Isn't the reduction of idle surfing and the increase of a "more direct, predetermined approach to the Web" just a "reflection" of an educated user base that knows what it wants?
Yes, and apparently the public wants the same kind of packaged, spoon-fed crap that we're already getting on the teevee. What a surprise.
Excepting the Morris worm, before which nobody cared much about Internet security, all of these worms have one thing in common: the exploited holes were discovered months before the worm, and official patches for the affected packages were widely available.
This was true for the Morris worm as well. Both the sendmail and fingerd issues being exploited by the worm were fairly well-known at the time of the exploit. If I recall correctly, part of the reason that Morris wrote the worm was because of his frustration over the continued presence of these security holes, and paradoxically, part of the reason that he released it prematurely was because one of holes had suddenly gotten extra attention.
I don't mind Slashdot ads either. I don't often click on them, but I have on occaision. Even the animations are fairly unobtrusive. What I do mind are the ads with embedded cookies. Please stop this.
I find Scientology as much of a cult as the next guy, but when did being of one organization or another give force you to give up the right to copyright.
I don't believe that nearly anyone is asking Scientology to give up their copyright. We merely want to be able to quote selected things from their teachings. This is a perfectly legal and acceptible practice called "fair use." The Church of Scientology takes the position that quoting even a single sentence from these works should be illegal and not considered to be fair use.
However, when MS included IE and their specialized Java VM (which they have already been punished for branding as such), they broke a lot of Java code
To be fair, the MS "enhancements" in their Java VM did not break any existing *pure* Java code. Instead, they changed how the interface to *native* code worked -- replacing Sun's JNI with something called J/Direct. I personally thought that J/Direct was more sophisticated than JNI; its only real sin was the lack of platform independence.
They are providing jobs that are better than most other jobs in the country.
While I don't know that this is specifically true for Nike, it is not generally true for US and multinational corporations that have farmed out their production to the "export zones" of countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. Many of these companies routinely flout even the feeble labor laws of the countries where they set up shop. Because of "incentive programs", they generally pay no taxes. Workers are forced to buy company housing at rates that don't leave them much "take-home pay".
I've known who these two people are for over ten years because of their high visibility in the free software world. This is the first time I've ever heard that they were gay, much less in a long-term relationship with each other. So, I'm not sure why you say "blatantly advertise". This was an interview that happened to be very focused on their relationship because of who was asking the questions. It certainly wasn't out-of-context.
Actually, the original NT kernel was written in Pascal.
This is just not true. The NT kernel uses the Pascal calling convention because it's marginally more efficient spacewise, but the operating system itself has always been written in C and C++.
What would you do if you were a patent examiner that knew the system was screwed up, but you couldn't get anyone to listen to you? I'd start approving all sorts of trivial patents in the hope that this would force some kind of change in the system...
Re:Same old rant over and over again
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
nobody really expects that after a hardware failure the server is going to fully recover due to a rollback feature. You get backup systems for that horrible eventuality.
This is a joke, right? I've seen many RDBMS's come right back up, without data corruption, after power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure. Naturally, in a mission-critical environment, you need backup systems, but both mirroring and replication are also vulnerable in the absence of logged rollback functionality.
No of course not, the IT-managers usually want to spend a lot of money and how should you do that with a free Unix box and MySQL?
Oops... sorry. I had thought I was speaking to a professional.
"Large businesses, theoretically, should be able to negotiate contracts with vendors that protect and exclude provisions they don't want."
If I were the CIO of a large company, I would be worried that my negotiating position would be much weaker with UCITA. After all, it pretty much creates a legal software cartel. Why would any member of this cartel break ranks and give me what I want, when I wouldn't be able to get it from any other vendor? But my real concern would be that the legislation could trigger an even greater decline in the quality of shrinkwrapped software.
On the other hand, if the measure passes and vendors make full use of it, the drive to all-Open Source could become unstoppable.
Iraq sells oil. So as long as they keep doing a good job, delivering in a timely manner and offering me arms and legs off the Saudi price, I will continue to be a customer. To not support them because of a petty squabble over their attempts at regional domination through any means possible is the real disgrace, in my eyes.
1980-era South Africa sells diamonds. So long as they keep doing a good job, carrying a wide size assortment, and offering me a good rate, I will continue to be a customer. To not support them because of a petty human rights squabble is the real disgrace, in my eyes.
Nazi Germany sells good products. So as long...
You get the picture. Now, there are obviously some scale issues here. I certainly don't equate the pursuit of unreasonable intellectual property rights with genocide. But the basic principle is the same: your financial support helps preserve the status quo and discourages change of the behavior you find objectionable.
