I read Playing in the sandbox - page and I really don't see what is so great in there compared to IE on Vista. Same NTFS Access Control Lists are used as any other Windows application. And I'm not 100% sure about this, but doesn't Chrome run on user privileges when IE (on Vista) uses more restricted privileges?
My understanding is that you can't totally sandbox browser unless you do it on kernel level like FreeBSD jail does. And even then browser must be able to access user files if user wants to upload something to the internet, and cookies of course.
But that enables, for example, me to vote "in behalf" of the whole family in the next elections, wouldn't it?
In my opinion, of course, there are some problems with elections in Finland but I don't think the actual voting happening is one of them. We have elections once a year at max so I don't think it is insurmountable problem to get to the election site. You have something about two weeks time to give your vote plus the actual election day. If you are sick in hospital, you get the change to vote from your sickbed.
Problem with the low voting activity is something to do with the candidates and parties. Candidates try to create images of themselves. Why don't they tell voters what they are actually trying to accomplish? Parties are sometimes so close together so that you can't tell a difference. Even in the god damn (excuse my language but I take this seriously) municipal elections no-one is telling the voter why he/she is running for the council! How can voter make a choice? By throwing the dice?
If I ever get the change to be a candidate again I have some nice ideas for my campaing:)
Oh yes. I forgot to write that only Finnish beer is considered second class. Imported beer on the other hand is thought to be snobby, maybe because it costs more.
And you have to remember that Finland is located in north-east part of Europe, next to Russia. There's a huge difference in habits if you cross the Baltic Sea and go, say, to Germany.
Electronic voting has been marketed as ultimately enabling voting by web, SMS, and whatever channels.
Internet-voting is absolute horror. It can be made technically sound but that's about it. Who can assure that it is my wife who gives the vote and not me who stole my wife's ID card or whatever (not that I would do so, just for example)? Who can assure that one isn't giving vote under physical threat? Rhetorical questions but current paper & pen method prevents these kinds of situations perfectly.
Alcohol during working hours is fine as long as you don't get drunk.
It is about insurance at least here in Finland. If you hurt yourself and someone goes and blathers that you had couple of beers on lunch insurance company says screw you, we won't pay.
But what comes to overall acceptance it gets weird. Glass of wine (12 centiliter) is OK with a meal, maybe cider is acceptable if its summer. Pint of beer is totally out of question because beer is considered second class alcohol which you only consume when you want to get drunk or when you watch ice-hockey. This is weird in my opinion. I don't drink alcohol but I don't frown on anyone who likes to take one or two beer in the middle of the work day. I mean, where's the difference? Of course ten beers would most certainly make a difference:)
Thank you very much! I wasn't in the know how counting goes in action and that cleared things up a lot.
Btw. I was counting votes last year in Kokoomus Puoluepäivät and there we had to disqualify, if I remember correctly, only one vote. I guess our party's voters are more adept in writing numbers. Just kidding...:)
And besides that is not even the point in my opinion. I was candidate in our municipality (but not in those in question) and I couldn't care less if one or two votes were missing. The issue I think is that we can now point our fingers and say "There, there is the problem. Now fix it!" and because this was forced on us by our goverment it is the goverment's job to fix the problem. So it is no matter if 1, 2, 3 or 50 percent of votes were lost. Just fix the damn problem and be done with it!
Of course fixing the problem means re-election to those municipalities. This way we get back to the democratic way of voting which how law writers meant it to happen when they wrote our Vaalilaki (law about elections) minus those stupid e-voting changes that were made in 2006 by our former parliament (and promoted by Tuija Brax).
and he'd pretty much stripped out my caching. Why? Because it used almost half a gig of RAM!
This goes off-topic but I had to write comment to this because I've stumbled couple of times in this kind of situation:)
My day job is to write business applications using C# / ASP.NET. I'm also written some web stuff with PHP. So I'm pretty much used to use the session to store... well, session data. This session data includes business transactions and business objects (I like to use ORM a lot).
Now for some reason I was told some time ago that I shouldn't do that. I was astounded! Why not, I go and ask. Because it consumes memory, was the answer. So now I'm either writing everything to view state (hidden input fields in web form, which makes page loads HUGE) or I'm constantly going all the way back to the database server 1 - 20 times on every page load. For heaven's sake our web servers has gigabytes of memory and couple of hundreds of kilobytes is too much?!
But there's still room for tampering the votes. There's always the question about public trust to the system also. Let me clear this up a bit. Oh, and I'm a Finn...
