These people were PERSONALLY AND DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TOP-LINE REVENUE...
I'm sure you can make the same sort of statement on behalf of Microsoft engineers who have worked on Windows and Office for six or more years. They are unquestionably the best system programmers in the business! Or maybe, their employer's dominant position and awesome marketing resources helped just a tad?
Bingo. You'll need to allocate a healthy chunk of your time and energies to making your boss look good and responding to his/her priorities (unless you're a entrepreneur working from your own site), helping and getting along with coworkers and customers, dealing with bureaucracy, etc. That's paying the rent. But your main point is absolutely correct.
At first I thought the EFF had sold us down the river, but now I think the settlement is reasonable. Sony agrees to cease and desist the practice, and they must provide a convenient mechanism for exchange of XCP disks. What it doesn't do is (1) provide reasonable compensation to people who suffered extensive system damage, or (2) blast Sony back to the Stone Age for having a corps of bozo executives running their music division. But as the EFF pointed out, those in the first category can opt out of the settlement and sue on their own dime (or perhaps join a separate class action), while the second criticism is just unproductive knee-jerk stuff.
The EFF gets their legal fees compensated, and I'm sure their hourly rates are of generous size by the standards of most IT workers. Sony did get off fairly cheaply. But in many class action suits involving low-ticket products, the law firm(s) representing the plaintiffs walk away with 40 percent of the pot while the consumers get peanuts, and the company does no worse than Sony did. The whole thing is basically a big reward for the law firm that filed the claim first. Here, we still get peanuts, and I personally don't intend to file a claim, but it probably wasn't a financial windfall for the EFF - just a nice little project for them.
Yeah, my initial reaction on the teaser was "duhhh... gee, d'ya think the big tech IPOs of the future will be the disruptive startups?" Moss has a great track record though. And the Media Lab needed a change - Negroponte had some great ideas about digital TV, computer animation and so forth, but it was time for fresh blood at the top. Hopefully Moss will stick around long enough to leave a mark, he'll certainly be tempted by offers from VCs to take over their startups.
Yeah, I'll bet Harvard Business School got mileage out of this case study, although it's old news now. Jim Clark (the #2 guy behind Ed McCracken) bailed and eventually started Netscape, after he saw the Microsoft locomotive in the rear view mirror. In retrospect, short of anticipating the Internet tidal wave, what they should've done was invest in a varied bunch of startups and have been prepared to spend most of their cash horde morphing into a different company.
that this is a fine essay, with atypical insights in almost every paragraph? Like this one:
A completely open system is also easy to design. The original Napster was an example. Completely open systems have their own problems. The usual criticism is that content creators are disincentivized, but the deeper problem is that their work is decontextualized. Completely open music distribution systems excel at either distributing music that was contextualized beforehand, such as classic rock, or new music that has little sense of authorship or identity, like the endless Internet feeds of bland techno mixes.
I'm not sure he and his company are evil. They're sort of an independent research lab that also collects and licenses other people's patents. It seems that Myrhvold would like to focus on patents that are high quality, i.e. real inventions. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that this approach won't degenerate down the road into the extortive tactics used by IP boutiques like Eolas and Forgent.
Maybe that's why he's gotten Microsoft, Google, and Sony to invest - following LBJ, they'd rather have this guy "inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in."
Users signing third party code as part of installation doesn't sound right. Signing something implies that you accept a certain level of responsibility for it. It's never a good idea to sign something you neither wrote nor completely understand.
The text of patent 4,698,672 by W. Chen et al. (Compression Labs) makes reference to an earlier patent 4,302,775 by R. Widergren, W. Chen et. al. (Compression Labs). Patent 775 covers a method involving the application of the discrete cosine transform to blocks of an image or video frame. It was first filed in 1978 and apparently revised in 1981. I don't know whether that was the original DCT patent, but in any case it has expired. That's why Forgent hasn't claimed ownership of the basic DCT algorithm itself (which is fortunate, because that it the basis of practically all videoconferencing and streaming video systems in use today).
Not bad, your system is actually readable. But it only works in functions that follow the convention of returning the error value, and all the error values from the various functions are from a consistent set.
