The rise of Sarbanes-Oxley highlights a key insecurity in the accountability of enterprise systems.
Yeah, I've heard that one too. Reality has a way of factoring out the ambiguity of such abstract, open-ended claims.
On way to deal with the problem of DBAs and their ability to access/modify financial data is to register them with the exchange, just like the finance and executive types. Now they're Sarbanes-Oxley insider compliant! That's what has been done where I earn my living.
Thus, we may dispense with elaborate schemes of secure data version control using unspecified, hypothetical systems, paid for with budgets that don't exist. Next!
Until some future revision of Sarbanes-Oxley begins to specify the design and implementation of electronic finance systems, no one can claim a database is more or less susceptible to malfeasance than a locked filing cabinet. That's why the auditors stop once they've concluded you're changing your password with adequate frequency.
This is the administration barring *individuals* based on thier polital (sic) past
Yep, that's pretty damn bad. How will their careers be affected now that they aren't being permitted to participate in international standards collaboration?
Watching Slashdot flip out over this is rather funny. As if this is somehow new or unique to "teh eBil Bush Nazi!!11". This sort of slapdash political chicanery is commonplace, planet-wide. It's times like these when Ralph Nader has a lot of appeal.
What I find surprising is the raw honesty of this deputy press secretary, Trent Duffy. The man clearly has no future in public life.
...biased to favour Corporate America? Naw, couldn't be...
As opposed to the well paid bias of any other nation-state and it's corporate favorites? Please.
The American Left has failed miserably. Until they figure out how articulate something without alienating vast swaths of the electorate, people like Bush will continue to get elected. I'm begging you, please, find a credible candidate that doesn't radiate BAF.
Disclaimer: All references to Hitler, Nazis, etc. contained within parody; Godwin does not apply.
You know what - changing jobs every couple of years is a nice way to clear out mental, virtual, and sometime physical clutter that is no longer needed.
Truth is this is the only real reason I left my last job four years ago. After six years I had become the go-to guy for every damn thing that computed. My ability to accomplish anything was approaching zero. Now, another half decade later, the same thing is occurring.
As far as email goes my policy is; delete nothing, period. Spam is the only exception. On at least three different occasions in the past ten years I've had to dig hard to find something I wrote years before. In each case I found it and saved my own ass. You can pry my old email out of my cold dead disk, but you best bring plenty of ammo.
Scientists do this stuff all the time in order to look at LARGE data sets and make some sense of them. The most primal of neural bundles do the biological equivalent of this all the time, it's not a sign of intelligence.
You're saying there is some fundamental difference between "the most primal of neural bundles" and the brain that implements the "intelligence" of ours. I've come to believe that the difference is not so great. Our vaunted intelligence is not so profound.
Our memory is a highly lossy collection of abstract metrics indexed by a multi-dimensional associative array. Our senses amount to subtle, small and efficient algorithms, today being readily emulated to various degrees. Combine these things with some sort of purpose and I'm thinking you will find awareness, as we understand it.
I don't think the barrier is computational power; we have probably already far exceeded the computational power necessary to emulate a few pounds of gray matter running on a couple watts. The difficulty is understanding the ways evolution has optimized a large number of subtle algorithms over billions of years. The fact that we now find it easy to emulate subsets of this indicates that the problem is tractable.
If I am right, the machine that rendered what you read now may have the capacity to match or exceed your intellect.
Why does it feel like our scientists are just chasing after the wind when it comes to the search for life on Mars?
Whenever new evidence appears that suggests biological activity, some geologist chimes in and speculates about some exotic geologic process that could duplicate the observation. This debate has been going on in earnest since the 70's.
Remote analysis will never be sufficient; any claims made will be (rightly) countered by geologists claiming ambiguity based on increasingly exotic ideas about Mars geology. A return sample mission won't be sufficient; anything returned that appears alive will be attributed to contamination, mutation or conspiracy. A dedicated robotic mission with sufficient capability might be able to reveal a unambiguous colony of something alive that would finally end the debate. However, if such a mission revealed nothing, it would not prove life isn't present. Short of a furry, rock eating, methane breathing quadruped walking up and sniffing one of the Rovers, I doubt it's possible to settle this thing with robots.
This debate will not end until people are stomping around on the surface of Mars, kicking over rocks, digging holes and putting stuff under microscopes. The price we pay once and the knowledge will last forever.
