First of all, what is the (Senior) designation for a BS in electrical engineering?
The phone call you hear is from UT Arlington asking for the return of his degree.
And we wonder why government IT systems rate a D from Homeland Security? Hmm, did Raytheon have anything to do with the FBI computer systems while Mr. Taylor was an employee?
The answers to some questions are just too unpleasant to contemplate.
A distributed denial of service attack is usually a consumption of resources that results in the service being unavailable for legitimate users. See Denial-of-service attack for a more complete explanation.
This is in contrast to a security flaw which leads to a compromised system. See security flaw for a definition.
Security flaws can be used in denial of service attacks, but it is difficult to tell from the Grid computing article if this was the case.
Finally, repeat after me. Sendmail is not UNIX. Sendmail is not UNIX. Sendmail is a program that is shipped with UNIX. An administrator may choose to run or not run the program. An administrator may use other mail transport agents.
Here's the summary:
Sun Grid computer DDoS - at best poor capacity planning
IE Security flaw - at best poor programming and testing
Fortunately you never had me as a prof. The best grade that you could hope to get from any of my classes would be a B. I require the ability to use knowledge from the class in order to earn an A. I can promise you that you will see questions on your exam that you've not seen in the book, homework, or lecture.
A student protested this method of teaching. Once. My answer was (and is):
When you graduate, do you expect the president of this university to hand you a cross-referenced and indexed book with answers to all the questions in life? If so, you should go spend your money elsewhere.
When students left my class, those that could think were rewarded. Those that couldn't hopefully learned a little about how to think. If the student did neither, the student failed. Surprisingly few students failed.
The Open XML Formats are currently going through the Ecma standards process, and the complete schemas are not yet available. There are no technical articles that have been published yet (other than blog posts, some of which are great), and there are no books out on Open XML Formats development yet.
So, we have no complete schemas (even draft), no technical articles, and no stated direction. We do have blog posts that are great (from a Microsoft technical evangelist).
And yet, we have the following.
Our goal will be to help developers work with the formats right now, through sharing of code samples, white papers, workspace projects, and links to other resources.
Of course, none of this is published on their web site. How do you set up code samples for an XML formate without a working and validating schema?
This entire web site sounds like it serves four purposes:
Evangelize Microsoft technology - but then that's the moderator's job
Spread FUD about other document standards and document standards processes
Get some unwitting help from the Internet community for coding and debugging their standard
Get people hooked on the latest Microsoft (eventually) proprietary environment
In short, nothing of note to see here. Move along. This is not the open document standard you're looking for.
This query has triggered our safe search filter.
Flexible settings are coming soon.
The user interface is completely opaque. Just what I want from a web search site and portal - something that is as unintuitive as many Microsoft programs. I'm not going to sit down and write a detailed critique of all the things I found counter-intuitive in my 5 minute exploration.
It sort of ran on Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows/2000 Professioinal. I'm doing some interoperability tests this morning, so I'm stuck in Windows/2000 Professional and not going to reboot into Fedora Core 4 just to look for any OS-related problems.
It seem to set all sorts of long-lived cookies in the background and does make Firefox run more slowly once you exit the site.
As a software company, Microsoft may be the world's greatest marketing company.
I think Java is a reasonable first language to learn. I learned languages in the following order:
BASIC
FORTRAN
PL/1
C
C++
Perl
Java
C#
I've played with Python, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, Modula-2, and Ruby, but I don't claim to know them well enough to be productive. One of these days I'll try SmallTalk.
Making the jump from C to C++ and actually writing object oriented code was a big switch. For a while I was writing C in C++. I think the earlier you introduce people to object oriented concepts the better. However, I don't teach programming so that's just my personal viewpoint.
I have mixed feelings about using command line interpreters to teach languages. On the one hand it does give instant feedback. On the other hand it teaches people to think in a scripting, sequential way rather than a building block object oriented way.
However, you can do command line interpreters in Java. The one that I know about is BeanShell. It's pretty useful in general.
Movies would stand a chance to be profitable even by the entertainment accounting methods if you writers could write.
As another poster said, tell a good story with characters that are believable and you will have an audience. Make a movie like Ultraviolet and you will continue to lose money.
There are two major troubles with most writers today.
They don't read
They don't live
Only when an artist becomes engaged in the world does the artist have any chance of producing art.
Only when a person becomes engaged in the world does that person have any chance to live.
