I don't think that the actual language used is
important. The value of programming as a tool/toy
is that it let kids think in creative ways and
learn the value of structuring their creativity.
When I was 12-13 I did not have a computer, but I
loved designing game worlds and writing and
running adventures for my friends.
The actual skills involved in those activities
were valueless from a job skill perspective (and I
remember my Father despaired of my mania for
games and dislike of school). I did learn a lot
about creating generic
components, scenario planning, maintenance, and
emergency fixes when things went in a different
direction than I had planned.
As far as I can see game maker software is just
a better set of tools than the 3x5 cards,
notebooks, and miniatures I used. There is the
added benefit that it gets kids familiar with
some fundamental concepts of programming, and the
idea that a computer can be as a creative tool
that can itself be manipulated.
I keep seeing those "Fighter Maker" and "RPG Maker"
PS2 games on the shelves.
Seems like that would be
the thing to give a 12 or 13 year old to get them
interested in programming and maybe learn some of
it's basics.
Which is why we have no VPs. They aren't even allowed in the building. We found one in the lobby once, but we had him escorted outside.
Was he escorted out in a Star Trek style ritual with
spooky chanting, tons of mist and a portentous
speech about the Outlander or did you all just
poke him with a stick?
Okay. This raises the question of why, if the primary task of a manger is to simply take in input and regurgitate an obvious yes or no based on some simply risk and profit analysis that *anyone* could do, we need more than one manager per twenty engineers.
Not all places organize like that. My department
has one real management person (who is actually
very sharp about the technical capabilities of
our products), with three direct reports acting
as team leads, those team leads have 30
programmers, 8 testing people, an architect and a
program manager.
In my organization the manager does more than
make a simple yes or no decision based on what
he is spoon fed by underlings - he has to be
aware of the regulatory environment, company
strategy, employee capabilities, budget, and all
manner of other factors... and he hates zero
content BS because it obscures rather than
simplifies.
That doesn't mean that managers are unnecessary (collecting and summarizing information and handing it up the chain *is* a necessary task), just that there are a lot more of them than there should be.
Keeping VPs away from programmers is important
because I know very few programmers who can give
reasonable dates, especially in the face of the
kind of power games that VPs tend to play.:)
Non-technical web pages contain much less
verifiable information and seem to encourage
exaggeration and deception. Non-technical
information often masquerades as technical
information, as a gee-whiz number in a software
product, golly wow trade names for standard
capabilities in a hardware product, or meaningless
statistics about a golf club.
So it is not that technical people hate any web
page that isn't written in technobabble - it's
that we prefer substance over style. Those of us
who have been in the industry for more than
a couple years have a mistrust of any information
that is presented in too slick a manner, because
it is often specious, hysterically repeats one
or two dubious facts, or is omptimistic conjecture
regarding the real world behaviour of the system
in question.
Re:Actually, from the link listed...[OT]
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 1
I dislike the 1-click patent, but understand
a company using any legal competitive advantage.
I used amazon until they had ignored my
privacy preferences and shared my info with partners
a couple times. Their privacy policy is a bad joke
and I refuse to do business with them because of it.
I don't believe a word of it, but still a funny story. The only
real downside would be that you would have to pass
all those "confidential and proprietary" documents to an
outsider. If you do any work that involves M&A or Legal you
could wind up in some trouble with the SEC if your
sub-employee were to use the insider information that you
made available to him.
Too many companies seem to be forgetting this these days. If it's your core competitive advantage, you can't outsource it.
There is a flip side to this: "Never do something in house if
it is not a core competive advantage."
Customer service is almost pure cost and has long been
viewed as something to outsource whenever possible,
and IT is moving in this direction. New frameworks
have turned order entry, HR systems, email, document
repositories, databases, and such into basic IT components.
As a
programmer you don't want waste your time writing
basic components, you use a library. This is the
logic that is being applied to the decision to outsource
development of basic IT functionality.
Can anyone recommend an interesting and thought provoking piece of science fiction? The Locus list is 300 long and I want a narrower target than that.