I know someone who considered citing the paper in a dissertation. Fortunately she noticed the retraction before doing so, but it would have been an embarrassment to say the least. Of course we can say that anyone who cites the paper deserves ridicule, but this sort of thing can cause real harm to people's livelihood.
Our disciplines are so ambiguous that it's practitioners can't distinguish between fraudulent and real material. This is understood and you're wrong to test it in public.
Astonishing.
Maybe this wake up call was necessary
This "wake up call" was inevitable.
but prior to Sokol's publication there was a healthy inter disciplinary effort between the humanities and sciences.
"healthy inter disciplinary effort"... Straight out of a paper generating algorithm. Whatever respect exists between hard science and the "humanities" hasn't been fundamentally shaken, which should provide some incite into how great that level of respect was to begin with.
It isn't hard to see how this publication put a wedge between the camps.
The wedge was already there. Sokol contributed to helping us to stop pretending.
For that reason I consider it intellectually dishonest, but there is no consensus.
We should not, however, consider the "intellectual" honesty of an academic publication with standards this low? Did Social Text not purport to have academic credibility? But this is an equivalence argument.
Sokol made himself some enemies with his prank. During the time between the moments of panic you've felt when thinking about being similarly exposed, has the thought ever occurred that Sokol deserves some credit for his courage?
"I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they're doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian," Murdoch said.
The operative word there is eventually.
Sayeth Murdoch; "But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released."
You needed that at least a year ago. Fix your model so that Debian can keep up with the rest of the Linux world and you won't have to gripe about forks that don't exist.
Debian should be the foundation of a plethora of tailored distributions dominating the Linux market. The one and only thing preventing this is the fact that Stable is perpetually very obsolete. This is not Ubuntu's fault.
However, the one singulare reason why we as humans are not making space colonisation a top priority is money and greed.
If an Apollo astronaut had kicked over a rock and discovered a pile of gold pellets, how many hundreds of thousands of humans would be reading this from a cave under the surface of the moon right now? Eventually, when greed has discovered a reason to go to space, the solarsystem will suddenly become small.
No doubt, you'll bitch about that greed too.
If one looks into the past for an answer as to why we are not colonizing space at this point it is simple.. We have not been given the old 'kick in the pants yet'
If one looks into the past one finds war. If you want something done, convince a general that it will win the next war. The old 'kick in the pants' you mention has usually been self-administered. The moment it becomes necessary to man space to defeat some 'enemy' we will have thousands of people floating around in weapons platforms saluting each other.
The simple truth is that there is simply vastly more testing that goes into hardware then most software
The truth is not so simple. Given that the largest part of a modern CPU is cache, as opposed to logic, the transistor count does not reflect the net complexity. If one considers the ISA of a CPU to be it's specification, a chip is a far less complex construct than a non-trivial piece of software. ISA evolution is measured in years and decades. An equivalent piece of software has a relatively small number (on the order of hundreds) of simple, precisely defined functions that are not subject to change. Software is so abstract and complex that it is routinely (trivially?) used to emulate CPUs.
Flash was once a rather nice delivery system for animated content. Then it became an advertising delivery system. Now it's becoming an adware/spyware vehicle.
Macromedia? Are you paying attention?
If you let this crap go on too long you're going to wreck your platform. People (a small fraction of them) are starting to think your stuff is a giant hole through which marketing zombies are driving Mac trucks. What happens to you when it's 15, 25 or 50%?
The page you provided is helpful; it also demonstrates the correct attitude. Unfortunately it is not enough. Not by a long shot. Here's a clue; if it could conceivably be used to monitor the user it needs to be OFF by DEFAULT. If ANYTHING the plug-in "knows" or "shares" is not ENTIRELY REMOVED simply by clearing the browser cache you are wrong, pure and simple.
Flash is not essential. Get on the stick or you're done in the market.
Doesn't look like it. The Altair battery uses "nano-crystals" to vastly increase the surface area of the anode. Toshiba has come up with some kind of "nano-particle" that... absorbs more Lithium ions. Neither of these advances appear to directly contribute to capacity. They improve charging (and discharge) efficiency.
Are these like only special coprocessors for million-dollar supercomputers?
No. These are not "processors" of any sort. It is a new way to modulate signal between CMOS and optical at high frequency and small scale. It may provide faster bus speeds, assuming the reality matches the funding hype.
