Monoculture and "free" are orthogonal. If the only thing being run for DNS were Bind 9, that would be a monoculture, even though BIND 9 is open source. I'm guessing you probably didn't mean "monoculture." Certainly given the vigorous competition in the DNS market, the notion that there is a monoculture there doesn't hold up.
"Cloud based" *is* a marketing profit-generating buzzword. What you said is all it *ever* means. That said, the big deal about "cloud based" as opposed to "in your local data center" is that you have a wider geographic spread, so you have rapid DNS response from anywhere in the world (roughly speaking). In reality, our cloud is in many ways quite a bit better than some competing clouds, which are really just one or two data centers located in the U.S. I'm as allergic to marketing jargon as you are, but they are talking about something that actually adds value.
We not only run Linux, we *support all our products* on various versions of Linux and FreeBSD (and Solaris, for that matter, which I guess is open source these days).
Ah yes, diving catch engineering. I actually like your way of doing it, because you're doing a big save for a problem someone else caused, rather than allowing a bad situation to fester and then being a hero at the last minute (right?). But really, they shouldn't have you in the critical path if that's your work philosophy. Being a good troubleshooter who can pull peoples' asses out of the fire when things go wrong is valuable in itself.
What you said is dead on, but the point you didn't explicitly make, but probably intended to, is that what you are doing there is valuable. It's not just fluff. Your management needs and wants that kind of communication, and when you provide it for them, they love it. When they have to suck it out of you, they hate it. When they never feel like they have a clear picture of what's going on, it's a source of stress for them, and when you communicate well, it lowers their stress levels.
Why don't they just trust you? Because they've had people working for them before who communicated poorly on purpose, because they *weren't getting anything done*. And they've had good people working for them who kept quiet about what they were doing because they didn't like the plan, and wanted to go in a different direction and present it as a fait accompli. And, so often, that sort of thing doesn't work out. So if you also communicate poorly, they're going to tend to assume your situation is the same. It doesn't matter how many poor communicators they've had working for them who actually got stuff done. They remember the times they've been burned, not the times they haven't.
Oh, and one other thing. The real reason this is unnecessary is that if your system is vulnerable to hacks from arbitrary code execution due to memory and stack smashes, you've got a bad security model. Why, for instance, does your media player have write access to anything on your system other than the frame buffer and the audio driver? Why does your web browser have the ability to read all your documents, given that it has to be able to open connections to arbitrary network hosts? This is just a bad security model.
It is a performance thing - it means a lot of unnecessary cache misses and TLB misses. It does solve a real problem, but it solves it the wrong way. You might notice that Apple is slowly weaning their developer base from manual memory management. This is a much better solution to the problem.
Apple can get away with radical changes because of the fan culture, MS can't.
That's a really good point - that hadn't occurred to me. Not sure what to do about it, though - I think it's the result of a conscious choice Microsoft's made in their marketing. I've felt for a long time that they (Microsoft) need to come out with a Windows competitor that breaks everything. Ten years from now, they'd have migrated all but the die-hards, and all those old, broken applications would be history.
Apples aren't immune to viruses, but they're a lot less likely to get them, because you don't have to escalate privileges all the time, so it's a surprise when you're asked to. What this article is basically saying is that because Apple has declined to hobble their machines with yet another performance-killing security measure designed to protect against bad coding in privileged apps, they are behind Microsoft.
The reality is that Microsoft has backslid on security with Windows 7 by taking out the feature they added in Vista, that got so much complaint, where privilege escalation had to be confirmed. Rather than maintaining backward compatibility with Mac OS 9, which was just as unsafe in terms of viruses as Windows 3.1, Apple decided to have a flag day with the switch to Mac OS X. Consequently, Macs are much less susceptible to viruses than Windows, simply by virtue of the fact that applications are more secure.
Should Apple implement this feature? I don't think so. It sucks performance for a very minimal return in security. What Apple *is* working on in security is much more useful (a bitfrost-like security model). Assuming they get that working well, this will simply be a non-issue.
(Seriously, I know how you feel, but there's just no point in thinking like this. If you're working to develop solar tech, get to work. If you're not, stop betting on what other people are doing and start working with what's available to you now.)
