Why would anyone in their right mind want to use IE? Maybe because they care about getting to the content, not about fighting some stupid war against Microsoft.
Let's take some imaginary TV manufacturers.
1. MicroTV. Their TV does have some technical issues, and maybe it's a little light on the featuritis list, but -- for whatever reason -- works flawlessly with every single TV sender ever made.
2. MozillaTV. A bloated piece of crap which took some half a decade to even have a usable product at all. In fact, instead of even designing a TV, they first went into fantasy land and spent years reinventing the CRT (rendering engine) from scratch, making a designer remote control (the interface widgets) and their very own personalized bug tracking system. Still has even more technical problems than MicroTV. Works _well_ with maybe 10% of the TV stations, and with some 25% of them it doesn't even work at all. In fact, some stations might make your TV crash. On the plus sides, it has some extra features... that 99% of the people don't even want.
3. OperaTV. Decent TV, and definitely more stable than MicroTV. Nice piece of engineering, really. But... it only works with some 80% of the TV stations. And with about half the rest, the image doesn't quite look right. They have an even bigger list of useless features, most of which 99% of the people end up explicitly turning off. (E.g., those retarded gestures.)
Which of those 3 TV's do you think Joe Average will pick? Let me assure you that he'll pick MicroTV every time. Why? Because it works with all stations. That's all.
Now apply that knowledge to browsers. Which browser will Joe Average pick? MSIE every time.
There's no laziness, no cluelessness, etc, involved. It's just that Joe is nothing like the standard/. geek. The geek loves doing things in the most uncomfortable and unnatural way just for bragging rights. (And, of course, for that fuzzy lemming feeling of being a part of the Anti-MS herd.) Joe Average, on the other hand, just wants to get to the sites he needs.
He's not going to give up on playing Backgammon on MS's site, just for the privilege of taking part in a stupid browser war. He's not going to move his account to another bank, just because his old bank only supported IE. He's not going to stop uploading his digital photos and commenting on that camera manufacturer's forum site just because they don't show right in Mozilla. Etc.
So if you really were wondering why Joe Average stays with that "inferior" IE, now you know. Consider yourself enlightened;)
Did I say anything about CPU power or RAM? Nope. Did I say anything about users not needing a good GUI? Nope. Etc. But you didn't actually read any of that, did you? Just jumped directly back to building straw men in your little phantasy world, eh? Sad.
So let's try again, in less words. Maybe this time you can actually be arsed to read first:
A. You can have your metaphors and intricate GUI. But does it have to be a _web_browser_? Exactly what the heck is so intricate and metaphor-rich about using a web browser to display the exact same flat list of files? I would have thought that if you want something intricate and advanced, Internet Explorer is the last place you'd look for that.
B. Why does the file manager have to be joined at the hip and unreplaceable? No, seriously. Precisely _because_ maybe someone wants to explore more rich metaphors, instead of being stuck with the 1990's HTML technology as the mandatory interface to the computer. How about letting me replace it with something that fits my needs better? How about letting people, yes, explore new concepts? Who knows? Maybe one of them will come with a better metaphor than that "boring and damn pedestrian" flat list.
C. Exactly how's using Windows Media Player as the new mandatory interface going to help? Exactly what advantages does that bring to the table? It's just a stupid program that plays movies.
Do you even understand any of the programming details that would go behind it? Or are you one of those whose tech knowledge of it all goes only as far as "ooh, pretty pictures and movies" and "Internet=Netscape"?
Let me enlighten you: the browser or media player is just a rendering program. It does nothing else than paint some stuff you sent it as a HTML or DivX file. That's all. No more, no less.
Most importantly: it doesn't add _anything_ that you couldn't have directly painted on the screen yourself.
If there's going to be any magic behind it all, any advanced metaphors in manipulating the files, it's _not_ the browser or media player facade. The magic will happen in some.DLL which sits behind it all, and tells the browser _what_ to display. (Just like when you browse slashdot, the magic isn't in your browser, it's in the server-side program that tells your browser what to display.)
Whether or not you get your metaphor-rich GUI, and a better structured view than today's "boring and pedestrian" flat list, will depend on this little module that sits behind it all. _Not_ on whether Microsoft forces it to go through IE or WMP to paint the result, or just allows it direct access to the screen.
Much as generally I'm fairly pro-Microsoft, IMHO this doesn't make sense at all.
"Why shouldn't a desktop management system utilize an 128 MB graphics card?" Let's see:
1. Because it's a straw man argument. You can use all the fancy graphics you want to, even without being a web-browser tied into the very operating system. You can write the exact same Windows file- and/or desktop-manager in user space, _without_ making it a web browser, and it will work just as well. In fact, heck, you can even make your full 3D real-time manager, one that even _needs_ a DirectX 10 graphics card, and it still won't need to be a web browser, nor to be intimately tied into the OS itself.
Noone says that need to go back to a command line prompt. You can have your relations, memories and information, or whatever else, and you can have them presented with as much fancy graphics as you want to. All I'm saying is: there is _no_ real reason why the drawing program _has_ to be a web browser, and there is _no_ real reason why it can't be replaceable with other programs that do the same thing.
2. Because it doesn't need to. All that a file/desktop manager like Windows uses is some 2D and font acceleration. That's all. There is no real need to use 3D texture-mapped environment-bump-mapped pixel-shaded full-screen-antialiased anisotropic-filtered graphics just to display a list of files, nor to paint a border around a window. We're talking a relatively primitive 2D app, not a FPS game.
3. That goes double for the codecs and media playing capabilities. There is no way in heck to say you need streaming video codec hooks into the very OS itself... to make a file or desktop manager. How and where the heck would that file or desktop manager even use those codecs? For what? Unless it's going to have DivX movies instead of icons, there is exactly _zero_ need for it to even know what a codec is.
(Just in case someone wants to jump in with a stupidity like "it needs codecs to play the media files when you double-click them": *bzzzt* Wrong answer. What happens when you double-click a file is launching an external application which knows what to do with the file. A media player app for WMA files, Word for.doc files, a browser for.html files and so on. The file manager does _not_ need any intrinsic knowledge about how to handle all those files. It just needs to know what application to launch for each of them. That's all.)
Either that, or they could have actually taken UO seriously. They pretty much owned the MMO market and genre, and still ended up number 3. How sad is that?
UO was released with just as many bugs as U9, and _stayed_ buggy. In fact, around 2002 when I last tried it, they were still blundering through patches which broke 2 things for each 1 bug fixed. I've seen patches released and rolled back within 4 hours... during which, they wrecked pure havoc upon those unlucky to download them. Patches which seemed to never have been tested at all.
UO also was released in a sad unfinished state, which since then has become the de-facto standard release for MMO games.
For starters, half the skills were either totally useless, or useless for anyone who wasn't playing a grief player. E.g., tinkering skill could only create trapped chests. Except no NPC ever opened a chest. So in effect the only use was to kill newbies.
The gameplay and game design itself was a poorly thought out catastrophe. Most of the issues were already known and tested for decades on MUDs, but UO just had to repeat every single mistake in the book.
E.g., it was dead predictable that someone will deadlock their original economy. The problem of people actually working hard to take non-renewable resources out of the game -- e.g., by stashing them in vaults or in the inventory of 100 non-played avatars -- was known on MUDs for ages. And blimey, who would have guessed? The exact same issue deadlocked UO's economy.
And how about listening to the customers? It took _years_ of screaming in anguish for a non-PK option, which Origin mostly just ignored. UO lost players hand-over-fist over that issue. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft basically made "we're the place where you won't get repeadedly PK'ed like on UO" their _main_ claim to glory.
It was already known on MUDs that purely player-enforced justice does not work. Ever. RL justice works only because you do care about what happens to your RL self. But on virtual world you can _count_ on having a hefty share of players who just don't care about their virtual avatars. There is _nothing_ you can do in-character to keep them inline, because they aren't in-character to start with.
Etc.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference? I believe that even if they came out the other way around, they'd still have been half-arsed. And still, basically, just a sympthom of the fact that something was already rotten at Origin.
What I resent is that unlike actual methodologies, XP is more of a religion. Where unsupported hype, trolling, insults and mindless zealotry are the main coin. And facts are usually to be avoided, or slightly altered.
E.g., the fact that the poster child for XP, the C3 project, was a project with fixed requirements, _not_ something requiring constant change. And it just burned money for many years in a row, didn't deliver even a fraction of what it had to do, until it was considered a miserable failure by the customer. Incidentally, it also gave the "on-site customer" stress-related health problems.
Yes, contrary to what the sacred XP scriptures claimed, that project was _not_ a success. The whole XP myth is based on repeating a lie over and over, until enough idiots start believing it. And God knows there's one born every minute.
But let's get back to XP zealots' trolling. Sorry, claims like basically "only XP gives you bug free code, while the rest of the world leaves bugs in", are bogus and it's just trolling. No programmer willingly leaves bugs in _release_ code. XP or no XP.
What XP does is redefine what bug means, so, blimey, under our double-speak standard we didn't have bugs. Well, gee, ain't it the easy way out...
Straight off the sacred books of XP: if the customer didn't explicitly give you an automated test-case that fails, then you don't have a bug. No, I'm serious.
If the customer's automated test case inputs the number 10, then presses button A, and then button B, that's the only "bug" you can possibly have. If inputting 15 and pressing directly button B causes the program to crash and burn, or even to garble the database, hey, it's not a bug because it wasn't in the automated test case.
Worse yet, if inputting a 65000 character string instead of a number there causes a buffer overflow and allows someone to take control of your machine, it's still not the developpers' problem under XP. If the user didn't explicitly give you a test case with a 65000 character string as input, it's not your problem. Yes, all the buffer overflows we moan and bitch about in Windows and IE would count as "delivering code without bugs" under the XP standard.
(Incidentally they also fit another XP koan: writing the simplest thing that can possibly work. Making the extra effort to write a buffer class with checked bounds, or an URL validator class, so such bugs don't happen... well, that's "wasting time with flowery design and frameworks.")
What's your recourse as a customer then? Well, hey, it was _your_ fault that you didn't give them the right test cases. But don't worry. You'll give them the new test cases, write it as a change request, and pay them another cycle to fix it. That's the XP way.