Since you mentioned KSR's Mars books I'll suggest
"The Years of Rice and Salt" - an alternate
history by KSR. Some worthwhile classic short SF
by Robert Silverberg and Phillip K. Dick is being
reprinted and some of that is very interesting
stuff: "The Man in the High Castle" and "Dying
Inside" being two of the best.
The fact that the Locus list contains books by
Terry Brooks and Stephen Baxter
means that I would
never base my reading on their list.
I'm not saying that integration capabilities don't exist, but
they don't get that shiny Windows logo that consumers
who use Windows at home want to see as an assurance
that everything will "just work".
Palm sales took a huge hit after CE devices started
appearing. Synching a CE device with a Mac or Linux box
is possible, but a pain in the ass.
Microsoft can raise barriers to integration at any point. A
few strategic patents, some arbitrary format changes, and
consumers view a non-MS smart phone as just too much
trouble.
Linux is not screwed, but it is too early to start celebrating a
victory in the smart phone sphere - the Microsoft lock on
the desktop means they have a lot of leverage for all
smart devices that work with consumer desktop software.
That happened in a totally different context. So much so, that the fact that MS currently has 90+% of the desktop market doesn't matter *at all* in the context of smart phones.
Sure it does. PDA integration with the desktop is very
important to consumers. Beyond the use of a smart phone
as a PDA the non-business user will use it as a message
terminal, game machine, music player, and so on. Easy
integration with software on the desktop is at least as
important to that type of user.
About the only people who would not care at all would be
people who use the phone exclusively as a phone, and in
that case why would they want a "smart phone" anyway?
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I didn't think SMB was an open standard. I thought it was a MS proprietary protocol that others reverse engineered.
I don't know that SMB was ever a truly open standard,
but was developed in common between IBM, Intel, Digital,
and SCO (the real one). So it was
at least openly documented and somewhat designed
to allow systems from all these vendors to interoperate.
Yeah, if only Microsoft didn't hold a gun to the heads of the companies using their software and it was all just a level playing field.
That is why I state that there are different was in which
MS extends open standards.
enhancements. If MS offers an
easier way to pop open a window in ecmascript and
documents
it at msdn then lots of people will use it. No one is forcing
those developers to use the MS extension, but users
of the products of those developers and the developers
of implementations that need to interoperate are dragged
along for the ride.
bugs. If protocol x has a configuration
negotiation sub-protocol and the MS implementation has a
bug in its state transitions then all vendors must support
work arounds for the MS implementation to avoid being
seen as broken themselves.
misfeatures.
MS often adds features that are not properly thought out
and change the operation of a protocol in such a way
as to create some pretty hairy corner cases. Vendors
who do not want to be viewed as broken must deal with
these cases - even if they do not support the extension
themselves.
It is not simply a case of being better than MS, compatibility
requirements with MS sneak into all sorts of things -
sometimes as a technical requirement, sometimes as a
business decision, and sometimes as the payoff to a bit of
MS quid pro quo. Often the sheer size of MS removes the
choice on whether or not to be compatible with them,
especially in consumer software but more and more in
enterprise software.
Got another example of an open technology Microsoft has made proprietry?
You cannot generally make an open standard proprietary,
what MS is good at is "damage and dillition" of an open
standard. The enhancements, bugs, and misfeatures
contained in MS implementations of open technolgies tend
to become de facto extensions to the standard.
Examples:
PPP
HTML
mpeg4
SMB
SIP
Kerberos
DNS
ecmascript
They have varying degrees of success with this tactic, and
to be fair most vendors do the same thing - but because
of the market pentration that MS enjoys they are more
successful at it than most. Proprietary lock in and vendor
bashing is bad enough, once patents are added to the mess
MS becomes truly evil in this area.
1.) You die horrible death.
2.) You're privacy is infringed on.
pick one.
False choice, case #1 is only accepted as valid by anyone
because of the media frenzy about BSE.
If you buy cigarettes at the supermarket do you want to
notification every time some new health risk for smoking
is discovered? The idea of contacting you for your own
good can obviously be extended to the point of absurdity
very easily.
The in-memory data-structures are the network data structures. That are all packed on 1-byte boundaries. Can you say SIGBUS? A Conversion layer probably wouldn't be that hard, if it weren't build as ONE FREAKING LAYER!
