Using good source control helps, a lot. I've gotten very fond of git and its ancestror for style though not code, BitKeeper, because they let you do work locally and submit it centrally when you're ready.
Also, if your "coding standard" isn't built into your editors and common tools, you're doing something wrong. For example, if your C++ standard is not consistent with 'indent', you're doing something wrong.
Most of us want information. We _tolerate_ advertising. By "tuning" the advertiser, they enhance the chances of their paying clients, _not their customers_, getting what they want. We as users of Google do not want the select few larger advertisers automatically getting the lion's shares of the hits.
You, and ifwm, need to be carefully with that phrase "do mot reveal" and "Never". Was that child care worker revealed by a whistleblower? Then you're not necessarily citing a relevant example. But even for cases that involve normal prosecution, rather than whistleblower cases, try the infamous Fritzl case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case). Because it was incestuous abuse, the identity of the children involved is obvious.
Some whistleblowers have to act in the face of police or corporate unwillingness to act against the offenders. The nature of the whistleblowing, and what exactly to publish, needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, because absolutes such as "never children!" will trap some of them into useless editing of their accusations.
True. If I see one more "I can write that in Perl!" unscalable, unstable, inconsistent, steep-learning-curve burdened piece of freeware to manage system configuratons across a network, I'll.... Oh, dear. I won't make as much money cleaning up the resulting messes as I do now. However, I understand that the "program" management across Windows machines is very iffy. Can you confirm that it actually works well?
That's why I love Wikileaks, at least so far. They actually protect their sources. And they do seem to show some discretion about what they publish, which helps prevent blackmail abuse. I was vastly amused when they published various manuals on operations at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonsense. When the whistleblower is exposing incest or certain types of child abuse, the whistleblower automatically reveals the names of children involved by revealing the abuser. And sometimes a whistleblower or anonymously protected exposition is necessary because the guilty person cannot or will not be pursued by law enforcement, as occurred with the Catholic priests finally convicted of child harassment in the strange cases that led to Cardinal Bernard Law being taken off the short list for the next Pope.
If you figure the electricity, air conditioning, bandwidth, and costs of disk replacements due to wear and tear across 5000 machines for a few years, $1,000,000 is not as outrageous as you might expect. It really does add up in a big environment.
Dear me. You've gotten my intent exactly _backwards_: I suspect I was not clear.
CPAN has examples of excellent, well-written modules. They are overwhelmed by amazingly badly constructed, conflicting, mislabeled, misnumbered, misused, and mostly unnecessary dross that new Perl programmers incorporate eagerly and without QA into their new modules. The result is typical Perl reliability: it works fine until it breaks, then you add a few lines to fix the particular spot it broke and ship it back out with the same underlying flaws and no consistent architecture. CPAN, as a large software repository, is awful because many of the programmers never learned better, and they've descended to a common level of great ideas, but extremely poor integration and small, deadly failures that cause competent developers to waste incredible amounts of time.
I certainly agree that a bad programmer will find ways to create bad code. But programmers need good examples to learn good practices from, and the amount of dross over at CPAN is so great that it teaches truly unfortunate behaviors for even competent programmers exposed to it.
That's a nice economic and social fantasy world you have there, and a fairly common one, I'm afraid. _Any_ benefits in overall land use from reducing the harvesting of meat animals can and will be absorbed within 2 generations of humans, at the most, from burgeoning human population. This is because it doesn't avoid the clear-cutting for growing vegetarian compatible food that occurs anyway and destroys the animal habitats. "Renewable harvesting" means nothing if more land is used to feed more humans and eliminates the ecological niches needed by our diverse animal and plant populations to survive.
I do see it as a reasonable ecological step to allow allow animal preservation, by removing the incentive to actually consume rare animals as part of treasured delicacies. I also see it as an incredibly useful technology for space habitats, where shipping meat for long space flights becomes amazingly expensive. But it's not any kind of long-term solution to the underlying populaton growth problem that is currently consuming our arable land and potable water supplies.
That's why you _don't_ encourage that. You use a few well defined examples, preferably from a library function with some history of reliability. I've had to clean up, repeatedly, after Perl programmers who keep re-inventing their own special shaped wheels.
I object to Perl for many reasons. Historical pain and suffering is one of them. And "amateur's code" is what a lot of the Perl available modules are, and it is _dificult_ to wean programmers away from the tremendous variety of truly awful debris that festoons CPAN. I'm afraid that I do often refer to CPAN as being part of Perl itself, because it's so much of the Perl that people actually use. I would expect, over time, that the older and more poorly written modules would be discarded and refined, but I just don't see it.