That's just one of the many lies and double-speak that XP is _based_ on. On one hand accuse everyone else of shipping buggy stuff, on the other hand conveniently redefine the _exact_ _same_ stuff as "without known bugs" for yourself.
First of all, it will add jack squat. Games already have a plethora of ways to tell you that something went wrong. Sounds or blinking indicators always got my attention.
On the other hand, the smell of something burning could just as well come from the neighbour's kitchen. Or from my own kitchen. So instead of adding a valuable new _signal_, you've just added a whole new source of _noise_.
Second, how will it interact with other such devices in the same room/house/office/etc? How do I know if that burning smell is from my game? Or maybe from dad who's visiting and just flipped the channel on the smell-enabled TV to a WW2 tank warfare documentary?
Did I mention "source of noise" yet?
Third, how will such persistent smells combine? And how they combine with other smells? Any guess what my room will smell like, between
- the neighbour's having a barbecue under my window,
- my own food which is just busy boiling on the stove,
- the cigarette I'm smoking,
- my game which is yet again in one of those sewer levels that everyone loves to put in a FPS,
- someone watching a documentary about god knows what smelly thing on TV
- someone else opening some perfume scented email on the other computer
Actually I don't even want to know what the resulting olfactory cacophony would be like. There's no bloody way I'll be thrilled to have something like that in my house.
Fourth, what about inconveniencing other people? Ever had to work with one of those retards who use a big subwoofer at the office, and never think about their co-workers hearing email notificatons and MP3s at 90db, resonating through the whole building? We used to have a couple of those.
In fact one of them actually made a point of inconveniencing everyone as much as possible to get attention.
What makes you think they'll think twice about stinking up the whole office too?
Or at home, what makes you think that everyone else around is thrilled to smell burning oil from my racing game?
Oh please... If I hear any more "PC gamers are like this, while console gamers are like that" sweeping generalizations I'm gonna barf.
As someone who plays both, I find it funny to be told that when I grab the PS2 controller suddenly my attention span takes a nose dive. Or whatever else.
But let's talk attention span. It's PC games which typically are over in 8 to 10 hours. There's an entire industry churning mindless 8 hour FPS clones for the PC.
Whereas most console games I've played packed 50 hours or more. Even KOTOR which was _huge_ for a PC game, was actually somewhat short for its genre as a console game.
E.g., on the PC you get racing games with maybe 3 to 5 cars to choose from. Most are with cars from only one manufacturer. Some are with only _one_ car total. On the consoles? GT2. 'Nuff said.
Want to talk online games? Good. Phantasy Star Online? Had a lot of people playing it for ages.
So some people are being obsessive about a single game. And in the case of some people I know, they're actually playing the same map again and again, because that's the map on which they can impress their clan.
I've watched someone, day after day and months after months, playing the exact same Counter-Strike map, running to the exact same spot, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent to see if someone's coming. _Hours_ in a row _each_ _day_ spent actually just jumping in place in front of the exact same vent hole. (Virtual aerobic, or what?;)
It's not an issue of "attention span", nor of "PC vs consoles". It's just sad. And they'd do it on consoles just as well, if they had a clan of retards to impress with their l33t score.
MMORPGs as a _game_ (i.e., talking about those who actually _play_ them, and not just use them as a fancy chat room with graphics) catter to a variation of the same obsessive compulsive group. The kind which puts up with 12 hours a day of boring, repetitive, mindless clicking on monsters, and with waiting in line for 5 hours at a monster respawn point... just to get to level 50 and build a castle. And imagines that anyone will actually envy him/her for that achievement.
Again, it's not an issue of "attention span", and I do believe they'd be just as sad on a console.
Just download IE 6 from Microsoft's site and there you go. MS even proposes that you do so every time you visit their update site.
The exploit actually requires you to view a malformed bitmap. You won't find any such bitmaps on Microsoft's site, and you can't get hacked via some RPC port while you update.
I.e., here's the deal, lemming: just click on that big "Microsoft upgrade" entry in the "Start" menu, and accept the proposed downloads. That's _all_ you need to do to fix this exploit.
I.e., please spare me the stupidity of "what if I want to wait for a fix for an outdated version of IE instead of downloading the existing free upgrade?" You'd be just as vulnerable if you absolutely didn't want to upgrade from an ancient version of Mozilla. Which _did_ have a few exploits, in spite of being OSS.
Either way, guess what? Even with Mozilla it's the same deal. You get to download a newer version.
Or I can think of quite a bunch of equally critical fixes that a whole bunch of other OSS Linux programs needed, in every single distro I've used. Which, typically mean... guess what? That you have to get a newer version of that program.
Yes, with you could personally fix every single bug in an ancient version of Sendmail, and Mozilla, and about 200 other ancient programs, if you really don't want to upgrade. But noone's going to do that. Why? Because reading and _understanding_ some 100 megabytes of source code, _and_ then fixing the bugs you've introduced while doing so, is _not_ going to be a $250 job. It's more likely going to keep a whole department busy making new bugs from now until kingdom come, and cost _millions_.
Plus, much as MS bashing is fashionable and cool on Slashdot, we're talking the same crowd which absolutely must spend countless hours downloading and compile every single new release of KDE and/or Gnome and/or XFree86 and/or the weekly kernel release, etc. So it's downright stupid to now hear about how inconvenient it is to download an IE update. An update that's half the size of the 2.6 kernel bz2, and doesn't require any compiling either.
I'm not talking about "certain benchmarks", I'm talking about the simple fact that if I don't want more performance, I can jolly well keep the old box.
A whole industry exists just because that good ol' 66 MHz 486 DX/2 can't even _decode_ movies in real time any more. Heck, even for rendering some of today's huge web pages it would be too slow. As software becomes more and more starved for CPU and GPU cycles, at some time it's time to bite the bullet and buy a new one.
And a whole marketting bulls**t industry exists only because Joe Average _hates_ those upgrades. He doesn't want them. Sure, he wants some funny new software, and he'd like to be able to view a DivX movie, but having to upgrade the computer for that is a downright trauma. On multiple levels. Not the least being the money level.
So a whole bullsh**t industry exists just to assure Joe Average that this upgrade will be the last one. Would we lie to you? Again?
Just as one example, the GeForce256 was marketted by tried to use this bogus advantage on _two_ counts. NVidia not only claimed everywhere that the card itself was "future proof" (it wasn't), but also that having T&L on the graphics card will make CPU upgrades a thing of the past (it didn't).
So where does the performance come in? Because performance is why Joe Average upgrades in the first place, he'll try to maximize his "months before the next upgrade / buck" ROI. Asking him to get less performance for more bucks just won't work that well.
It's not just "in some benchmarks", it's not a "GHz obsession", it's plain old "how many months until I'm forced to upgrade again, because in very real applications it's crawling again." That's all.
Can we get to caring for software quality instead? Well, sure. Around the time when the makers of that software stop writing crap code and telling us to upgrade the whole computer to get better performance. Our current school of software design is _based_ on assuming that by the time you're done writing it, Moore's law will make your crap code run well enough.
Re:Just Drop Into the Sun from Sail Ship
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 2, Funny
Do it from a solar sail craft that is hovering over the sun (from a point where light pressure is balanced between gravitational pull), and just drop the body in.
Or just drop the whole thing in, sails and all, and call it a modern day Viking funeral;)
If Apple could come up with a reasonably priced Mac, I'd get one, just for experiment sake. It might just make another high-tech toy to play with.
My problem is pretty much what you describe: I already have monitors, and damn better ones than what's in iMacs, so that rules those out. And I simply don't need a laptop at all, so that rules out iBooks and PowerBooks. And the G5, well, let's just say I'm not going to pay twice the price of an Athlon 64 (not counting the yearly Apple tax on MacOS upgrades) just to get Apple's logo and a funny blue desktop theme.
But just to be nasty, I don't think Apple has that much of a reason to lower prices. Their hardware _is_ underperforming, and you can know that when benchmarks start pitting a dual CPU G5 against a single CPU P4. (And start putting ridiculously expensive and unneeded gizmos in the P4, like the most expensive professional Open GL card, to hike the price up the Mac's. The Mac compared, of course, having a much cheaper ATI 9800 in it. Well, guess if it ends up just as fast, might as well try to hide that a PC equivalent is half the price.) As a replacement for the previous benchmarks which needed to cripple the PC's compiler to look competitive.
Getting in the price race for commodity hardware still isn't going to sell much more boxes than they already do. Once you catter to that market, we're talking bang per buck. Apple desktops don't have the bang, and can't match Dell's buck, so I really can't see them selling gazillions of boxes in that market.
Plus, to be even nastier, without the "I'm an elitist snob and look how much I can afford to pay for a modern art computer case" factor, they might actually sell _less_ boxes. Noone got fanboys for selling commodities yet.
The same goes for the UI and apps. Apple doesn't want to be yet another X11 box. First because that just begs comparing it to a PC running the exact same X11 and the exact same software on X11. Second, it just begs comparing the cost of just downloading the latest XFree86, versus paying the yearly Apple tax on MacOS. And third, see above. Being another X11 box doesn't have that nice "I'm a snob with an expensive kitsch for a GUI" touch.
So I really can't see them getting in a pissing contest with Dell, price-wise. It's just not economically feasible.
To be fair, you're not (only) talking about Linux users out there. I know plenty of people who download ripped software for Windows off P2P or warez sites.
I'm not even talking poor people. I'm talking very well paid consultants and at least one company owner.
Some of them also haul their sleek Apple PowerBooks everywhere they go. In between downloading every single new game off some P2P network.
On the other hand, there _are_ some of us who do pay for software. Regardless of for what OS. (And for that matter, for movies and for music too.)
So I'm thinking you're making a confusion there. Some people simply are leeches and cheapskates. On any OS.
No, if it's implemented correctly, I don't have to trust them. It doesn't take a genius to design or implement a system where I'm _not_ on the same network trunk as everyone else connected to that server.
Even if we're connected to the same router, my packets would have to (at least logically) go out through my firewall configuration and _back_ _in_ through _your_ firewall configuration. And even if I opened port ABCD for _my_ Surreal Tournament 2003 (to use a completely made up name;) FPS server, it wouldn't also be opened for packets coming towards _your_ machine. Unless you opened it for yourself too, that is.
The packets wouldn't have to physically exit the router and come back. The router would just need to select and apply _your_ set of rules before forwarding the message to you. Regardless of where the message comes from.