Re:Only anti-Linux FUD or all FUD?
on
Stopping the FUD
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· Score: 3
I would agree that there is some FUD being spread by Slashdotter, but you have to understand they we didn't START it.
I see, then. You're against FUD, but you're against Microsoft even more? Fighting back doesn't necessarily mean adopting the same tactics that you despise in your opponent. Furthermore, those tactics can cause you to give up the moral high ground in the eyes of the people that you are trying to convince.
So you're blaming Netscape for the fact that Microsoft doesn't have a standards compliant browser? Please, go troll elsewhere.
Call a spade a spade. Microsoft's bypass of the standards process does not justify the same by Netscape and vice versa. The Open Source community should supports open standards and the companies that adhere to them, and should avoid products that aren't standards-compliant *especially* when the lack of compliance is because of a desire to achieve market dominance.
Coincidentally, I just read Darwin's Radio last night. It is interesting to compare and contrast this book with Bear's much-earlier novel Blood Music. Both are about genetics, and about what comes after homo sapiens. Darwin's Radio is well-written and has better characterization than Blood Music (if you disagree, then reread the "Suzy" parts of BM). Blood Music is no less plausible as a "hard sf" premise, but is much more wildly speculative. In short, Blood Music is the work of a young writer full of passion and energy. Darwin's Radio is the work of a mature, more conservative writer.
If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, Wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using MSMQ with reliability guaranteed using a TP Monitor like MTS?
If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using MQSeries with reliability guaranteed using a TP Monitor like Tuxedo?
If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using Java Message Queue with reliability guaranteed using Enterprise Java Beans?
If SOAP makes sense (which I feel it does), then it will have broad vendor and developer support. If SOAP does not make sense, then only MS will implement support for it and you'd have to be an idiot not to expect to be locked into MS tools. (Nobody buys into VB development thinking they may someday be able to buy tools from Sun.)
you haven't looked very hard then. The comment was rebutted very quickly, but it is here
One post hardly equals "a lot of the comments" that were claimed by the original AC (who may or may not be you).
It's fairly standard Astroturfing.
The author of the referenced comment may not have his facts correct. This does not immediately qualify him as an undercover Microsoft employee. Dismissing someone's opinion by claiming that it was paid for by a third party is insulting and offensive, unless you have the kind of evidence that seems to exist in the Gartner Group example. It certainly adds nothing to the dialog. *Not*, mind you, that I expect anything better from an anonymous coward.
The design of Netscape is also commonly regarded as bad. Mozilla isn't much better - check out www.mnemonic.org for a well thought-out browser design.
Be that as it may, if there was ever a software company motivated to *not* use MS technology out of strictly ideological reasons, it was Netscape. Presumably, the XPCOM design was chosen because it made at least *some* technical sense. Your comment says nothing to refute my claim that in terms of technological superiority, COM vs CORBA is basically a wash.
A lot of the comments on this page are MS stooges astroturfing!!!
Notice how as an aside to a valid argument, they'll introducing FUD and/or straight Crapola - such as DCOM is more popular than CORBA
I haven't seen anybody post here that DCOM is more popular than CORBA. Certainly, idiots at Microsoft make ridiculuous statements all the time, but some of us don't think that every technology coming from Redmond is crap by default. In fact, I *gasp* even *like* some of their products.
Statements about COM vs CORBA seem particularly prone to mindless boosterism. Both of these attempt to solve the problem of component design in different ways; both are successful; neither enjoys any particular advantage over the other, other than the cross-platform-ness of CORBA and the tight system integration of COM on Windows. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either technically ignorant, has an axe to grind, or both.
If the design of COM is so bad (as I've seen claimed here many times), then why did Mozilla/Netscape base XPCOM on the exact same model?
A well-written article, Arrowhead! The way I understand it, the design goals for SOAP were to keep it as lowest-common-denominator and lightweight as possible. You could trivially implement a SOAP server in any TCP-IP-capable embedded device, for instance. I'm not sure you'd want to do that with CORBA.
There is no real requirement for a new HTTP method. The goal in defining one is to allow a firewall to filter HTTP requests of this type based on the XML content. SOAP works just fine with a normal POST command. Try the Perl sample with Linux/Apache if you don't believe me.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the SOAP development happened outside of Microsoft. Don Box of Developmentor is listed as the lead author on the RFC. Dave Winer has been involved as well: XMLRPC is based on an early draft of the SOAP spec. The most comprehensive information currently available on SOAP can be found at http://www.develop.com/soap/. There's a Perl-based implementation that runs under both NT/IIS and Linux/Apache. This stuff is great -- check it out!