Hopefully you'll never have to support the DB interface. Hopefully you won't go on vacation for three weeks and forget how it works. If it's not documented, then it's not done.
Accurate documentation does not take long to write. Lack of accurate documentation is a sign of fuzzy thinking. Fuzzy thinking is often an indicator of poorly thought out code (design, business requirements, etc.).
Good documentation takes a while to write. Good documentation is appropriate for non-core audiences and long-lived products.
Accurate documentation should be a requirement for everything. Know your audience and your purpose. Write accordingly.
Once upon a time I wrote some software without using software configuration management principles. I went down the wrong track. I lost three weeks worth of work. I had to burn the midnight oil in order to recover. I will NOT write software (or documentation, or create designs) without practicing some sort of configuration management again.
Software configuration management done right takes almost NO time. Any configuration management process that gets in the way of being productive rather than boosting productivity is the fault of a broken process, not a broken concept.
Throw it over the wall mentality creates a huge negative impact on reliability, availability, responsiveness, and ultimately end user confidence.
Ah yes, the DEBUG mode in sendmail. I remember it well, since I spent an entire day patching sendmail from various vendors during the Robert Morris, Jr. Internet worm.
I know there have been lots of other unpleasant security issues with sendmail over the years. However, that particular one could have been completely avoided if the people releasing binary copies of sendmail had read the Makefile.
Also, another point needs to be made. Sendmail is not a part of the UNIX OS. It is an additional program which doesn't need to be present in order for a UNIX system to function. The vulnerabilities in Windows are a part of the OS.
This is going to be a long, rambling comment. I don't arrive at any snap answers. You have been warned.
I don't think that new music or genres will come from the US. I'm not sure that new music or new genres will filter in from abroad either. I have some thoughts about that, discussed below.
The entertainment business is a very risky business. Movies, music, and theater require a lot of up front money in order to create a luxury product that consumers may or may not buy. The pressure to make money is huge. Without a few successes, stock prices decrease and the ability of an entertainment company to finance new projects decreases.
Reducing the risk is a really challenging task. Some ways to reduce the risk include having the stakeholders shoulder some of the risk, reduce the budget, or target the audience.
Reducing the corporate risk by asking the stakeholders to share in the risk (actors, producers, directors, other principles) is a tough sell especially to A list talent. Reducing the budget is also challenging, especially in light of production and talent costs. Targeting an audience seems to be the least difficult way of reducing a project's risk.
Unfortunately, there are several problems with this path. Some of the problems include the following. I'm sure entertainment people can think of lots more.
Rapidly changing audience preferences
Highly fragmented audience preferences
Derivative view of audience preferences
Laziness, hubris, incompetence
A lot has been written about the speed of change, While obvious, this speed still needs to be mentioned. The spread of new art, new video, and new music can happen in as little as a few hours (one good review plus a torrent). Keeping up with that and sifting out the garbage is a daunting task. Coupled with free or low-cost tools capable of producing quality finished material, and the task of keeping up with new trends has to be near impossible.
This speed and volume can create a very fragmented audience. An interesting hypothesis might be the following:
Does facile communication foster the creation of a more homogeneous or more fragmented demographic?
I think that in areas where preferences are not constrained, rapid communication can result in more diversity, not less. However, exploring those ideas might be the subject of another set of articles.
In order to combat this, many entertainment businesses try to abstract trends from derivative experiences. This leads to a disconnect between the consumers and the producers. In the 1960s we would say - you just don't get it, man. Same story, different tune, much faster.
I don't think incompetence can be counted out, and probably is responsible for the vast majority of entertainment garbage that's out there today. Couple that with derivative trend watching and you get the following:
Dukes of Hazard
Rocky XXXXX
Bands that are indistinguishable - listen to any radio station
Entertainment companies try to avoid work by running American Idol and direvatives. These efforts are destined to fail since the audiences reflect the conservative (risk-aversion) views of the show's creators and executives.
Driving all of these decisions is a rampant conservatism. The overall drive is to make money. This used to be fueled by discovering new talent and creating new entertainment. Making money now seems to be accomplished by reducing costs and reducing risk.
The result is predictable (pun intended). Musicians sound the same, have nothing new to say, and no original insight. Movies are based on tired sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s (Gilligan's Island, Dukes of Hazard). Shock value is passed off as entertainment and art.
