If your interface is complex, why are you using HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc?
A better question might be, why is your interface complex?
I do think HTML/CSS/JavaScript can handle complex interfaces, but I also think a complex interface is its own form of code smell. Sometimes you really need it.
Why not take advantage of a more advanced and mature UI widget set, such as that provided by Java
The JVM is a bitch to install, compared to a browser. (I know, it's easy. It's still a ridiculous number of steps compared to the "Get Firefox" links.) More users are likely to have a working browser already than a working JVM, let alone the widget set you want. And with a browser, you can gracefully degrade to whatever denominator makes sense, giving your users the ability to access the application from anywhere that has a decent browser (or not-so-decent, depending what you support).
But both Java and browsers have an advantage over native (compile-once, run-anywhere) -- and the native widgets themselves, whether or not you're in a portable language, are not portable, so you'd want an abstraction layer (Qt, WxWidgets, etc) at some point, if you want a portable app.
The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience.
Depends what you mean by "rich".
In what other platform can you open multiple screens of an application in tabs, just by middle-clicking on the buttons (or 'links') to them? Or bookmark a chunk of the application (possibly application state, also)? Or script the application's UI, easily, even applying arbitrary customizations which apply to all applications?
And that's just scratching the surface -- I'm not counting what you can do with APIs and "widgets" in the Web sense, or mashups, or feedback and real-time collaboration...
Now, yes, you can add Web-like interfaces to native software -- the browser is, after all, a native app. But as you said, "don't shoehorn." At the end of the day, you may well have reinvented the wheel of the back button, forward button, hyperlink/tab UI, collection of bookmarks, easily zoomable text, etc... And don't get me wrong, that's not necessarily worse than reinventing GUI concepts like context menus (or lack thereof), keyboard bindings, menu bar, etc...
But which of these is it going to hurt the most when it doesn't feel "right" and "native"? That depends -- I can see a Mac user being frustrated by something which doesn't use the system's menu bar. But I can also see a native Web user being frustrated when their Greasemonkey script won't run, or that they have to send a screenshot if they want to show something cool to their friend...
I don't know that it's necessarily a step forward. I think it's a step forward for some things, a step back for others, and not entirely clear for most things.
An edge case. #39 on the list was the main point I was trying to refute -- that is, yes, my system is going to handle the vast majority of cases, and situations like yours -- sure, I'd like to handle those, but that's where it gets hard enough that there's no guarantees, even if I'm trying.
Also, "immigrant" implies that they're now a citizen, or at least a resident, meaning they'll have a legal name somewhere. What the system needs is to be able to update to that name, and sync with records associated with it, once he's coherent enough to communicate it. If he's not, put whatever name we can figure out, or give him a number until then.
I imagine quite a few Slashdotters might tell my parents to simply get an extra email address from GMail or whatever, but that's missing the point: namely, that the system already can't handle everything that's out there "in the wild".
Actually, it's exactly the point -- your parents are an edge case, and they can easily and pro-actively deal with sharing an email address. In fact, chances are, this isn't an issue -- if they can share an email address, they can almost certainly share an account in my system.
Now, we could just do it on login, but I think the activation-by-email route is still one of the better CAPTCHA-like systems.
Look up by name? Tokenize it and search it, the same way you'd do any other fulltext search.
and greet them on the phone?
Ah, but if you've got them on the phone, you've likely already tied them to their account anyway, by all the other data you've got on them -- mailing address, phone number, etc. Each of these present their own problems, of course...
I wasn't trying to trivialize the problem of querying this data. I was trying to point out that what you need to know, when writing an application, is to store the original text as a mostly opaque blob. Then, as we figure names out together, you can get more and more sophisticated about querying it.
Also, until you get that sacred name, you have some name. Changing names is perfectly legitimate. Having no name is the part that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
For a brief but wonderful window of time, it looked like the Web was going to be the new platform.
Then Apple came along and fucked it up.
Please explain: Why does this need to be an iPhone app? I keep hearing about more and more iPhone apps which would make just as much sense -- more sense, even -- as web apps, and that includes the iTunes store itself. (WTF is the point of making the iTunes store DRM-free if I still need a specific, proprietary client program to purchase stuff with?)
It seems to me that most misconceptions about names can be fixed by the following:
Allow a single, Unicode-enabled field of "unlimited" length (let's say 4 kilobytes) which represents "name". Several would be defined by different roles -- "Real name", "Nickname", "login", where only login (sometimes simply an email address) is required to be globally unique.
Now let's look at what that breaks:
First, #1, 2, 4, and 5. How am I supposed to avoid assuming these? People should be allowed to enter an arbitrary number of names for themselves? I suppose that's possible, but it immediately kills most of the potential uses of this data. If I want to set a nickname that goes with my forum posts, say, what good is it for me to have five nicknames? Seems like the only potential use would be making people easy to find by real name -- so, a social network.