Weak. How did the original team convince the compiler that
that was
okay? Even on architectures that allow a misalligned
memory access to complete it winds up slow as hell.
That's bullshit. I agree it was wrong, but where's the consistency when it comes to anybody else.. diebold, the MS halloween memos... all supposed to be internal memos that were leaked.
Leaked. Stolen.
Leaked. Stolen.
Any difference between the meaning of those two words
jump out and grab you yet?
Here is the answer (for those who's critical thinking abilities
have been erroded by too much conservative talk radio):
A leak is done by an insider with legitimate access to the
thing that they leak. It may be an insider who is
worried about the ethics of the actions of his employer, or
an insider who is angry at his boss and just wants to cause
trouble, or almost any other reason.
A thief has no justifiable access to the thing they steal. They
are either an outsider or an insider exceeding their level of
access.
Hi, I cannot compete against this, a better product that costs less. Please outlaw it as soon as possible. Competition is just so un-american!
If you read the pdf he repeats over and over that the free
products are only valuable because they stole from SCO.
The first couple times he says "in our opinion" and
"we believe" regarding the origin of the value of free
software, but by the end he is in full rant mode and
outright stating that North Korea has received valuable
stolen IP via Linux.
Kind of surprised the lawyers have not muzzled that moron
yet.
If you or I did something similar we'd be accused of attempting to break in to their electronic system or some such crime.
Exactly. Replacing a parameter in an http GET string is
considered hacking if done by a private citizen, but
any misuse of a private citizen's systems or
information seems to be okay when
done by a business.
Well I respectfully disagree with your disagreement:)
Spammers do prey on trust, and are scum - but aside from
their global reach how are they any different from a
con-man, burglar, or dealer in stolen goods?
I think the death penalty should be reserved for murder,
rape, and treason. Most spammers really are small time
crooks and should be dealt with in that manner, the leaders
should probably be dealt with any other organized crime
leader - nail them with every charge you can get and max
the penalties for each and every offense.
Spammers are people and some of them have a family and kids, too.
Sure, but spam generates a lot of emotion, frustration, and
hatred because of the unrepentant nature of the crime.
If you deal with spammers at all they tend to be
self-righteous and have an attitude of "I'm doing nothing
wrong and I'll never be punished", even as they steal
resources and damage reputations.
Spammers shouldn't be killed, tortured, raped, or any of the
other things many posters here are suggesting (and
those suggestions are mostly joking) - but those kinds
of sentiments are a natural reaction on the part of those
who are victimized with no recourse. Spammers need to go
to jail and make reparations.
Surveillance inevitable because AAA won't scale?
on
The Future of Security
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This article looks like another bit of soft sell for
intrusive surveillance by Berinato. If you have read his
articles in the past you may recognize this regretful
but "realistic" pose regarding government regulation.
However, as Dan Geer, former CTO of @Stake, notes, authentication can't possibly keep up with the number of people who need it and the number of transactions we try to control with it. Authentication doesn't scale. But
surveillance does.
...
Geer is convinced we're heading toward a broadly surveilled police state. "I'm sad about this," he says, "but I'm trying to be realistic."
So how would surveillance stop a bad guy from doing his
bad deeds, especially surveillance that uses the user's own
machine to spy on him. There is nothing "realistic" or useful
about this scenario, and I think Berinato is being a bit
disingenuous here by putting the suggestion in his expert's
mouth that it would be useful.
The twin notions: that 24/7 surveillance of every
computer in the US is possible, and that a national AAA
system is not possible are presented and no reason is
given - we are just to accept these 'facts' because they
appear in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was 12-13 I did not have a computer, but I loved designing game worlds and writing and running adventures for my friends. The actual skills involved in those activities were valueless from a job skill perspective (and I remember my Father despaired of my mania for games and dislike of school). I did learn a lot about creating generic components, scenario planning, maintenance, and emergency fixes when things went in a different direction than I had planned.
As far as I can see game maker software is just a better set of tools than the 3x5 cards, notebooks, and miniatures I used. There is the added benefit that it gets kids familiar with some fundamental concepts of programming, and the idea that a computer can be as a creative tool that can itself be manipulated.