This is due to a conservative, risk-aversion view of entertainment. This is due to (in part) a huge disconnect between the people living the life and those
The CLR affords far better platform specific integration than Java. JNI is complicated and horrible. COM Interop and API invocation in.NET is fairly easy and straight forward. This is important for adoption considering the huge amount of legacy code that often needs to be interop'd with.
Yes, if you wish to restrict your environment to Microsoft platforms. However I work in a world where there are over 800 core applications running on everything but the kitchen sink. The environment grew organically and will take a long time to standardize. Furthermore, not all business requirements can be well supported in one environment..NET requires one environment (Microsoft's), while Java does mot.
In short, I can change the technologoy, but I have much less freedom to change the business.
While both.NET and Java are free, the application servers they run on are not. For ASP.NET, IIS is the application server. For Java/J2EE, it could be Web Sphere or a variety of others. In pretty much every case a Windows license will be a lot cheaper than the license for the J2EE app server... especially Web Sphere.
First of all, while the actual CLR is free, the tools to build enterprise level applications in.NET are not. In order to get the tools, you will need to probably purchase a professional version of Visual Studio.NET.
As far as application server costs (both capital and continuing), this depends on your environment's comfort with freely available software. There are at least three good J2EE servers available (Jonas , JBoss, Geronimo ). There are several flavors of Linux available. If you do not need EJB functionality, then there are several freely available JSP/Servlet containers available with Tomcat probably being the most well-known.
In short, if you have an organically grown environment or are not in a position to dictate the environment, Java is a good choice. If you can completely dictate the environment and force it to be Microsoft - only, then.NET may be a viable option.
As far as a technology being so pick your timeframe, that's just marketing speak. You pick the tool for the task at hand. People who create IS environments based on marketing rather than business, technical, and business culture requirements get what they deserve.
They get expesive, poorly functioning, business-inhibiting environments that can only be changed by the forklift upgrade method.
This hardly counts as a
DoS attack in its traditional meaning. However it is an annoying bug. I am glad to read that it has been addressed in the latest beta.
What follows is probably an ad hominem attack. Moderate accordingly.
I decided to spend a little time on the
Whitedust site. The site is advertised as "The Leading Independent Security News Portal".
The site is run by a group of former crackers. Of course one has to wonder about their cracking, security, and business skills when:
They advertise their many connections within the underground hacker scene
They leave the administrative link to their PHP web site in the footer of every page
Their business writing would fail my mom's 7th grade remedial English class
Very similar to where I work as a web administrator.
When I complained about the ampersands, parentheses, and invalid HTML in the web sites, I was told the following from the development manager.
As long as it works in IE, I don't care.
Meanwhile, if you go to their external site with any compliant browser you will have to struggle to navigate the site. There are tags that aren't closed, syntax errors, and missing files scattered throughout the site.
I can't even get the developers to give me a complete set of files. The last release took thirteen attempts because the developers forgot files. The current one that we're working on has gone through seven today, and my manager wants me to give the developers complete access to the QA server to speed things along.
Never mind that this access and others that he supports violates the Sarbanes-Oxley act. It's all about not making waves.
Oh, and when a release is late or doesn't work, the excuse is that the developers are new or the operations support (me) was slow in responding.
Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro
on
The Future of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been avoiding the Windows/2000 Professional to Windows/XP Professional upgrade on one of my home systems for a long time.
I use Windows/XP Professional as one of my systems at work and I loathe the environment. About the only reason I would consider upgrading the home system is to investigate IE 7.
And the only reason I plan to investigate IE 7 is to make sure web sites I build will work in that environment.
The method is: Build the web to standards, and hack on it until IE can render it correctly. I don't imagine IE 7 will change this method. It just means that I will have to use different hacks for a new set of standards embelishments that Microsoft decides to make.
If you want a Longhorn machine to automatically configure itself so you can work in a coffee shop, it will. If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen. "You shouldn't have to spend a lot of time struggling with things," Allchin said, adding that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: "It just works."
This is the philosophy that makes Windows such a challenge to use in situations not thought up by Microsoft programmers.
Microsoft software doesn't make it easy for you to accomplish tasks. Microsoft engineers design software that makes it easy to do what they think you want to do in the way that they think you want to do it.
This approach to usability can create a lot of problems. Some of these are as follows:
Inconsistent user interface for accomplishing similar tasks
Automatic actions that aren't what the user wished to have happen
Forcing the user to think in patterns that are uncomfortable
Discouraging a user to learn how to use the tool
This approach not only shows up in the user interface, but also in the software architecture. Internet Explorer just assumes things about page layout that may or may not be true. All sorts of interesting CSS hacks are needed in order to get pages to display more or less correctly in Internet Explorer. Most of these issues are probably not bugs, but Microsoft engineers trying to protect people (web authors) from mistakes.