Re:Proof that it's optimal? I don't believe that.
on
David Huffman is Dead
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· Score: 1
Given an input alphabet of fixed length, Huffman coding can be *proven* to produce optimally short output sequences. Translation: you're wrong.
This is one of the reasons why the ability to be anonymous on the Internet is important. Semi-public figures like Rutt should be allowed to communicate in a public forum on a personal level without having his every utterance scrutinized by a ruthless media and public.
As far the "Media" focusing on individuals is concerned, I think that this is something that we all do. It is easier for us as individuals to focus on specific individuals. In regard to bands, for instance, people tend to focus their attention on the vocalist as an individual, even if the band is truly a collective effort.
Technorealism, described as a movement of which two of the three authors are members, has some evil ideas. Read the webpage -- www.technorealism.org. Some of the assertions made are that information does *not* want to be free and that technology standards should be determined by the government.
Gleick, on the other hand, rocks, and I enjoyed his book.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and apparently the public wants the same kind of packaged, spoon-fed crap that we're already getting on the teevee. What a surprise.
The author writes
Excepting the Morris worm, before which nobody cared much about Internet security, all of these worms have one thing in common: the exploited holes were discovered months before the worm, and official patches for the affected packages were widely available.
This was true for the Morris worm as well. Both the sendmail and fingerd issues being exploited by the worm were fairly well-known at the time of the exploit. If I recall correctly, part of the reason that Morris wrote the worm was because of his frustration over the continued presence of these security holes, and paradoxically, part of the reason that he released it prematurely was because one of holes had suddenly gotten extra attention.
Negativland kicks serious ass.
I don't mind Slashdot ads either. I don't often click on them, but I have on occaision. Even the animations are fairly unobtrusive. What I do mind are the ads with embedded cookies. Please stop this.
I don't believe that nearly anyone is asking Scientology to give up their copyright. We merely want to be able to quote selected things from their teachings. This is a perfectly legal and acceptible practice called "fair use." The Church of Scientology takes the position that quoting even a single sentence from these works should be illegal and not considered to be fair use.
To be fair, the MS "enhancements" in their Java VM did not break any existing *pure* Java code. Instead, they changed how the interface to *native* code worked -- replacing Sun's JNI with something called J/Direct. I personally thought that J/Direct was more sophisticated than JNI; its only real sin was the lack of platform independence.
While I don't know that this is specifically true for Nike, it is not generally true for US and multinational corporations that have farmed out their production to the "export zones" of countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. Many of these companies routinely flout even the feeble labor laws of the countries where they set up shop. Because of "incentive programs", they generally pay no taxes. Workers are forced to buy company housing at rates that don't leave them much "take-home pay".
Read No Logo by Naomi Klein.
I've known who these two people are for over ten years because of their high visibility in the free software world. This is the first time I've ever heard that they were gay, much less in a long-term relationship with each other. So, I'm not sure why you say "blatantly advertise". This was an interview that happened to be very focused on their relationship because of who was asking the questions. It certainly wasn't out-of-context.
This is just not true. The NT kernel uses the Pascal calling convention because it's marginally more efficient spacewise, but the operating system itself has always been written in C and C++.
Kinakuta was internationally recognized "de jure"
Kinakuta had its own domain "kk"
Kinakuta was rather wealthy to begin with, and did not need to raise capital.
Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net is a more pertinent "data haven" reference.
What would you do if you were a patent examiner that knew the system was screwed up, but you couldn't get anyone to listen to you? I'd start approving all sorts of trivial patents in the hope that this would force some kind of change in the system...
This is a joke, right? I've seen many RDBMS's come right back up, without data corruption, after power loss/UPS failure/hardware failure. Naturally, in a mission-critical environment, you need backup systems, but both mirroring and replication are also vulnerable in the absence of logged rollback functionality.
No of course not, the IT-managers usually want to spend a lot of money and how should you do that with a free Unix box and MySQL?
Oops... sorry. I had thought I was speaking to a professional.
If I were the CIO of a large company, I would be worried that my negotiating position would be much weaker with UCITA. After all, it pretty much creates a legal software cartel. Why would any member of this cartel break ranks and give me what I want, when I wouldn't be able to get it from any other vendor? But my real concern would be that the legislation could trigger an even greater decline in the quality of shrinkwrapped software.
On the other hand, if the measure passes and vendors make full use of it, the drive to all-Open Source could become unstoppable.
