I do not disagree with anything you have said. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it is justified, instead I am saying that is understandable.
Right after 9/11 there were articles stating that the use of torture as a means of obtaining information should now be acceptable. I understand why people might ask for that, but that does not mean I agree with them.
I guess I am also saying that the reality is that both sides in pretty much any conflict bend and break the rules. There are no knights in shining armour.
Take WWII. The allies bombed numerous towns with the sole intention of killing civilian populations, the aim being to cause terror among the populations and destroy morale on the home front. Does that mean that they were really the evil ones in the war? Does it mean that Germany was the "white knight"? No, the reality is that the allies were less bad than the Germans. To their credit they did end attacks of this sort, partly on moral grounds.
The point I am trying to make is that things are not as black and white as we would like them all to be.
Take the Middle East, do we side with the Israelis even though their state sanctions torture, has bombed an apartment block filled with civilians and fired tank shells into a crowd of unarmed civilian protestors? Or do we side with the Palestinians who send in suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians, condone torture and celebrate when they hear of the 9/11 attacks?
I think a better way (using more than one word) to put what I meant is the impression of stability to those evaulating the product. Stability means as much in that case knowing that you can depend on the company as much as you can depend on the product.
SQL Server has been around for a while, and importantly has been around as an enterprise level database for a while. If you include Sybase, it has been around for even longer. It is a mature product, and that includes everything that goes with that: 1. Bugs worked out of the system 2. KB articles (or equivalent) for common issues 3. Active developer community 4. APIs that cannot be changed quickly due to existing market penetration
I think that postgres lacks all of these to the outside eye. On the other hand I think that Postgress developers are going to be much more responsive to bugs than SQL Server developers. I'm using SQL Server as an example here but you could equally be talking about Oracle or DB2.
I have heard anecdotal evidence of some instabilities in the product itself, but that is certainly not evidence. I would be interested to see some comparisons with different size databases (say going up to 1TB or so) over time.
I've built and continue to maintain a web application that consists mainly of 65,000+ lines of ASP code (With some perl, VB, the odd batch file and a boatload of SQL Server procs. This application is very stable. I could rewrite it in php or.Net, and have the same stability.
The platform doesn't make a whole lot of difference to stability. The programmer does.
I code ASP (always) and ASP.NET (sometimes) in textpad...
I'm interested to know, have you got a syn file that does decent highlighting for ASP? I've found that Textpad seems to get confused by the <%%>.
I personally find myself still using Interdev (and swearing under my breath a lot) mainly because it offers decent syntax highlighting and because of intellisense.
Sorry, but when someone starts deliberately murdering innocent civilians he instantly loses any moral claims he may have had.
No. The moral high claims are likely to be somewhat diminished, if not removed, but they may not be totally removed. Suppose the person who is doing the killing of hundreds is avenging the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians?
The Palestinian suicide bombers would argue that they are avenging those innocent palestinans killed by the Israeli army, with some justification.
People/groups generally fit somewhere between extremes on a moral scale. All you can claim is that you are closer to one extreme than the other.
BTW I am not condoning murdering innocent civilians, I am just pointing out that in many cases these things tend to degenerate and neither side can claim the absolute moral high ground.
I like reading history, although I am by no means an expert, and I have noticed one thing: Change does not happen quickly. When it does happen quickly, it is equally quickly undone and we return to the earlier state or near the earlier state.
I think that the article's author is expecting change to happen quickly and this is a mistaken belief. You cannot change a whole community quickly, there is a lot of inertia. How do you tell someone who til last week has been your best coder that they are doing things wrong?
Microsoft started its secure computing intiative 2 years ago, we are only seeing some fruits of that now. News from Iraq, the newly elected prime minister is alleged to have executed 6 insurgents personally, echoes of Saddam.
I'd agree with that. I have long held that people are stpuid, many irretrievably so. But occasionally they do have a point. And in that case when you hold IE up next to mozilla this is one area where mozilla lacks something. IE sucks in so many other ways when comapred to mozilla, but here it is better. And maybe the mozilla developers should look into it.
Let's try to keep a little perspective here. All programs have failings and limitations. No program is a cure all without any failings. It is worthwhile pointing out one of those failings, while still recognising the benefits.
Hello!! You said it yourselves! NONSTANDARD. Its websites that aren't perfect, not the browser. *head explodes*
This is however a signifigant problem. Define what you mean by standard. There are effectively two sets of standards for HTML, CSS, Javascript: W3C and IE. Note the word effectively. While IE has signifigant market share and looks lik remaining that way, it is acceptable to ignore the W3C standards and concentrate on the IE "standards". And that is in fact what a lot of web developers have done, hence the problem we face now.
