How long did we know that the year 2000 would pose a problem for legacy and other craptacular computer systems? How long before that date did the industry actually begin to address them?
It's always a problem for "next quarter". Unless it damages (profits|revenues|share price) right now, fixing it is just a cost center.
Isn't it terrible, how society coddles the weak, the sick, the old, the feeble, the lame, the blind? The whole-bodied majority are weighed down and forced to drag the defectives with us into the future.
I'm sure the insurance companies would love that, and maybe after a few high-profile bankruptcies and ruined lives people will start to take this seriously.
Well, if the ruined lives include innocent victims who don't receive an insurance settlement and who will receive virtually nothing after bankrupting the perpetrator, I'm not so much in favor of it.
About the only mitigation I can see is if the perp is parted out and his organs are auctioned to the highest bidder, all proceeds to the victim.
If those twerps don't take right off, promptly and immediately, when the light turns green, not only should they be arrested, but they should be executed. Painfully.
Besides, distracted people aren't always as "stopped" as they think they are. I've seen several instances of people (texting, or yakking on the cell) inadvertently easing up on the brakes and unknowingly drifting into the intersection or the bumper of the car in front of them. (Or behind them, if facing up on a steep hill.)
And when the unthinkable happens, it's someone else's fault.
"Dammit, it's not my fault! What was that old lady doing in the street, anyways!" "She was crossing the street. At a crosswalk. With an active "Walk" signal. And you ran the red." "It's a street. Pedestrians NEVER BELONG IN THE STREET. It's not my fault, and she had it coming!" "And the young mother with the baby in the stroller, on the sidewalk beyond the intersection, that you ran over too?" "That's not my fault either! It's the old lady's fault for making me go up on the sidewalk!"
I think I'm exaggerating. But I can't really be sure.
They're not mutually exclusive; the rhetoric of example "X" above has been used in recent history in support of exactly the same vile and evil racism as example "Y" above.
Yeah, the lack of neutrality is kind of interesting.
"Google is not evil" returns an instant page. "Google is good" returns an instant page. "Google is evil"... doesn't. "Google is awesome" is even a suggested auto-completion.
Of course, the embargo isn't perfect. "Google is tasty" has an instant page, but so does "Google is nasty".
"Google is now evil" still returns an instant. This, in contrast with the blank page for "Google is evil", when the former has ~ 41,000,000 hits, and the later has ~ 80,800,000 hits. That's a good counter-argument someone might make that it's based on the size of the returned space. There seems to be some of that: "Google is peristeronic" also doesn't have an instant return, and that search has 185 hits.
Excellent trollage. Wow. That has the absolute ring of sincerely-held and honestly-stated opinion, while simultaneously being so completely out there that it has to attract massive energetic flamage.
Meh. This is/. There are more militant Pastafarians here then slashdotters who actually believe in the mythical "social".
My own social needs are modest, but my wife must be frantic by now. Pretty much her entire extended family over the whole North American continent conducts a continuous virtual family reunion on Facebook.
That is the entire point of having an open source project is that the developers don't have to be experts.
For matters of net-wide security, if you aren't an expert, you need to have an expert, BEFORE public visibility, if there's ANY risk the exploitable code can escape into production.
Or do you think Linus is some great wizard of security back when he wrote the very first version of Linux?
And how highly anticipated was the initial Linux release? What was the resulting threat surface? How much practical risk was the pre-alpha of the kernel?
People seem to think that criticism of Diaspora is of OS development philosophy. In and of itself, it isn't (and doesn't be, although it might be if the critic is weighting his argument to support an anti-OS bias.) But again, the OS philosophy doesn't excuse catastrophic results, even temporary ones. Basic ethical responsibility requires that your openness is tempered by your understanding of the community environment. If there's even a slight risk your community is going to go off half-cocked on your "pre-alpha" code, you owe it to that community and the rest of the net to make sure the pre-alpha code cannot be used until it's secure.
Just because the current main developers aren't that great of security doesn't mean security is compromised, actually its the opposite, they can get security advice from professionals and other people who are good at security.
And they should have. Before dumping this on the world and saying "This is pre-alpha, don't run it!" with a wink and a sly nod.