#6 -- surely 4k is enough, but this is also not a terribly difficult assumption to change later. Annoying, but not devastating, not even as hard as changing from the first name / last name combination into one "real name" field.
#7, 8 -- most systems would make it trivial for people to change their names.
#9, 10 -- UTF8 is easy.
#11 -- very, very curious to see an example. And wouldn't that be a bug in Unicode? And this is again one where I have to ask -- how do you change this? Allow arbitrary images?
#12, 13 -- obvious solution is to make the name system case-preserving, thus allowing both case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches.
#14 -- again, avoid by simply allowing the name to be a single opaque field.
#15, 16, 17 -- if your name supports random unicode, no idea why these would be a problem.
#18 -- not sure why it matters.
#19, 20 -- again, if it's just arbitrary text, it just works.
#21, 22, 23 -- not sure how I'd make that assumption.
#24, 25, 26, 27 -- again, the name is just an opaque bunch of characters.
#28 -- what?
#29 -- opaque characters.
#30 -- keep the original text as-is. If you want to try to split people out by naming scheme, do it later, but keep the original. This should be a "duh" concept -- always preserve the original user input. Cache transformations for speed, if you like, but they're a cache -- keep the original. Your algorithm might change.
#31 -- bad idea to assume bad words won't cause problems in general. I currently play an MMO in which I physically can't talk about Emily Dickinson, and have occasion to more frequently than you might suspect.
#32-36 -- why would it matter? Unless...
#37 -- Fine, but how would I otherwise connect the same person?
#38 -- How about unicode-equivalent? And of course, they might not -- one might make a mistake, or the name might be represented differently. But you'd have to deal with typos anyway, so this isn't exactly shocking.
#39 -- I'm going to have to agree with the assumption, though. If I develop a system which works well for people who only follow the US standard, and I suddenly have a ton of people from China wanting to use my service -- enough that this is actually a problem for me -- that's a nice problem to have.
#40 -- People can make up names. I guess this explains #32-36, though.
The sense I get is that half the list is stuff you'd almost have to be stupid to run into (seriously, who doesn't use Unicode?), and the other half involves some seriously weird names and cultures that are going to have to meet me halfway, if they expect me to do anything interesting with their name. As I understand it, the only way to get this right would be to allow people to have zero or more names, each of which is either an unlimited amount of text in any encoding, or an image (raster or vector) of unlimited size. To query such a system requires insane amounts of logic just to deal with the text, and throw in some OCR for good measure.
I think this is a case where I would much rather see people evolve to match the technology, rather than the other way
His point about web design is just that, a point about web design.
And it's wrong.
Again, non-techies learning HTML were the ones abusing <blink>, MIDIs, etc. Eventually, the professional designers took over, which looked better, but was technically worse -- ever seen the HTML generated by Adobe GoLive?
What we have now is a decent compromise -- designers design, web developers implement, and I'm not just talking about sysadmins. Then throw in some edit fields and you've got a CMS, so content producers can add content, random anonymous cowards can comment, etc.
In other words: Design itself is not an IT function. Implementing that design often is. The designers should NOT be allowed HTML WYSIWYG tools, at least not for design work -- let them use Photoshop, let the new guy on the dev team translate it into proper semantic HTML and CSS (because nobody else wants to).
And yes plenty of large commercial sites had awful initial attempts at designs because no one realized this.
Plenty of sites, large and small, fall prey to one side or the other. You need both technical people and design people.
as a matter of policy it should not be their job to examine logs. That should be a management or HR function.
This is where I'm not sure if I agree, and why I'm not sure it's analogous. It absolutely should be IT's job to dig through logs, in that HR should not have unrestricted access to server logs or to the accounts which can talk to those server logs. It should go something like this:
HR: We think Smith has been slacking off. Check some recent logs. IT: He spent half his time on Facebook and the other half looking at porn. HR: Ok, we'll fire him.
This is the part I'm less sure of, though. I can see exposing the relevant information to HR, such that IT doesn't need to see it at all. That's entirely different than blaming IT people for the blink tag.
Employee monitoring is in the position today where web page creation was 15-20 years ago. It was an "IT Function," because the tools were new and computer-y. Eight million "blink" tags and six hundred thousand animated "under construction" GIFs later...
You're really going to blame the IT people for that? Blink tags, "under construction" GIFs, psychadelic animated backgrounds, and loud MIDIs and other forms of music playing when a page loads are all the kind of thing you get when you give the shiny new tech tools to non-technical people. What you're describing is basically Geocities, and later MySpace, and generally the Eternal September phenomenon.