And it is possible to argue that this is a problem with Mozilla because it is not supporting both "standards". I personally wouldn't argue that lone though.
Every time some one points out a problem with some open source app/baby, at least more than one person posts a reply telling them that they are wrong. Impressive.
It is like the man who went to the doctor and said, "doctor my shoulder hurts when I lift my arm up". The doctor said "don't lift your arm".
What you are really saying is that I should change how I use my computer to match the application I am using, rather than the application changing to fit *my* needs?
Maybe I should always leave the browser on. But wait, I need to start it when I boot up. Ah in that case I shouldn't shut down. But wait, I have a laptop. In that case I should buy another high performance battery and never travel more than 3 hours from a power point. Yep I think that has solved it. Expcept for the fact that I am running windows and "teh computer reb00ts all the time". Oh no, we are doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU.
This is just one bug. IE has a long history of bugs.
Secondly it could be argued that this is a bug in windows. Sure it should have been anticipated by the mozilla developers, but this is not of the scale of the bugs that we see in IE.
Here's a thought. It is possible that Microsoft is hiring smart people because they need them to solve some serious problems. Like backwards compatibility back to 95, like compatibility with existing windows software, all the while trying to introduce some new technologies (you have to give them some credit for.Net).
I do think that this is a less useful reason to hire smart people.
Forgive my ignorance but I thought that Yukon slipped as a result of Longhorn slipping. I seem to recollect that there were technologies in Longhorn that were going to be used in Yukon. The reverse may also be true, ie Yukon cannot be finished until longhorn is finished because lonhorn uses some Yukon tech (eg winFS).
The interesting thing with Yukon and Longhorn is that betas for both are available to some right now, however neither is slated for release this year.
I think you overestimate it, and are clearly ignorant of some key facts with regard to it.
You assert that, however I see nothing in your answer that suggests that you have a better understanding than I do.
That's not true at all. You are ignoring many books from several Eastern philosophies. The Baghavad Ghita, the Dhamapada, the Analects of Confusius, the I Ching, Sun Tzu's Art of War. All of these have been around for at least centuries, in some cases millenia, and are at least as "tested" as the Bible.
The two points I made about the bible were the claims it made and it's authenticity. On those grounds I think we can eliminate Art of War. I have to admit that I haven't read any of the others, or studied them so I will have to take your word for that. However each of those books (as far as I am aware) was written by one author, not ~40. The bible is more unique than you imagine.
Fictional characters, on the other hand, have no support for their existence other than documentation, and therefore need a lot of it.
You are saying that the more evidence of someone's existence, the less likely they are to have existed. That is a novel argument.
Not really, in light of the actual evidence. The fact is that there are no complete copies older than 900AD, and there are no fragments older than 300AD, and there is strong evidence that entire books have been removed (the Dead Sea Scrolls are a prime example, but by no means the only one).
Now that is interesting. Here was I thinking that the dead sea scrolls proved that it was possible for the bible to traverse those thousands of years without being altered chinese whispers style. This argues somewhat against your next point.
Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence of tampering in the Bible itself. For example, the idea of a soul is a Greek concept, and doesn't exist at all in historical Hebrew philosophy, which holds that it is the Jewish race that is eternal, not the spirit or essence of the individual.
Read Ezekial 37. Then read John 11:24. There is a clear conception of the resurrection, or life beyond the what we see. Secondly if you read the New Testament it is clear that the nation of Israel is replaced by the church (all Christians) under Christ. This body (and all the people in it) is raised to new life with Christ (fulfilling the OT prophecies). The Old and New Testaments hang together.
Interestingly, the vast majority of early converts were brought in by Paul, a greek who never even met Jesus. I'm sure it's mere coincidence that many of the miracles performed by Jesus had supposedly also been performed by the patron demigod of Paul's home village.
Ah, on that you are completely wrong. Paul was a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin (this is one of the purest of the 12 tribes of Israel). That fact that he came from Tarsus, has no impact on his being a Jew. I'd also be interested to know where get the information on the demigod. I mean that seriously, I would like to dig further. You might note that in Acts on the day of Pentecost that thousands convert under the teaching of the disciples (Paul was an apostle not a disciple).
Additionally, the term "Son of God" was quite common in those times, and refered to any Jewish male. Everyone else was a "Son of Man".