See? It wasn't even that hard to come up with that. It's just a 5 minute thinking exercise. It's perfectly equivalent to a firewall on your local machine, and it requires no trust at all. In fact it's _based_ on _not_ trusting anyone.
See, it just takes a bit of thinking along the lines of "_how_ can we make things better?" instead of insisting on "it's the way it is. Don't change it!!!" If having a single firewall config and a single trunk behind it is a liability, as your example aptly demonstrates, then the thing to do is change all that to something better. Just because years ago one config for everyone was all we had RAM and CPU cycles for, doesn't mean we _must_ stick for ever to that kind of a setup. We can already do _much_ better.
Just throwing our collective in a two-hands-up-salute and complaining about clueless users, that's the wrong answer.
As for my example being compliant with one of the points in the article, even while I'm arguing another sweeping generalization he _explicitly_ makes: see, that's just what annoys me about that article. It's all one big inconsistency, where they can't decide if they're talking about the IP protocol, network topology, applications, content providers, the other people on the net, or the physical wire.
It's more like a standard-run-of-the-mill political speech, full of truisms, so _something_ will sound true enough to everyone. Not the same thing for everyone, though. Network admins can nod and say "he's right" about one aspect, while programmers can nod about something else, while end users can understand (or latch onto) something completely different... and nod about it too.
Even in that case, I'm not sure what their point is.
I don't think that most of the censorship proposes to stop it at the IP packets level. Noone's really proposing to shoot down the copyrighted packets in flight in the first place.
Even the most stupid DRM ideas I've seen (like enforcing the DRM in the hard drive's firmware) tend to leave the TCP/IP stack alone. They're pretty much _based_ on the idea that once on the Internet those files _will_ get to you, or from you. So they try to limit what you can do with them after that.
What they _might_ want from the internet protocol is some accountability. Like being able to find out who did what. But that happens at one end too.
Other proposed changes, such as the recurring ideas to change the SMTP protocol to deterr spammers, are also (A) at one or both ends, not in the middle, and (B) about a completely other protocol, not at the TCP/IP stack level.
Most MMOGs are in the habbit of banning like there's no tomorrow. And that goes double for Sony. They've been known to ban people for stuff like posting a distateful fan-fic about their game.
The RL government of banning would be capital punishment.
That's it. No lawsuit, no jury, no appeal, no recourse. Bang, you're out of the game. Just because we didn't like the article you've posted about our country. Bullet to the back of the head, right here and now.
Do we really want to live in that kind of a country?
MMOGs also have whole castes which exist without any democratic checks. E.g., overworked underpaid game-masters which hold the power to apply the law on the spot. Tech support, judge, jurry and executioner rolled into one. They're not paid to do extensive investigations, and there aren't enough of them for that anyway. They're basically there just to ban on sight or confiscate items on the slightest suspicion. Do we really want that kind of a Judge Dredd caste IRL?
And I'll go and say another thing: MMOGs don't have to deal with RL economics. They can and generally _do_ blunder through monumental mistakes, making the economy swing wildly between "everyone is a billionaire" and "everyone is starving." But since it's all virtual, it's OK. We'll just randomly tweak two lines of code and see what happens.
Ultima Online initially managed to get most species extinct, and end up a world-wide shortage of any resources. A dead obvious problem with their model was, surprisingly enough, not predicted. Noone even thought about it, until some players used it to deadlock the whole economy. Literally.
The solution was to tweak the code and make more ore spawn in the mines. Can the RL government do that, to cover for mistakes? Can George Bush wave a magic wand and make cheap oil sprout in the US, to fix the economy? No.
Well, then, I'll want more responsible people in the RL government. It's easy to be smug about their virtual world, where they make catastrophic decisions weekly, and fix them by just spawning more or less resources or changing production rates overnight. RL governments don't have that luxury. Their job is to _not_ make those catastrophic mistakes in the first place. That's why they're slower and less efficient.
And, to get back to the article, speaking of lawmaking: UO also initially ended up with _massive_ PK problem because their legal system just didn't work. The RL equivalent of that would be people shooting each other on the streets in broad daylight. Everywhere, all the time. And whole hordes of outlaws waiting at every city's exit to kill you.
Somehow I don't want the same people in charge of RL laws.
_I_ know what the difference between protocol, application, infrastructure and service provider is. Seein' as I make a living writing applications which use the protocol for a service provider, and usually I get to work around some infrastructure problem. (E.g., true story, someone firewalling the application from the database.)
My point is more like the article doesn't, and it actually _uses_ that confusion as "proof" of their conclusions. E.g, yes, the "I have a right to steal your work" that you noticed too.
If they wanted to educate the masses about the differences between
1. The IP protocol,
2. The ISP,
3. The applications using TCP/IP or UDP, and
4. The content providers on the internet
I'm all for that. Indeed the world would be a far better place if more people understood the distinction between those. By all means, make people write it 100 times on the blackboard before they get an ISP account, or whatever it takes to get it into their head.
But IMHO the article is making an awful job of it. Far from dispelling that misunderstanding, it looks to me more like propagating and using the confusion.
And even for "proving" things like "I have a right to steal your work", it's still a bad article IMHO. Those I've seen better argued in other places and forms. There is a more compelling argument to be made about how the RIAA business model is obsolete and inadequate by now. Or about how copying that music is providing free advertising for concerts. Or whatever.
Mind you, I don't aggree with that anyway. But nevertheless it's a far better argument than "the Internet is all about sending bits from X to Y, so quit trying to stop me from sending _your_ bits to everyone."
The internet is well defined in what is called the "internet protocol". And this protocol is just an agreement on a way to communicate.
[...]
And usually when people refer to the internet, they mean the main one that most people connect to.
Well, see, that's the point. Usually when people -- including the article's authors -- talk about the Internet, they mean many things: the applications, the ISP, the content providers, the content itself, etc.
E.g., I'm going to take a wild guess that you too, at some point, said things like "I searched for it on the Internet" or "I found a tutorial on the Internet." Did you mean running a packet sniffer directly at IP protocol level? No. More likely you used an application (e.g., a browser) to connect to a content provider (e.g., Google.)
So if the article authors really meant "the Internet is just an aggreement" (the IP protocol), they could have ended the article right there and then. And spared us the other 9 points of whining against change.
But no, they go into things like IM applications talking to each other. There's nothing in the IP RFCs about IM, nor any special provisions for them. At that level, we're talking about applications (the IM clients) and content providers (the IM servers.)
Or they talk about censorship and copying copyrighted bits, which again happen on a completely different level than the IP protocol.
So no, they don't really mean that it's just a protocol, either. They mean the same lot of things that everyone else means.
The only difference is that they use funny semantics tricks to use one meaning of the word in one sentence, and in the next one extend the conclusion over a totally different meaning of it.
E.g., while the IP protocol is indeed about routing bits from X to Y, there is noting in it to say that two different content providers (the IM services) have to make their own data formats compatible to each other. Nor that they should share their login databases with each other.
The falacy goes like this:
- "The Internet is just the IP protocol"
- Therefore all computers connected to it must use the same protocol (IP)
- Now we stealthily change the meaning to something like "The Internet includes IM applications"
- Therefore all IM applications must use the same IM protocol
Or:
- "The Internet is just the IP protocol"
- The IP protocol routes around obstructions
- Now we stealthily change the meaning to something like "The Internet includes the content on it"
- Trying to stop piracy of copyrighted material is a form of obstructing that content
- Therefore the Internet should actively bypass and thwart any effort by the copyright owners to protect their IP
The whole article is _based_ on such lame logic tricks.
Spam is not a problem of the internet, it is a problem of an application which uses the internet. Even draconian changes to how we all do email to deal with spam could be made without affecting the internet per-se. Eg, all email could be signed by keys given out personally by Bill Gates, the internet would not even notice, it's all just bits.
No offense, but here you use just the kind of smoke and mirrors show that I despised in the article. He uses different meaning for the same word, and somehow draws a conclusion which doesn't fit any of those meanings.
E.g., when he says the Internet isn't for capturing eyeballs for ads, I don't think he means the TCP/IP stack. Noone yet sent ads as pure UDP packets, with no application to wait for them. When you're talking ads, you're typically talking browsers or IM clients or such. Applications.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
When he talks about censorship or about copying copyrighted bits, I don't think he means the TCP/IP protocol either. He means very speciffic applications there.
So here's an idea: if you want to make a point, don't resort to falacies and semantic tricks. Changing the meaning of a word in the middle of the "proof" is a well known fallacy. And he does just that: changes his meaning of "Internet" from one sentence to the other, to mean anything from the TCP/IP protocol, to applications running on top of it, to content providers, to everything else.
That's politics, not logic. And it's lame.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
Yes, but the NNTP server or the message board were provided by someone else. The poster of that advice doesn't pay for the bandwidth, but the forum's owner or the NNTP server owner _does_.
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
A lot of forums are supported by advertising. Or _are_ a form of advertising: helping gain some goodwill for the company hosting them, and hopefully also get some attention to the products it's selling. (E.g., when I go to Paradox's forum to talk about Hearts of Iron, I might also notice that "hey, they're also working on something called Crusader Kings. Let's read what it's about [... some 15 minutes of reading later...] Cool! I think I'll buy it!")
Again, it seems to me like you're _not_ getting that much for free. It's easy to say "the internet isn't for advertising, now go away!" But if advertising and commercial interests went away, good luck in getting someone to pay for those servers.
Re:More like "Boneheaded whine", if you ask me
on
What The Internet Isn't
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Porn "of some kind" was just an example. There are plenty of other things -- such as viruses, or spam, or buffer overflow exploits -- where we _do_ use packet filtering right here and now.
You don't even have to take my word for why that's a good idea. See the billion posts right her on Slashdot that say "MS Windows is inferior because, unlike MacOS, it doesn't activate the firewall by default." Or "MS Internet Explorer is inferior because, unlike Mozilla and Opera, it doesn't block certain kinds of JavaScript functions." (The pop-ups.) Or the billion posts about bayesian spam filters.
Basically not only Joe Average, but even the Slashdot crowd, actually _wants_ some form of filtering. The slashdot crowd may also want some _control_ over the filter, but they _are_ using several filters nevertheless. Spam filters, virus scanners, popup blockers, firewalls, you name it. We already _want_ those packets filtered.