And the tools I've had to deal with were not "amateur code", they were professionally provided tools written by commercially funded devlopers. It made me shudder a lot: I've simply not seen such extensively poor code littering other projects.
By the consistent example of previously written C. There are, in my observation, so many different ways to do the same things in Perl that developing consistent good practices is very difficult indeed.
But those lower level programmers are not getting the experience that turns them into good programmers. They're cutting and pasting bad code and propagating errors which are nightmarish to track down after the fact. And yes, I'm trusting the language designer to write a good _compiler_ to write small utilities, well written, rather than presenting every programmer with that stunning mass of debris I find coming out of places like CPAN.
We should not resist new tools for good programmers. We should resist toolboxes that include that many slightly different hammers, many of which are liable to break and many of which have handles likely to slip in the grip of a normal user, sending a large and spinning object flying towards anyone working near them. I'm afraid I've been that person near them and struck with those handles too many times in the last five years, and from observation, far too many of the scripting language authors need to go back and be _mentored_ in how to do efficient or even safe code, because they certainly didn't learn it dealing with Perl.
For examples of the insanity, I'll point you directly to mod_perl itself and resolving which versions of mod_perl itself are compatible with your project. Though that utility was written in C, it has to deal with a lot of Perl's vagaries, and it can be very awkward to coordinate multiple old and new Perl utilities with a single mod_perl release.
I'd consider it if I had spare new laptops or netbooks to play with. I'm afraid I don't right now: my ancient Thinkpad is too light on memory to even consider running Fedora 11 live.
What remains is serious enough. The _depletion_ of minable resources, coupled with the draining of reserves of arable land, petroleum, potable water, and harvested food stocks all amount to plenty of reasons to stop the population increase that will overwhelm any reasonable ecological efforts by the burgeoning billions of humnity. It's going to take a pretty radical restructuring to run the world's economies without population growth, but Malthus had a point.
I would far, far rather have the truly awful Perl and PHP I've been seeing the last few years fail outright to compile, rather than being published over at CPAN and corrupting every downstream project that is automatically built with the latest release of the author's fantasies. Compilation failures, and compilation warnings are helpful to cleaning up code. And taking the directly legible source code away from the programming equivalent of script kiddies and forcing them to read genuine source code helps raise the threshold of them simply cutting and pasting tools instead of using the already existing, well-written ones.
It's a long-term problem: flushing times that Perl programmers attempt to rewrite the "transcribe text as numbers" printf statement would probably shrink the deployed Perl software of the world by 5%.
That would be like saying "the fifth floor is in our building, not a public street address, so this warrant is useless". I bet that would be a useful bit of precedent to establish for lots of people who are served with search warrants. Given the router information mentioned in the article, and the settings of the laptop with an address in the address space, it's unsurprising that our plaintiff was upset that those machines did not get reported or searched properly.
Please take a look at CPAN. Select half a dozen web related modules, and check them form case statements that fail to have a fallthrough for unexpected conditions, and check them for input text processing that does not sanitize the inputs, especially for database information. Then come back and explain how the excessive flexibility of Perl does not contribute to writing far too many approaches to solving similar approaches, and how its flexibility encourages the use of robust and well-understood approaches to processing data.
So yes, indeed, limiting the number of ways to write precisely the same functionality does enocurage consistent structures whose vulnerabilities become understood. There are trade-offs. Such loss of flexibility may make code less efficient. But who writes perl for efficiency of execution?
Speed and security. The endless permutations and add-ons to Apache do, in fact, cause a significant security and compatibility and performance burden, much as the endless and often poorly written add-ons to Perl create similar issues. The idea can be taken to extremes, but how many of todays Perl and PHP website scripting security issues would evaporate if the authors were forced to write in a less flexible language that took a few moments to actually compile before being enabled?
Please allow me to disagree, somewhat, sir. Regular software updates and anti-virus tools are also critical. Too many holes are active in the wild for far too long, with cross-site scripting bugs and malware downloaded and installed via otherwise innocuous websites, to leave a machine unprotected. Take advantage of the occasional connections with higher bandwidth for these downloads, of course, or they will interfere with normal use.