This is a little left field but I'll comment. Jesus is referred to as both.
(Sorry, I don't have any documentation of any of this handy, these are just a few things I remember from the World Religeons class I took many years ago. The instructor, whose name was Moorman, spent 8 years in a seminary college before dropping since, as a homosexual, he was considered an irredemable sinner
jammed a DIMM in backwards (this is hard -- the slot is asymmetric to avoid this very thing)
I thought I was the only one to do this! It gets kind of hot doesn't it. This wasn't my first DIY system.
My other gem was to blow several power supplies in exactly the same way. That is by shorting the power pins of the front panel connector using a screwdriver. It is hard to get a good contact and the intermittant contact tends to be bad for the power supply. I've blown 3 that way. After the third I ripped a button out of the front panel of an old machine.
IUnless you are using some bastardized code like ASP or JSP
In case you aren't aware ASP is server side and the browser is client side. ASP and JSP generate HTML on the server that is passed to the client to render. Both ASP and JSP can be used to generate HTML that conforms to the standards and HTML that doens't. The same goes for Perl, PHP, ASP.Net etc.
Your OS only needs to have one flaw capable of giving remote root, and you're insecure. The other security flaws are just extras that make it harder to get back to secure when patching things up... so long as there's one way to get total control, you can be 0wned and the rest just doesn't matter at that point.
You are never totally secure. Never. So by your argument we are always in the off position. On the other hand if you have 9 out of an available 10 patches, if someone tries one of those exploits you are fine.
Repeat after me, the only secure box is one that is turned off, isn't connected to any interfaces, is encased in concrete and buried 6 feet under. And then only maybe.
You aren't secure if you are fully patched. You aren't secure if you are fully patched and have a firewall, but you are more secure.
There are bugs in all software (including ROM). Some can be exploited to provide unauthorised access.
Slashdot Mirror
And here you thought iPods were just for music
I bet that is all they'll end up being used for.
It will burn, Mission Impossible style.
I do not disagree with anything you have said. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it is justified, instead I am saying that is understandable.
Right after 9/11 there were articles stating that the use of torture as a means of obtaining information should now be acceptable. I understand why people might ask for that, but that does not mean I agree with them.
I guess I am also saying that the reality is that both sides in pretty much any conflict bend and break the rules. There are no knights in shining armour.
Take WWII. The allies bombed numerous towns with the sole intention of killing civilian populations, the aim being to cause terror among the populations and destroy morale on the home front. Does that mean that they were really the evil ones in the war? Does it mean that Germany was the "white knight"? No, the reality is that the allies were less bad than the Germans. To their credit they did end attacks of this sort, partly on moral grounds.
The point I am trying to make is that things are not as black and white as we would like them all to be.
Take the Middle East, do we side with the Israelis even though their state sanctions torture, has bombed an apartment block filled with civilians and fired tank shells into a crowd of unarmed civilian protestors? Or do we side with the Palestinians who send in suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians, condone torture and celebrate when they hear of the 9/11 attacks?
I am sorry, that was a bit of troll.
I think a better way (using more than one word) to put what I meant is the impression of stability to those evaulating the product. Stability means as much in that case knowing that you can depend on the company as much as you can depend on the product.
SQL Server has been around for a while, and importantly has been around as an enterprise level database for a while. If you include Sybase, it has been around for even longer. It is a mature product, and that includes everything that goes with that:
1. Bugs worked out of the system
2. KB articles (or equivalent) for common issues
3. Active developer community
4. APIs that cannot be changed quickly due to existing market penetration
I think that postgres lacks all of these to the outside eye. On the other hand I think that Postgress developers are going to be much more responsive to bugs than SQL Server developers. I'm using SQL Server as an example here but you could equally be talking about Oracle or DB2.
I have heard anecdotal evidence of some instabilities in the product itself, but that is certainly not evidence. I would be interested to see some comparisons with different size databases (say going up to 1TB or so) over time.
Stability.
Oh dear! I so much wanted to be a real developer.
I guess I've lost so much cred I'll have to start editing my files off the HD using a magnet.
Nice troll.
.Net, and have the same stability.
I've built and continue to maintain a web application that consists mainly of 65,000+ lines of ASP code (With some perl, VB, the odd batch file and a boatload of SQL Server procs. This application is very stable. I could rewrite it in php or
The platform doesn't make a whole lot of difference to stability. The programmer does.
I code ASP (always) and ASP.NET (sometimes) in textpad...