TFA's author acknowledges that it's a pre-alpha preview release. In a sane world, that means no one should ever go on-line with this code. But this is not a sane world, and he very specifically addresses how this release should have been done:
If you put a gun to my head and said "Our donations came from 6,000 people who want to see progress, give me something to show them", I would have released the code that they had with the registration pages elided, forcing people to only add new users via Rake tasks or the console. That preserves 100% of the ability of developers to work on the project, and for news outlets to take screenshots, without allowing technically unsophisticated people to successfully sign up to the Diaspora seed sites.
In other words, defang the thing before you turn it loose on an unsuspecting community. If I can successfully develop an open-source backyard nuclear fission generator, and release the pre-alpha blueprints, I would be rightly criticized for the occasional containment failure and subsequent deaths or injuries.
Also, the attitude of "meh, the security issues are trivially easy to fix" completely misses the point. If the known issues are trivially easy to fix, why weren't they trivially easy to avoid in the first place? Because, apparently, the core developers aren't sufficiently competent or committed to actual application and architectural security. So there's no reason for confidence that there won't be another batch of crippling security flaws with each new release.
Yeah, a lot of the backlash is probably in response to the hype around Diaspora. But much of the danger is also because of the hype. If Diaspora were just another quiet little Sourceforge project, it might have the luxury of a slow and casual crawl towards reliable application security. But guess what, Diaspora is the current Open Source equivalent of Paris Hilton. Being this screwed up is not an option, when the project is under such scrutiny and subject to such high expectations.
"...I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."
--Charles Wilson, then President of General Motors[emphasis mine]
This snippet is often misquoted "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." But the literal misquoting is probably accurately characterized as a paraphrase, because the idea is embedded there, and I think a lot of people take it seriously.
That's the political philosophy Freedom advocates are up against. "Software patents are good for software companies, and therefore good for the nation." While economic processes aren't generally zero-sum, stuff surrounding intellectual property issues are significantly closer to "win-lose" than other components of capitalism, especially in the fast-moving arenas of computer technology.
I don't buy appliances from the crazy neighborhood appliance store that's had a perpetual "going out of business sale" for the last three years, either.
Clearly, you are mistaken. The only rational and sensible opinion on any matter is the one identical to mine. Therefore, no sane poster here can "disagree" in good faith. So, someone who "disagrees" can be safely presumed to be acting in bad faith and modded appropriately. (I.e., "Troll", "Flamebait", or the ever-effective "Overrated".)
Downloading over my connection would take... 19 hours, less than a day.
Downloading IS the instant gratification.
"Instant." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Instant" is "15 seconds!?! But I'm hungry NOW!"
I'm not much of an entertainment consumer, but I wouldn't consider "I'll start this download and watch it sometime tomorrow night" as even approximating "instant". Media-based entertainment not a priority, so I sure as Hell am not scheduling the next 24 hours of my life to accommodate it.
Physical media is perfect for the "impulse purchase, genuinely instant gratification" lifestyle expected of consumers (and many consumers strive to live up to).
Their in-depth chemical analysis of the lava in the volcanic caldera will reveal startling amounts of hydrocarbon and nitrogen gas. Someone will pin global warming on this, attempting to counter anthropogenic GW. Hilarity will ensue.
So, you're saying that fingerprint readers have beaten this attack? I hadn't heard that, but then I imagine "Now no longer vulnerable to Gummi Bear attack" isn't much of a marketing bullet point either.
Up Next: BSA claims that Open Source is the same as piracy. All software must be licensed, and those licenses must be purchased from member companies of the BSA.
From the same mindset that brought you "Skipping commercials is theft"
Never install the "dot-zero" version of ANYTHING for production
The devs are young. That means energetic and possibly well-intentioned, but inexperienced. If this works out, the OS community will be enriched by skilled and savvy devs who have seen the elephant and have the scars to prove it.
After all, "good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
Slashdot Mirror
And Nevinyrral's Disk, as well.
How long did we know that the year 2000 would pose a problem for legacy and other craptacular computer systems? How long before that date did the industry actually begin to address them?
