To me those differences are bigger than you make them
out to be.
The music itself is created without company resources. The
production and distribution are the expensive resources
that the company can provide, and many companies treat
use of those resources as a loan that will be paid back.
I acknowledge that some music is created to spec, and I
think a lot of people would agree with me that such music
is valueless junk - and the people paid to perform it should
not be considered artists as they are not creators.
A programmer is paid a salary and works according to
specifications provided by his employer, using company
resources. An author or artist is not salaried and does
not use company resources or work to spec.
I should note that if we do have less variable length allocations, then, we less likely need programming languages that make variable length easy. A more conservative, almost retro programming technique could make for faster, more secure programming.
This is my prefered method of programming - the problem
lies in convincing users to accept arbitrary restrictions.
The next best thing is to wrap all dynamic allocations in
protected functions with paranoid checks built right in.
Asserts are not enough, they document programming
decisions and can prevent a large number of programming
errors, but are not suitable for catching runtime errors
or abuse of the system.
Both the original and this completely beg the basic question -- in much of the 20th century people had a very vivid picture of The Future, accurate or inaccurate. Today, that sense has completely disappeared. Why?
Just saying over and over that it's so, as this response does and most of the comments here last time did don't explain WHY it's so.
I disagree that people have lost their vivid picture of the
future. The difference is that the picture has
fragmented and there is no common vision for the future.
The
popular SF of each period always had a common set of
assumptions: galactic empires, police states, hive minds,
AI, human-machine interfaces, rampant crime, evil aliens,
psionics, benevolent aliens, human immortality, and so
on. The vision of the future (which finds its way into SF) has
always depended on what is happening in the real world
and at this point we have little agreement about
what is happening in the world.
The future presented in popular SF these days tends to be
somewhat depressing -
Vinge went from the "singularity" to the "age of failed
dreams", Banks has always been more than slightly bitter,
Williamson has a future in which humanity has been subjegated for thousands of years, even the wildly
optimistic Brinn has lost the faith in a bright and shiny
future.
SF still offers vivid pictures of the future - but the image
of the future as a better place has mostly disapeared.
So some of the SF reading public has switched to fantasy,
or fantasy masquerading as SF, or Clancey.
anyone can form an organization to make standards
, but they dont' mean anything if nobody wants to follow them.
IEEE has a fair amount of credibility with the U.S.
government - this standard could easily become a
purchase requirement like POSIX.
microsoft will just make their own standards and ignore the ones already set.
MS will support this standard if it is a purchase
requirement.
I think it is more likely that MS will have an inconvenient
BOSS mode, they will then be able to point to users failure
to use that mode as the reason for security failures
In the same manner MS
has supported POSIX for a long time, they just kind of sneer
at it and suggest you write native apps instead.
I'd reply to your implication that SWG is a
"non-fun" game, but I have to get back to work
killing the swarms of butterflies and prairie dogs
that seem to infest every planet in the known
universe.
15 more hours and I'll grind enough experience to
qualify for the elite puppy stomper profession....
and some storm trooper armor.
Another of Heinlein's early works I really like is The Past Through Tomorrow
Yeah, I forgot about that one - it had some great stories
in it. Apparently Number of the Beast and To
Sail Beyond the Sunset were so bad they destroyed
the happy memories of the Future History stuff I had
liked earlier.
Not quite as badly as Heinlein messed up his own series with dreck like Number of the Beast
I think RAH must have pissed of all the good editors by the
time he wrote that stinker.
But maybe I'm a poor judge, "the cat that walks though
walls" and "the moon is a harsh mistress" are his only
books I liked after the age of 14.
Hmm, I think you might be talking about the IT dept at
my company. Engineering winds up building its own
systems much of the time because IT takes forever and
builds crap that doesn't do what it needs to, fails to scale,
is too slow, or all of the above. I've seen good
projects taken from engineering and turned into typical
IT projects (ie big, dumb, and slow). Engineers moved into
IT often transfer back, quit, or are fired because the culture
doesn't allow "worker bees" to make decisions.
It might be that there is something wrong with
the American IT industry - friends of mine at
other companies report pretty much the same situation
that I've seen.
It seems every new overused slashdot joke gets old faster than the last.
So true.
It's like we are approaching some sort of bad joke
singularity, the cliches are moving so fast they start to blur
together.