I don't think the situation is analogous, though, because I do think designers should have access to these tools -- though I also think that any decent website is going to require a technical person at some point. But it seems to me that the problem here is the amount of monitoring, and the extent to which we don't watch the watchers, and I doubt that moving that to another department would solve anything.
As a tech, I'd be perfectly fine handing off responsibility once a violation is found, but until one is at least suspected, why monitor at all? And once one is suspected (which should be a rare event), why not tap IT to do what they do best -- configure things, look at logs, filter information -- and then let HR handle the human factor?
That depends very much what you mean by "good", which is why (I'm guessing) you put it in quotes. "Amateur" is an entire fetish of its own anyhow -- one which people pay for, oddly enough.
Agreed that some of it is art, but I very much doubt Pirates is at all close to that. An example of good acting? Maybe, but not the best example of "quality"...
Of course, I can't believe I'm actually getting into a critical discussion of porn. It's not that I think porn doesn't deserve to have its own critics, awards, etc -- it's more that I wonder what it says about me:(
In other words, a $100/year fee plus enough familiarity with development tools to compile an app and install it?
Meanwhile, there's still a slew of restrictions that dictate what and how you can develop stuff.
In other words, Apple has gone well out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to distribute apps independently, or to consume independently-distributed apps.
The DMCA already outlaws jailbreaking, and if it didn't, contract law might. It looks like this request was an attempt to get Apple to exempt people from that.
The useful part is that anything that's natively on the Web is something which can be pulled into other completely unrelated applications, without having to wire them directly into whatever database you're running.
In other words, it seems a bit like REST or AJAX in that it's a new name for a useful idea which has been around for awhile, even in use for awhile, but needed a name and a slogan to become a concrete concept.
Found yes, but, by WHOM is what matters, because malware makers &/or hacker-cracker types aren't going to use security vulnerabilities they find to HELP fix an OS
There's also those on the fence, who might go either way -- either help fix it (if they can), or release or even exploit it, out of frustration or to force the vendor to release a fix.
There's also the chance that more "good guys" are looking for them, and are likely to find them before the "bad guys" do.
So you're not going to accept this because I didn't explicitly say that others can find exploits? I mean, it's not enough that this is obvious in the language itself:
more vulnerabilities publicly found
I mean, was I either explicitly or implicitly saying that these are only ever found by people who would fix them? Maybe you could interpret this part:
found and fixed
Of course, they will eventually be fixed, no matter who finds them.
If you really want to claim that you had to force me to admit something against my will, when it was so clearly evident in the first post, you're going to need more than vagueness on my part. You're going to need evidence of me saying something contrary to that.
Oh, I use it as a "Term of endearment"
Would "fetid boils" be a "term of endearment" also?
So, on that note then: WHY DID YOU TOSS NAMES MY WAY HERE
I don't know, why did you toss "terms of endearment" my way?
And why are you still harping about this?
It's QUITE relevant to note that "Open 'SORES'" has a HUGE DOWNSIDE
It's evident in the same breath as mentioning the upside -- and it's not as huge as you paint it. Anything as obvious as you point out would obviously have been found and fixed already, or I would expect massively more exploits in the wild than we observe. Thus, we end up with (again, as I said) a more secure system overall than the proprietary software, in which you rely on security through obscurity to deal with the same sloppy programming techniques.
So again, I acknowledged the one fact you pointed out: more vulnerabilities are found, and they are more easily found, in open source software. I acknowledged it in my first post to you. I just disagree that it's a "HUGE DOWNSIDE" as you suggest.
Note: disagree. That doesn't mean I don't understand. It just means I disagree. But clearly, you need at least those two paragraphs (and possibly more) to explain a concept that most people (including the mods) understood in a single sentence.
Funny you cut off from the rest of the sentence in your quote:
The "it works both ways" is both obvious and irrelevant -- the question is whether it's a net positive or negative, and since the finding of bugs naturally leads to fixing them, and since the fixing of them leads to an overall more secure system (including known and unknown bugs), I thought I'd sufficiently acknowledged and addressed your argument.
You know, the one where I explain why it's irrelevant?
Either works to show you are guilty of illogic because they are ad hominem attacks,
On the contrary, they are both relevant to your near-constant appeals to authority -- if you are indeed a liar or a moron, you are also not an authority.
attacks here, near constantly directed MY way!
I know it seems that way when you quote one of the only things I said that could be construed that way in every post for five posts or more, but the fact is, I've said very little, compared to your constant "term of endearment" about open source, which you continue to use deliberately, knowing I don't like it, because I don't like it, which is pretty much the definition of trolling.