I'm interested to know, have you got a syn file that does decent highlighting for ASP? I've found that Textpad seems to get confused by the <%%>.
I personally find myself still using Interdev (and swearing under my breath a lot) mainly because it offers decent syntax highlighting and because of intellisense.
Sorry, but when someone starts deliberately murdering innocent civilians he instantly loses any moral claims he may have had.
No. The moral high claims are likely to be somewhat diminished, if not removed, but they may not be totally removed. Suppose the person who is doing the killing of hundreds is avenging the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians?
The Palestinian suicide bombers would argue that they are avenging those innocent palestinans killed by the Israeli army, with some justification.
People/groups generally fit somewhere between extremes on a moral scale. All you can claim is that you are closer to one extreme than the other.
BTW I am not condoning murdering innocent civilians, I am just pointing out that in many cases these things tend to degenerate and neither side can claim the absolute moral high ground.
This should have been apparent after ABU Graib.
I like reading history, although I am by no means an expert, and I have noticed one thing: Change does not happen quickly. When it does happen quickly, it is equally quickly undone and we return to the earlier state or near the earlier state.
I think that the article's author is expecting change to happen quickly and this is a mistaken belief. You cannot change a whole community quickly, there is a lot of inertia. How do you tell someone who til last week has been your best coder that they are doing things wrong?
Microsoft started its secure computing intiative 2 years ago, we are only seeing some fruits of that now. News from Iraq, the newly elected prime minister is alleged to have executed 6 insurgents personally, echoes of Saddam.
Which will make it even more interesting.
I'd agree with that. I have long held that people are stpuid, many irretrievably so. But occasionally they do have a point. And in that case when you hold IE up next to mozilla this is one area where mozilla lacks something. IE sucks in so many other ways when comapred to mozilla, but here it is better. And maybe the mozilla developers should look into it.
Let's try to keep a little perspective here. All programs have failings and limitations. No program is a cure all without any failings. It is worthwhile pointing out one of those failings, while still recognising the benefits.
I think you may be missing the point.
It is standard. It follows the standards set by IE. The reality is that there are two sets of standards, IE and W3C.
Hello!! You said it yourselves! NONSTANDARD. Its websites that aren't perfect, not the browser. *head explodes*
This is however a signifigant problem. Define what you mean by standard. There are effectively two sets of standards for HTML, CSS, Javascript: W3C and IE. Note the word effectively. While IE has signifigant market share and looks lik remaining that way, it is acceptable to ignore the W3C standards and concentrate on the IE "standards". And that is in fact what a lot of web developers have done, hence the problem we face now.
And it is possible to argue that this is a problem with Mozilla because it is not supporting both "standards". I personally wouldn't argue that lone though.
You've got to love /.
Every time some one points out a problem with some open source app/baby, at least more than one person posts a reply telling them that they are wrong. Impressive.
It is like the man who went to the doctor and said, "doctor my shoulder hurts when I lift my arm up". The doctor said "don't lift your arm".
What you are really saying is that I should change how I use my computer to match the application I am using, rather than the application changing to fit *my* needs?
Maybe I should always leave the browser on. But wait, I need to start it when I boot up. Ah in that case I shouldn't shut down. But wait, I have a laptop. In that case I should buy another high performance battery and never travel more than 3 hours from a power point. Yep I think that has solved it. Expcept for the fact that I am running windows and "teh computer reb00ts all the time". Oh no, we are doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU.
This is just one bug. IE has a long history of bugs.
Secondly it could be argued that this is a bug in windows. Sure it should have been anticipated by the mozilla developers, but this is not of the scale of the bugs that we see in IE.
Here's a thought. It is possible that Microsoft is hiring smart people because they need them to solve some serious problems. Like backwards compatibility back to 95, like compatibility with existing windows software, all the while trying to introduce some new technologies (you have to give them some credit for .Net).
I do think that this is a less useful reason to hire smart people.
Forgive my ignorance but I thought that Yukon slipped as a result of Longhorn slipping. I seem to recollect that there were technologies in Longhorn that were going to be used in Yukon. The reverse may also be true, ie Yukon cannot be finished until longhorn is finished because lonhorn uses some Yukon tech (eg winFS).
The interesting thing with Yukon and Longhorn is that betas for both are available to some right now, however neither is slated for release this year.
On a slight tangent, I believe that the Russian Space program was classified as an Artillery program.
I think you overestimate it, and are clearly ignorant of some key facts with regard to it.
