty much *all* use of Flash on web sites is as bad as these tricked out Hondas you're hinting at.
Maybe it's just a male thing to be fascinated by tacky chrome trim on our tools. In any case, I can't see much evidence of women doing this sort of stuff, but I see plenty of guys -- of all races -- doing it.
</feeding trolls>
One note: the headline used isn't the one I was expecting. It's not that Ximian has ported Connector, but that I feel people would like to see the company offer a port in the future, and would be willing to pay for it if such a port were to become available. The way the headline is written makes it seem as if it's already happened, but that's not the case.
Poking around a little, it looks like there's a good (but old?) FAQ from Netscape, though there some other sources of information out there.
So, given that these people are trying to tell stories, and that stories are always About Things, and that the people telling these stories are more interested in Telling than the Getting Details Right, there is always going to be glitches like this.
I would suggest that every movie ever made -- and for that matter, every other work of fiction ever told -- is going to have technical glitches that pisses off some Expert In The Field.
Hell, look hard enough and you can even fine people that think cinematic typography is offensive. :)
Anyway, there are two solutions to this. You can either enforce that storytellers have to get the details right, keeping in mind that this involves myriad areas of learning, that most people won't notice or care, and that hell its can get pretty damned subjective anyway. Not too many stories get told that way -- Kubrick and who else? (And look how long it took him to finish off each film...). The alternative is a little literary device we like to call "suspension of disbelief." The point is, ignore the details, the story isn't about those details, and you're not going to see the forest if you keep focusing on the fact that the trees are just cardboard cutouts. We know that already, please keep moving along with us anyway.
Not that this kind of deconstruction can't be fun or anything -- that fontography site cracks me up, and half the fun in damn near all scifi movies is the fundamental implausibility of it all. As another commenter noted, you don't have a problem with spiders granting superhuman powers, but you want to quibble over aerodynamics? Come on.... :)
Allowing power users to target requests more efficiently is a boost to both sides here -- even if Google doesn't charge a nominal fee for this, the bandwidth savings could still put them ahead of where they would have been under a more traditional HTTP/HTML transaction. You phrase your comment in a very cynical way, but really this seems like a great thing to me. One of the biggest burdens in getting info from the web is having to manually scrape it out of a web browser (or muck around with say LWP and HTML parsers). With an API like this, we can see more applications such as Watson, that aggregate the data & cut through all the web crap that makes finding information tedious. This is where everything is going with SOAP, .NET, MONO, XML-RPC, and so on, and I for one am glad to see a great company like Google leading the way.
Yeah, it makes it hard/impossible to make money on it with current models (no ads etc), but it could evolve into a system where sites can exchange data for mutual benefit, giving them all data they need while cutting back on transmission overheads.
Think of it as being ahead of the curve. This is where MS is pushing with SOAP, and others are going with XML-RPC. It can lead us to the point where the "noosphere" of web info can be universally accessed without having to run a clunky old web browser to do it (cell phone, palm pilot, and other alternative access users of the world, rejoice! :).
Google is clever. They're trying to set themselves up as all purpose, all access information scroungers, and they're doing a hell of a good job at it while making a nice profit besides. I don't doubt that they'll be able to parlay this into a revenue stream if it takes off -- just give it a chance to flourish...
It's a mapping problem. At the core of all these common languages are some implicit ideas about what should be possible, what should be easy, and what just can't be done. Any interface/language built on top of this core has to reflect those assumptions. As long as the core assumptions are sufficiently broad, and map well enough onto your way of thinking and solving problems, then there is no problem here. Sooner or later though, the more you use this system, the more you realize that it does have boundaries and that they will come to restrict you.
The same idea holds in lots of areas. Compare & contrast the tasks you can solve -- and how easily they can be solved -- when using DOS/cmd.exe on one hand and one of the Unix shells on the other. Even plain old /bin/sh is more versatile than modern NT command shells. On the other hand, compare the graphical environments for Windows and X11, and for that matter MacOS. Each of them has different "easy" situations and "hard" situations. I won't get into which of them is better (well ok I will, MacOS9 was best), but suffice to say that they implicitly force a certain mindset.
And again this holds up with more traditional human cultural situations. The French phrases "il y a" and "je ne c'est quoi" [surely that's spelled wrong] just don't translate fully into English. English cars don't 'translate' well onto European or American roadways, and vice versa. Not every piece of bread fits into every toaster (try putting a nice big slab of foccaccia into one), and that's a good thing. A lot of people feel that these little cultural rough edges are what make culture interesting in the first place.