No, that's not going to wash now is it? Especially since your own words were quoted...
Are you saying you know what I meant better than me?
AND??
You also called me other derogatory things (like "dick" & more also).
Actually, I didn't. Go look for the quote. I know it's a fine distinction, maybe too fine for you to grasp, but it's there -- attacking your behavior is not the same as attacking you.
Oh, I proved right enough
Yep. Your loss. Oh well.
I mean...
Heh, you even provided me the ammo...
...you're still locked in this mindset that it has to be a competition, that it's all about winning. Has it occurred to you that it might be better to become right than to be right?
Yes, where you ONLY ADMITTED THE "UPSIDE" of "Open 'sores'" ONLY,
Oh really?
Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source,
That's not acknowledging that more vulnerabilities are found? What did you think I was saying here?...Oh, I see:
You FAILED to note what I have been stating here ALL along though, which IS THE "DOWNSIDE" of "Open 'SORES'" (yes, I know: It offends you that I use that term,
Yeah, it does. Why do you keep using it?
You initially stated, & not even to me, what the "upside" of open sores is,
Wrong. I stated both -- the yin and the yang. Found and fixed.
You seem obsessed with separating these two. I presented their sum as a net positive. I did so repeatedly:
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I said. I also explained why this is a good thing.
That was in reply to this:
if I have the sourcecode to an operating system, I have a FAR easier time of finding bugs in it
In other words, I was clarifying here that what you said (it's easier to find bugs) is pretty much what I said (it's easier to find and fix bugs) -- and that one naturally leads from the other. The "it works both ways" is both obvious and irrelevant -- the question is whether it's a net positive or negative, and since the finding of bugs naturally leads to fixing them, and since the fixing of them leads to an overall more secure system (including known and unknown bugs), I thought I'd sufficiently acknowledged and addressed your argument.
By contrast, you eventually tried to downplay the "easier to fix" part by asking whether I (a sample size of one) can fix the kernel myself. You also wasted both our time with a slew of posts trying to get me to "admit" something I acknowledged and addressed right away. It's a bit like if you said, "We never see a crocoduck," and I said, "And evolution never predicted one," and you said, "But we never see a crocoduck!" And then, when I finally say what you were looking for, you quotemine me -- "Yes, you're right, we never see a crocoduck, but..." and you say "See?! HE ADMITS IT!!!"
That's not just stupid. That's willful ignorance to the point of dishonesty.
But let's address the part where you actually lied:
First of all - that was not a reply to me, note that,
Erm, sorry, but when the truth is staring you in the face, what do you gain by lying?
Or were you talking about a different post of mine? Nope, it seems pretty clear:
"That's the important part. Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source, a process which leads to a more secure system" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Tuesday June 01, @02:09AM (#32415160) Journal
First of all - that was not a reply to me
Looks pretty clear. You're still talking about this post, which is still a reply to this post, which is still pretty clear.
So yeah, I think I'm justified in calling you a moron here. For all your "accomplishments", you've just said something which is absolutely, undeniably, factually wrong, despite the truth being a mere click away from the page you wrote that lie on. Calling you a moron would certainly be more generous than calling you a liar -- which do you prefer?
Good Lord, you finally had to ADMIT I was correct is more like it on that note...
Here it is again:
Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source,
Is that where I "admitted it"? Huh?
That was in my first post.
Clearly, that's not getting through your thick fucking skull, so here it is again:
THAT WAS IN MY FIRST POST.
you mean, AFTER I SAID IT
So, I said it in this post. You did not say it in this post. You, in fact, did not mention it until this post.
So where did you say it before me? Again: It was in my VERY FIRST reply to you. It was not hidden behind "doublespeak", it was right there. I even quoted it for you in my last post.
This is where you say "I'm sorry. I was wrong about that." But you won't. You'll whine about ad-hom -- if you acknowledge it at all. More likely, you'll find some twisted way to convince yourself, just so you don't have to admit defeat, because that is more important to you than truth or validity.
Slashdot Mirror
If your interface is complex, why are you using HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc?
A better question might be, why is your interface complex?
I do think HTML/CSS/JavaScript can handle complex interfaces, but I also think a complex interface is its own form of code smell. Sometimes you really need it.
Why not take advantage of a more advanced and mature UI widget set, such as that provided by Java
The JVM is a bitch to install, compared to a browser. (I know, it's easy. It's still a ridiculous number of steps compared to the "Get Firefox" links.) More users are likely to have a working browser already than a working JVM, let alone the widget set you want. And with a browser, you can gracefully degrade to whatever denominator makes sense, giving your users the ability to access the application from anywhere that has a decent browser (or not-so-decent, depending what you support).