That's a great attitude for them to have if you want to be an employee who's stuck doing the same thing your whole career. Some people are very comfortable with that. The problem is that it tends to work poorly both for the employer and for the employee: the employer has a project that will be difficult to recover if the programmer gets hit by a truck, and the programmer stagnates, so that when, as inevitably happens, the job goes away despite being "stable," he or she is unable to easily land a new job.
My personal experience of this is that A-level programmers are great, and valuable, and worth having around, but they are not the only kind of programmer that is useful. A detail-oriented programmer who's not a real hotshot coder can be just as helpful. Programmers who go off and do what you asked them to, but need to be re-cued every day, can get a lot of work done, and can produce a quality product, as long as there is at least one good architect on the project who's willing to work with a team.
So in a team where you have a bunch of hotshots, scrum may not be the best idea. But in a team where you have a lot of careful plodders and a good architect, scrum is actually a very good idea.
Well, sure. If you only need to do business with Americans, you can keep using IPv4 until the cows come home. Eventually, though, we will be the only people living in our walled garden.
The problem is that congestion control on the Internet is strictly based on the Van Jacobsen hacks to TCP/IP. These work pretty well, but they have problems. First, a lot of IP traffic is not TCP. Second, various IP protocols like Bittorrent actually game congestion control to get more than their fair share of the pipe, and there's really no way to prevent this (e.g., what Comcast tried isn't a good solution).
The belief that no-one is working on this is incorrect, however. There's some very good work being done in the IRTF (a research organization associated with the IETF). They did a really cool presentation on their work at the Stockholm IETF this month. There are really good people at various ISPs and running the backbones. It is not the case that it's all on autopilot and slowly decaying. E.g., check out Hurricane Electric. Comcast has a very good team.
The most hopeless thing I see on the Internet is the continued prevalence of operating systems that are highly vulnerable to attack due to poorly-thought-out security models. Apple is starting to do some interesting work on this - they recently hired the guy who did BitFrost for the OLPC project, for example. A big complaint about Bitfrost is that it's not necessarily all that useable, but if anyone can fix that, it's probably Apple. Would be nice if Microsoft weren't backsliding on this.
You can certainly argue that it was a silly waste of resources to prosecute this lawsuit to the point where the offender's identity was revealed. But I find the notion that this action was a miscarriage of justice to be a bit weird. If you walk up to someone and insult them to their face, that's assault. Generally speaking it's not prosecuted, but that doesn't mean you did nothing wrong. It's just too lame to prosecute.
The same is true here. If you don't want to get sued for libel and have your identity outed, don't call people skanks on the Internet. That seems like a pretty easy thing to avoid doing. Of course, chances are that they won't sue you for libel, and won't out you, because it's just too lame for words to do that, but is it really the case that they are not entitled to try?
The moral of this story, to me, is: don't be an asshole.
Great, credit card readers in every meter. Let the sploiting begin.
These meters really aren't bad at all. Andrea and I had to go shopping in Chicago, and what we found was that it was a little more expensive to park, but you could pay by credit card or cash at the kiosk - you didn't have to have quarters. There were fewer people parking on the street because the value proposition isn't good for all-day parking anymore. So we were able to get a space for the time we wanted, get done what we needed to do, and didn't have to walk five blocks from the parking space we found.
I'm sure it does suck for people who used to feed the meter all day. One more incentive to ride your bike to work.
Is Joe-on-the-street even *aware* of the existence of the RIAA? I don't think so; otherwise they'd be out of business by now. We are aware of the RIAA, because we're geeks and we care about these issues. People who've been sued are aware also. But even a Joe-on-the-street who knows about the RIAA lawsuits assumes that the people being sued deserve what they get, or else the courts wouldn't have allowed it to happen. Because that's what the mainstream media is reporting, and they don't read slashdot.
Nope, I'm someone who wants to sell software, and I think their audit tactics are extremely slimy, and should be illegal. Generally speaking the difference is that software people know that even though people will pirate their stuff, they'll do okay anyway, because plenty of people will pay for it. The company I work for has fantastic customer support, and we fix problems on a dime. Our customers would, frankly, be crazy to pirate from us. And I doubt that a BSA audit would identify a pirated copy of our software anyway, since it's not a Windows package.