Here's a way your function could be revised to avoid goto (this might not work in a more complicated situation however):
if (ERROK(return_value)) { buffer1 = (char *)malloc(1000);
if (!buffer1) return_value = ERRFAIL; }
if (ERROK(return_value)) { buffer2 = (char *)malloc(1000);
if (!buffer2) return_value = ERRFAIL; }
/* Do something here */
/* only free buffer1 and buffer2 if they actually were allocated. */ SAFE_FREE(buffer1); SAFE_FREE(buffer2);
return return_value; }
Rochkind provides a more complicated set of macros in his book "Advanced UNIX Programming". His are probably more typical of a larger project where additional requirements have accumulated over time, e.g. errno to string mapping and function back trace.
The need of relying on the preprocessor for error handling constructs is a serious drawback. In C++ you would typically use templated smart pointers/resource holders to ensure cleanup. You could report errors either by throwing exceptions or propagating return values (as you've done it) - smart pointers work either way.
timing not coincidental with Tiger?
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
This is standard Microsoft marketing procedure, coming out with stuff on their forthcoming product just when a competitor is making a major release. It's a technique to muffle the media impact made by the competition. So instead of featuring Tiger on the cover, newspapers and magazines will play "Tiger vs. Longhorn: which will win?", ignoring the fact that one of them is just an announcement.
Proper support goes beyond checking the user agent string. A site could decide to support IE only by embedding some.NET code to be executed by the browser, for instance, or simply by only testing their stuff using IE.
Users have the right to filter out ads on the client side.
But content providers also have the right to select which user agents they will properly support. If a much greater percentage of Firefox users block ads as compared to IE users, don't be surprised if some marketing VP uses this as a reason to support only IE.
So I would suggest blocking the most annoying types of ads, such as popups, pop-unders, and overlays, but leaving a little bit of money on the table for the sites. Fortunately someone else is paying the money, anyways.
I took a quick look at Intuit's web site
on
Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 5, Informative
Here's a relevant portion of their personal account login page:
This HTML is active if scripting is disabled in your browser. There's also a corresponding block of code within a SCRIPT tag that does the same thing when scripting is enabled. I would've included that, but I couldn't get it past the/. lameness filter.
What it does is ask the server for an image (JPEG or GIF). But this request actually triggers a CGI program on the server side, passing it a unique session identifier that was served in the original page. The CGI app on Intuit's side most likely relays the request to the tracking company's server for logging. Cute, huh?
Since I'm not a customer, I didn't go past the login page. But it would be interesting to examine the analytics code served up in the account management pages - perhaps they pass not only the session identifier, but form values as well. (The analytics script could be triggered after the user hits the submit button, for instance). This may have been the point Omniture's CEO was making when he said that he could get customer's SSNs and salary data if he wanted to. Hopefully, there is a negotiation between Intuit and the web analytics firm about what customer information will be tracked, and procedures in place to verify that the analytics portion of the HTML does not collect more information than agreed upon.
Maybe someone with an account at Intuit should take a closer look at the page sources to see what parameters are being passed to the analytics server while you're managing your money.
Didn't John von Neumann say that redundancy made it possible to engineer a highly reliable system using thousands of unreliable parts? Parts that were extremely unreliable by today's standards.
Maybe this is kind of design mentality that is needed in the space program. Not one standby for each part, but a massively redundant system.
"Arid" is a decent synonym for hardscrabble. Hardscrabble Road is a street in Westchester County, NY, a county with pleasantly earthy names. Nearby are Hawthorne, Croton, and Tarrytown.
MS gets a nice peer-to-peer product, a "next generation Lotus Notes" that dovetails well with MS Office and MS Communicator (well, there's probably some overlap with the latter but that can be ironed out). More importantly, they get Ray Ozzie as CTO. People have noticed that Microsoft's technical direction seems to have been foundering a bit lately - Ozzie has both outstanding architectural skills and an excellent intuitive grasp of how people and teams use technology. It'll be interesting to see how Gates manages to share his C-level technical responsibilities with Ozzie.
The only people at fault here are the coders at ApplyYourself (the 3rd party application site). Having used it last year, I can tell you that it is technically inferior to most products that other schools build themselves.
Most of the students involved had to be aware of the recent case involving Princeton officials illegally accessing Yale's admissions data. One of the Princeton folks was quoted as saying they were only testing the security of Yale's system. Seems that the Harvard applicants either agreed with this type of rationalization, or it didn't occur to them that their own little shenanigans could be audited by IT administrators.