Basically the "it just allows bits to go from X to Y" theory is a straw man. Yes, it just allows bits to flow from X, but Y may not want those bits at all. Enter the filters, stage right.
And I'm going to go further and say: why can't the ISP do that for me?
No, seriously. Why must 600 _million_ people have to go through configuring their own firewall, and virus scanner, and spam filter, and popup blocker, and spyware detector, etc? Why? Why must their machines crawl under the burden of all that, and force them into even earlier upgrades?
For Joe Average all that is _not_ fun.
Heck, even for _me_ it isn't. If the ISPs implemented those filters at their end, _and_ gave me control over them, I'm all for it. As long as my multiplayer FPS can tell the ISP to open port ABCD when I want to host a server, but a script kiddie can't open port XYZ from the other side of the wall to exploit some buffer overflow... what's the disadvantage?
It serves the same function as a local firewall, but without the inconvenience. So why not?
So there goes the "adding value just lowers its value" stupidity too. It's an example where adding value, surprisingly enough, really _adds_ value for hundreds of millions of people who have better things to do with their time.
And so on. Basically I'll stick to what I've said. The whole whine is a smoke, mirrors and straw men exercise in missing the real point. It hides behind irrelevant details like "but it's just a protocol", and then dismisses the real issues based on that.
Well, gee. I used to think one needed a politician for that.
More like "Boneheaded whine", if you ask me
on
What The Internet Isn't
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
The whole thing is an exercise in whining about:
- don't change anything. Ever. Just because something exists in one particular shape, it obviously shouldn't be improved in any way. Doing so would, uhm, just lower its value.
(Yeah, buddy, I'm sure you'd be happy to still drive a carriage with a horse. That's a simple and robust design, after all. Noone should have tried to complicate it by adding an engine.)
- I'm a spoiled brat, and I want everything for free. Stop trying to advertise. Stop trying to make it useful for any commercial purpose. And goddamn it, stop trying to stop me from stealing copyrighted content already.
(I'm sure everyone will be happy to pay out of their own pocket to offer you stuff for free. Please do enlighten me then: why does advertising even exist? Why doesn't everyone already rush to pay out of their pocket for their sites?)
- stop trying to control anything, for that matter. Just because it's based on a networking protocol (that "aggreement"), it magically becomes exempt from any other human or legal considerations.
(Reality check: radio or TV is also just an "aggreement". You aggree to modulate the signal in a certain way. Yet it doesn't mean you can show anything on TV. I'm sure if anyone tried showing child porn at noon on TV, they'd _very_ quickly learn that "it's just a protocol" isn't a legal defense.)
On the whole, it's just a sad whine.
The reality is that, regardless of the underlying protocols:
A. there are a bunch of problems with the Net as it is today. Whining along the lines of "it's just the way it is, don't change it" won't magically solve them. It will just let them get worse.
E.g.: see how spam is exponentially increasing. Even just configuring spam filters is getting to be a full time job. Letting it be, on account that "everyone is _supposed_ to be able to send bits to everyone" only made it get worse and worse.
Can those problems be solved without turning the Net into something different? I don't know. But there are smarter people than me working on it. They'll come up with something.
And, hey, even changing it into something different might not be _that_ bad an idea.
B. Someone has to make money out of offering you a service, or they won't offer it at all. That's the way capitalism works.
Since he mentions search engines, one might notice that Google doesn't make a living out of the internet search market. Because there is no such market in the first place. Noone pays to find something on the net. What they make a living from is: ads.
Same applies to everyone else. Insisting that everyone stops trying to make a profit at all, or lives on cents per month profit margin per subscriber, is just retarded.
Seems to me like incompetence and irresponsibility all the way. A database with real data _that_ sensitive gets basically given to the first guy who wants it, on a web site.
Surely because he's cheap, it's got to mean he's also qualified, ethical, etc. And surely he can be trusted with real live secret data, no other questions asked.
Sorry, on an irresponsibility scale, it pegs the meter.
Even ignoring the enormity of what this idiot did: did anyone even think about quality when we're talking data _this_ sensitive? No, seriously.
You take the cheapest guy which takes the job off a web site. How do you know he's even qualified to deal with that kind of data?
Does he even know even the most basic kinds of threats? Like buffer overflows? Or like people editing URL's by hand?
I.e., can his _program_ be trusted to not have a backdoor you can drive a bus through? Or maybe, 6 months later, would it have exposed the data to every script kiddie on the planet? Or maybe, someone this irresponsible and unethical, might even leave some _intentional_ backdoor? (Not even maliciously intended. Just for his personal convenience, in case he later needs to see why some data doesn't work.)
That's what pisses me off at the current trend of hiring the cheapest moron, regardless of competence or qualifications. While there is plenty of work to do with incompetent novices, I'd expect to have at least one experienced programmer on the team. Someone who knows about the security dangers, and who can design, code and review to avoid them.
I do _not_ want my personal information to depend solely on some clueless moron who's strung together some COM controlls in VB (or Java, or PHP, or whatever) without any clue what he's doing. And who needs to ask on a web site every two days how to do something like string formatting.
When my data, or some children's data, is entrusted to some program, I'll want that program to be as armoured and bullet-proof as a bank vault. _Not_ the equivalent of a shoddy paper box in the middle of the street.
So, as I've said, I wouldn't say that Denis is the only incompetent there. I'd say that the whole chain of idiots that allowed that data to get to him, should be shot at dawn.
The same god which promises to fry you in Hell for eternity, if you're not a good boy? The same God who drowned His creation once? The same God who nuked Sodom and Gomorah? And the same God who thought that His son getting nailed to a cross was a good way to make peace with the humans?
Hmm... Dunno, dude, sounds like you had a very mean mother there. You have my compassion;)
Now, joke aside, the comparison is fundamentally flawed. You trust that your mother exists, because you've _seen_ her. You trust that she'll come back, because she's come back to you before. Again and again.
If I had seen God as 1% often as I saw mom, I'd have a lot of faith in Him too.
(On the other hand, I can only hope God wouldn't also start calling to cry about "I clicked on this link, and there was this dialog, and I didn't read it, and now my computer shows popups and shuts down" like mom does. That would be just scary, you know;)
And, yes, if mom went shopping and didn't return after 12 hours... dunno about you, but I'd start worrying. What if something did happen to her?
So God did... what? Buggered off some 2000 years ago, and never came back? I'd worry by now. A lot:P
I see a fundamental conflict there between that and assuming that people "willing to shed their assumptions about their pet model and truly investigate the alternatives" would automatically reach _your_ pet conclusion.
You've just described science and scientists there. That's what science is all about: being willing to acknowledge that any model may not be perfect, and investigating alternatives.
The difference is that:
1. Scientific theories have to be supported by facts. So far we have enough facts to support the theory of gravity for example. We have millions of experiments which confirm it, from apples falling off trees, to light curvature around a massive gravity well.
I'm all willing to investigate alternatives: you just need to give me the facts that support your alternative more. Give me the facts that support the divine intervention theory more, and I'm all converted. Does a blessed apple fall faster or slower than a normal one? Does holy light curve more or less around a star?
Devise some experiments. Convince me.
2. Those scientific theories have to be able to not only explain what happened ("uh, he got hit by lightning because he was a sinner"), they have to be able to predict what's going to happen in a controlled experiment.
It's based on these predictions that you now have a computer and are able to post on Slashdot. You can predict that if you make an 130nm CMOS transistor, it will act in a very well defined way. If you connect a few tens of millions of them, you can predict very accurately what the resulting CPU will do. That's science at work.
Everything else around you is based on such predictions: your car, your telephone, your clothes, your toothpaste, etc. They're based on taking some scientific rules, and predicting that a 4 cylinder engine will do this, instead of that.
Can your divine theory do the same? When you explain everything as God's will, can you quantify that will? Can you design a transistor based on faith instead of science?
No, seriously. I want to know. In fact, I want to know how.
What will that transistor run with? Divine Will particles instead of electrons? How are you going to control their flow? Make the gate switch from blessed to non-blessed? How? And exactly how much blessing does that gate need to switch? Does it produce heat too, like normal transistors, or is the divine transistor completely cool?
See, when you can actually do that, _then_ I'll throw away science and explain everything via God.
Until then, I'll see them as non-exclusive. God can jolly well exist, and for all I know maybe it was He that caused the Big Bang. In which case, science just tries to understand His creation. Or maybe he doesn't. In which case, science serves us just as well.
You can also think of it this way: God, if He exists, was the greatest hacker of all times.
Creating something this complex in 6 days? (The 7th he rested.) Dang, even during the college days of pulling 3 all-nighters in a row to finish an assignment, I haven't come even close;)
One could argue that He only had one zone (Eden) and not much gameplay in the 1.0 version.
And the first two players were bug-abusers. You tell them to stay away from that tree, 'cause it's buggy and does funny things to you stats... and what do they do? Right. Same thing they do on MMORPGs and MUDs now in that kind of a situation.
But you can't blame God for that.
Either way, _very_ impressive job. The guy has all my respect. Keep up the good work, God.
So what we're trying to do is understand His work. Learn how does it all work. Reverse engineer it, if you will. See what makes the sky blue. What makes the sun bright? How do those little bright dots on the night sky work?
Of course, we'll never see His code, nor be able to replicate it. But we can get some idea of the kind of maths He's used. For example, we can get the idea that if a constant here or there was just a tiny little bit different, life wouldn't even be possible. Or the sun wouldn't even be possible.
It's this kind of knowledge that gives us a better understanding of how great and unique His work is. The fact that the more we understand about it, the more it looks like it's all based on a few clean elegant formulas and a few neatly tuned constants. It looks like a professional and elegant piece of work.
I wish my code was that neat. (And I'm not even getting into some of my co-workers' code;)
All I can say is "Amen, brother." It so pisses me off to see clueless HR droids hire _completely_ incompetent burger-flippers. Based on faked resumes and having the right colour socks.
I'm talking people who:
A. Have never even _read_ about the technology they claim to master.
B. At most have a superficial understanding of the language's syntax, but _not_ the standard libraries, best practices, pitfalls, etc.
C. Have never even heard of bog-standard vulnerabilities and security risks (e.g., if you code a web-based GUI, FFS, don't assume that everyone _has_ to click on your links to get to a page. People do edit URLs. Do check that the currently logged in user does have the right to view that data.)