They shoot horses don't they?
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Next up, authenticated delivery, whitelisting, and the death of the mail server as we know it.
Why not? Self hosting and mail are already pretty
much dead as user hosted services.
The combination of comcast, verizon, qwest, and
other "last
mile" providers replacing the ISP (and disallowing
servers) and large ISPs (esp AOL) refusing to
accept SMTP originated from the indie ISPs ip
blocks that remain has pretty much killed off the mail server as it existed until 2001.
Might as well start budgeting for a cert of
some variety right now if you plan to run a mail
server in the future.
At this stage of the game, MSN doesn't look like much of a threat to the One True Search Engine.
Initial version of IE didn't look like much of a threat either.
4.X after they turned off active desktop by default was the
first good version, they took over pretty fast after that.
As a few people have mentioned that these are called
polymorphic viruses and have been around for some
time. Now that viruses sizes have grown so much I've
always been a bit surprised that no every wrote a mini-bios
for their worm, in order to avoid the regex and behaviour
blocking that catches polymorphic viruses.
Combine polymorphism and very simple encryption
(maybe xor based on an object-id and some machine based
value) of the nasty code, have a random set of activation
settings to foil activation testing and the result could be
very hard to identify and stop.
Guile -- This is a complete bitch to build and install, in my experience. I understand the need for scripting in an application like this, but why not pick a good language like Perl:)
In my experience guile is pretty easy to build, my only
problem with guile is the speed at which functions are
deprecated. You often wind up with a dependancy on
libguile version X (and only version X) which clashes with
the version required by another app which requires version
Y (and only version Y).
(define (.sig) (list 'my 'other 'car 'is 'a 'cdr))
was actually my first run at the sig, but I
decided that it was not sufficiently lispy
and added the 'cons' to make the joke clearer to
anyone who had a vague memory of lisp or scheme
from school but not thought about it since.
I almost used a self printing statement instead,
but would have had to use short variables to
keep the sig under 120 char and
decided I liked the joke about a joke about a joke
better anyway.:)
If your company ever purchases cisco software
(or cisco purchases a company who's software you
use) be prepared for this opinion to change.
I never had a problem that anyone other than the
software engineers were able to handle, and several
that they could not. The first and second level
support people barely knew anything about the
product and were obviously reading off a script
whenever I spoke with them.
I'm not sure what ticketing/tracking support
software they use, but it seems to have issues.
Every time I called support we had an argument
about whether I had a contract or not, and
several times was sent email regarding cases
opened by people at other companies. I just have
to wonder if the details of cases for which I had
opened tickets were misrouted in the same manner.
Tech support is one of the most thankless jobs out there...
Having a service job (any service job) will teach
you a truth about human nature: Some people are
jerks.
Tech support just seems worse than other service
jobs, it's not even in the top 10. I agree that
it is stressful and thankless, but so is fast
food or retail.
Slashdot Mirror
The music itself is created without company resources. The production and distribution are the expensive resources that the company can provide, and many companies treat use of those resources as a loan that will be paid back.
I acknowledge that some music is created to spec, and I think a lot of people would agree with me that such music is valueless junk - and the people paid to perform it should not be considered artists as they are not creators.
A programmer is paid a salary and works according to specifications provided by his employer, using company resources. An author or artist is not salaried and does not use company resources or work to spec.
Posters: whenever you feel the urge to type that phrase, please reconsider.
Mods: whenever you see someone has given in to temptation and used that phrase, please justify it and mod that post down.
This is my prefered method of programming - the problem lies in convincing users to accept arbitrary restrictions.
The next best thing is to wrap all dynamic allocations in protected functions with paranoid checks built right in. Asserts are not enough, they document programming decisions and can prevent a large number of programming errors, but are not suitable for catching runtime errors or abuse of the system.
Just saying over and over that it's so, as this response does and most of the comments here last time did don't explain WHY it's so.
I disagree that people have lost their vivid picture of the future. The difference is that the picture has fragmented and there is no common vision for the future.
The popular SF of each period always had a common set of assumptions: galactic empires, police states, hive minds, AI, human-machine interfaces, rampant crime, evil aliens, psionics, benevolent aliens, human immortality, and so on. The vision of the future (which finds its way into SF) has always depended on what is happening in the real world and at this point we have little agreement about what is happening in the world.