For live CD's, I myself prefer a Knoppix CD, which also includes NTFS drivers and is generally friendlier on laptops of odd vintage. And backup, backup, backup! A nice laptop is easy to have stolen, easy to loose, and easy to break. USB keys are cheap, and can be easily stored encrypted to protect yourself from casual hardware theft or hotel room spies who image hard drives. (That's an old industrial espionage problem: I've seen reports on visitors to China having this problem a lot.)
Excellent points. But the last time I used Xen, there was no evidence of the kind of mixed hardware virtualization/para-virtualization you refer to here. It was either/or, hard-coded into the XML configuration files by the setup tools or re-configurating the installed guest environment. Are you saying this is a run-time detected and enabled behavior? And given that no server class motherboards ship with hardware virtualization enabled, it was very important to be able to run para-virtualized enviornments on other people's hardware, to avoid forcing them to reset their BIOS.
Because such "learn at home" videos are in fact very difficult to make: they have no feedback with the student, they're easily at far too sophisticated or far too untrained an audience, and because "teaching Photoshop" reequires a great deal of hands-on experience to learn how the workflow really works, and to recover from errors or inappropriate shortcuts. It's far easier to make a very lame and poorly produced document that does not actually teach, but relies on fraud to make its profit.
Such behavior is very common: do not rely on something sounding "perfictly viable" to assure that it has, in fact, any useful quality.
Xen need not use the hardware virtualization, and in fact performs far better in "para-virtualization". So would any system that avoided so much of the hardware virtualization and used a customized kernel, more suited to use in a virtualized OS by speaking more gracefully with the virtual server's system. I find it wonderful, and dearly with that VMWare could be convinced to support that kind of guest environment.
No, that "$500" is a "Suggested Retail Price". Very, very few people actually pay that: they get it at a profoundly "reduced" price as part of a contract for years of cell phone service. The cell phone service may or may not be very profitable, but it's absolutely vital for the careers of the investors and VP's at the cell phone companies to grow, no matter what the rest of the market does, preferably faster than other carriers. So they commit unsustainable economic foolishness to make this quarter's growth figures, and completely ignore the fallacies of projecting an exponential growth curve in a crowded environment past even one order of magnitude.
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Using good source control helps, a lot. I've gotten very fond of git and its ancestror for style though not code, BitKeeper, because they let you do work locally and submit it centrally when you're ready.
Also, if your "coding standard" isn't built into your editors and common tools, you're doing something wrong. For example, if your C++ standard is not consistent with 'indent', you're doing something wrong.
Most of us want information. We _tolerate_ advertising. By "tuning" the advertiser, they enhance the chances of their paying clients, _not their customers_, getting what they want. We as users of Google do not want the select few larger advertisers automatically getting the lion's shares of the hits.
And that the person who turned him in wouldn't get a very special price involving 40,000 ounces of plastique, hand delivered?
You, and ifwm, need to be carefully with that phrase "do mot reveal" and "Never". Was that child care worker revealed by a whistleblower? Then you're not necessarily citing a relevant example. But even for cases that involve normal prosecution, rather than whistleblower cases, try the infamous Fritzl case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case). Because it was incestuous abuse, the identity of the children involved is obvious.
Some whistleblowers have to act in the face of police or corporate unwillingness to act against the offenders. The nature of the whistleblowing, and what exactly to publish, needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, because absolutes such as "never children!" will trap some of them into useless editing of their accusations.
True. If I see one more "I can write that in Perl!" unscalable, unstable, inconsistent, steep-learning-curve burdened piece of freeware to manage system configuratons across a network, I'll.... Oh, dear. I won't make as much money cleaning up the resulting messes as I do now. However, I understand that the "program" management across Windows machines is very iffy. Can you confirm that it actually works well?
That's why I love Wikileaks, at least so far. They actually protect their sources. And they do seem to show some discretion about what they publish, which helps prevent blackmail abuse. I was vastly amused when they published various manuals on operations at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonsense. When the whistleblower is exposing incest or certain types of child abuse, the whistleblower automatically reveals the names of children involved by revealing the abuser. And sometimes a whistleblower or anonymously protected exposition is necessary because the guilty person cannot or will not be pursued by law enforcement, as occurred with the Catholic priests finally convicted of child harassment in the strange cases that led to Cardinal Bernard Law being taken off the short list for the next Pope.