D. Have no clue of even the most elementary algorithms or data structures.
E. All the above.
Yet some clueless HR droid will hire them anyway. Because, hey, "it's just typing. Anyone can learn it."
I find it just insulting. Especially coming from some people who can't even program their VCR's clock. I'd like to see them do my work, and _then_ decide if it's easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone in their right mind want to use IE? Maybe because they care about getting to the content, not about fighting some stupid war against Microsoft.
/. geek. The geek loves doing things in the most uncomfortable and unnatural way just for bragging rights. (And, of course, for that fuzzy lemming feeling of being a part of the Anti-MS herd.) Joe Average, on the other hand, just wants to get to the sites he needs.
;)
Let's take some imaginary TV manufacturers.
1. MicroTV. Their TV does have some technical issues, and maybe it's a little light on the featuritis list, but -- for whatever reason -- works flawlessly with every single TV sender ever made.
2. MozillaTV. A bloated piece of crap which took some half a decade to even have a usable product at all. In fact, instead of even designing a TV, they first went into fantasy land and spent years reinventing the CRT (rendering engine) from scratch, making a designer remote control (the interface widgets) and their very own personalized bug tracking system. Still has even more technical problems than MicroTV. Works _well_ with maybe 10% of the TV stations, and with some 25% of them it doesn't even work at all. In fact, some stations might make your TV crash. On the plus sides, it has some extra features... that 99% of the people don't even want.
3. OperaTV. Decent TV, and definitely more stable than MicroTV. Nice piece of engineering, really. But... it only works with some 80% of the TV stations. And with about half the rest, the image doesn't quite look right. They have an even bigger list of useless features, most of which 99% of the people end up explicitly turning off. (E.g., those retarded gestures.)
Which of those 3 TV's do you think Joe Average will pick? Let me assure you that he'll pick MicroTV every time. Why? Because it works with all stations. That's all.
Now apply that knowledge to browsers. Which browser will Joe Average pick? MSIE every time.
There's no laziness, no cluelessness, etc, involved. It's just that Joe is nothing like the standard
He's not going to give up on playing Backgammon on MS's site, just for the privilege of taking part in a stupid browser war. He's not going to move his account to another bank, just because his old bank only supported IE. He's not going to stop uploading his digital photos and commenting on that camera manufacturer's forum site just because they don't show right in Mozilla. Etc.
So if you really were wondering why Joe Average stays with that "inferior" IE, now you know. Consider yourself enlightened
Did I say anything about CPU power or RAM? Nope. Did I say anything about users not needing a good GUI? Nope. Etc. But you didn't actually read any of that, did you? Just jumped directly back to building straw men in your little phantasy world, eh? Sad.
.DLL which sits behind it all, and tells the browser _what_ to display. (Just like when you browse slashdot, the magic isn't in your browser, it's in the server-side program that tells your browser what to display.)
So let's try again, in less words. Maybe this time you can actually be arsed to read first:
A. You can have your metaphors and intricate GUI. But does it have to be a _web_browser_? Exactly what the heck is so intricate and metaphor-rich about using a web browser to display the exact same flat list of files? I would have thought that if you want something intricate and advanced, Internet Explorer is the last place you'd look for that.
B. Why does the file manager have to be joined at the hip and unreplaceable? No, seriously. Precisely _because_ maybe someone wants to explore more rich metaphors, instead of being stuck with the 1990's HTML technology as the mandatory interface to the computer. How about letting me replace it with something that fits my needs better? How about letting people, yes, explore new concepts? Who knows? Maybe one of them will come with a better metaphor than that "boring and damn pedestrian" flat list.
C. Exactly how's using Windows Media Player as the new mandatory interface going to help? Exactly what advantages does that bring to the table? It's just a stupid program that plays movies.
Do you even understand any of the programming details that would go behind it? Or are you one of those whose tech knowledge of it all goes only as far as "ooh, pretty pictures and movies" and "Internet=Netscape"?
Let me enlighten you: the browser or media player is just a rendering program. It does nothing else than paint some stuff you sent it as a HTML or DivX file. That's all. No more, no less.
Most importantly: it doesn't add _anything_ that you couldn't have directly painted on the screen yourself.
If there's going to be any magic behind it all, any advanced metaphors in manipulating the files, it's _not_ the browser or media player facade. The magic will happen in some
Whether or not you get your metaphor-rich GUI, and a better structured view than today's "boring and pedestrian" flat list, will depend on this little module that sits behind it all. _Not_ on whether Microsoft forces it to go through IE or WMP to paint the result, or just allows it direct access to the screen.
Much as generally I'm fairly pro-Microsoft, IMHO this doesn't make sense at all.
.doc files, a browser for .html files and so on. The file manager does _not_ need any intrinsic knowledge about how to handle all those files. It just needs to know what application to launch for each of them. That's all.)
"Why shouldn't a desktop management system utilize an 128 MB graphics card?" Let's see:
1. Because it's a straw man argument. You can use all the fancy graphics you want to, even without being a web-browser tied into the very operating system. You can write the exact same Windows file- and/or desktop-manager in user space, _without_ making it a web browser, and it will work just as well. In fact, heck, you can even make your full 3D real-time manager, one that even _needs_ a DirectX 10 graphics card, and it still won't need to be a web browser, nor to be intimately tied into the OS itself.
Noone says that need to go back to a command line prompt. You can have your relations, memories and information, or whatever else, and you can have them presented with as much fancy graphics as you want to. All I'm saying is: there is _no_ real reason why the drawing program _has_ to be a web browser, and there is _no_ real reason why it can't be replaceable with other programs that do the same thing.
2. Because it doesn't need to. All that a file/desktop manager like Windows uses is some 2D and font acceleration. That's all. There is no real need to use 3D texture-mapped environment-bump-mapped pixel-shaded full-screen-antialiased anisotropic-filtered graphics just to display a list of files, nor to paint a border around a window. We're talking a relatively primitive 2D app, not a FPS game.
3. That goes double for the codecs and media playing capabilities. There is no way in heck to say you need streaming video codec hooks into the very OS itself... to make a file or desktop manager. How and where the heck would that file or desktop manager even use those codecs? For what? Unless it's going to have DivX movies instead of icons, there is exactly _zero_ need for it to even know what a codec is.
(Just in case someone wants to jump in with a stupidity like "it needs codecs to play the media files when you double-click them": *bzzzt* Wrong answer. What happens when you double-click a file is launching an external application which knows what to do with the file. A media player app for WMA files, Word for
Either that, or they could have actually taken UO seriously. They pretty much owned the MMO market and genre, and still ended up number 3. How sad is that?
UO was released with just as many bugs as U9, and _stayed_ buggy. In fact, around 2002 when I last tried it, they were still blundering through patches which broke 2 things for each 1 bug fixed. I've seen patches released and rolled back within 4 hours... during which, they wrecked pure havoc upon those unlucky to download them. Patches which seemed to never have been tested at all.
UO also was released in a sad unfinished state, which since then has become the de-facto standard release for MMO games.
For starters, half the skills were either totally useless, or useless for anyone who wasn't playing a grief player. E.g., tinkering skill could only create trapped chests. Except no NPC ever opened a chest. So in effect the only use was to kill newbies.
The gameplay and game design itself was a poorly thought out catastrophe. Most of the issues were already known and tested for decades on MUDs, but UO just had to repeat every single mistake in the book.
E.g., it was dead predictable that someone will deadlock their original economy. The problem of people actually working hard to take non-renewable resources out of the game -- e.g., by stashing them in vaults or in the inventory of 100 non-played avatars -- was known on MUDs for ages. And blimey, who would have guessed? The exact same issue deadlocked UO's economy.
And how about listening to the customers? It took _years_ of screaming in anguish for a non-PK option, which Origin mostly just ignored. UO lost players hand-over-fist over that issue. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft basically made "we're the place where you won't get repeadedly PK'ed like on UO" their _main_ claim to glory.
It was already known on MUDs that purely player-enforced justice does not work. Ever. RL justice works only because you do care about what happens to your RL self. But on virtual world you can _count_ on having a hefty share of players who just don't care about their virtual avatars. There is _nothing_ you can do in-character to keep them inline, because they aren't in-character to start with.
Etc.
Basically I'm saying that UO and U9 were both equally half-arsed efforts. Which one came first and which was delayed... does it even make that much of a difference? I believe that even if they came out the other way around, they'd still have been half-arsed. And still, basically, just a sympthom of the fact that something was already rotten at Origin.
What I resent is that unlike actual methodologies, XP is more of a religion. Where unsupported hype, trolling, insults and mindless zealotry are the main coin. And facts are usually to be avoided, or slightly altered.
E.g., the fact that the poster child for XP, the C3 project, was a project with fixed requirements, _not_ something requiring constant change. And it just burned money for many years in a row, didn't deliver even a fraction of what it had to do, until it was considered a miserable failure by the customer. Incidentally, it also gave the "on-site customer" stress-related health problems.
Yes, contrary to what the sacred XP scriptures claimed, that project was _not_ a success. The whole XP myth is based on repeating a lie over and over, until enough idiots start believing it. And God knows there's one born every minute.
But let's get back to XP zealots' trolling. Sorry, claims like basically "only XP gives you bug free code, while the rest of the world leaves bugs in", are bogus and it's just trolling. No programmer willingly leaves bugs in _release_ code. XP or no XP.
What XP does is redefine what bug means, so, blimey, under our double-speak standard we didn't have bugs. Well, gee, ain't it the easy way out...
Straight off the sacred books of XP: if the customer didn't explicitly give you an automated test-case that fails, then you don't have a bug. No, I'm serious.
If the customer's automated test case inputs the number 10, then presses button A, and then button B, that's the only "bug" you can possibly have. If inputting 15 and pressing directly button B causes the program to crash and burn, or even to garble the database, hey, it's not a bug because it wasn't in the automated test case.
Worse yet, if inputting a 65000 character string instead of a number there causes a buffer overflow and allows someone to take control of your machine, it's still not the developpers' problem under XP. If the user didn't explicitly give you a test case with a 65000 character string as input, it's not your problem. Yes, all the buffer overflows we moan and bitch about in Windows and IE would count as "delivering code without bugs" under the XP standard.