It's always a problem for "next quarter". Unless it damages (profits|revenues|share price) right now, fixing it is just a cost center.
Isn't it terrible, how society coddles the weak, the sick, the old, the feeble, the lame, the blind? The whole-bodied majority are weighed down and forced to drag the defectives with us into the future.
Perhaps you're recommending a little racial hygiene?
Allow me to repeat another comment I made in this thread:
I'm sure the insurance companies would love that, and maybe after a few high-profile bankruptcies and ruined lives people will start to take this seriously.
Well, if the ruined lives include innocent victims who don't receive an insurance settlement and who will receive virtually nothing after bankrupting the perpetrator, I'm not so much in favor of it.
About the only mitigation I can see is if the perp is parted out and his organs are auctioned to the highest bidder, all proceeds to the victim.
If those twerps don't take right off, promptly and immediately, when the light turns green, not only should they be arrested, but they should be executed. Painfully.
Besides, distracted people aren't always as "stopped" as they think they are. I've seen several instances of people (texting, or yakking on the cell) inadvertently easing up on the brakes and unknowingly drifting into the intersection or the bumper of the car in front of them. (Or behind them, if facing up on a steep hill.)
Education and peer pressure will just bounce right off of the epidemic "It'll never happen to me, it only happens to careless people."
Incompetent people can't be convinced they're incompetent, even when it's startlingly obvious to everyone else.
And when the unthinkable happens, it's someone else's fault.
"Dammit, it's not my fault! What was that old lady doing in the street, anyways!"
"She was crossing the street. At a crosswalk. With an active "Walk" signal. And you ran the red."
"It's a street. Pedestrians NEVER BELONG IN THE STREET. It's not my fault, and she had it coming!"
"And the young mother with the baby in the stroller, on the sidewalk beyond the intersection, that you ran over too?"
"That's not my fault either! It's the old lady's fault for making me go up on the sidewalk!"
I think I'm exaggerating. But I can't really be sure.
They're not mutually exclusive; the rhetoric of example "X" above has been used in recent history in support of exactly the same vile and evil racism as example "Y" above.
"German power! We Germans have been oppressed for too long! Within living memory our ancestors were explicitly legally discriminated against!..."
Yeah, the lack of neutrality is kind of interesting.
"Google is not evil" returns an instant page. "Google is good" returns an instant page. "Google is evil"... doesn't. "Google is awesome" is even a suggested auto-completion.
Of course, the embargo isn't perfect. "Google is tasty" has an instant page, but so does "Google is nasty".
"Google is now evil" still returns an instant. This, in contrast with the blank page for "Google is evil", when the former has ~ 41,000,000 hits, and the later has ~ 80,800,000 hits. That's a good counter-argument someone might make that it's based on the size of the returned space. There seems to be some of that: "Google is peristeronic" also doesn't have an instant return, and that search has 185 hits.
Excellent trollage. Wow. That has the absolute ring of sincerely-held and honestly-stated opinion, while simultaneously being so completely out there that it has to attract massive energetic flamage.
Simply brilliant.
WTF, you're serious?
My bad.
Besides, Julian gets all the groupies.
No matter what it takes.
No? Not what you were thinking of?
Meh. This is /. There are more militant Pastafarians here then slashdotters who actually believe in the mythical "social".
My own social needs are modest, but my wife must be frantic by now. Pretty much her entire extended family over the whole North American continent conducts a continuous virtual family reunion on Facebook.
That is the entire point of having an open source project is that the developers don't have to be experts.
For matters of net-wide security, if you aren't an expert, you need to have an expert, BEFORE public visibility, if there's ANY risk the exploitable code can escape into production.
Or do you think Linus is some great wizard of security back when he wrote the very first version of Linux?
And how highly anticipated was the initial Linux release? What was the resulting threat surface? How much practical risk was the pre-alpha of the kernel?
People seem to think that criticism of Diaspora is of OS development philosophy. In and of itself, it isn't (and doesn't be, although it might be if the critic is weighting his argument to support an anti-OS bias.) But again, the OS philosophy doesn't excuse catastrophic results, even temporary ones. Basic ethical responsibility requires that your openness is tempered by your understanding of the community environment. If there's even a slight risk your community is going to go off half-cocked on your "pre-alpha" code, you owe it to that community and the rest of the net to make sure the pre-alpha code cannot be used until it's secure.