You assert that, however I see nothing in your answer that suggests that you have a better understanding than I do.
That's not true at all. You are ignoring many books from several Eastern philosophies. The Baghavad Ghita, the Dhamapada, the Analects of Confusius, the I Ching, Sun Tzu's Art of War. All of these have been around for at least centuries, in some cases millenia, and are at least as "tested" as the Bible.
The two points I made about the bible were the claims it made and it's authenticity. On those grounds I think we can eliminate Art of War. I have to admit that I haven't read any of the others, or studied them so I will have to take your word for that. However each of those books (as far as I am aware) was written by one author, not ~40. The bible is more unique than you imagine.
Fictional characters, on the other hand, have no support for their existence other than documentation, and therefore need a lot of it.
You are saying that the more evidence of someone's existence, the less likely they are to have existed. That is a novel argument.
Not really, in light of the actual evidence. The fact is that there are no complete copies older than 900AD, and there are no fragments older than 300AD, and there is strong evidence that entire books have been removed (the Dead Sea Scrolls are a prime example, but by no means the only one).
Now that is interesting. Here was I thinking that the dead sea scrolls proved that it was possible for the bible to traverse those thousands of years without being altered chinese whispers style. This argues somewhat against your next point.
Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence of tampering in the Bible itself. For example, the idea of a soul is a Greek concept, and doesn't exist at all in historical Hebrew philosophy, which holds that it is the Jewish race that is eternal, not the spirit or essence of the
individual.
Read Ezekial 37. Then read John 11:24. There is a clear conception of the resurrection, or life beyond the what we see. Secondly if you read the New Testament it is clear that the nation of Israel is replaced by the church (all Christians) under Christ. This body (and all the people in it) is raised to new life with Christ (fulfilling the OT prophecies). The Old and New Testaments hang together.
Interestingly, the vast majority of early converts were brought in by Paul, a greek who never even met Jesus. I'm sure it's mere coincidence that many of the miracles performed by Jesus had supposedly also been performed by the patron demigod of Paul's home village.
Ah, on that you are completely wrong. Paul was a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin (this is one of the purest of the 12 tribes of Israel). That fact that he came from Tarsus, has no impact on his being a Jew. I'd also be interested to know where get the information on the demigod. I mean that seriously, I would like to dig further. You might note that in Acts on the day of Pentecost that thousands convert under the teaching of the disciples (Paul was an apostle not a disciple).
Additionally, the term "Son of God" was quite common in those times, and refered to any Jewish male. Everyone else was a "Son of Man".
This is a little left field but I'll comment. Jesus is referred to as both.
(Sorry, I don't have any documentation of any of this handy, these are just a few things I remember from the World Religeons class I took many years ago. The instructor, whose name was Moorman, spent 8 years in a seminary college before dropping since, as a homosexual, he was considered an irredemable sinner
jammed a DIMM in backwards (this is hard -- the slot is asymmetric to avoid this very thing)
I thought I was the only one to do this! It gets kind of hot doesn't it. This wasn't my first DIY system.
My other gem was to blow several power supplies in exactly the same way. That is by shorting the power pins of the front panel connector using a screwdriver. It is hard to get a good contact and the intermittant contact tends to be bad for the power supply. I've blown 3 that way. After the third I ripped a button out of the front panel of an old machine.
IUnless you are using some bastardized code like ASP or JSP
In case you aren't aware ASP is server side and the browser is client side. ASP and JSP generate HTML on the server that is passed to the client to render. Both ASP and JSP can be used to generate HTML that conforms to the standards and HTML that doens't. The same goes for Perl, PHP, ASP.Net etc.
What exact UN Security Council resolution did "France, Russia, Germany and so on" break?
They broke a US Security Council resolution.
The one that says "We are always right".
Security is in some ways a binary state.
Excuse me?
Your OS only needs to have one flaw capable of giving remote root, and you're insecure. The other security flaws are just extras that make it harder to get back to secure when patching things up... so long as there's one way to get total control, you can be 0wned and the rest just doesn't matter at that point.
You are never totally secure. Never. So by your argument we are always in the off position. On the other hand if you have 9 out of an available 10 patches, if someone tries one of those exploits you are fine.
Repeat after me, the only secure box is one that is turned off, isn't connected to any interfaces, is encased in concrete and buried 6 feet under. And then only maybe.
You aren't secure if you are fully patched. You aren't secure if you are fully patched and have a firewall, but you are more secure.
There are bugs in all software (including ROM). Some can be exploited to provide unauthorised access.