Well, if they followed the RIAA's tactics, they'd use the fact that you switched to open source in court to demonstrate that you're guilty. Why would you have switched if you didn't have something to hide?
Dude, haven't you read the Trilogy? It takes half a book just to cross Mordor, plus there's Orcs and shit. That's way more trouble than it's worth. And have you ever tried to find Middle Earth on a map? Sure, lots of people have theories, but what with continental drift and such, it's all pretty obscure. How can you be sure the volcano you use is *really* Mount Doom in this late, degenerate age?
A degausser weakens the magnetized regions, but it's still at least theoretically possible to read it if it's not done thoroughly enough. What I don't get is why you don't just take it apart and sand the platters clean. There's zero chance of reading it after that, and it's a lot less energy intensive than actually chunking the platters. Extra credit if you use the disk drive motor to spin the disk so that you can sand it without any actual effort...
This is exactly right. Even if what you're doing is working on a book, MS Word is not the tool you need to produce the book, and yet authors typically are asked to submit their work as Word docs. This just creates needless extra effort, because Word docs are so clumsy and Word is so buggy. The problem is that everything that's been done so far to replace Word (e.g., OpenOffice) has replaced all of Word's functionality, including the dead-end-to-print function.
What we need is a word processor whose intended end-product is a web page, not a printed document. The nice thing about this is that if you need to turn it into a print document, turning a web page into a print document is very easy. But making the print document be the main product means that we wind up with documents that work best on dead trees, instead of documents that are easy to use electronically. So we need to stop wasting so much effort on OpenOffice, and start working on something that actually does what we need now.
BTW, somebody pointed out that PDF is what should die, not Word, because PDF is a way to transport stuff in virtual dead-tree format. That's true as far as it goes, but Word docs are used in the same way, and cause much greater harm because they are a closed format. So while the author's point is as valid for PDF as it is for Word, Word is the root of the problem, and PDF and Word documents used in place of paper are a symptom of the problem, not the underlying problem.
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Monoculture and "free" are orthogonal. If the only thing being run for DNS were Bind 9, that would be a monoculture, even though BIND 9 is open source. I'm guessing you probably didn't mean "monoculture." Certainly given the vigorous competition in the DNS market, the notion that there is a monoculture there doesn't hold up.
"Cloud based" *is* a marketing profit-generating buzzword. What you said is all it *ever* means. That said, the big deal about "cloud based" as opposed to "in your local data center" is that you have a wider geographic spread, so you have rapid DNS response from anywhere in the world (roughly speaking). In reality, our cloud is in many ways quite a bit better than some competing clouds, which are really just one or two data centers located in the U.S. I'm as allergic to marketing jargon as you are, but they are talking about something that actually adds value.
We not only run Linux, we *support all our products* on various versions of Linux and FreeBSD (and Solaris, for that matter, which I guess is open source these days).
Sigh.
Dunno why you wanted to heap scorn on me - what you said sounds pretty accurate.
Ah yes, diving catch engineering. I actually like your way of doing it, because you're doing a big save for a problem someone else caused, rather than allowing a bad situation to fester and then being a hero at the last minute (right?). But really, they shouldn't have you in the critical path if that's your work philosophy. Being a good troubleshooter who can pull peoples' asses out of the fire when things go wrong is valuable in itself.
What you said is dead on, but the point you didn't explicitly make, but probably intended to, is that what you are doing there is valuable. It's not just fluff. Your management needs and wants that kind of communication, and when you provide it for them, they love it. When they have to suck it out of you, they hate it. When they never feel like they have a clear picture of what's going on, it's a source of stress for them, and when you communicate well, it lowers their stress levels.
Why don't they just trust you? Because they've had people working for them before who communicated poorly on purpose, because they *weren't getting anything done*. And they've had good people working for them who kept quiet about what they were doing because they didn't like the plan, and wanted to go in a different direction and present it as a fait accompli. And, so often, that sort of thing doesn't work out. So if you also communicate poorly, they're going to tend to assume your situation is the same. It doesn't matter how many poor communicators they've had working for them who actually got stuff done. They remember the times they've been burned, not the times they haven't.