The top tier b-school application process is very stressful and the idea of seeing your results early is hardly scandalous... Furthermore, our new post-scandal "Leadership and Corporate Accountability" course spends a great deal of time discussing the ethical trade-offs inherent in business, such as weighing employee concerns vs. shareholder concerns vs. customer concerns.
Maybe the students should have exercised a bit of restraint. Many situations in the business world are stressful, that's why it's important to have unimpeachable ethics. We've just seen several CEOs and CFOs who apparently concluded that lying was justified when the future direction of the company was at stake, as well as riches for themselves. And maybe Martha Stewart figured that by acting on a tip and securing her fortune, she was indirectly helping hundreds of employees and millions of viewers who counted on her, at the possible expense of a professional speculator or two.
Our society is poorly served by courses on ethics that teach students that most decisions are not black and white and that they come down to tradeoffs between various stakeholders.
RG: Microsoft treats.NET as a useful library to extend its products, and to date, it has not shown any more conviction to the framework. There have been a few.NET products written entirely in.NET; one such product is Microsoft CRM....They do not want the expense of rewriting their existing code for.NET, and there is no compulsion to provide all new code in.NET; instead,.NET will be hosted as and when it's needed, particularly to allow extensibility through user-supplied code.
My Response: We should dissect exactly what Richard says here. He says that Microsoft is using.NET to extend existing products and that Microsoft doesn't want the expense of rewriting applications from scratch in.NET. This makes perfect sense to me, why would we re-write perfectly good code?.NET code can interoperate with existing code, and you bet we're going to take advantage of the interoperability layer to add new features that exploit the best managed code has to offer. As I pointed out previously, Microsoft is using.NET in all sorts of software from operating systems, to developer tools, to Office.
If Microsoft doesn't use.NET in the core code of its flagship products (and not merely as an interop gateway), Grimes asks, why should anyone else? Well, Fernandez points out that Microsoft does use it in a number of places, including some new high-level portions of Windows. But it is telling that we don't hear about an effort to rewrite MS Office or SQL Server using.NET. Some of us are old enough to remember Bill Gates evangelizing for OS/2, telling everyone that that represented the new direction of the computing industry... until he changed his mind. A more recent example was MFC, a truly ugly framework which was (and is) widely used but has been shunned by Microsoft's own developers.
Grimes is saying that.NET has been oversold. It excels as a framework for server-side enterprise applications on Windows, and also sounds like a good solution for browsers and other client-side platforms running untrusted application code - but only on Windows. For other situations.NET offers some benefits such as better error detection and easier installation than DCOM apps, but they are often outweighed by disadvantages including less control over performance, the additional size of the.NET framework, and the diminished control over one's source code IP.
A common coding convention is for variable names to begin with a lowercase letter, while class names begin with an uppercase letter. So a maintenance programmer would expect ThisLittleThing and thisLittleThing to name a class and a variable, respectively.
As for the underscore thing... many people agree with you, but this_little_thing is slightly more verbose (takes longer to type AND read) than thisLittleThing without adding content. But hey, that's another one of those religious issues that always flares up whenever the project coding standards document is released.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you can make the same sort of statement on behalf of Microsoft engineers who have worked on Windows and Office for six or more years. They are unquestionably the best system programmers in the business! Or maybe, their employer's dominant position and awesome marketing resources helped just a tad?
Bingo. You'll need to allocate a healthy chunk of your time and energies to making your boss look good and responding to his/her priorities (unless you're a entrepreneur working from your own site), helping and getting along with coworkers and customers, dealing with bureaucracy, etc. That's paying the rent. But your main point is absolutely correct.
The EFF gets their legal fees compensated, and I'm sure their hourly rates are of generous size by the standards of most IT workers. Sony did get off fairly cheaply. But in many class action suits involving low-ticket products, the law firm(s) representing the plaintiffs walk away with 40 percent of the pot while the consumers get peanuts, and the company does no worse than Sony did. The whole thing is basically a big reward for the law firm that filed the claim first. Here, we still get peanuts, and I personally don't intend to file a claim, but it probably wasn't a financial windfall for the EFF - just a nice little project for them.
Yeah, my initial reaction on the teaser was "duhhh... gee, d'ya think the big tech IPOs of the future will be the disruptive startups?" Moss has a great track record though. And the Media Lab needed a change - Negroponte had some great ideas about digital TV, computer animation and so forth, but it was time for fresh blood at the top. Hopefully Moss will stick around long enough to leave a mark, he'll certainly be tempted by offers from VCs to take over their startups.