If you figure the electricity, air conditioning, bandwidth, and costs of disk replacements due to wear and tear across 5000 machines for a few years, $1,000,000 is not as outrageous as you might expect. It really does add up in a big environment.
Dear me. You've gotten my intent exactly _backwards_: I suspect I was not clear.
CPAN has examples of excellent, well-written modules. They are overwhelmed by amazingly badly constructed, conflicting, mislabeled, misnumbered, misused, and mostly unnecessary dross that new Perl programmers incorporate eagerly and without QA into their new modules. The result is typical Perl reliability: it works fine until it breaks, then you add a few lines to fix the particular spot it broke and ship it back out with the same underlying flaws and no consistent architecture. CPAN, as a large software repository, is awful because many of the programmers never learned better, and they've descended to a common level of great ideas, but extremely poor integration and small, deadly failures that cause competent developers to waste incredible amounts of time.
I certainly agree that a bad programmer will find ways to create bad code. But programmers need good examples to learn good practices from, and the amount of dross over at CPAN is so great that it teaches truly unfortunate behaviors for even competent programmers exposed to it.
That's a nice economic and social fantasy world you have there, and a fairly common one, I'm afraid. _Any_ benefits in overall land use from reducing the harvesting of meat animals can and will be absorbed within 2 generations of humans, at the most, from burgeoning human population. This is because it doesn't avoid the clear-cutting for growing vegetarian compatible food that occurs anyway and destroys the animal habitats. "Renewable harvesting" means nothing if more land is used to feed more humans and eliminates the ecological niches needed by our diverse animal and plant populations to survive.
I do see it as a reasonable ecological step to allow allow animal preservation, by removing the incentive to actually consume rare animals as part of treasured delicacies. I also see it as an incredibly useful technology for space habitats, where shipping meat for long space flights becomes amazingly expensive. But it's not any kind of long-term solution to the underlying populaton growth problem that is currently consuming our arable land and potable water supplies.
That's why you _don't_ encourage that. You use a few well defined examples, preferably from a library function with some history of reliability. I've had to clean up, repeatedly, after Perl programmers who keep re-inventing their own special shaped wheels.
I object to Perl for many reasons. Historical pain and suffering is one of them. And "amateur's code" is what a lot of the Perl available modules are, and it is _dificult_ to wean programmers away from the tremendous variety of truly awful debris that festoons CPAN. I'm afraid that I do often refer to CPAN as being part of Perl itself, because it's so much of the Perl that people actually use. I would expect, over time, that the older and more poorly written modules would be discarded and refined, but I just don't see it.
And the tools I've had to deal with were not "amateur code", they were professionally provided tools written by commercially funded devlopers. It made me shudder a lot: I've simply not seen such extensively poor code littering other projects.
By the consistent example of previously written C. There are, in my observation, so many different ways to do the same things in Perl that developing consistent good practices is very difficult indeed.
But those lower level programmers are not getting the experience that turns them into good programmers. They're cutting and pasting bad code and propagating errors which are nightmarish to track down after the fact. And yes, I'm trusting the language designer to write a good _compiler_ to write small utilities, well written, rather than presenting every programmer with that stunning mass of debris I find coming out of places like CPAN.
We should not resist new tools for good programmers. We should resist toolboxes that include that many slightly different hammers, many of which are liable to break and many of which have handles likely to slip in the grip of a normal user, sending a large and spinning object flying towards anyone working near them. I'm afraid I've been that person near them and struck with those handles too many times in the last five years, and from observation, far too many of the scripting language authors need to go back and be _mentored_ in how to do efficient or even safe code, because they certainly didn't learn it dealing with Perl.
For examples of the insanity, I'll point you directly to mod_perl itself and resolving which versions of mod_perl itself are compatible with your project. Though that utility was written in C, it has to deal with a lot of Perl's vagaries, and it can be very awkward to coordinate multiple old and new Perl utilities with a single mod_perl release.
I'd consider it if I had spare new laptops or netbooks to play with. I'm afraid I don't right now: my ancient Thinkpad is too light on memory to even consider running Fedora 11 live.
What remains is serious enough. The _depletion_ of minable resources, coupled with the draining of reserves of arable land, petroleum, potable water, and harvested food stocks all amount to plenty of reasons to stop the population increase that will overwhelm any reasonable ecological efforts by the burgeoning billions of humnity. It's going to take a pretty radical restructuring to run the world's economies without population growth, but Malthus had a point.