Traditional pen & paper method is almost 100% fool proof system. It is almost impossible to tamper the votes and here's why: Every party sets their own observer to overlook the counting. Any foul play is quickly discovered by observers. In order to fool the system you would need to bribe a whole lot of people.
With computer based counting all you need to do is tamper the code that counts the votes. Allthought I don't know if the counting machines are checked against the tampering.
Currently we, the voters, count on our old style voting method a great deal. But when faced with e-voting some questions tend to arise. Is this as fool proof as the old system? Is the machine coded correctly? etc. etc. We know what kind of mess the-company-which-should-not-be-named produces where ever it operates in public projects and this brings a great deal of untrust to the picture. Add our almost-totally-incompetent Minister of Justice Tuija "science fiction" Brax to the mix and we can pretty much forget about demcratic elections as we know it.
I would consider system which requires root access to send data to internet a) not very secure b) not very usable. And I really much doubt that you need root access to connect to internet on Mac OS X. UNIX permission model doesn't help shit in this kind of situation.
Thank the Creator, whoever he/it may be or not, that Finnish parliament decided to ditch electronic voting after one catastrophic failure in local elections (couple of hundred or so votes were lost and Finnish election law prohibits re-election in this case). Our Minister of Justice told us that no such failures can never-ever occur; it's just "science-fiction" and fearmongering even to consider such a thing! Well, that "science-fiction" just dropped it's "fiction" part.
If HP includes Firefox on their machines, having the IE binary around means that HP has to support two browsers
Well in that case all they need to do is to remove the Internet Explorer icon from user's desktop and Start menu. What they cannot do is to remove the actual libraries underneath IE or all hell would break loose. I, for one, would crawl over telephone lines and cables to OEM headquarter and have a little chat with them for making my programmer's life difficult.
And another thing. He doesn't want to run Steam with admin privileges, which is understandable, but he seems to be quite okay installing applications from unknown sources;)
Heh. So you had a problem where customer used Windows and different browsers. You solved the situation by making cross browser compatible code. Good for you.
But with rich Windows application you would not have even been in such situation at all:D
You could always use ClickOnce. No hassle, user just "clicks once" and be done with it.
I personally hate web apps. I hate to use them and I especially hate to write them. When customer wants web app it means he wants an app which works just like rich Windows app but on the allmight internet. This means lines and lines of hard-to-debug JavaScript, AJAX, heck load of CSS and headaches. And in 99,5 percent of cases they use single OS and single browser (Windows XP/IE 7) inside their own secured LAN thus demeaning the whole idea of web app. What I've understood is that the central idea of web application is that it is platform agnostic and mobile.
So in 99,9 percent of cases simple Windows Forms or WPF.NET application would do the trick with much less lines of code.
Ha! Car analogy time. This came to my mind the instant I read the fine summary.
I really don't know whats different between my Renault Megane and neighbour's Renault Laguna. Now, I'm thinking about switching my 10 year old Megane to new a Renault. Now which one would I choose? I have an idea! I'll check from Renault's local web site! Or even better, go to the store and ask.
The big question is, why is this any different from choosing between Windows versions?
You are correct, it doesn't work well with loops. I don't think gotos are bad but let me clear up this a bit.
When I was doing C stuff, I wrote device drivers for Windows 9x/NT/CE. I took this approach that I split my code to tiny little functions and trusted that the compiler would inline them if appropriate. So I tried to isolate all those nasty loops to sub-functions though this was not always possible. This allowed me to efficiently test those tiny functions. Well, I think this is clear to all (or at least should be) so enough with the blathering...
I ended up, in my opinion of course, with some nice looking code and I could avoid goto-clauses which were considered bad amongst our most purist coders. This approach also tidied up the cleanup code which I also split inside those sub-functions. It would have really been pain in the ass otherwise.
So actually the code was something like this:
int do_some_loopy_loop() {
int retval = 0;
while (...) {
if (!ok) {
retval = -1;
break;
}
}/* Clean up local stuff */
return retval; }
void initialize_em_all() {
while (0) {
if (do_some_loopy_loop() 0) {/* If there's something special to cleanup do it here.
We could use goto here but that would piss
off rest of the coders.
In the end it doesn't really matter. */
break;
}
}/* Clean up local stuff */ }
Weird. Slashdot doesn't like my C-style comments:(
Slashdot Mirror
I read Playing in the sandbox - page and I really don't see what is so great in there compared to IE on Vista. Same NTFS Access Control Lists are used as any other Windows application. And I'm not 100% sure about this, but doesn't Chrome run on user privileges when IE (on Vista) uses more restricted privileges?