Yeah, I'll bet Harvard Business School got mileage out of this case study, although it's old news now. Jim Clark (the #2 guy behind Ed McCracken) bailed and eventually started Netscape, after he saw the Microsoft locomotive in the rear view mirror. In retrospect, short of anticipating the Internet tidal wave, what they should've done was invest in a varied bunch of startups and have been prepared to spend most of their cash horde morphing into a different company.
named for the witches dance in the Middle Ages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexentanz Also the name of a little piano piece by Edward MacDowell.
A completely open system is also easy to design. The original Napster was an example. Completely open systems have their own problems. The usual criticism is that content creators are disincentivized, but the deeper problem is that their work is decontextualized. Completely open music distribution systems excel at either distributing music that was contextualized beforehand, such as classic rock, or new music that has little sense of authorship or identity, like the endless Internet feeds of bland techno mixes.
Maybe that's why he's gotten Microsoft, Google, and Sony to invest - following LBJ, they'd rather have this guy "inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in."
Users signing third party code as part of installation doesn't sound right. Signing something implies that you accept a certain level of responsibility for it. It's never a good idea to sign something you neither wrote nor completely understand.
The text of patent 4,698,672 by W. Chen et al. (Compression Labs) makes reference to an earlier patent 4,302,775 by R. Widergren, W. Chen et. al. (Compression Labs). Patent 775 covers a method involving the application of the discrete cosine transform to blocks of an image or video frame. It was first filed in 1978 and apparently revised in 1981. I don't know whether that was the original DCT patent, but in any case it has expired. That's why Forgent hasn't claimed ownership of the basic DCT algorithm itself (which is fortunate, because that it the basis of practically all videoconferencing and streaming video systems in use today).
Here's a way your function could be revised to avoid goto (this might not work in a more complicated situation however):
Rochkind provides a more complicated set of macros in his book "Advanced UNIX Programming". His are probably more typical of a larger project where additional requirements have accumulated over time, e.g. errno to string mapping and function back trace.
The need of relying on the preprocessor for error handling constructs is a serious drawback. In C++ you would typically use templated smart pointers/resource holders to ensure cleanup. You could report errors either by throwing exceptions or propagating return values (as you've done it) - smart pointers work either way.
This is standard Microsoft marketing procedure, coming out with stuff on their forthcoming product just when a competitor is making a major release. It's a technique to muffle the media impact made by the competition. So instead of featuring Tiger on the cover, newspapers and magazines will play "Tiger vs. Longhorn: which will win?", ignoring the fact that one of them is just an announcement.
Proper support goes beyond checking the user agent string. A site could decide to support IE only by embedding some .NET code to be executed by the browser, for instance, or simply by only testing their stuff using IE.
Users have the right to filter out ads on the client side.
But content providers also have the right to select which user agents they will properly support. If a much greater percentage of Firefox users block ads as compared to IE users, don't be surprised if some marketing VP uses this as a reason to support only IE.
So I would suggest blocking the most annoying types of ads, such as popups, pop-unders, and overlays, but leaving a little bit of money on the table for the sites. Fortunately someone else is paying the money, anyways.
What it does is ask the server for an image (JPEG or GIF). But this request actually triggers a CGI program on the server side, passing it a unique session identifier that was served in the original page. The CGI app on Intuit's side most likely relays the request to the tracking company's server for logging. Cute, huh?
Since I'm not a customer, I didn't go past the login page. But it would be interesting to examine the analytics code served up in the account management pages - perhaps they pass not only the session identifier, but form values as well. (The analytics script could be triggered after the user hits the submit button, for instance). This may have been the point Omniture's CEO was making when he said that he could get customer's SSNs and salary data if he wanted to. Hopefully, there is a negotiation between Intuit and the web analytics firm about what customer information will be tracked, and procedures in place to verify that the analytics portion of the HTML does not collect more information than agreed upon.
Maybe someone with an account at Intuit should take a closer look at the page sources to see what parameters are being passed to the analytics server while you're managing your money.
Maybe this is a sneak preview of Longhorn antivirus technology?