I would far, far rather have the truly awful Perl and PHP I've been seeing the last few years fail outright to compile, rather than being published over at CPAN and corrupting every downstream project that is automatically built with the latest release of the author's fantasies. Compilation failures, and compilation warnings are helpful to cleaning up code. And taking the directly legible source code away from the programming equivalent of script kiddies and forcing them to read genuine source code helps raise the threshold of them simply cutting and pasting tools instead of using the already existing, well-written ones.
It's a long-term problem: flushing times that Perl programmers attempt to rewrite the "transcribe text as numbers" printf statement would probably shrink the deployed Perl software of the world by 5%.
That would be like saying "the fifth floor is in our building, not a public street address, so this warrant is useless". I bet that would be a useful bit of precedent to establish for lots of people who are served with search warrants. Given the router information mentioned in the article, and the settings of the laptop with an address in the address space, it's unsurprising that our plaintiff was upset that those machines did not get reported or searched properly.
Please take a look at CPAN. Select half a dozen web related modules, and check them form case statements that fail to have a fallthrough for unexpected conditions, and check them for input text processing that does not sanitize the inputs, especially for database information. Then come back and explain how the excessive flexibility of Perl does not contribute to writing far too many approaches to solving similar approaches, and how its flexibility encourages the use of robust and well-understood approaches to processing data.
So yes, indeed, limiting the number of ways to write precisely the same functionality does enocurage consistent structures whose vulnerabilities become understood. There are trade-offs. Such loss of flexibility may make code less efficient. But who writes perl for efficiency of execution?
Speed and security. The endless permutations and add-ons to Apache do, in fact, cause a significant security and compatibility and performance burden, much as the endless and often poorly written add-ons to Perl create similar issues. The idea can be taken to extremes, but how many of todays Perl and PHP website scripting security issues would evaporate if the authors were forced to write in a less flexible language that took a few moments to actually compile before being enabled?
Please allow me to disagree, somewhat, sir. Regular software updates and anti-virus tools are also critical. Too many holes are active in the wild for far too long, with cross-site scripting bugs and malware downloaded and installed via otherwise innocuous websites, to leave a machine unprotected. Take advantage of the occasional connections with higher bandwidth for these downloads, of course, or they will interfere with normal use.
For live CD's, I myself prefer a Knoppix CD, which also includes NTFS drivers and is generally friendlier on laptops of odd vintage. And backup, backup, backup! A nice laptop is easy to have stolen, easy to loose, and easy to break. USB keys are cheap, and can be easily stored encrypted to protect yourself from casual hardware theft or hotel room spies who image hard drives. (That's an old industrial espionage problem: I've seen reports on visitors to China having this problem a lot.)
Excellent points. But the last time I used Xen, there was no evidence of the kind of mixed hardware virtualization/para-virtualization you refer to here. It was either/or, hard-coded into the XML configuration files by the setup tools or re-configurating the installed guest environment. Are you saying this is a run-time detected and enabled behavior? And given that no server class motherboards ship with hardware virtualization enabled, it was very important to be able to run para-virtualized enviornments on other people's hardware, to avoid forcing them to reset their BIOS.
Because such "learn at home" videos are in fact very difficult to make: they have no feedback with the student, they're easily at far too sophisticated or far too untrained an audience, and because "teaching Photoshop" reequires a great deal of hands-on experience to learn how the workflow really works, and to recover from errors or inappropriate shortcuts. It's far easier to make a very lame and poorly produced document that does not actually teach, but relies on fraud to make its profit.
Such behavior is very common: do not rely on something sounding "perfictly viable" to assure that it has, in fact, any useful quality.
Xen need not use the hardware virtualization, and in fact performs far better in "para-virtualization". So would any system that avoided so much of the hardware virtualization and used a customized kernel, more suited to use in a virtualized OS by speaking more gracefully with the virtual server's system. I find it wonderful, and dearly with that VMWare could be convinced to support that kind of guest environment.
No, that "$500" is a "Suggested Retail Price". Very, very few people actually pay that: they get it at a profoundly "reduced" price as part of a contract for years of cell phone service. The cell phone service may or may not be very profitable, but it's absolutely vital for the careers of the investors and VP's at the cell phone companies to grow, no matter what the rest of the market does, preferably faster than other carriers. So they commit unsustainable economic foolishness to make this quarter's growth figures, and completely ignore the fallacies of projecting an exponential growth curve in a crowded environment past even one order of magnitude.