But both Java and browsers have an advantage over native (compile-once, run-anywhere) -- and the native widgets themselves, whether or not you're in a portable language, are not portable, so you'd want an abstraction layer (Qt, WxWidgets, etc) at some point, if you want a portable app.
The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience.
Depends what you mean by "rich".
In what other platform can you open multiple screens of an application in tabs, just by middle-clicking on the buttons (or 'links') to them? Or bookmark a chunk of the application (possibly application state, also)? Or script the application's UI, easily, even applying arbitrary customizations which apply to all applications?
And that's just scratching the surface -- I'm not counting what you can do with APIs and "widgets" in the Web sense, or mashups, or feedback and real-time collaboration...
Now, yes, you can add Web-like interfaces to native software -- the browser is, after all, a native app. But as you said, "don't shoehorn." At the end of the day, you may well have reinvented the wheel of the back button, forward button, hyperlink/tab UI, collection of bookmarks, easily zoomable text, etc... And don't get me wrong, that's not necessarily worse than reinventing GUI concepts like context menus (or lack thereof), keyboard bindings, menu bar, etc...
But which of these is it going to hurt the most when it doesn't feel "right" and "native"? That depends -- I can see a Mac user being frustrated by something which doesn't use the system's menu bar. But I can also see a native Web user being frustrated when their Greasemonkey script won't run, or that they have to send a screenshot if they want to show something cool to their friend...
I don't know that it's necessarily a step forward. I think it's a step forward for some things, a step back for others, and not entirely clear for most things.
...but now Google Docs store arbitrary files, and Google Storage has a very Amazon S3-like API.
An edge case. #39 on the list was the main point I was trying to refute -- that is, yes, my system is going to handle the vast majority of cases, and situations like yours -- sure, I'd like to handle those, but that's where it gets hard enough that there's no guarantees, even if I'm trying.
Also, "immigrant" implies that they're now a citizen, or at least a resident, meaning they'll have a legal name somewhere. What the system needs is to be able to update to that name, and sync with records associated with it, once he's coherent enough to communicate it. If he's not, put whatever name we can figure out, or give him a number until then.
I imagine quite a few Slashdotters might tell my parents to simply get an extra email address from GMail or whatever, but that's missing the point: namely, that the system already can't handle everything that's out there "in the wild".
Actually, it's exactly the point -- your parents are an edge case, and they can easily and pro-actively deal with sharing an email address. In fact, chances are, this isn't an issue -- if they can share an email address, they can almost certainly share an account in my system.
Now, we could just do it on login, but I think the activation-by-email route is still one of the better CAPTCHA-like systems.
How do you represent this name on an invoice?
Verbatim.
how can phone support look up individuals,
Look up by name? Tokenize it and search it, the same way you'd do any other fulltext search.
and greet them on the phone?
Ah, but if you've got them on the phone, you've likely already tied them to their account anyway, by all the other data you've got on them -- mailing address, phone number, etc. Each of these present their own problems, of course...
I wasn't trying to trivialize the problem of querying this data. I was trying to point out that what you need to know, when writing an application, is to store the original text as a mostly opaque blob. Then, as we figure names out together, you can get more and more sophisticated about querying it.
Whoops, replied too soon...
Also, until you get that sacred name, you have some name. Changing names is perfectly legitimate. Having no name is the part that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
That's why I also mentioned vector. The issue isn't raster or vector, it's image or text.
Wonder what those are used for?
Are they ever read? Sent anywhere? Are they permanent (always taking up space), or are they rotated out?
Is there any particular reason I should care?
For a brief but wonderful window of time, it looked like the Web was going to be the new platform.
Then Apple came along and fucked it up.
Please explain: Why does this need to be an iPhone app? I keep hearing about more and more iPhone apps which would make just as much sense -- more sense, even -- as web apps, and that includes the iTunes store itself. (WTF is the point of making the iTunes store DRM-free if I still need a specific, proprietary client program to purchase stuff with?)
It seems to me that most misconceptions about names can be fixed by the following:
Allow a single, Unicode-enabled field of "unlimited" length (let's say 4 kilobytes) which represents "name". Several would be defined by different roles -- "Real name", "Nickname", "login", where only login (sometimes simply an email address) is required to be globally unique.
Now let's look at what that breaks:
First, #1, 2, 4, and 5. How am I supposed to avoid assuming these? People should be allowed to enter an arbitrary number of names for themselves? I suppose that's possible, but it immediately kills most of the potential uses of this data. If I want to set a nickname that goes with my forum posts, say, what good is it for me to have five nicknames? Seems like the only potential use would be making people easy to find by real name -- so, a social network.
#6 -- surely 4k is enough, but this is also not a terribly difficult assumption to change later. Annoying, but not devastating, not even as hard as changing from the first name / last name combination into one "real name" field.