And in a general way, that all comes up again in computer languages. VB is highly optimized for writing Windows applications, and I'd suffer if I tried to do the same things in Perl. On the other hand I can do sophisticated text analysis in a Perl one liner that would be almost impossible to do in VB. Likewise, it might be possible to run a wide variety of dynamic scripting languages on top of Parrot, but it looks like they won't necessarily be able to run on Microsoft's CLI (and thus won't necessarily be able to do .NET or Windows GUI stuff); and at the same time code written in relatively static, compile languages for the CLI might not perform so well on top of Parrot and might not run well on Free Software platforms.
There are good & bad & deep & subtle reasons for all this, but the end lesson is that a certain degree of non-conformity makes the software "ecosystem" richer and healthier. The benefits of a one core engine runs all approach are eventually offset by the restrictions in the types of problems that can be solved by such a system in the long run. Those non-mainstream languages are a valuable source of ideas & direction for the more standard languages to move in. A lot of Perl's best ideas are brazenly stolen from SmallTalk, APL, Scheme, and other obscure but clever languages. I might not use those others -- hell I don't even know how to code in any of them at this point -- but the fact that they're able to demonstrate new ideas in practice propels the development of the languages that I am interested in. I have little doubt that that development would stagnate without this kind of cross-pollination, and I worry that increased language homogenization & core-engine-standardization could strangle this sort of evolution in the future.
This may be painful, yes, but it had to be done because the existing Perl codebase was such a mess that a reimplementation was seen as the only way for the language to keep evolving. In return from starting from scratch like this, the Perl community gets a lot of benefits: there will be lots of tasty new syntactic sugar (which you're welcome to ignore by writing Perl5 style code, but which will make a lot of tasks easier if you get used to the syntax), it should be easier to develop extension libraries (no more evil XS hackery, and PDL becomes much less necessary), it will be easier to port Perl to new platforms (like say Palm Pilots), and you get this great language engine out of Parrot.
Plus, the only reference implementation of Perl the language has been Perl the interpreter, and this bothers a lot of people for a lot of reasons. With this reworking, the language specification will be fleshed out in much better detail than has ever existed before, and the official reference implementation should be much easier to understand & work with, with actual abstraction of different working layers that should be replaced just as TCP/IP layers can be replaced. Ideally, this will allow others to come in and develop their own implementations of Perl the language, and that competition could stand to benefit us all.
Still, the funny thing to me is that all this Parrot work was born out of an April Fools Joke last year. Not only was it a funny joke -- unlike say everything that was posted here the other day -- but it has evolved into quite an interesting piece of software architecture. Be careful what you joke about, you just might get it... :)
You could argue that regular shows could do this stuff too, and I wouldn't disagree except to say that they don't. You see a little bit of surrealism & imagination in shows like Ally McBeal, but these are the quirky exceptions. Mostly it's all just cookie cutter, paint by numbers stuff like, well, almost every sitcom, talk show, and drama I can think of. Commercials (and, now that I think about it, music videos) seem to be much more free to be experimental & creative than regular shows, for a wagonload of reasons.
Why? Well, what use is a four year old copy of Python when I can download a current version just as easily? I'd have been happier if that one was a couple bucks cheaper, just as I was happy about the blurbs on the back of Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and Mac OS9 Missing Manual saying that avoiding the cd keeps costs down while allowing you to get more up to date software. As a paying customer, I appreciate that sort of consideration for my needs and my wallet. So to me, it's kind of a tradeoff among several factors. In no particular order:
Deciding what way to go is a matter of looking at factors like these & others, and evaluating what you're trying to provide for your customer and what their expectations are likely to be over time. If the digital material is just a supplement to the book, and can be easily downloaded, then most customers will probably appreciate it if you save them a few bucks & don't include the CD. On the other hand, if the book is really a supplement to the discs, and the digital material is difficult or impossible to download (for bandwidth, copyright, or other reasons) then including the CD media is a good idea. Find out where things seem to balance and make your decision from there.
It was FreeBSD with FrontPage extensions through yesterday evening, but must have been moved to a different machine (or masked with fake server headers) over the night.