(Incidentally they also fit another XP koan: writing the simplest thing that can possibly work. Making the extra effort to write a buffer class with checked bounds, or an URL validator class, so such bugs don't happen... well, that's "wasting time with flowery design and frameworks.")
What's your recourse as a customer then? Well, hey, it was _your_ fault that you didn't give them the right test cases. But don't worry. You'll give them the new test cases, write it as a change request, and pay them another cycle to fix it. That's the XP way.
That's just one of the many lies and double-speak that XP is _based_ on. On one hand accuse everyone else of shipping buggy stuff, on the other hand conveniently redefine the _exact_ _same_ stuff as "without known bugs" for yourself.
But, as I've said, that's just one of many.
First of all, it will add jack squat. Games already have a plethora of ways to tell you that something went wrong. Sounds or blinking indicators always got my attention.
On the other hand, the smell of something burning could just as well come from the neighbour's kitchen. Or from my own kitchen. So instead of adding a valuable new _signal_, you've just added a whole new source of _noise_.
Second, how will it interact with other such devices in the same room/house/office/etc? How do I know if that burning smell is from my game? Or maybe from dad who's visiting and just flipped the channel on the smell-enabled TV to a WW2 tank warfare documentary?
Did I mention "source of noise" yet?
Third, how will such persistent smells combine? And how they combine with other smells? Any guess what my room will smell like, between
- the neighbour's having a barbecue under my window,
- my own food which is just busy boiling on the stove,
- the cigarette I'm smoking,
- my game which is yet again in one of those sewer levels that everyone loves to put in a FPS,
- someone watching a documentary about god knows what smelly thing on TV
- someone else opening some perfume scented email on the other computer
Actually I don't even want to know what the resulting olfactory cacophony would be like. There's no bloody way I'll be thrilled to have something like that in my house.
Fourth, what about inconveniencing other people? Ever had to work with one of those retards who use a big subwoofer at the office, and never think about their co-workers hearing email notificatons and MP3s at 90db, resonating through the whole building? We used to have a couple of those.
In fact one of them actually made a point of inconveniencing everyone as much as possible to get attention.
What makes you think they'll think twice about stinking up the whole office too?
Or at home, what makes you think that everyone else around is thrilled to smell burning oil from my racing game?
Oh please... If I hear any more "PC gamers are like this, while console gamers are like that" sweeping generalizations I'm gonna barf.
As someone who plays both, I find it funny to be told that when I grab the PS2 controller suddenly my attention span takes a nose dive. Or whatever else.
But let's talk attention span. It's PC games which typically are over in 8 to 10 hours. There's an entire industry churning mindless 8 hour FPS clones for the PC.
Whereas most console games I've played packed 50 hours or more. Even KOTOR which was _huge_ for a PC game, was actually somewhat short for its genre as a console game.
E.g., on the PC you get racing games with maybe 3 to 5 cars to choose from. Most are with cars from only one manufacturer. Some are with only _one_ car total. On the consoles? GT2. 'Nuff said.
Want to talk online games? Good. Phantasy Star Online? Had a lot of people playing it for ages.
So some people are being obsessive about a single game. And in the case of some people I know, they're actually playing the same map again and again, because that's the map on which they can impress their clan.
I've watched someone, day after day and months after months, playing the exact same Counter-Strike map, running to the exact same spot, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent to see if someone's coming. _Hours_ in a row _each_ _day_ spent actually just jumping in place in front of the exact same vent hole. (Virtual aerobic, or what?;)
It's not an issue of "attention span", nor of "PC vs consoles". It's just sad. And they'd do it on consoles just as well, if they had a clan of retards to impress with their l33t score.
MMORPGs as a _game_ (i.e., talking about those who actually _play_ them, and not just use them as a fancy chat room with graphics) catter to a variation of the same obsessive compulsive group. The kind which puts up with 12 hours a day of boring, repetitive, mindless clicking on monsters, and with waiting in line for 5 hours at a monster respawn point... just to get to level 50 and build a castle. And imagines that anyone will actually envy him/her for that achievement.
Again, it's not an issue of "attention span", and I do believe they'd be just as sad on a console.
Just download IE 6 from Microsoft's site and there you go. MS even proposes that you do so every time you visit their update site.
The exploit actually requires you to view a malformed bitmap. You won't find any such bitmaps on Microsoft's site, and you can't get hacked via some RPC port while you update.
I.e., here's the deal, lemming: just click on that big "Microsoft upgrade" entry in the "Start" menu, and accept the proposed downloads. That's _all_ you need to do to fix this exploit.
I.e., please spare me the stupidity of "what if I want to wait for a fix for an outdated version of IE instead of downloading the existing free upgrade?" You'd be just as vulnerable if you absolutely didn't want to upgrade from an ancient version of Mozilla. Which _did_ have a few exploits, in spite of being OSS.
Either way, guess what? Even with Mozilla it's the same deal. You get to download a newer version.
Or I can think of quite a bunch of equally critical fixes that a whole bunch of other OSS Linux programs needed, in every single distro I've used. Which, typically mean... guess what? That you have to get a newer version of that program.
Yes, with you could personally fix every single bug in an ancient version of Sendmail, and Mozilla, and about 200 other ancient programs, if you really don't want to upgrade. But noone's going to do that. Why? Because reading and _understanding_ some 100 megabytes of source code, _and_ then fixing the bugs you've introduced while doing so, is _not_ going to be a $250 job. It's more likely going to keep a whole department busy making new bugs from now until kingdom come, and cost _millions_.
Plus, much as MS bashing is fashionable and cool on Slashdot, we're talking the same crowd which absolutely must spend countless hours downloading and compile every single new release of KDE and/or Gnome and/or XFree86 and/or the weekly kernel release, etc. So it's downright stupid to now hear about how inconvenient it is to download an IE update. An update that's half the size of the 2.6 kernel bz2, and doesn't require any compiling either.
I'm not talking about "certain benchmarks", I'm talking about the simple fact that if I don't want more performance, I can jolly well keep the old box.
A whole industry exists just because that good ol' 66 MHz 486 DX/2 can't even _decode_ movies in real time any more. Heck, even for rendering some of today's huge web pages it would be too slow. As software becomes more and more starved for CPU and GPU cycles, at some time it's time to bite the bullet and buy a new one.
And a whole marketting bulls**t industry exists only because Joe Average _hates_ those upgrades. He doesn't want them. Sure, he wants some funny new software, and he'd like to be able to view a DivX movie, but having to upgrade the computer for that is a downright trauma. On multiple levels. Not the least being the money level.
So a whole bullsh**t industry exists just to assure Joe Average that this upgrade will be the last one. Would we lie to you? Again?
Just as one example, the GeForce256 was marketted by tried to use this bogus advantage on _two_ counts. NVidia not only claimed everywhere that the card itself was "future proof" (it wasn't), but also that having T&L on the graphics card will make CPU upgrades a thing of the past (it didn't).
So where does the performance come in? Because performance is why Joe Average upgrades in the first place, he'll try to maximize his "months before the next upgrade / buck" ROI. Asking him to get less performance for more bucks just won't work that well.
It's not just "in some benchmarks", it's not a "GHz obsession", it's plain old "how many months until I'm forced to upgrade again, because in very real applications it's crawling again." That's all.
Can we get to caring for software quality instead? Well, sure. Around the time when the makers of that software stop writing crap code and telling us to upgrade the whole computer to get better performance. Our current school of software design is _based_ on assuming that by the time you're done writing it, Moore's law will make your crap code run well enough.
Or just drop the whole thing in, sails and all, and call it a modern day Viking funeral ;)
If Apple could come up with a reasonably priced Mac, I'd get one, just for experiment sake. It might just make another high-tech toy to play with.
My problem is pretty much what you describe: I already have monitors, and damn better ones than what's in iMacs, so that rules those out. And I simply don't need a laptop at all, so that rules out iBooks and PowerBooks. And the G5, well, let's just say I'm not going to pay twice the price of an Athlon 64 (not counting the yearly Apple tax on MacOS upgrades) just to get Apple's logo and a funny blue desktop theme.
But just to be nasty, I don't think Apple has that much of a reason to lower prices. Their hardware _is_ underperforming, and you can know that when benchmarks start pitting a dual CPU G5 against a single CPU P4. (And start putting ridiculously expensive and unneeded gizmos in the P4, like the most expensive professional Open GL card, to hike the price up the Mac's. The Mac compared, of course, having a much cheaper ATI 9800 in it. Well, guess if it ends up just as fast, might as well try to hide that a PC equivalent is half the price.) As a replacement for the previous benchmarks which needed to cripple the PC's compiler to look competitive.
Getting in the price race for commodity hardware still isn't going to sell much more boxes than they already do. Once you catter to that market, we're talking bang per buck. Apple desktops don't have the bang, and can't match Dell's buck, so I really can't see them selling gazillions of boxes in that market.
Plus, to be even nastier, without the "I'm an elitist snob and look how much I can afford to pay for a modern art computer case" factor, they might actually sell _less_ boxes. Noone got fanboys for selling commodities yet.
The same goes for the UI and apps. Apple doesn't want to be yet another X11 box. First because that just begs comparing it to a PC running the exact same X11 and the exact same software on X11. Second, it just begs comparing the cost of just downloading the latest XFree86, versus paying the yearly Apple tax on MacOS. And third, see above. Being another X11 box doesn't have that nice "I'm a snob with an expensive kitsch for a GUI" touch.
So I really can't see them getting in a pissing contest with Dell, price-wise. It's just not economically feasible.
To be fair, you're not (only) talking about Linux users out there. I know plenty of people who download ripped software for Windows off P2P or warez sites.
I'm not even talking poor people. I'm talking very well paid consultants and at least one company owner.
Some of them also haul their sleek Apple PowerBooks everywhere they go. In between downloading every single new game off some P2P network.
On the other hand, there _are_ some of us who do pay for software. Regardless of for what OS. (And for that matter, for movies and for music too.)
So I'm thinking you're making a confusion there. Some people simply are leeches and cheapskates. On any OS.
No, if it's implemented correctly, I don't have to trust them. It doesn't take a genius to design or implement a system where I'm _not_ on the same network trunk as everyone else connected to that server.