#7, 8 -- most systems would make it trivial for people to change their names.
#9, 10 -- UTF8 is easy.
#11 -- very, very curious to see an example. And wouldn't that be a bug in Unicode? And this is again one where I have to ask -- how do you change this? Allow arbitrary images?
#12, 13 -- obvious solution is to make the name system case-preserving, thus allowing both case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches.
#14 -- again, avoid by simply allowing the name to be a single opaque field.
#15, 16, 17 -- if your name supports random unicode, no idea why these would be a problem.
#18 -- not sure why it matters.
#19, 20 -- again, if it's just arbitrary text, it just works.
#21, 22, 23 -- not sure how I'd make that assumption.
#24, 25, 26, 27 -- again, the name is just an opaque bunch of characters.
#28 -- what?
#29 -- opaque characters.
#30 -- keep the original text as-is. If you want to try to split people out by naming scheme, do it later, but keep the original. This should be a "duh" concept -- always preserve the original user input. Cache transformations for speed, if you like, but they're a cache -- keep the original. Your algorithm might change.
#31 -- bad idea to assume bad words won't cause problems in general. I currently play an MMO in which I physically can't talk about Emily Dickinson, and have occasion to more frequently than you might suspect.
#32-36 -- why would it matter? Unless...
#37 -- Fine, but how would I otherwise connect the same person?
#38 -- How about unicode-equivalent? And of course, they might not -- one might make a mistake, or the name might be represented differently. But you'd have to deal with typos anyway, so this isn't exactly shocking.
#39 -- I'm going to have to agree with the assumption, though. If I develop a system which works well for people who only follow the US standard, and I suddenly have a ton of people from China wanting to use my service -- enough that this is actually a problem for me -- that's a nice problem to have.
#40 -- People can make up names. I guess this explains #32-36, though.
The sense I get is that half the list is stuff you'd almost have to be stupid to run into (seriously, who doesn't use Unicode?), and the other half involves some seriously weird names and cultures that are going to have to meet me halfway, if they expect me to do anything interesting with their name. As I understand it, the only way to get this right would be to allow people to have zero or more names, each of which is either an unlimited amount of text in any encoding, or an image (raster or vector) of unlimited size. To query such a system requires insane amounts of logic just to deal with the text, and throw in some OCR for good measure.
I think this is a case where I would much rather see people evolve to match the technology, rather than the other way
His point about web design is just that, a point about web design.
And it's wrong.
Again, non-techies learning HTML were the ones abusing <blink>, MIDIs, etc. Eventually, the professional designers took over, which looked better, but was technically worse -- ever seen the HTML generated by Adobe GoLive?
What we have now is a decent compromise -- designers design, web developers implement, and I'm not just talking about sysadmins. Then throw in some edit fields and you've got a CMS, so content producers can add content, random anonymous cowards can comment, etc.
In other words: Design itself is not an IT function. Implementing that design often is. The designers should NOT be allowed HTML WYSIWYG tools, at least not for design work -- let them use Photoshop, let the new guy on the dev team translate it into proper semantic HTML and CSS (because nobody else wants to).
And yes plenty of large commercial sites had awful initial attempts at designs because no one realized this.
Plenty of sites, large and small, fall prey to one side or the other. You need both technical people and design people.
as a matter of policy it should not be their job to examine logs. That should be a management or HR function.
This is where I'm not sure if I agree, and why I'm not sure it's analogous. It absolutely should be IT's job to dig through logs, in that HR should not have unrestricted access to server logs or to the accounts which can talk to those server logs. It should go something like this:
HR: We think Smith has been slacking off. Check some recent logs.
IT: He spent half his time on Facebook and the other half looking at porn.
HR: Ok, we'll fire him.
This is the part I'm less sure of, though. I can see exposing the relevant information to HR, such that IT doesn't need to see it at all. That's entirely different than blaming IT people for the blink tag.
First of all:
Employee monitoring is in the position today where web page creation was 15-20 years ago. It was an "IT Function," because the tools were new and computer-y. Eight million "blink" tags and six hundred thousand animated "under construction" GIFs later...
You're really going to blame the IT people for that? Blink tags, "under construction" GIFs, psychadelic animated backgrounds, and loud MIDIs and other forms of music playing when a page loads are all the kind of thing you get when you give the shiny new tech tools to non-technical people. What you're describing is basically Geocities, and later MySpace, and generally the Eternal September phenomenon.
I don't think the situation is analogous, though, because I do think designers should have access to these tools -- though I also think that any decent website is going to require a technical person at some point. But it seems to me that the problem here is the amount of monitoring, and the extent to which we don't watch the watchers, and I doubt that moving that to another department would solve anything.