I keep seeing those "Fighter Maker" and "RPG Maker" PS2 games on the shelves. Seems like that would be the thing to give a 12 or 13 year old to get them interested in programming and maybe learn some of it's basics.
Was he escorted out in a Star Trek style ritual with spooky chanting, tons of mist and a portentous speech about the Outlander or did you all just poke him with a stick?
Ah c'mon, the vapid models decorating the Microsoft site are actually charming in a 1999 kind of way.
Not all places organize like that. My department has one real management person (who is actually very sharp about the technical capabilities of our products), with three direct reports acting as team leads, those team leads have 30 programmers, 8 testing people, an architect and a program manager.
In my organization the manager does more than make a simple yes or no decision based on what he is spoon fed by underlings - he has to be aware of the regulatory environment, company strategy, employee capabilities, budget, and all manner of other factors... and he hates zero content BS because it obscures rather than simplifies.
That doesn't mean that managers are unnecessary (collecting and summarizing information and handing it up the chain *is* a necessary task), just that there are a lot more of them than there should be.
Keeping VPs away from programmers is important because I know very few programmers who can give reasonable dates, especially in the face of the kind of power games that VPs tend to play. :)
So it is not that technical people hate any web page that isn't written in technobabble - it's that we prefer substance over style. Those of us who have been in the industry for more than a couple years have a mistrust of any information that is presented in too slick a manner, because it is often specious, hysterically repeats one or two dubious facts, or is omptimistic conjecture regarding the real world behaviour of the system in question.
I used amazon until they had ignored my privacy preferences and shared my info with partners a couple times. Their privacy policy is a bad joke and I refuse to do business with them because of it.
I don't believe a word of it, but still a funny story. The only real downside would be that you would have to pass all those "confidential and proprietary" documents to an outsider. If you do any work that involves M&A or Legal you could wind up in some trouble with the SEC if your sub-employee were to use the insider information that you made available to him.
There is a flip side to this: "Never do something in house if it is not a core competive advantage."
Customer service is almost pure cost and has long been viewed as something to outsource whenever possible, and IT is moving in this direction. New frameworks have turned order entry, HR systems, email, document repositories, databases, and such into basic IT components. As a programmer you don't want waste your time writing basic components, you use a library. This is the logic that is being applied to the decision to outsource development of basic IT functionality.
Since you mentioned KSR's Mars books I'll suggest "The Years of Rice and Salt" - an alternate history by KSR. Some worthwhile classic short SF by Robert Silverberg and Phillip K. Dick is being reprinted and some of that is very interesting stuff: "The Man in the High Castle" and "Dying Inside" being two of the best.
The fact that the Locus list contains books by Terry Brooks and Stephen Baxter means that I would never base my reading on their list.
ISPs are not common carriers.
The legal responsibility which an ISP assumes for carrying traffic is still very much a grey area, at least in the US.
Palm sales took a huge hit after CE devices started appearing. Synching a CE device with a Mac or Linux box is possible, but a pain in the ass.
Microsoft can raise barriers to integration at any point. A few strategic patents, some arbitrary format changes, and consumers view a non-MS smart phone as just too much trouble.
Linux is not screwed, but it is too early to start celebrating a victory in the smart phone sphere - the Microsoft lock on the desktop means they have a lot of leverage for all smart devices that work with consumer desktop software.
Sure it does. PDA integration with the desktop is very important to consumers. Beyond the use of a smart phone as a PDA the non-business user will use it as a message terminal, game machine, music player, and so on. Easy integration with software on the desktop is at least as important to that type of user.
About the only people who would not care at all would be people who use the phone exclusively as a phone, and in that case why would they want a "smart phone" anyway?
I don't know that SMB was ever a truly open standard, but was developed in common between IBM, Intel, Digital, and SCO (the real one). So it was at least openly documented and somewhat designed to allow systems from all these vendors to interoperate.