1980-era South Africa sells diamonds. So long as they keep doing a good job, carrying a wide size assortment, and offering me a good rate, I will continue to be a customer. To not support them because of a petty human rights squabble is the real disgrace, in my eyes.
Nazi Germany sells good products. So as long...
You get the picture. Now, there are obviously some scale issues here. I certainly don't equate the pursuit of unreasonable intellectual property rights with genocide. But the basic principle is the same: your financial support helps preserve the status quo and discourages change of the behavior you find objectionable.
I see, then. You're against FUD, but you're against Microsoft even more? Fighting back doesn't necessarily mean adopting the same tactics that you despise in your opponent. Furthermore, those tactics can cause you to give up the moral high ground in the eyes of the people that you are trying to convince.
Call a spade a spade. Microsoft's bypass of the standards process does not justify the same by Netscape and vice versa. The Open Source community should supports open standards and the companies that adhere to them, and should avoid products that aren't standards-compliant *especially* when the lack of compliance is because of a desire to achieve market dominance.
I much preferred Blood Music.
If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using MQSeries with reliability guaranteed using a TP Monitor like Tuxedo?
If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using Java Message Queue with reliability guaranteed using Enterprise Java Beans?
If SOAP makes sense (which I feel it does), then it will have broad vendor and developer support. If SOAP does not make sense, then only MS will implement support for it and you'd have to be an idiot not to expect to be locked into MS tools. (Nobody buys into VB development thinking they may someday be able to buy tools from Sun.)
One post hardly equals "a lot of the comments" that were claimed by the original AC (who may or may not be you).
It's fairly standard Astroturfing.
The author of the referenced comment may not have his facts correct. This does not immediately qualify him as an undercover Microsoft employee. Dismissing someone's opinion by claiming that it was paid for by a third party is insulting and offensive, unless you have the kind of evidence that seems to exist in the Gartner Group example. It certainly adds nothing to the dialog. *Not*, mind you, that I expect anything better from an anonymous coward.
The design of Netscape is also commonly regarded as bad. Mozilla isn't much better - check out www.mnemonic.org for a well thought-out browser design.
Be that as it may, if there was ever a software company motivated to *not* use MS technology out of strictly ideological reasons, it was Netscape. Presumably, the XPCOM design was chosen because it made at least *some* technical sense. Your comment says nothing to refute my claim that in terms of technological superiority, COM vs CORBA is basically a wash.
Notice how as an aside to a valid argument, they'll introducing FUD and/or straight Crapola - such as DCOM is more popular than CORBA
I haven't seen anybody post here that DCOM is more popular than CORBA. Certainly, idiots at Microsoft make ridiculuous statements all the time, but some of us don't think that every technology coming from Redmond is crap by default. In fact, I *gasp* even *like* some of their products.
Statements about COM vs CORBA seem particularly prone to mindless boosterism. Both of these attempt to solve the problem of component design in different ways; both are successful; neither enjoys any particular advantage over the other, other than the cross-platform-ness of CORBA and the tight system integration of COM on Windows. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either technically ignorant, has an axe to grind, or both.
If the design of COM is so bad (as I've seen claimed here many times), then why did Mozilla/Netscape base XPCOM on the exact same model?
A well-written article, Arrowhead! The way I understand it, the design goals for SOAP were to keep it as lowest-common-denominator and lightweight as possible. You could trivially implement a SOAP server in any TCP-IP-capable embedded device, for instance. I'm not sure you'd want to do that with CORBA.
There is no real requirement for a new HTTP method. The goal in defining one is to allow a firewall to filter HTTP requests of this type based on the XML content. SOAP works just fine with a normal POST command. Try the Perl sample with Linux/Apache if you don't believe me.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the SOAP development happened outside of Microsoft. Don Box of Developmentor is listed as the lead author on the RFC. Dave Winer has been involved as well: XMLRPC is based on an early draft of the SOAP spec. The most comprehensive information currently available on SOAP can be found at http://www.develop.com/soap/. There's a Perl-based implementation that runs under both NT/IIS and Linux/Apache. This stuff is great -- check it out!
Given an input alphabet of fixed length, Huffman coding can be *proven* to produce optimally short output sequences. Translation: you're wrong.
As far the "Media" focusing on individuals is concerned, I think that this is something that we all do. It is easier for us as individuals to focus on specific individuals. In regard to bands, for instance, people tend to focus their attention on the vocalist as an individual, even if the band is truly a collective effort.
Gleick, on the other hand, rocks, and I enjoyed his book.