Even if we're connected to the same router, my packets would have to (at least logically) go out through my firewall configuration and _back_ _in_ through _your_ firewall configuration. And even if I opened port ABCD for _my_ Surreal Tournament 2003 (to use a completely made up name;) FPS server, it wouldn't also be opened for packets coming towards _your_ machine. Unless you opened it for yourself too, that is.
The packets wouldn't have to physically exit the router and come back. The router would just need to select and apply _your_ set of rules before forwarding the message to you. Regardless of where the message comes from.
See? It wasn't even that hard to come up with that. It's just a 5 minute thinking exercise. It's perfectly equivalent to a firewall on your local machine, and it requires no trust at all. In fact it's _based_ on _not_ trusting anyone.
See, it just takes a bit of thinking along the lines of "_how_ can we make things better?" instead of insisting on "it's the way it is. Don't change it!!!" If having a single firewall config and a single trunk behind it is a liability, as your example aptly demonstrates, then the thing to do is change all that to something better. Just because years ago one config for everyone was all we had RAM and CPU cycles for, doesn't mean we _must_ stick for ever to that kind of a setup. We can already do _much_ better.
Just throwing our collective in a two-hands-up-salute and complaining about clueless users, that's the wrong answer.
As for my example being compliant with one of the points in the article, even while I'm arguing another sweeping generalization he _explicitly_ makes: see, that's just what annoys me about that article. It's all one big inconsistency, where they can't decide if they're talking about the IP protocol, network topology, applications, content providers, the other people on the net, or the physical wire.
It's more like a standard-run-of-the-mill political speech, full of truisms, so _something_ will sound true enough to everyone. Not the same thing for everyone, though. Network admins can nod and say "he's right" about one aspect, while programmers can nod about something else, while end users can understand (or latch onto) something completely different... and nod about it too.
That's really all that got me ticked off.
Even in that case, I'm not sure what their point is.
I don't think that most of the censorship proposes to stop it at the IP packets level. Noone's really proposing to shoot down the copyrighted packets in flight in the first place.
Even the most stupid DRM ideas I've seen (like enforcing the DRM in the hard drive's firmware) tend to leave the TCP/IP stack alone. They're pretty much _based_ on the idea that once on the Internet those files _will_ get to you, or from you. So they try to limit what you can do with them after that.
What they _might_ want from the internet protocol is some accountability. Like being able to find out who did what. But that happens at one end too.
Other proposed changes, such as the recurring ideas to change the SMTP protocol to deterr spammers, are also (A) at one or both ends, not in the middle, and (B) about a completely other protocol, not at the TCP/IP stack level.
Most MMOGs are in the habbit of banning like there's no tomorrow. And that goes double for Sony. They've been known to ban people for stuff like posting a distateful fan-fic about their game.
The RL government of banning would be capital punishment.
That's it. No lawsuit, no jury, no appeal, no recourse. Bang, you're out of the game. Just because we didn't like the article you've posted about our country. Bullet to the back of the head, right here and now.
Do we really want to live in that kind of a country?
MMOGs also have whole castes which exist without any democratic checks. E.g., overworked underpaid game-masters which hold the power to apply the law on the spot. Tech support, judge, jurry and executioner rolled into one. They're not paid to do extensive investigations, and there aren't enough of them for that anyway. They're basically there just to ban on sight or confiscate items on the slightest suspicion. Do we really want that kind of a Judge Dredd caste IRL?
And I'll go and say another thing: MMOGs don't have to deal with RL economics. They can and generally _do_ blunder through monumental mistakes, making the economy swing wildly between "everyone is a billionaire" and "everyone is starving." But since it's all virtual, it's OK. We'll just randomly tweak two lines of code and see what happens.
Ultima Online initially managed to get most species extinct, and end up a world-wide shortage of any resources. A dead obvious problem with their model was, surprisingly enough, not predicted. Noone even thought about it, until some players used it to deadlock the whole economy. Literally.
The solution was to tweak the code and make more ore spawn in the mines. Can the RL government do that, to cover for mistakes? Can George Bush wave a magic wand and make cheap oil sprout in the US, to fix the economy? No.
Well, then, I'll want more responsible people in the RL government. It's easy to be smug about their virtual world, where they make catastrophic decisions weekly, and fix them by just spawning more or less resources or changing production rates overnight. RL governments don't have that luxury. Their job is to _not_ make those catastrophic mistakes in the first place. That's why they're slower and less efficient.
And, to get back to the article, speaking of lawmaking: UO also initially ended up with _massive_ PK problem because their legal system just didn't work. The RL equivalent of that would be people shooting each other on the streets in broad daylight. Everywhere, all the time. And whole hordes of outlaws waiting at every city's exit to kill you.
Somehow I don't want the same people in charge of RL laws.
My point is more like the article doesn't, and it actually _uses_ that confusion as "proof" of their conclusions. E.g, yes, the "I have a right to steal your work" that you noticed too.
If they wanted to educate the masses about the differences between
1. The IP protocol,
2. The ISP,
3. The applications using TCP/IP or UDP, and
4. The content providers on the internet
I'm all for that. Indeed the world would be a far better place if more people understood the distinction between those. By all means, make people write it 100 times on the blackboard before they get an ISP account, or whatever it takes to get it into their head.
But IMHO the article is making an awful job of it. Far from dispelling that misunderstanding, it looks to me more like propagating and using the confusion.
And even for "proving" things like "I have a right to steal your work", it's still a bad article IMHO. Those I've seen better argued in other places and forms. There is a more compelling argument to be made about how the RIAA business model is obsolete and inadequate by now. Or about how copying that music is providing free advertising for concerts. Or whatever.
Mind you, I don't aggree with that anyway. But nevertheless it's a far better argument than "the Internet is all about sending bits from X to Y, so quit trying to stop me from sending _your_ bits to everyone."
[...]
And usually when people refer to the internet, they mean the main one that most people connect to.
Well, see, that's the point. Usually when people -- including the article's authors -- talk about the Internet, they mean many things: the applications, the ISP, the content providers, the content itself, etc.
E.g., I'm going to take a wild guess that you too, at some point, said things like "I searched for it on the Internet" or "I found a tutorial on the Internet." Did you mean running a packet sniffer directly at IP protocol level? No. More likely you used an application (e.g., a browser) to connect to a content provider (e.g., Google.)
So if the article authors really meant "the Internet is just an aggreement" (the IP protocol), they could have ended the article right there and then. And spared us the other 9 points of whining against change.
But no, they go into things like IM applications talking to each other. There's nothing in the IP RFCs about IM, nor any special provisions for them. At that level, we're talking about applications (the IM clients) and content providers (the IM servers.)
Or they talk about censorship and copying copyrighted bits, which again happen on a completely different level than the IP protocol.
So no, they don't really mean that it's just a protocol, either. They mean the same lot of things that everyone else means.
The only difference is that they use funny semantics tricks to use one meaning of the word in one sentence, and in the next one extend the conclusion over a totally different meaning of it.
E.g., while the IP protocol is indeed about routing bits from X to Y, there is noting in it to say that two different content providers (the IM services) have to make their own data formats compatible to each other. Nor that they should share their login databases with each other.
The falacy goes like this:
- "The Internet is just the IP protocol"
- Therefore all computers connected to it must use the same protocol (IP)
- Now we stealthily change the meaning to something like "The Internet includes IM applications"
- Therefore all IM applications must use the same IM protocol
Or:
- "The Internet is just the IP protocol"
- The IP protocol routes around obstructions
- Now we stealthily change the meaning to something like "The Internet includes the content on it"
- Trying to stop piracy of copyrighted material is a form of obstructing that content
- Therefore the Internet should actively bypass and thwart any effort by the copyright owners to protect their IP
The whole article is _based_ on such lame logic tricks.
No offense, but here you use just the kind of smoke and mirrors show that I despised in the article. He uses different meaning for the same word, and somehow draws a conclusion which doesn't fit any of those meanings.
E.g., when he says the Internet isn't for capturing eyeballs for ads, I don't think he means the TCP/IP stack. Noone yet sent ads as pure UDP packets, with no application to wait for them. When you're talking ads, you're typically talking browsers or IM clients or such. Applications.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
When he talks about censorship or about copying copyrighted bits, I don't think he means the TCP/IP protocol either. He means very speciffic applications there.
So here's an idea: if you want to make a point, don't resort to falacies and semantic tricks. Changing the meaning of a word in the middle of the "proof" is a well known fallacy. And he does just that: changes his meaning of "Internet" from one sentence to the other, to mean anything from the TCP/IP protocol, to applications running on top of it, to content providers, to everything else.
That's politics, not logic. And it's lame.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
Yes, but the NNTP server or the message board were provided by someone else. The poster of that advice doesn't pay for the bandwidth, but the forum's owner or the NNTP server owner _does_.
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
A lot of forums are supported by advertising. Or _are_ a form of advertising: helping gain some goodwill for the company hosting them, and hopefully also get some attention to the products it's selling. (E.g., when I go to Paradox's forum to talk about Hearts of Iron, I might also notice that "hey, they're also working on something called Crusader Kings. Let's read what it's about [... some 15 minutes of reading later ...] Cool! I think I'll buy it!")
Again, it seems to me like you're _not_ getting that much for free. It's easy to say "the internet isn't for advertising, now go away!" But if advertising and commercial interests went away, good luck in getting someone to pay for those servers.
Porn "of some kind" was just an example. There are plenty of other things -- such as viruses, or spam, or buffer overflow exploits -- where we _do_ use packet filtering right here and now.
You don't even have to take my word for why that's a good idea. See the billion posts right her on Slashdot that say "MS Windows is inferior because, unlike MacOS, it doesn't activate the firewall by default." Or "MS Internet Explorer is inferior because, unlike Mozilla and Opera, it doesn't block certain kinds of JavaScript functions." (The pop-ups.) Or the billion posts about bayesian spam filters.
Basically not only Joe Average, but even the Slashdot crowd, actually _wants_ some form of filtering. The slashdot crowd may also want some _control_ over the filter, but they _are_ using several filters nevertheless. Spam filters, virus scanners, popup blockers, firewalls, you name it. We already _want_ those packets filtered.
Basically the "it just allows bits to go from X to Y" theory is a straw man. Yes, it just allows bits to flow from X, but Y may not want those bits at all. Enter the filters, stage right.
And I'm going to go further and say: why can't the ISP do that for me?