The future presented in popular SF these days tends to be somewhat depressing - Vinge went from the "singularity" to the "age of failed dreams", Banks has always been more than slightly bitter, Williamson has a future in which humanity has been subjegated for thousands of years, even the wildly optimistic Brinn has lost the faith in a bright and shiny future.
SF still offers vivid pictures of the future - but the image of the future as a better place has mostly disapeared. So some of the SF reading public has switched to fantasy, or fantasy masquerading as SF, or Clancey.
IEEE has a fair amount of credibility with the U.S. government - this standard could easily become a purchase requirement like POSIX.
microsoft will just make their own standards and ignore the ones already set.
MS will support this standard if it is a purchase requirement. I think it is more likely that MS will have an inconvenient BOSS mode, they will then be able to point to users failure to use that mode as the reason for security failures In the same manner MS has supported POSIX for a long time, they just kind of sneer at it and suggest you write native apps instead.
I'd reply to your implication that SWG is a "non-fun" game, but I have to get back to work killing the swarms of butterflies and prairie dogs that seem to infest every planet in the known universe.
15 more hours and I'll grind enough experience to qualify for the elite puppy stomper profession.... and some storm trooper armor.
Yeah, I forgot about that one - it had some great stories in it. Apparently Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond the Sunset were so bad they destroyed the happy memories of the Future History stuff I had liked earlier.
The only person I've ever seen use the term correctly was Darl McBride, and he used it to say the kind of silly crap he always says.
I think RAH must have pissed of all the good editors by the time he wrote that stinker. But maybe I'm a poor judge, "the cat that walks though walls" and "the moon is a harsh mistress" are his only books I liked after the age of 14.
It might be that there is something wrong with the American IT industry - friends of mine at other companies report pretty much the same situation that I've seen.
Ah c'mon AC, you'll always be a '10' to me.
So true. It's like we are approaching some sort of bad joke singularity, the cliches are moving so fast they start to blur together.
Why not? Self hosting and mail are already pretty much dead as user hosted services.
The combination of comcast, verizon, qwest, and other "last mile" providers replacing the ISP (and disallowing servers) and large ISPs (esp AOL) refusing to accept SMTP originated from the indie ISPs ip blocks that remain has pretty much killed off the mail server as it existed until 2001.
Might as well start budgeting for a cert of some variety right now if you plan to run a mail server in the future.
That depends on whether you use AT&T style week or Vixie week.
Initial version of IE didn't look like much of a threat either. 4.X after they turned off active desktop by default was the first good version, they took over pretty fast after that.
As a few people have mentioned that these are called polymorphic viruses and have been around for some time. Now that viruses sizes have grown so much I've always been a bit surprised that no every wrote a mini-bios for their worm, in order to avoid the regex and behaviour blocking that catches polymorphic viruses. Combine polymorphism and very simple encryption (maybe xor based on an object-id and some machine based value) of the nasty code, have a random set of activation settings to foil activation testing and the result could be very hard to identify and stop.
Why not a duck?
In my experience guile is pretty easy to build, my only problem with guile is the speed at which functions are deprecated. You often wind up with a dependancy on libguile version X (and only version X) which clashes with the version required by another app which requires version Y (and only version Y).
I almost used a self printing statement instead, but would have had to use short variables to keep the sig under 120 char and decided I liked the joke about a joke about a joke better anyway. :)
I never had a problem that anyone other than the software engineers were able to handle, and several that they could not. The first and second level support people barely knew anything about the product and were obviously reading off a script whenever I spoke with them.
I'm not sure what ticketing/tracking support software they use, but it seems to have issues. Every time I called support we had an argument about whether I had a contract or not, and several times was sent email regarding cases opened by people at other companies. I just have to wonder if the details of cases for which I had opened tickets were misrouted in the same manner.
Having a service job (any service job) will teach you a truth about human nature: Some people are jerks.
Tech support just seems worse than other service jobs, it's not even in the top 10. I agree that it is stressful and thankless, but so is fast food or retail.
Wow it's late. I actually read that as "root you" and had to catch it on the double-take.
That said - 27%? I don't believe it. You need to provide a link to credible evidence to back up that number.
Quo usque tandem abutere, SCO, patientia nostra?