Protecting people from mistakes may be laudable, but this level of protection actually discourages someone from intelligently using a computer.
I think this in loco parentis attitude encourages the Joe Sixpack and clueless newbie users.
I don't know how Microsoft helps change this culture that they've played a major part in creating. Changing this would be a fundamental philosophical shift for Microsoft.
I don't find it easier to program in python. There
are several reasons, and I'll give you a small summary of each.
Block indentation syntax - ie., whitespace
Line continuations
Language documentation
Module installation
Inconsistent interface patterns
I realize it's a matter of preference, but I do not like the block syntax of Python. I find the resulting code difficult to parse. Whitespace errors are really tough to track down, especially in editors that do not support Python well.
The language (and especially class) documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Finding method and method signatures is painful. Different module writers appear to use different conventions. The end result is that I have to parse through a lot of documentation to find exactly what I'm looking for.
Module installation is scary. While more and more modules are supporting separate build and install steps, many still do not. There is no standardized test step that I have found. I basically have to install modules and hope that they work.
Some modules come with tests, while others do not. I recently ran a batch of tests on a production module and got five percent failures. At this point, I don't know if I should rely on any of the module's functionality without careful examination of the code.
One of the major issues I have with Python is that modules performing similar tasks don't have similar methods and method signatures. Database modules are especially unpleasant to use. I am not looking forward to migrating code written against MySQL to work with PostGreSQL. While there is a DBI PEP, virtually no one uses it, and it hasn't been touched since 1999.
I just tried building the latest version of wxPython. Build documentation is incorrect (significantly at several points), entire libraries don't compile (OpenGL), and many of the demos fail to load. All this was so I could install SPE and have an editor to do a better job of whitespace checking (see above).
In short, I'll revist Python from time to time. However, I don't think the state of the language is quite there yet.
In short, the Republican agenda is all about enforcing their morals. If it takes bigger government and more regulation, so be it.
By the way, adult fare on cable is pretty lame. However I guess people who are offended by bare body parts would get upset with it.
Note: To all you fervent religious people, I respect your beliefs. However if you want to go live in a theocracy, then move to Iran, reinstate the Taliban, move to Israel, or start a Christian theocracy.
Let those of us who believe morality requires free will alone.
Ford's thumb I can understand. Even the modifications to Zaphod I can understand. How long can you look at a character with animatronic parts on the screen?
However, I'm sorry but I just cannot wrap my head around Marvin's . . . . head.
No, I don't have a better design. I wish I did. Marvin looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and a Teletubby
Slashdot Mirror
Reading his qualifications:
First of all, what is the (Senior) designation for a BS in electrical engineering?
The phone call you hear is from UT Arlington asking for the return of his degree.
And we wonder why government IT systems rate a D from Homeland Security? Hmm, did Raytheon have anything to do with the FBI computer systems while Mr. Taylor was an employee?
The answers to some questions are just too unpleasant to contemplate.
Let me see if I can explain a few things.
A distributed denial of service attack is usually a consumption of resources that results in the service being unavailable for legitimate users. See Denial-of-service attack for a more complete explanation.
This is in contrast to a security flaw which leads to a compromised system. See security flaw for a definition.
Security flaws can be used in denial of service attacks, but it is difficult to tell from the Grid computing article if this was the case.
Finally, repeat after me. Sendmail is not UNIX. Sendmail is not UNIX. Sendmail is a program that is shipped with UNIX. An administrator may choose to run or not run the program. An administrator may use other mail transport agents.
Here's the summary:
Fortunately you never had me as a prof. The best grade that you could hope to get from any of my classes would be a B. I require the ability to use knowledge from the class in order to earn an A. I can promise you that you will see questions on your exam that you've not seen in the book, homework, or lecture.
A student protested this method of teaching. Once. My answer was (and is):
When students left my class, those that could think were rewarded. Those that couldn't hopefully learned a little about how to think. If the student did neither, the student failed. Surprisingly few students failed.
Life does not grade on a curve. Neither do I.
So, we have no complete schemas (even draft), no technical articles, and no stated direction. We do have blog posts that are great (from a Microsoft technical evangelist).
And yet, we have the following.