If it makes you feel better, it's useless for us on April 1st. Same shit, different day. :-/
Oh, I don't know about that. Sure, it's bad when it's the only line of defence, but as a mere "first" line I think it's perfectly reasonable. (Just as it's a reasonable defence to, say, have your web server misidentify itself, or to have an unlisted phone number, or what have you.) As long as the layers of security behind this first one are robust, obscurity is perfectly reasonable as a front line defense.
No offence, but thank god you're not, buddy... :)
Oh baloney, they work all the time. Maybe you should consider putting down the standard /. party line and try putting some of this hyperbole into perspective. If secrets have never worked then why is the story of the Trojan Horse so famous? If secrets have never mattered then why is the element of surprise considered to be so tactically valuable? If secrets didn't matter to security then why did Nixon have those 18 minutes of blank tape, and why did Cheney turn in thousands of blank documents, and why do all governments bother classifying things as top secret?
If you're in a position of just stupendously overwhelming strength -- like say if the US were to invade Bermuda tomorrow -- then no I don't suppose you need to be all that secretive about things. For everyone else, in every other situation, secrets can have an important role to play. Even if trolls would suggest otherwise.
Ok, but [a] that's still third party, not Apple (but it's still interesting to learn -- thanks), and [b] there's still a big difference between a G4 that might have a couple of CPUs on one hand, and the 16, 32, and 64 way high-end systems that this FUD campaign seems to really be about. As far as I know, OSX hasn't been ported to anything at all like this kind of hardware, and though it can do nice clean SMP across a couple of processors, I don't know if that translates to the ability to scale up to these much larger systems. Even beyond what the actual case looks like, *that* is what I'm saying is minimally a couple of years away...
Not that I disagree with this specific example or your point in general, but this isn't a particularly strong counterargument to the MS anti-unix campaign. Yes, OSX is nice, and yes it coul even be a good server, but I would be very reluctant to do that at this point. It's a young and still not quite polished OS, and it currently runs on hardware that excels as a workstation but might not be so competitive as a high end server (no rack-mount models now and I doubt there would be any on the horizon). And while you can start & stop these services with the click of a button, it's still valuable to know how to work with them at the command line / config file level.
As nice as Aqua is, I don't think I'd want to have it running (or even installed, maybe) on a dedicated server -- it takes too much CPU and it's an extra point of possible failure or system compromise. Darwin by itself might be okay, but I don't see the benefit of using it over any other BSD. And if you're going to run raw Darwin without Aqua, then why bother using OSX at all? Seen that way, it's just a young & as yet unproven BSD clone, and you might as well go with the originals there.
None of this is meant to knock OSX. I'm typing this from an OSX box, as I compile Mozilla in a different window and have an ssh/pine session open in another. I love OSX as a desktop Unix system (even if it doesn't have the "adduser" command, by the way ;-). But from what I can tell of MS's anti-Unix campaign, high-end Unix is the target, not desktop-Unix. Of the two main desktop Unix variants -- Linux and OSX -- they're fighting the former on different fronts while embracing the latter as another bit revenue source for Office. The target is Sun, IBM, etc -- and that's just an area that Apple isn't even seriously trying to compete in right now. Maybe in two or three years they'll be experimenting with that market, but not today.
Once you've divided your enemies and picked off or embraced the ones you can, you're left with the ones you can't buy or beat. And when all else fails and you find out that you really can't buy or beat your enemy, you might as well slander them, right?
I'm really not trying to "look down my nose" at anyone here. Just because *I* think "Friends" is the most boring thirty minutes a week doesn't mean that the millions of others that enjoy the show have to change their minds, and I'm fine with that. Most of them would probably find my shelf full of O'Reilly books just as boring, and that's okay with me. But I'm not kidding when I say that I really *do* think that most of the stuff is just ambitiously awful, as if they're trying to outdo each other in terms of how bad these shows can be. I really do think that it's incredibly difficult to be an informed member of society when all you get is the slash & burn pap on broadcast news, and I really do think it's an insult to think that the infotainment on shows like "Dateline" is in any way insightful, investigative, or, well, relevant. Others disagree. That's okay. I don't want everyone to see things my way anyhow.
But my main point remains. Think what you will of the shows, but the commercials is where the real creativity seems to be these days. They have a lot more freedom to do innovative stuff within their "must sell in thirty seconds" format, than the regular shows get to do in 22 or 48 minutes of paint by numbers genre programming. Even if all they do is amuse, that in my opinion is a head start over their competition.....