As a tech, I'd be perfectly fine handing off responsibility once a violation is found, but until one is at least suspected, why monitor at all? And once one is suspected (which should be a rare event), why not tap IT to do what they do best -- configure things, look at logs, filter information -- and then let HR handle the human factor?
That depends very much what you mean by "good", which is why (I'm guessing) you put it in quotes. "Amateur" is an entire fetish of its own anyhow -- one which people pay for, oddly enough.
Agreed that some of it is art, but I very much doubt Pirates is at all close to that. An example of good acting? Maybe, but not the best example of "quality"...
Of course, I can't believe I'm actually getting into a critical discussion of porn. It's not that I think porn doesn't deserve to have its own critics, awards, etc -- it's more that I wonder what it says about me :(
In other words, a $100/year fee plus enough familiarity with development tools to compile an app and install it?
Meanwhile, there's still a slew of restrictions that dictate what and how you can develop stuff.
In other words, Apple has gone well out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to distribute apps independently, or to consume independently-distributed apps.
The DMCA already outlaws jailbreaking, and if it didn't, contract law might. It looks like this request was an attempt to get Apple to exempt people from that.
The useful part is that anything that's natively on the Web is something which can be pulled into other completely unrelated applications, without having to wire them directly into whatever database you're running.
In other words, it seems a bit like REST or AJAX in that it's a new name for a useful idea which has been around for awhile, even in use for awhile, but needed a name and a slogan to become a concrete concept.
Unless he then creates a repeatable process, which shouldn't be hard to do -- the player needs such a repeatable process in order for it to work.
Found yes, but, by WHOM is what matters, because malware makers &/or hacker-cracker types aren't going to use security vulnerabilities they find to HELP fix an OS
There's also those on the fence, who might go either way -- either help fix it (if they can), or release or even exploit it, out of frustration or to force the vendor to release a fix.
There's also the chance that more "good guys" are looking for them, and are likely to find them before the "bad guys" do.
So you're not going to accept this because I didn't explicitly say that others can find exploits? I mean, it's not enough that this is obvious in the language itself:
more vulnerabilities publicly found
I mean, was I either explicitly or implicitly saying that these are only ever found by people who would fix them? Maybe you could interpret this part:
found and fixed
Of course, they will eventually be fixed, no matter who finds them.
If you really want to claim that you had to force me to admit something against my will, when it was so clearly evident in the first post, you're going to need more than vagueness on my part. You're going to need evidence of me saying something contrary to that.
Oh, I use it as a "Term of endearment"
Would "fetid boils" be a "term of endearment" also?
So, on that note then: WHY DID YOU TOSS NAMES MY WAY HERE
I don't know, why did you toss "terms of endearment" my way?
And why are you still harping about this?
It's QUITE relevant to note that "Open 'SORES'" has a HUGE DOWNSIDE
It's evident in the same breath as mentioning the upside -- and it's not as huge as you paint it. Anything as obvious as you point out would obviously have been found and fixed already, or I would expect massively more exploits in the wild than we observe. Thus, we end up with (again, as I said) a more secure system overall than the proprietary software, in which you rely on security through obscurity to deal with the same sloppy programming techniques.
So again, I acknowledged the one fact you pointed out: more vulnerabilities are found, and they are more easily found, in open source software. I acknowledged it in my first post to you. I just disagree that it's a "HUGE DOWNSIDE" as you suggest.
Note: disagree. That doesn't mean I don't understand. It just means I disagree. But clearly, you need at least those two paragraphs (and possibly more) to explain a concept that most people (including the mods) understood in a single sentence.
Funny you cut off from the rest of the sentence in your quote:
The "it works both ways" is both obvious and irrelevant -- the question is whether it's a net positive or negative, and since the finding of bugs naturally leads to fixing them, and since the fixing of them leads to an overall more secure system (including known and unknown bugs), I thought I'd sufficiently acknowledged and addressed your argument.
You know, the one where I explain why it's irrelevant?
Either works to show you are guilty of illogic because they are ad hominem attacks,
On the contrary, they are both relevant to your near-constant appeals to authority -- if you are indeed a liar or a moron, you are also not an authority.
attacks here, near constantly directed MY way!
I know it seems that way when you quote one of the only things I said that could be construed that way in every post for five posts or more, but the fact is, I've said very little, compared to your constant "term of endearment" about open source, which you continue to use deliberately, knowing I don't like it, because I don't like it, which is pretty much the definition of trolling.
Of course, you've demonstrated
No, that's not going to wash now is it? Especially since your own words were quoted...
Are you saying you know what I meant better than me?
AND??
You also called me other derogatory things (like "dick" & more also).