Oh, and one other thing. The real reason this is unnecessary is that if your system is vulnerable to hacks from arbitrary code execution due to memory and stack smashes, you've got a bad security model. Why, for instance, does your media player have write access to anything on your system other than the frame buffer and the audio driver? Why does your web browser have the ability to read all your documents, given that it has to be able to open connections to arbitrary network hosts? This is just a bad security model.
It is a performance thing - it means a lot of unnecessary cache misses and TLB misses. It does solve a real problem, but it solves it the wrong way. You might notice that Apple is slowly weaning their developer base from manual memory management. This is a much better solution to the problem.
That's a really good point - that hadn't occurred to me. Not sure what to do about it, though - I think it's the result of a conscious choice Microsoft's made in their marketing. I've felt for a long time that they (Microsoft) need to come out with a Windows competitor that breaks everything. Ten years from now, they'd have migrated all but the die-hards, and all those old, broken applications would be history.
Apples aren't immune to viruses, but they're a lot less likely to get them, because you don't have to escalate privileges all the time, so it's a surprise when you're asked to. What this article is basically saying is that because Apple has declined to hobble their machines with yet another performance-killing security measure designed to protect against bad coding in privileged apps, they are behind Microsoft.
The reality is that Microsoft has backslid on security with Windows 7 by taking out the feature they added in Vista, that got so much complaint, where privilege escalation had to be confirmed. Rather than maintaining backward compatibility with Mac OS 9, which was just as unsafe in terms of viruses as Windows 3.1, Apple decided to have a flag day with the switch to Mac OS X. Consequently, Macs are much less susceptible to viruses than Windows, simply by virtue of the fact that applications are more secure.
Should Apple implement this feature? I don't think so. It sucks performance for a very minimal return in security. What Apple *is* working on in security is much more useful (a bitfrost-like security model). Assuming they get that working well, this will simply be a non-issue.
Whiner.
(Seriously, I know how you feel, but there's just no point in thinking like this. If you're working to develop solar tech, get to work. If you're not, stop betting on what other people are doing and start working with what's available to you now.)
...combined with a form of fusion, the Machines had all the power they would ever need....
That's a great attitude for them to have if you want to be an employee who's stuck doing the same thing your whole career. Some people are very comfortable with that. The problem is that it tends to work poorly both for the employer and for the employee: the employer has a project that will be difficult to recover if the programmer gets hit by a truck, and the programmer stagnates, so that when, as inevitably happens, the job goes away despite being "stable," he or she is unable to easily land a new job.
My personal experience of this is that A-level programmers are great, and valuable, and worth having around, but they are not the only kind of programmer that is useful. A detail-oriented programmer who's not a real hotshot coder can be just as helpful. Programmers who go off and do what you asked them to, but need to be re-cued every day, can get a lot of work done, and can produce a quality product, as long as there is at least one good architect on the project who's willing to work with a team.
So in a team where you have a bunch of hotshots, scrum may not be the best idea. But in a team where you have a lot of careful plodders and a good architect, scrum is actually a very good idea.
Well, sure. If you only need to do business with Americans, you can keep using IPv4 until the cows come home. Eventually, though, we will be the only people living in our walled garden.
The problem is that congestion control on the Internet is strictly based on the Van Jacobsen hacks to TCP/IP. These work pretty well, but they have problems. First, a lot of IP traffic is not TCP. Second, various IP protocols like Bittorrent actually game congestion control to get more than their fair share of the pipe, and there's really no way to prevent this (e.g., what Comcast tried isn't a good solution).
The belief that no-one is working on this is incorrect, however. There's some very good work being done in the IRTF (a research organization associated with the IETF). They did a really cool presentation on their work at the Stockholm IETF this month. There are really good people at various ISPs and running the backbones. It is not the case that it's all on autopilot and slowly decaying. E.g., check out Hurricane Electric. Comcast has a very good team.
The most hopeless thing I see on the Internet is the continued prevalence of operating systems that are highly vulnerable to attack due to poorly-thought-out security models. Apple is starting to do some interesting work on this - they recently hired the guy who did BitFrost for the OLPC project, for example. A big complaint about Bitfrost is that it's not necessarily all that useable, but if anyone can fix that, it's probably Apple. Would be nice if Microsoft weren't backsliding on this.