Are they going to be x86-compatible? MIPS compatible? What?
It will be "compatible" with any CMOS device that needs a bus to communicate with some other device. Since that includes all useful CMOS devices, it will be compatible with everything!
But finding un-biased opinions is becoming increasingly difficult.
Un-biased opinion is an oxymoron. How would the UN, or anyone else, alter the "Internet" such that opinions are generally less "biased"?
"Biased" opinions appearing on the "Internet" is a good thing; it allows one to gauge to what degree people, generally, use objective fact in forming opinions. The various "sides" of various debates will, discernibly, permit (or not) facts to intrude or contribute to their arguments, and this is a useful measure of their credibility.
The "Internet" needs the UN like I need a hole in my head. For some reason I doubt whether Libya and China's influence on the "Internet" will be a positive contribution. How many hours after the UN obtains governance over the "Internet" will elapse before the UN begins to ponder who should and should not "have a place" within it.
I really can't imagine where such a hair brained notion will garner support. Stipulate with me, for a moment, the simple model of Left vs. Right. The Left has claimed the UN is a whore of international corporate hegemony and an rubberstamp for the West. On the other hand, the Right sees the UN as, at best, ineffectual and irrelevant and, at worst, a tool of whomever happens to be attempting to oppose them. Which of these two sides has some vested interest in federating "Internet" governance to the UN? Who, precisely, has this desire and why?
I can't blame the UN; it is simply the nature of any governing institution to attempt to fill whatever governance void is perceived to exist. The fault lies with anyone foolish enough to permit this. I, for one, value the lack of governance; it is very cool that the most powerful communications medium in the history of our species has no "owner." Anyone who feels threatened by this probably deserves it.
CCTV facial recognition is a joke, don't worry about that.
Worry about it.
The Super Bowl XXXV thing in Florida was a low budget pilot. It failed because the system couldn't cope with the poor resolution provided by the cameras used and the very poor ambient lighting. That problem does not apply in all cases where facial recognition can be deployed.
Here's an interesting site; Facial Recognition Vendor Test. Don't let the.org fool you; this thing is sponsored by the FBI and the Dept. of Homeland Defense. Ten vendors are currently participating. They are actively putting these systems through a testing regime. Interestingly, no results appear from prior year testing.
You and I have no idea how good this stuff is. The important thing is the They haven't given up on it.
Text is better than pictures for describing anything complex. We have thousands of years of experience to back this up.
Wow. That's quite a generalization.
Most engineers born during the last few thousand years would disagree with you. Most (all?) structures, machines, circuits and other engineering constructs are described via pictures. Implementation follows directly from these with no intermediate "text". Recently various tools have had to "serialize" this data for the benefit of machines, but the reference document is the image, not the intermediate.
I'll take a stab at matching your generalization; Software has no generic visual representation because "we" haven't figured out how to do this yet. We're only recently beginning to generalize software constructs larger than a few lines of code as "Patterns".
Aardappel's own inventor broke down and created a textual equivalent language for the sample code in his PhD thesis.
The question that should occur is; what is wrong with Aardappel's visual representation that it is not sufficient by itself?
GIPSpin, Aardappel and many others reflect a desire by a long continuum of programmers to illustrate their thinking and, in turn, translate illustrations directly into implementation. Is there something provably wrong with this desire? Are you claiming to know this is misguided?
I believe we simply haven't had enough time to wrap our collective head around software. The fact that no formulaic or visual representation of software which is both general enough to encompass all systems and concise enough to be useful is not a reason to cop-out and claim "text" is the only way. It's a couple centuries too early for that conclusion.
I read in a recent Linus interview that he is waiting for all major distributions to move to 2.6. How is that suppose to happen if 2.6 is where all development is happening? Wouldn't handing 2.6 off to the Alan Cox's of the Linux world where development is restricted to "fixes" be a better way to encourage the distribution vendors to move, as it has for the all previous "stable" kernels? Distribution vendors are always one release behind the development kernel, and this is as it should be.
What had "Websphere" been using? Java exclusively?
Websphere is a full application server stack. One part of that happens to be the "IBM HTTP Listener", which is Apache repackaged. It is also a straightforward way to run Apache with a working SSL implementation on Windows. I used it a few years ago to run a PHP site on W2K. It worked pretty well and problems were actively addressed on IBM's support forums.