That is why I state that there are different was in which MS extends open standards.
enhancements. If MS offers an easier way to pop open a window in ecmascript and documents it at msdn then lots of people will use it. No one is forcing those developers to use the MS extension, but users of the products of those developers and the developers of implementations that need to interoperate are dragged along for the ride.
bugs. If protocol x has a configuration negotiation sub-protocol and the MS implementation has a bug in its state transitions then all vendors must support work arounds for the MS implementation to avoid being seen as broken themselves.
misfeatures. MS often adds features that are not properly thought out and change the operation of a protocol in such a way as to create some pretty hairy corner cases. Vendors who do not want to be viewed as broken must deal with these cases - even if they do not support the extension themselves.
It is not simply a case of being better than MS, compatibility requirements with MS sneak into all sorts of things - sometimes as a technical requirement, sometimes as a business decision, and sometimes as the payoff to a bit of MS quid pro quo. Often the sheer size of MS removes the choice on whether or not to be compatible with them, especially in consumer software but more and more in enterprise software.
You cannot generally make an open standard proprietary, what MS is good at is "damage and dillition" of an open standard. The enhancements, bugs, and misfeatures contained in MS implementations of open technolgies tend to become de facto extensions to the standard.
Examples:
- PPP
- HTML
- mpeg4
- SMB
- SIP
- Kerberos
- DNS
- ecmascript
They have varying degrees of success with this tactic, and to be fair most vendors do the same thing - but because of the market pentration that MS enjoys they are more successful at it than most. Proprietary lock in and vendor bashing is bad enough, once patents are added to the mess MS becomes truly evil in this area.2.) You're privacy is infringed on.
pick one.
False choice, case #1 is only accepted as valid by anyone because of the media frenzy about BSE.
If you buy cigarettes at the supermarket do you want to notification every time some new health risk for smoking is discovered? The idea of contacting you for your own good can obviously be extended to the point of absurdity very easily.
Weak. How did the original team convince the compiler that that was okay? Even on architectures that allow a misalligned memory access to complete it winds up slow as hell.
Leaked. Stolen.
Leaked. Stolen.
Any difference between the meaning of those two words jump out and grab you yet?
Here is the answer (for those who's critical thinking abilities have been erroded by too much conservative talk radio):
A leak is done by an insider with legitimate access to the thing that they leak. It may be an insider who is worried about the ethics of the actions of his employer, or an insider who is angry at his boss and just wants to cause trouble, or almost any other reason.
A thief has no justifiable access to the thing they steal. They are either an outsider or an insider exceeding their level of access.
If you read the pdf he repeats over and over that the free products are only valuable because they stole from SCO.
The first couple times he says "in our opinion" and "we believe" regarding the origin of the value of free software, but by the end he is in full rant mode and outright stating that North Korea has received valuable stolen IP via Linux.
Kind of surprised the lawyers have not muzzled that moron yet.
Exactly. Replacing a parameter in an http GET string is considered hacking if done by a private citizen, but any misuse of a private citizen's systems or information seems to be okay when done by a business.
So these are the obnoxious fuckers that leave empty messages, dead air, and fax tones on my voice mail?
Why isn't this considered electronic trespass or hacking?
Spammers do prey on trust, and are scum - but aside from their global reach how are they any different from a con-man, burglar, or dealer in stolen goods?
I think the death penalty should be reserved for murder, rape, and treason. Most spammers really are small time crooks and should be dealt with in that manner, the leaders should probably be dealt with any other organized crime leader - nail them with every charge you can get and max the penalties for each and every offense.
Spammers are people and some of them have a family and kids, too.
Sure, but spam generates a lot of emotion, frustration, and hatred because of the unrepentant nature of the crime. If you deal with spammers at all they tend to be self-righteous and have an attitude of "I'm doing nothing wrong and I'll never be punished", even as they steal resources and damage reputations.
Spammers shouldn't be killed, tortured, raped, or any of the other things many posters here are suggesting (and those suggestions are mostly joking) - but those kinds of sentiments are a natural reaction on the part of those who are victimized with no recourse. Spammers need to go to jail and make reparations.
The twin notions: that 24/7 surveillance of every computer in the US is possible, and that a national AAA system is not possible are presented and no reason is given - we are just to accept these 'facts' because they appear in the article.