No, seriously. Why must 600 _million_ people have to go through configuring their own firewall, and virus scanner, and spam filter, and popup blocker, and spyware detector, etc? Why? Why must their machines crawl under the burden of all that, and force them into even earlier upgrades?
For Joe Average all that is _not_ fun.
Heck, even for _me_ it isn't. If the ISPs implemented those filters at their end, _and_ gave me control over them, I'm all for it. As long as my multiplayer FPS can tell the ISP to open port ABCD when I want to host a server, but a script kiddie can't open port XYZ from the other side of the wall to exploit some buffer overflow... what's the disadvantage?
It serves the same function as a local firewall, but without the inconvenience. So why not?
So there goes the "adding value just lowers its value" stupidity too. It's an example where adding value, surprisingly enough, really _adds_ value for hundreds of millions of people who have better things to do with their time.
And so on. Basically I'll stick to what I've said. The whole whine is a smoke, mirrors and straw men exercise in missing the real point. It hides behind irrelevant details like "but it's just a protocol", and then dismisses the real issues based on that.
Well, gee. I used to think one needed a politician for that.
The whole thing is an exercise in whining about:
- don't change anything. Ever. Just because something exists in one particular shape, it obviously shouldn't be improved in any way. Doing so would, uhm, just lower its value.
(Yeah, buddy, I'm sure you'd be happy to still drive a carriage with a horse. That's a simple and robust design, after all. Noone should have tried to complicate it by adding an engine.)
- I'm a spoiled brat, and I want everything for free. Stop trying to advertise. Stop trying to make it useful for any commercial purpose. And goddamn it, stop trying to stop me from stealing copyrighted content already.
(I'm sure everyone will be happy to pay out of their own pocket to offer you stuff for free. Please do enlighten me then: why does advertising even exist? Why doesn't everyone already rush to pay out of their pocket for their sites?)
- stop trying to control anything, for that matter. Just because it's based on a networking protocol (that "aggreement"), it magically becomes exempt from any other human or legal considerations.
(Reality check: radio or TV is also just an "aggreement". You aggree to modulate the signal in a certain way. Yet it doesn't mean you can show anything on TV. I'm sure if anyone tried showing child porn at noon on TV, they'd _very_ quickly learn that "it's just a protocol" isn't a legal defense.)
On the whole, it's just a sad whine.
The reality is that, regardless of the underlying protocols:
A. there are a bunch of problems with the Net as it is today. Whining along the lines of "it's just the way it is, don't change it" won't magically solve them. It will just let them get worse.
E.g.: see how spam is exponentially increasing. Even just configuring spam filters is getting to be a full time job. Letting it be, on account that "everyone is _supposed_ to be able to send bits to everyone" only made it get worse and worse.
Can those problems be solved without turning the Net into something different? I don't know. But there are smarter people than me working on it. They'll come up with something.
And, hey, even changing it into something different might not be _that_ bad an idea.
B. Someone has to make money out of offering you a service, or they won't offer it at all. That's the way capitalism works.
Since he mentions search engines, one might notice that Google doesn't make a living out of the internet search market. Because there is no such market in the first place. Noone pays to find something on the net. What they make a living from is: ads.
Same applies to everyone else. Insisting that everyone stops trying to make a profit at all, or lives on cents per month profit margin per subscriber, is just retarded.
Seems to me like incompetence and irresponsibility all the way. A database with real data _that_ sensitive gets basically given to the first guy who wants it, on a web site.
Surely because he's cheap, it's got to mean he's also qualified, ethical, etc. And surely he can be trusted with real live secret data, no other questions asked.
Sorry, on an irresponsibility scale, it pegs the meter.
Even ignoring the enormity of what this idiot did: did anyone even think about quality when we're talking data _this_ sensitive? No, seriously.
You take the cheapest guy which takes the job off a web site. How do you know he's even qualified to deal with that kind of data?
Does he even know even the most basic kinds of threats? Like buffer overflows? Or like people editing URL's by hand?
I.e., can his _program_ be trusted to not have a backdoor you can drive a bus through? Or maybe, 6 months later, would it have exposed the data to every script kiddie on the planet? Or maybe, someone this irresponsible and unethical, might even leave some _intentional_ backdoor? (Not even maliciously intended. Just for his personal convenience, in case he later needs to see why some data doesn't work.)
That's what pisses me off at the current trend of hiring the cheapest moron, regardless of competence or qualifications. While there is plenty of work to do with incompetent novices, I'd expect to have at least one experienced programmer on the team. Someone who knows about the security dangers, and who can design, code and review to avoid them.
I do _not_ want my personal information to depend solely on some clueless moron who's strung together some COM controlls in VB (or Java, or PHP, or whatever) without any clue what he's doing. And who needs to ask on a web site every two days how to do something like string formatting.
When my data, or some children's data, is entrusted to some program, I'll want that program to be as armoured and bullet-proof as a bank vault. _Not_ the equivalent of a shoddy paper box in the middle of the street.
So, as I've said, I wouldn't say that Denis is the only incompetent there. I'd say that the whole chain of idiots that allowed that data to get to him, should be shot at dawn.
The same god which promises to fry you in Hell for eternity, if you're not a good boy? The same God who drowned His creation once? The same God who nuked Sodom and Gomorah? And the same God who thought that His son getting nailed to a cross was a good way to make peace with the humans?
Hmm... Dunno, dude, sounds like you had a very mean mother there. You have my compassion ;)
Now, joke aside, the comparison is fundamentally flawed. You trust that your mother exists, because you've _seen_ her. You trust that she'll come back, because she's come back to you before. Again and again.
If I had seen God as 1% often as I saw mom, I'd have a lot of faith in Him too.
(On the other hand, I can only hope God wouldn't also start calling to cry about "I clicked on this link, and there was this dialog, and I didn't read it, and now my computer shows popups and shuts down" like mom does. That would be just scary, you know;)
And, yes, if mom went shopping and didn't return after 12 hours... dunno about you, but I'd start worrying. What if something did happen to her?
So God did... what? Buggered off some 2000 years ago, and never came back? I'd worry by now. A lot :P
I see a fundamental conflict there between that and assuming that people "willing to shed their assumptions about their pet model and truly investigate the alternatives" would automatically reach _your_ pet conclusion.
You've just described science and scientists there. That's what science is all about: being willing to acknowledge that any model may not be perfect, and investigating alternatives.
The difference is that:
1. Scientific theories have to be supported by facts. So far we have enough facts to support the theory of gravity for example. We have millions of experiments which confirm it, from apples falling off trees, to light curvature around a massive gravity well.
I'm all willing to investigate alternatives: you just need to give me the facts that support your alternative more. Give me the facts that support the divine intervention theory more, and I'm all converted. Does a blessed apple fall faster or slower than a normal one? Does holy light curve more or less around a star?
Devise some experiments. Convince me.
2. Those scientific theories have to be able to not only explain what happened ("uh, he got hit by lightning because he was a sinner"), they have to be able to predict what's going to happen in a controlled experiment.
It's based on these predictions that you now have a computer and are able to post on Slashdot. You can predict that if you make an 130nm CMOS transistor, it will act in a very well defined way. If you connect a few tens of millions of them, you can predict very accurately what the resulting CPU will do. That's science at work.
Everything else around you is based on such predictions: your car, your telephone, your clothes, your toothpaste, etc. They're based on taking some scientific rules, and predicting that a 4 cylinder engine will do this, instead of that.
Can your divine theory do the same? When you explain everything as God's will, can you quantify that will? Can you design a transistor based on faith instead of science?
No, seriously. I want to know. In fact, I want to know how.
What will that transistor run with? Divine Will particles instead of electrons? How are you going to control their flow? Make the gate switch from blessed to non-blessed? How? And exactly how much blessing does that gate need to switch? Does it produce heat too, like normal transistors, or is the divine transistor completely cool?
See, when you can actually do that, _then_ I'll throw away science and explain everything via God.
Until then, I'll see them as non-exclusive. God can jolly well exist, and for all I know maybe it was He that caused the Big Bang. In which case, science just tries to understand His creation. Or maybe he doesn't. In which case, science serves us just as well.
You can also think of it this way: God, if He exists, was the greatest hacker of all times.
;)
Creating something this complex in 6 days? (The 7th he rested.) Dang, even during the college days of pulling 3 all-nighters in a row to finish an assignment, I haven't come even close
One could argue that He only had one zone (Eden) and not much gameplay in the 1.0 version.
And the first two players were bug-abusers. You tell them to stay away from that tree, 'cause it's buggy and does funny things to you stats... and what do they do? Right. Same thing they do on MMORPGs and MUDs now in that kind of a situation.
But you can't blame God for that.
Either way, _very_ impressive job. The guy has all my respect. Keep up the good work, God.
So what we're trying to do is understand His work. Learn how does it all work. Reverse engineer it, if you will. See what makes the sky blue. What makes the sun bright? How do those little bright dots on the night sky work?
Of course, we'll never see His code, nor be able to replicate it. But we can get some idea of the kind of maths He's used. For example, we can get the idea that if a constant here or there was just a tiny little bit different, life wouldn't even be possible. Or the sun wouldn't even be possible.
It's this kind of knowledge that gives us a better understanding of how great and unique His work is. The fact that the more we understand about it, the more it looks like it's all based on a few clean elegant formulas and a few neatly tuned constants. It looks like a professional and elegant piece of work.
I wish my code was that neat. (And I'm not even getting into some of my co-workers' code;)
All I can say is "Amen, brother." It so pisses me off to see clueless HR droids hire _completely_ incompetent burger-flippers. Based on faked resumes and having the right colour socks.
I'm talking people who:
A. Have never even _read_ about the technology they claim to master.
B. At most have a superficial understanding of the language's syntax, but _not_ the standard libraries, best practices, pitfalls, etc.
C. Have never even heard of bog-standard vulnerabilities and security risks (e.g., if you code a web-based GUI, FFS, don't assume that everyone _has_ to click on your links to get to a page. People do edit URLs. Do check that the currently logged in user does have the right to view that data.)
D. Have no clue of even the most elementary algorithms or data structures.
E. All the above.
Yet some clueless HR droid will hire them anyway. Because, hey, "it's just typing. Anyone can learn it."
I find it just insulting. Especially coming from some people who can't even program their VCR's clock. I'd like to see them do my work, and _then_ decide if it's easy.