Actually, I didn't. Go look for the quote. I know it's a fine distinction, maybe too fine for you to grasp, but it's there -- attacking your behavior is not the same as attacking you.
Oh, I proved right enough
Yep. Your loss. Oh well.
I mean...
Heh, you even provided me the ammo...
...you're still locked in this mindset that it has to be a competition, that it's all about winning. Has it occurred to you that it might be better to become right than to be right?
A simple Haiku
won't excuse a trollish joke.
Sorry, dude, nice try.
Yes, where you ONLY ADMITTED THE "UPSIDE" of "Open 'sores'" ONLY,
Oh really?
Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source,
That's not acknowledging that more vulnerabilities are found? What did you think I was saying here? ...Oh, I see:
You FAILED to note what I have been stating here ALL along though, which IS THE "DOWNSIDE" of "Open 'SORES'" (yes, I know: It offends you that I use that term,
Yeah, it does. Why do you keep using it?
You initially stated, & not even to me, what the "upside" of open sores is,
Wrong. I stated both -- the yin and the yang. Found and fixed.
You seem obsessed with separating these two. I presented their sum as a net positive. I did so repeatedly:
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I said. I also explained why this is a good thing.
That was in reply to this:
if I have the sourcecode to an operating system, I have a FAR easier time of finding bugs in it
In other words, I was clarifying here that what you said (it's easier to find bugs) is pretty much what I said (it's easier to find and fix bugs) -- and that one naturally leads from the other. The "it works both ways" is both obvious and irrelevant -- the question is whether it's a net positive or negative, and since the finding of bugs naturally leads to fixing them, and since the fixing of them leads to an overall more secure system (including known and unknown bugs), I thought I'd sufficiently acknowledged and addressed your argument.
By contrast, you eventually tried to downplay the "easier to fix" part by asking whether I (a sample size of one) can fix the kernel myself. You also wasted both our time with a slew of posts trying to get me to "admit" something I acknowledged and addressed right away. It's a bit like if you said, "We never see a crocoduck," and I said, "And evolution never predicted one," and you said, "But we never see a crocoduck!" And then, when I finally say what you were looking for, you quotemine me -- "Yes, you're right, we never see a crocoduck, but..." and you say "See?! HE ADMITS IT!!!"
That's not just stupid. That's willful ignorance to the point of dishonesty.
But let's address the part where you actually lied:
First of all - that was not a reply to me, note that,
Erm, sorry, but when the truth is staring you in the face, what do you gain by lying?
This is where I said it. That was a reply to this post. What, was that a different APK?
Or were you talking about a different post of mine? Nope, it seems pretty clear:
"That's the important part. Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source, a process which leads to a more secure system" - by SanityInAnarchy (655584) on Tuesday June 01, @02:09AM (#32415160) Journal
First of all - that was not a reply to me
Looks pretty clear. You're still talking about this post, which is still a reply to this post, which is still pretty clear.
So yeah, I think I'm justified in calling you a moron here. For all your "accomplishments", you've just said something which is absolutely, undeniably, factually wrong, despite the truth being a mere click away from the page you wrote that lie on. Calling you a moron would certainly be more generous than calling you a liar -- which do you prefer?
Fun fact: I haven't actually called you a moron since that moment, and even there, what was meant was, "Now you're being moronic."
You have dragged it up in nearly every post, and have continued to throw these accusations at me, as if they mean anything.
But hey, if you want to make it about being right, that's your loss.
Good Lord, you finally had to ADMIT I was correct is more like it on that note...
Here it is again:
Linux always has more vulnerabilities publicly found and fixed due to it being open source,
Is that where I "admitted it"? Huh?
That was in my first post.
Clearly, that's not getting through your thick fucking skull, so here it is again:
THAT WAS IN MY FIRST POST.
you mean, AFTER I SAID IT
So, I said it in this post. You did not say it in this post. You, in fact, did not mention it until this post.
So where did you say it before me? Again: It was in my VERY FIRST reply to you. It was not hidden behind "doublespeak", it was right there. I even quoted it for you in my last post.
This is where you say "I'm sorry. I was wrong about that." But you won't. You'll whine about ad-hom -- if you acknowledge it at all. More likely, you'll find some twisted way to convince yourself, just so you don't have to admit defeat, because that is more important to you than truth or validity.
I feel sorry for you, dude.
I don't obey your orders boy, get it?
Well, let me put it this way...
You accuse me of something. You don't bother to find out if it's actually true. That's exactly the kind of behavior I mean by "don't be a dick."
If you don't want to bother to find out, don't throw accusations, it's that simple.
I mean, lol, who do you *THINK* you are??
Another human being. You clearly don't know how to treat other human beings.