Of course, none of this is published on their web site. How do you set up code samples for an XML formate without a working and validating schema?
This entire web site sounds like it serves four purposes:
In short, nothing of note to see here. Move along. This is not the open document standard you're looking for.
Ummm . . . an executive responsible for a product offering doesn't know (or can't find out) who is responsible for a product feature set?
Is there any wonder why Microsoft has such a terrible product?
I bet if they asked marketing who is responsible for a particular line in an advertisement, the answer would be almost instantly known.
Microsoft - the greastest marketing company in the world.
The validator reports 47 errors on your page. Fix those first and then start working on why the page doesn't render properly.
I ran your page through the validator and got 80 errors. You expect this to render correctly?
Before you start throwing stones at the browser of your choice, make sure your page validates.
The user interface is completely opaque. Just what I want from a web search site and portal - something that is as unintuitive as many Microsoft programs. I'm not going to sit down and write a detailed critique of all the things I found counter-intuitive in my 5 minute exploration.
It sort of ran on Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows/2000 Professioinal. I'm doing some interoperability tests this morning, so I'm stuck in Windows/2000 Professional and not going to reboot into Fedora Core 4 just to look for any OS-related problems.
It seem to set all sorts of long-lived cookies in the background and does make Firefox run more slowly once you exit the site.
As a software company, Microsoft may be the world's greatest marketing company.
I think Java is a reasonable first language to learn. I learned languages in the following order:
I've played with Python, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, Modula-2, and Ruby, but I don't claim to know them well enough to be productive. One of these days I'll try SmallTalk.
Making the jump from C to C++ and actually writing object oriented code was a big switch. For a while I was writing C in C++. I think the earlier you introduce people to object oriented concepts the better. However, I don't teach programming so that's just my personal viewpoint.
I have mixed feelings about using command line interpreters to teach languages. On the one hand it does give instant feedback. On the other hand it teaches people to think in a scripting, sequential way rather than a building block object oriented way.
However, you can do command line interpreters in Java. The one that I know about is BeanShell. It's pretty useful in general.
Odd. You're right, I don't know any writers personally. I do know a lot of successful writers who have done this - and their stories get told.
I won't name names, but I'm sure you can think of a few.
I hate to say this, but it must be said.
Movies would stand a chance to be profitable even by the entertainment accounting methods if you writers could write.
As another poster said, tell a good story with characters that are believable and you will have an audience. Make a movie like Ultraviolet and you will continue to lose money.
There are two major troubles with most writers today.
Only when an artist becomes engaged in the world does the artist have any chance of producing art.
Only when a person becomes engaged in the world does that person have any chance to live.
Someone please tell Mr. Gates to run for political office - or not.
Hopefully you'll never have to support the DB interface. Hopefully you won't go on vacation for three weeks and forget how it works. If it's not documented, then it's not done.
Accurate documentation does not take long to write. Lack of accurate documentation is a sign of fuzzy thinking. Fuzzy thinking is often an indicator of poorly thought out code (design, business requirements, etc.).
Good documentation takes a while to write. Good documentation is appropriate for non-core audiences and long-lived products.
Accurate documentation should be a requirement for everything. Know your audience and your purpose. Write accordingly.
Once upon a time I wrote some software without using software configuration management principles. I went down the wrong track. I lost three weeks worth of work. I had to burn the midnight oil in order to recover. I will NOT write software (or documentation, or create designs) without practicing some sort of configuration management again.
Software configuration management done right takes almost NO time. Any configuration management process that gets in the way of being productive rather than boosting productivity is the fault of a broken process, not a broken concept.
Throw it over the wall mentality creates a huge negative impact on reliability, availability, responsiveness, and ultimately end user confidence.
Ah yes, the DEBUG mode in sendmail. I remember it well, since I spent an entire day patching sendmail from various vendors during the Robert Morris, Jr. Internet worm.
I know there have been lots of other unpleasant security issues with sendmail over the years. However, that particular one could have been completely avoided if the people releasing binary copies of sendmail had read the Makefile.
Also, another point needs to be made. Sendmail is not a part of the UNIX OS. It is an additional program which doesn't need to be present in order for a UNIX system to function. The vulnerabilities in Windows are a part of the OS.
This is going to be a long, rambling comment. I don't arrive at any snap answers. You have been warned.
I don't think that new music or genres will come from the US. I'm not sure that new music or new genres will filter in from abroad either. I have some thoughts about that, discussed below.