Just because the current main developers aren't that great of security doesn't mean security is compromised, actually its the opposite, they can get security advice from professionals and other people who are good at security.
And they should have. Before dumping this on the world and saying "This is pre-alpha, don't run it!" with a wink and a sly nod.
You're overlooking a few points.
TFA's author acknowledges that it's a pre-alpha preview release. In a sane world, that means no one should ever go on-line with this code. But this is not a sane world, and he very specifically addresses how this release should have been done:
In other words, defang the thing before you turn it loose on an unsuspecting community. If I can successfully develop an open-source backyard nuclear fission generator, and release the pre-alpha blueprints, I would be rightly criticized for the occasional containment failure and subsequent deaths or injuries.
Also, the attitude of "meh, the security issues are trivially easy to fix" completely misses the point. If the known issues are trivially easy to fix, why weren't they trivially easy to avoid in the first place? Because, apparently, the core developers aren't sufficiently competent or committed to actual application and architectural security. So there's no reason for confidence that there won't be another batch of crippling security flaws with each new release.
Yeah, a lot of the backlash is probably in response to the hype around Diaspora. But much of the danger is also because of the hype. If Diaspora were just another quiet little Sourceforge project, it might have the luxury of a slow and casual crawl towards reliable application security. But guess what, Diaspora is the current Open Source equivalent of Paris Hilton. Being this screwed up is not an option, when the project is under such scrutiny and subject to such high expectations.
Devil's advocate time!
The corporate good is the public good.
--Charles Wilson, then President of General Motors[emphasis mine]
This snippet is often misquoted "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." But the literal misquoting is probably accurately characterized as a paraphrase, because the idea is embedded there, and I think a lot of people take it seriously.
That's the political philosophy Freedom advocates are up against. "Software patents are good for software companies, and therefore good for the nation." While economic processes aren't generally zero-sum, stuff surrounding intellectual property issues are significantly closer to "win-lose" than other components of capitalism, especially in the fast-moving arenas of computer technology.
Yeah... that was my last purchase from them.
^^
I don't buy appliances from the crazy neighborhood appliance store that's had a perpetual "going out of business sale" for the last three years, either.
Clearly, you are mistaken. The only rational and sensible opinion on any matter is the one identical to mine. Therefore, no sane poster here can "disagree" in good faith. So, someone who "disagrees" can be safely presumed to be acting in bad faith and modded appropriately. (I.e., "Troll", "Flamebait", or the ever-effective "Overrated".)
Am I kidding, or am I serious? Good question.
Downloading over my connection would take... 19 hours, less than a day.
Downloading IS the instant gratification.
"Instant." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Instant" is "15 seconds!?! But I'm hungry NOW!"
I'm not much of an entertainment consumer, but I wouldn't consider "I'll start this download and watch it sometime tomorrow night" as even approximating "instant". Media-based entertainment not a priority, so I sure as Hell am not scheduling the next 24 hours of my life to accommodate it.
Physical media is perfect for the "impulse purchase, genuinely instant gratification" lifestyle expected of consumers (and many consumers strive to live up to).
OTOH, it is moist and delicious.
I postulate that, in spite of the published corporate history, Aperture Science must have started life as Oracle.
Their in-depth chemical analysis of the lava in the volcanic caldera will reveal startling amounts of hydrocarbon and nitrogen gas. Someone will pin global warming on this, attempting to counter anthropogenic GW. Hilarity will ensue.
So, you're saying that fingerprint readers have beaten this attack? I hadn't heard that, but then I imagine "Now no longer vulnerable to Gummi Bear attack" isn't much of a marketing bullet point either.
Up Next: BSA claims that Open Source is the same as piracy. All software must be licensed, and those licenses must be purchased from member companies of the BSA.
From the same mindset that brought you "Skipping commercials is theft"
FWIW, my take-aways on this topic are:
After all, "good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."