You can certainly argue that it was a silly waste of resources to prosecute this lawsuit to the point where the offender's identity was revealed. But I find the notion that this action was a miscarriage of justice to be a bit weird. If you walk up to someone and insult them to their face, that's assault. Generally speaking it's not prosecuted, but that doesn't mean you did nothing wrong. It's just too lame to prosecute.
The same is true here. If you don't want to get sued for libel and have your identity outed, don't call people skanks on the Internet. That seems like a pretty easy thing to avoid doing. Of course, chances are that they won't sue you for libel, and won't out you, because it's just too lame for words to do that, but is it really the case that they are not entitled to try?
The moral of this story, to me, is: don't be an asshole.
Great, credit card readers in every meter. Let the sploiting begin.
These meters really aren't bad at all. Andrea and I had to go shopping in Chicago, and what we found was that it was a little more expensive to park, but you could pay by credit card or cash at the kiosk - you didn't have to have quarters. There were fewer people parking on the street because the value proposition isn't good for all-day parking anymore. So we were able to get a space for the time we wanted, get done what we needed to do, and didn't have to walk five blocks from the parking space we found.
I'm sure it does suck for people who used to feed the meter all day. One more incentive to ride your bike to work.
Is Joe-on-the-street even *aware* of the existence of the RIAA? I don't think so; otherwise they'd be out of business by now. We are aware of the RIAA, because we're geeks and we care about these issues. People who've been sued are aware also. But even a Joe-on-the-street who knows about the RIAA lawsuits assumes that the people being sued deserve what they get, or else the courts wouldn't have allowed it to happen. Because that's what the mainstream media is reporting, and they don't read slashdot.
Nope, I'm someone who wants to sell software, and I think their audit tactics are extremely slimy, and should be illegal. Generally speaking the difference is that software people know that even though people will pirate their stuff, they'll do okay anyway, because plenty of people will pay for it. The company I work for has fantastic customer support, and we fix problems on a dime. Our customers would, frankly, be crazy to pirate from us. And I doubt that a BSA audit would identify a pirated copy of our software anyway, since it's not a Windows package.
Well, if they followed the RIAA's tactics, they'd use the fact that you switched to open source in court to demonstrate that you're guilty. Why would you have switched if you didn't have something to hide?
Too true. :')
Dude, haven't you read the Trilogy? It takes half a book just to cross Mordor, plus there's Orcs and shit. That's way more trouble than it's worth. And have you ever tried to find Middle Earth on a map? Sure, lots of people have theories, but what with continental drift and such, it's all pretty obscure. How can you be sure the volcano you use is *really* Mount Doom in this late, degenerate age?
A degausser weakens the magnetized regions, but it's still at least theoretically possible to read it if it's not done thoroughly enough. What I don't get is why you don't just take it apart and sand the platters clean. There's zero chance of reading it after that, and it's a lot less energy intensive than actually chunking the platters. Extra credit if you use the disk drive motor to spin the disk so that you can sand it without any actual effort...
Feh, the morse code requirement was easy compared to all the legalese we had to memorize. It was also kind of fun. The legalese, though, was not fun.
This is exactly right. Even if what you're doing is working on a book, MS Word is not the tool you need to produce the book, and yet authors typically are asked to submit their work as Word docs. This just creates needless extra effort, because Word docs are so clumsy and Word is so buggy. The problem is that everything that's been done so far to replace Word (e.g., OpenOffice) has replaced all of Word's functionality, including the dead-end-to-print function.
What we need is a word processor whose intended end-product is a web page, not a printed document. The nice thing about this is that if you need to turn it into a print document, turning a web page into a print document is very easy. But making the print document be the main product means that we wind up with documents that work best on dead trees, instead of documents that are easy to use electronically. So we need to stop wasting so much effort on OpenOffice, and start working on something that actually does what we need now.
BTW, somebody pointed out that PDF is what should die, not Word, because PDF is a way to transport stuff in virtual dead-tree format. That's true as far as it goes, but Word docs are used in the same way, and cause much greater harm because they are a closed format. So while the author's point is as valid for PDF as it is for Word, Word is the root of the problem, and PDF and Word documents used in place of paper are a symptom of the problem, not the underlying problem.