The entertainment business is a very risky business. Movies, music, and theater require a lot of up front money in order to create a luxury product that consumers may or may not buy. The pressure to make money is huge. Without a few successes, stock prices decrease and the ability of an entertainment company to finance new projects decreases.
Reducing the risk is a really challenging task. Some ways to reduce the risk include having the stakeholders shoulder some of the risk, reduce the budget, or target the audience.
Reducing the corporate risk by asking the stakeholders to share in the risk (actors, producers, directors, other principles) is a tough sell especially to A list talent. Reducing the budget is also challenging, especially in light of production and talent costs. Targeting an audience seems to be the least difficult way of reducing a project's risk.
Unfortunately, there are several problems with this path. Some of the problems include the following. I'm sure entertainment people can think of lots more.
A lot has been written about the speed of change, While obvious, this speed still needs to be mentioned. The spread of new art, new video, and new music can happen in as little as a few hours (one good review plus a torrent). Keeping up with that and sifting out the garbage is a daunting task. Coupled with free or low-cost tools capable of producing quality finished material, and the task of keeping up with new trends has to be near impossible.
This speed and volume can create a very fragmented audience. An interesting hypothesis might be the following:
I think that in areas where preferences are not constrained, rapid communication can result in more diversity, not less. However, exploring those ideas might be the subject of another set of articles.
In order to combat this, many entertainment businesses try to abstract trends from derivative experiences. This leads to a disconnect between the consumers and the producers. In the 1960s we would say - you just don't get it, man. Same story, different tune, much faster.
I don't think incompetence can be counted out, and probably is responsible for the vast majority of entertainment garbage that's out there today. Couple that with derivative trend watching and you get the following:
Entertainment companies try to avoid work by running American Idol and direvatives. These efforts are destined to fail since the audiences reflect the conservative (risk-aversion) views of the show's creators and executives.
Driving all of these decisions is a rampant conservatism. The overall drive is to make money. This used to be fueled by discovering new talent and creating new entertainment. Making money now seems to be accomplished by reducing costs and reducing risk.
The result is predictable (pun intended). Musicians sound the same, have nothing new to say, and no original insight. Movies are based on tired sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s (Gilligan's Island, Dukes of Hazard). Shock value is passed off as entertainment and art.
This is due to a conservative, risk-aversion view of entertainment. This is due to (in part) a huge disconnect between the people living the life and those
Yes, if you wish to restrict your environment to Microsoft platforms. However I work in a world where there are over 800 core applications running on everything but the kitchen sink. The environment grew organically and will take a long time to standardize. Furthermore, not all business requirements can be well supported in one environment. .NET requires one environment (Microsoft's), while Java does mot.
In short, I can change the technologoy, but I have much less freedom to change the business.
First of all, while the actual CLR is free, the tools to build enterprise level applications in .NET are not. In order to get the tools, you will need to probably purchase a professional version of Visual Studio .NET.
As far as application server costs (both capital and continuing), this depends on your environment's comfort with freely available software. There are at least three good J2EE servers available (Jonas , JBoss, Geronimo ). There are several flavors of Linux available. If you do not need EJB functionality, then there are several freely available JSP/Servlet containers available with Tomcat probably being the most well-known.
In short, if you have an organically grown environment or are not in a position to dictate the environment, Java is a good choice. If you can completely dictate the environment and force it to be Microsoft - only, then .NET may be a viable option.
As far as a technology being so pick your timeframe, that's just marketing speak. You pick the tool for the task at hand. People who create IS environments based on marketing rather than business, technical, and business culture requirements get what they deserve.
They get expesive, poorly functioning, business-inhibiting environments that can only be changed by the forklift upgrade method.
This hardly counts as a DoS attack in its traditional meaning. However it is an annoying bug. I am glad to read that it has been addressed in the latest beta.
What follows is probably an ad hominem attack. Moderate accordingly.
I decided to spend a little time on the Whitedust site. The site is advertised as "The Leading Independent Security News Portal".
The site is run by a group of former crackers. Of course one has to wonder about their cracking, security, and business skills when:
In short this web site has no redeeming value.
Quit insulting chimps.
Very similar to where I work as a web administrator.
When I complained about the ampersands, parentheses, and invalid HTML in the web sites, I was told the following from the development manager.
As long as it works in IE, I don't care.
Meanwhile, if you go to their external site with any compliant browser you will have to struggle to navigate the site. There are tags that aren't closed, syntax errors, and missing files scattered throughout the site.