My understanding is that you can't totally sandbox browser unless you do it on kernel level like FreeBSD jail does. And even then browser must be able to access user files if user wants to upload something to the internet, and cookies of course.
Allthough I've been known to be wrong :)
Probably, not always. I have two years of commercial school behind and I'm myyntimerkantti ;)
But that enables, for example, me to vote "in behalf" of the whole family in the next elections, wouldn't it?
In my opinion, of course, there are some problems with elections in Finland but I don't think the actual voting happening is one of them. We have elections once a year at max so I don't think it is insurmountable problem to get to the election site. You have something about two weeks time to give your vote plus the actual election day. If you are sick in hospital, you get the change to vote from your sickbed.
Problem with the low voting activity is something to do with the candidates and parties. Candidates try to create images of themselves. Why don't they tell voters what they are actually trying to accomplish? Parties are sometimes so close together so that you can't tell a difference. Even in the god damn (excuse my language but I take this seriously) municipal elections no-one is telling the voter why he/she is running for the council! How can voter make a choice? By throwing the dice?
If I ever get the change to be a candidate again I have some nice ideas for my campaing :)
Oh yes. I forgot to write that only Finnish beer is considered second class. Imported beer on the other hand is thought to be snobby, maybe because it costs more.
And you have to remember that Finland is located in north-east part of Europe, next to Russia. There's a huge difference in habits if you cross the Baltic Sea and go, say, to Germany.
Internet-voting is absolute horror. It can be made technically sound but that's about it. Who can assure that it is my wife who gives the vote and not me who stole my wife's ID card or whatever (not that I would do so, just for example)? Who can assure that one isn't giving vote under physical threat? Rhetorical questions but current paper & pen method prevents these kinds of situations perfectly.
It is about insurance at least here in Finland. If you hurt yourself and someone goes and blathers that you had couple of beers on lunch insurance company says screw you, we won't pay.
But what comes to overall acceptance it gets weird. Glass of wine (12 centiliter) is OK with a meal, maybe cider is acceptable if its summer. Pint of beer is totally out of question because beer is considered second class alcohol which you only consume when you want to get drunk or when you watch ice-hockey. This is weird in my opinion. I don't drink alcohol but I don't frown on anyone who likes to take one or two beer in the middle of the work day. I mean, where's the difference? Of course ten beers would most certainly make a difference :)
Thank you very much! I wasn't in the know how counting goes in action and that cleared things up a lot.
Btw. I was counting votes last year in Kokoomus Puoluepäivät and there we had to disqualify, if I remember correctly, only one vote. I guess our party's voters are more adept in writing numbers. Just kidding... :)
And besides that is not even the point in my opinion. I was candidate in our municipality (but not in those in question) and I couldn't care less if one or two votes were missing. The issue I think is that we can now point our fingers and say "There, there is the problem. Now fix it!" and because this was forced on us by our goverment it is the goverment's job to fix the problem. So it is no matter if 1, 2, 3 or 50 percent of votes were lost. Just fix the damn problem and be done with it!
Of course fixing the problem means re-election to those municipalities. This way we get back to the democratic way of voting which how law writers meant it to happen when they wrote our Vaalilaki (law about elections) minus those stupid e-voting changes that were made in 2006 by our former parliament (and promoted by Tuija Brax).
This goes off-topic but I had to write comment to this because I've stumbled couple of times in this kind of situation :)
My day job is to write business applications using C# / ASP.NET. I'm also written some web stuff with PHP. So I'm pretty much used to use the session to store ... well, session data. This session data includes business transactions and business objects (I like to use ORM a lot).
Now for some reason I was told some time ago that I shouldn't do that. I was astounded! Why not, I go and ask. Because it consumes memory, was the answer. So now I'm either writing everything to view state (hidden input fields in web form, which makes page loads HUGE) or I'm constantly going all the way back to the database server 1 - 20 times on every page load. For heaven's sake our web servers has gigabytes of memory and couple of hundreds of kilobytes is too much?!
But there's still room for tampering the votes. There's always the question about public trust to the system also. Let me clear this up a bit. Oh, and I'm a Finn...
Traditional pen & paper method is almost 100% fool proof system. It is almost impossible to tamper the votes and here's why: Every party sets their own observer to overlook the counting. Any foul play is quickly discovered by observers. In order to fool the system you would need to bribe a whole lot of people.
With computer based counting all you need to do is tamper the code that counts the votes. Allthought I don't know if the counting machines are checked against the tampering.