It was a good experience overall. If I ever have to run a PHP site on Windows again (as opposed to feeding my forehead into a belt sander) I'd use it.
The real problem is the next stage of advert evolution, which will be when content providers still use third parties to sell and supply adverts, but start to act as proxies for the adverts.
This is dead on. Either they're going to use WebDAV (or something similar) to allow the popup people to populate some virtual directory (the low-brow way, suitable for low end hosts,) or they'll have the content provider proxy ads via the web server. The ad content will be indistinguishable from non-ad content and current ad blockers will fail completely. The latter method will be more desireable because trackers will still function (the web server just has to proxy the client cookies to the ad server.)
Slashdot Mirror
The rise of Sarbanes-Oxley highlights a key insecurity in the accountability of enterprise systems.
Yeah, I've heard that one too. Reality has a way of factoring out the ambiguity of such abstract, open-ended claims.
On way to deal with the problem of DBAs and their ability to access/modify financial data is to register them with the exchange, just like the finance and executive types. Now they're Sarbanes-Oxley insider compliant! That's what has been done where I earn my living.
Thus, we may dispense with elaborate schemes of secure data version control using unspecified, hypothetical systems, paid for with budgets that don't exist. Next!
Until some future revision of Sarbanes-Oxley begins to specify the design and implementation of electronic finance systems, no one can claim a database is more or less susceptible to malfeasance than a locked filing cabinet. That's why the auditors stop once they've concluded you're changing your password with adequate frequency.
Blame America First
Yep, that's pretty damn bad. How will their careers be affected now that they aren't being permitted to participate in international standards collaboration?
Watching Slashdot flip out over this is rather funny. As if this is somehow new or unique to "teh eBil Bush Nazi!!11". This sort of slapdash political chicanery is commonplace, planet-wide. It's times like these when Ralph Nader has a lot of appeal.
What I find surprising is the raw honesty of this deputy press secretary, Trent Duffy. The man clearly has no future in public life.
As opposed to the well paid bias of any other nation-state and it's corporate favorites? Please.
The American Left has failed miserably. Until they figure out how articulate something without alienating vast swaths of the electorate, people like Bush will continue to get elected. I'm begging you, please, find a credible candidate that doesn't radiate BAF.
Disclaimer: All references to Hitler, Nazis, etc. contained within parody; Godwin does not apply.
You know what - changing jobs every couple of years is a nice way to clear out mental, virtual, and sometime physical clutter that is no longer needed.
Truth is this is the only real reason I left my last job four years ago. After six years I had become the go-to guy for every damn thing that computed. My ability to accomplish anything was approaching zero. Now, another half decade later, the same thing is occurring.
As far as email goes my policy is; delete nothing, period. Spam is the only exception. On at least three different occasions in the past ten years I've had to dig hard to find something I wrote years before. In each case I found it and saved my own ass. You can pry my old email out of my cold dead disk, but you best bring plenty of ammo.
Scientists do this stuff all the time in order to look at LARGE data sets and make some sense of them. The most primal of neural bundles do the biological equivalent of this all the time, it's not a sign of intelligence.
You're saying there is some fundamental difference between "the most primal of neural bundles" and the brain that implements the "intelligence" of ours. I've come to believe that the difference is not so great. Our vaunted intelligence is not so profound.
Our memory is a highly lossy collection of abstract metrics indexed by a multi-dimensional associative array. Our senses amount to subtle, small and efficient algorithms, today being readily emulated to various degrees. Combine these things with some sort of purpose and I'm thinking you will find awareness, as we understand it.
I don't think the barrier is computational power; we have probably already far exceeded the computational power necessary to emulate a few pounds of gray matter running on a couple watts. The difficulty is understanding the ways evolution has optimized a large number of subtle algorithms over billions of years. The fact that we now find it easy to emulate subsets of this indicates that the problem is tractable.
If I am right, the machine that rendered what you read now may have the capacity to match or exceed your intellect.
Why does it feel like our scientists are just chasing after the wind when it comes to the search for life on Mars?
Whenever new evidence appears that suggests biological activity, some geologist chimes in and speculates about some exotic geologic process that could duplicate the observation. This debate has been going on in earnest since the 70's.