I can't even get the developers to give me a complete set of files. The last release took thirteen attempts because the developers forgot files. The current one that we're working on has gone through seven today, and my manager wants me to give the developers complete access to the QA server to speed things along.
Never mind that this access and others that he supports violates the Sarbanes-Oxley act. It's all about not making waves.
Oh, and when a release is late or doesn't work, the excuse is that the developers are new or the operations support (me) was slow in responding.
I have been avoiding the Windows/2000 Professional to Windows/XP Professional upgrade on one of my home systems for a long time.
I use Windows/XP Professional as one of my systems at work and I loathe the environment. About the only reason I would consider upgrading the home system is to investigate IE 7.
And the only reason I plan to investigate IE 7 is to make sure web sites I build will work in that environment.
The method is: Build the web to standards, and hack on it until IE can render it correctly. I don't imagine IE 7 will change this method. It just means that I will have to use different hacks for a new set of standards embelishments that Microsoft decides to make.
This is the philosophy that makes Windows such a challenge to use in situations not thought up by Microsoft programmers.
Microsoft software doesn't make it easy for you to accomplish tasks. Microsoft engineers design software that makes it easy to do what they think you want to do in the way that they think you want to do it.
This approach to usability can create a lot of problems. Some of these are as follows:
This approach not only shows up in the user interface, but also in the software architecture. Internet Explorer just assumes things about page layout that may or may not be true. All sorts of interesting CSS hacks are needed in order to get pages to display more or less correctly in Internet Explorer. Most of these issues are probably not bugs, but Microsoft engineers trying to protect people (web authors) from mistakes.
Protecting people from mistakes may be laudable, but this level of protection actually discourages someone from intelligently using a computer.
I think this in loco parentis attitude encourages the Joe Sixpack and clueless newbie users.
I don't know how Microsoft helps change this culture that they've played a major part in creating. Changing this would be a fundamental philosophical shift for Microsoft.
I don't find it easier to program in python. There are several reasons, and I'll give you a small summary of each.
I realize it's a matter of preference, but I do not like the block syntax of Python. I find the resulting code difficult to parse. Whitespace errors are really tough to track down, especially in editors that do not support Python well.
The language (and especially class) documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Finding method and method signatures is painful. Different module writers appear to use different conventions. The end result is that I have to parse through a lot of documentation to find exactly what I'm looking for.
Module installation is scary. While more and more modules are supporting separate build and install steps, many still do not. There is no standardized test step that I have found. I basically have to install modules and hope that they work.
Some modules come with tests, while others do not. I recently ran a batch of tests on a production module and got five percent failures. At this point, I don't know if I should rely on any of the module's functionality without careful examination of the code.
One of the major issues I have with Python is that modules performing similar tasks don't have similar methods and method signatures. Database modules are especially unpleasant to use. I am not looking forward to migrating code written against MySQL to work with PostGreSQL. While there is a DBI PEP, virtually no one uses it, and it hasn't been touched since 1999.
I just tried building the latest version of wxPython. Build documentation is incorrect (significantly at several points), entire libraries don't compile (OpenGL), and many of the demos fail to load. All this was so I could install SPE and have an editor to do a better job of whitespace checking (see above).
In short, I'll revist Python from time to time. However, I don't think the state of the language is quite there yet.
Right, and that's why two republican lawmakers want to apply broadcast TV standards to cable TV. Here are some links to the articles.
In short, the Republican agenda is all about enforcing their morals. If it takes bigger government and more regulation, so be it.
By the way, adult fare on cable is pretty lame. However I guess people who are offended by bare body parts would get upset with it.
Note: To all you fervent religious people, I respect your beliefs. However if you want to go live in a theocracy, then move to Iran, reinstate the Taliban, move to Israel, or start a Christian theocracy.
Let those of us who believe morality requires free will alone.
No, for sensitive email I encrypt. However since SHA-1 has been broken, it's back to carrier pigeons I guess.
However, I would like at least my mail password to be encrypted when I pick up my mail. It's just way too easy for someone to pick up passwords.
Passwords - the good, bad, and ugly - is another topic.
Ford's thumb I can understand. Even the modifications to Zaphod I can understand. How long can you look at a character with animatronic parts on the screen?
However, I'm sorry but I just cannot wrap my head around Marvin's . . . . head.
No, I don't have a better design. I wish I did. Marvin looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and a Teletubby