Currently we, the voters, count on our old style voting method a great deal. But when faced with e-voting some questions tend to arise. Is this as fool proof as the old system? Is the machine coded correctly? etc. etc. We know what kind of mess the-company-which-should-not-be-named produces where ever it operates in public projects and this brings a great deal of untrust to the picture. Add our almost-totally-incompetent Minister of Justice Tuija "science fiction" Brax to the mix and we can pretty much forget about demcratic elections as we know it.
Yes, yes. Ubuntu fixes any possible hardware bugs in your boss' system. I'm sure he appreciates kernel panics more than BSODs.
Heeeyyyyy! Wait a minute! I haven't been drunk in over six months and I'm coding shitty business applications. Now take that you Finn hater! ;)
I would consider system which requires root access to send data to internet a) not very secure b) not very usable. And I really much doubt that you need root access to connect to internet on Mac OS X. UNIX permission model doesn't help shit in this kind of situation.
Thank the Creator, whoever he/it may be or not, that Finnish parliament decided to ditch electronic voting after one catastrophic failure in local elections (couple of hundred or so votes were lost and Finnish election law prohibits re-election in this case). Our Minister of Justice told us that no such failures can never-ever occur; it's just "science-fiction" and fearmongering even to consider such a thing! Well, that "science-fiction" just dropped it's "fiction" part.
... and revive as 'plugin'? I've never understood what's different between IE ActiveX component and Firefox plugin. Basically they do the same thing.
Well in that case all they need to do is to remove the Internet Explorer icon from user's desktop and Start menu. What they cannot do is to remove the actual libraries underneath IE or all hell would break loose. I, for one, would crawl over telephone lines and cables to OEM headquarter and have a little chat with them for making my programmer's life difficult.
And another thing. He doesn't want to run Steam with admin privileges, which is understandable, but he seems to be quite okay installing applications from unknown sources ;)
Heh. So you had a problem where customer used Windows and different browsers. You solved the situation by making cross browser compatible code. Good for you.
But with rich Windows application you would not have even been in such situation at all :D
You could always use ClickOnce. No hassle, user just "clicks once" and be done with it.
I personally hate web apps. I hate to use them and I especially hate to write them. When customer wants web app it means he wants an app which works just like rich Windows app but on the allmight internet. This means lines and lines of hard-to-debug JavaScript, AJAX, heck load of CSS and headaches. And in 99,5 percent of cases they use single OS and single browser (Windows XP/IE 7) inside their own secured LAN thus demeaning the whole idea of web app. What I've understood is that the central idea of web application is that it is platform agnostic and mobile.
So in 99,9 percent of cases simple Windows Forms or WPF .NET application would do the trick with much less lines of code.
Ha! Car analogy time. This came to my mind the instant I read the fine summary.
I really don't know whats different between my Renault Megane and neighbour's Renault Laguna. Now, I'm thinking about switching my 10 year old Megane to new a Renault. Now which one would I choose? I have an idea! I'll check from Renault's local web site! Or even better, go to the store and ask.
The big question is, why is this any different from choosing between Windows versions?
Yes it is funny that programs doesn't magically appear to repositiories. They have to be added there! ;)
You are correct, it doesn't work well with loops. I don't think gotos are bad but let me clear up this a bit.
When I was doing C stuff, I wrote device drivers for Windows 9x/NT/CE. I took this approach that I split my code to tiny little functions and trusted that the compiler would inline them if appropriate. So I tried to isolate all those nasty loops to sub-functions though this was not always possible. This allowed me to efficiently test those tiny functions. Well, I think this is clear to all (or at least should be) so enough with the blathering...
I ended up, in my opinion of course, with some nice looking code and I could avoid goto-clauses which were considered bad amongst our most purist coders. This approach also tidied up the cleanup code which I also split inside those sub-functions. It would have really been pain in the ass otherwise.
So actually the code was something like this:
int do_some_loopy_loop() { /* Clean up local stuff */
int retval = 0;
while (...) {
if (!ok) {
retval = -1;
break;
}
}
return retval;
}
void initialize_em_all() { /* If there's something special to cleanup do it here.
while (0) {
if (do_some_loopy_loop() 0) {
We could use goto here but that would piss
off rest of the coders.
In the end it doesn't really matter. */ /* Clean up local stuff */
break;
}
}
}
Weird. Slashdot doesn't like my C-style comments :(
This is the structure I used when I was writing stuff in C some ten years ago.
do {
if (condition1)
break;
do_something();
if (condition2)
break;
do_something_else();
}
while(0);
cleanup();
I find the saying "When dealing with idiot, make sure he's not doing the same" to be very appropriate from time to time :)
Yeah. Just like Linux hasn't improved a bit in almost twenty years. I'm still seeing this on the command line!
weicco@flamebait:
;)