...and pay no attention to the graduate student hunched over his laptop computer
They could change their name to MANARCH... as in MAnarch's Not Affiliated with that Radical Chick
Distro Renamed to Irritate Various Americans
Didn't John von Neumann say that redundancy made it possible to engineer a highly reliable system using thousands of unreliable parts? Parts that were extremely unreliable by today's standards.
Maybe this is kind of design mentality that is needed in the space program. Not one standby for each part, but a massively redundant system.
"Jumble" is already taken.
"Arid" is a decent synonym for hardscrabble.
Hardscrabble Road is a street in Westchester County, NY, a county with pleasantly earthy names. Nearby are Hawthorne, Croton, and Tarrytown.
I vote for "Hawthorne".
MS gets a nice peer-to-peer product, a "next generation Lotus Notes" that dovetails well with MS Office and MS Communicator (well, there's probably some overlap with the latter but that can be ironed out). More importantly, they get Ray Ozzie as CTO. People have noticed that Microsoft's technical direction seems to have been foundering a bit lately - Ozzie has both outstanding architectural skills and an excellent intuitive grasp of how people and teams use technology. It'll be interesting to see how Gates manages to share his C-level technical responsibilities with Ozzie.
Most of the students involved had to be aware of the recent case involving Princeton officials illegally accessing Yale's admissions data. One of the Princeton folks was quoted as saying they were only testing the security of Yale's system. Seems that the Harvard applicants either agreed with this type of rationalization, or it didn't occur to them that their own little shenanigans could be audited by IT administrators.
The top tier b-school application process is very stressful and the idea of seeing your results early is hardly scandalous... Furthermore, our new post-scandal "Leadership and Corporate Accountability" course spends a great deal of time discussing the ethical trade-offs inherent in business, such as weighing employee concerns vs. shareholder concerns vs. customer concerns.
Maybe the students should have exercised a bit of restraint. Many situations in the business world are stressful, that's why it's important to have unimpeachable ethics. We've just seen several CEOs and CFOs who apparently concluded that lying was justified when the future direction of the company was at stake, as well as riches for themselves. And maybe Martha Stewart figured that by acting on a tip and securing her fortune, she was indirectly helping hundreds of employees and millions of viewers who counted on her, at the possible expense of a professional speculator or two.
Our society is poorly served by courses on ethics that teach students that most decisions are not black and white and that they come down to tradeoffs between various stakeholders.
RG: Microsoft treats .NET as a useful library to extend its products, and to date, it has not shown any more conviction to the framework. There have been a few .NET products written entirely in .NET; one such product is Microsoft CRM....They do not want the expense of rewriting their existing code for .NET, and there is no compulsion to provide all new code in .NET; instead, .NET will be hosted as and when it's needed, particularly to allow extensibility through user-supplied code.
My Response: We should dissect exactly what Richard says here. He says that Microsoft is using .NET to extend existing products and that Microsoft doesn't want the expense of rewriting applications from scratch in .NET. This makes perfect sense to me, why would we re-write perfectly good code? .NET code can interoperate with existing code, and you bet we're going to take advantage of the interoperability layer to add new features that exploit the best managed code has to offer. As I pointed out previously, Microsoft is using .NET in all sorts of software from operating systems, to developer tools, to Office.
If Microsoft doesn't use .NET in the core code of its flagship products (and not merely as an interop gateway), Grimes asks, why should anyone else? Well, Fernandez points out that Microsoft does use it in a number of places, including some new high-level portions of Windows. But it is telling that we don't hear about an effort to rewrite MS Office or SQL Server using .NET. Some of us are old enough to remember Bill Gates evangelizing for OS/2, telling everyone that that represented the new direction of the computing industry... until he changed his mind. A more recent example was MFC, a truly ugly framework which was (and is) widely used but has been shunned by Microsoft's own developers.
Grimes is saying that .NET has been oversold. It excels as a framework for server-side enterprise applications on Windows, and also sounds like a good solution for browsers and other client-side platforms running untrusted application code - but only on Windows. For other situations .NET offers some benefits such as better error detection and easier installation than DCOM apps, but they are often outweighed by disadvantages including less control over performance, the additional size of the .NET framework, and the diminished control over one's source code IP.
As for the underscore thing... many people agree with you, but this_little_thing is slightly more verbose (takes longer to type AND read) than thisLittleThing without adding content. But hey, that's another one of those religious issues that always flares up whenever the project coding standards document is released.