Remote analysis will never be sufficient; any claims made will be (rightly) countered by geologists claiming ambiguity based on increasingly exotic ideas about Mars geology. A return sample mission won't be sufficient; anything returned that appears alive will be attributed to contamination, mutation or conspiracy. A dedicated robotic mission with sufficient capability might be able to reveal a unambiguous colony of something alive that would finally end the debate. However, if such a mission revealed nothing, it would not prove life isn't present. Short of a furry, rock eating, methane breathing quadruped walking up and sniffing one of the Rovers, I doubt it's possible to settle this thing with robots.
This debate will not end until people are stomping around on the surface of Mars, kicking over rocks, digging holes and putting stuff under microscopes. The price we pay once and the knowledge will last forever.
That's a good way to get an automatic b*llsh*t detector written.
I know someone who considered citing the paper in a dissertation. Fortunately she noticed the retraction before doing so, but it would have been an embarrassment to say the least. Of course we can say that anyone who cites the paper deserves ridicule, but this sort of thing can cause real harm to people's livelihood.
Our disciplines are so ambiguous that it's practitioners can't distinguish between fraudulent and real material. This is understood and you're wrong to test it in public.
Astonishing.
Maybe this wake up call was necessary
This "wake up call" was inevitable.
but prior to Sokol's publication there was a healthy inter disciplinary effort between the humanities and sciences.
"healthy inter disciplinary effort"... Straight out of a paper generating algorithm. Whatever respect exists between hard science and the "humanities" hasn't been fundamentally shaken, which should provide some incite into how great that level of respect was to begin with.
It isn't hard to see how this publication put a wedge between the camps.
The wedge was already there. Sokol contributed to helping us to stop pretending.
For that reason I consider it intellectually dishonest, but there is no consensus.
We should not, however, consider the "intellectual" honesty of an academic publication with standards this low? Did Social Text not purport to have academic credibility? But this is an equivalence argument.
Sokol made himself some enemies with his prank. During the time between the moments of panic you've felt when thinking about being similarly exposed, has the thought ever occurred that Sokol deserves some credit for his courage?
I didn't think so.
This is an editorial disguised as news. And a poor one at that.
"I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they're doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian," Murdoch said.
The operative word there is eventually.
Sayeth Murdoch; "But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released."
You needed that at least a year ago. Fix your model so that Debian can keep up with the rest of the Linux world and you won't have to gripe about forks that don't exist.
Debian should be the foundation of a plethora of tailored distributions dominating the Linux market. The one and only thing preventing this is the fact that Stable is perpetually very obsolete. This is not Ubuntu's fault.
However, the one singulare reason why we as humans are not making space colonisation a top priority is money and greed.
If an Apollo astronaut had kicked over a rock and discovered a pile of gold pellets, how many hundreds of thousands of humans would be reading this from a cave under the surface of the moon right now? Eventually, when greed has discovered a reason to go to space, the solarsystem will suddenly become small.
No doubt, you'll bitch about that greed too.
If one looks into the past for an answer as to why we are not colonizing space at this point it is simple.. We have not been given the old 'kick in the pants yet'
If one looks into the past one finds war. If you want something done, convince a general that it will win the next war. The old 'kick in the pants' you mention has usually been self-administered. The moment it becomes necessary to man space to defeat some 'enemy' we will have thousands of people floating around in weapons platforms saluting each other.
No doubt, you'll be bitching about this also.
The simple truth is that there is simply vastly more testing that goes into hardware then most software
The truth is not so simple. Given that the largest part of a modern CPU is cache, as opposed to logic, the transistor count does not reflect the net complexity. If one considers the ISA of a CPU to be it's specification, a chip is a far less complex construct than a non-trivial piece of software. ISA evolution is measured in years and decades. An equivalent piece of software has a relatively small number (on the order of hundreds) of simple, precisely defined functions that are not subject to change. Software is so abstract and complex that it is routinely (trivially?) used to emulate CPUs.
Flash was once a rather nice delivery system for animated content. Then it became an advertising delivery system. Now it's becoming an adware/spyware vehicle.
Macromedia? Are you paying attention?
If you let this crap go on too long you're going to wreck your platform. People (a small fraction of them) are starting to think your stuff is a giant hole through which marketing zombies are driving Mac trucks. What happens to you when it's 15, 25 or 50%?
The page you provided is helpful; it also demonstrates the correct attitude. Unfortunately it is not enough. Not by a long shot. Here's a clue; if it could conceivably be used to monitor the user it needs to be OFF by DEFAULT. If ANYTHING the plug-in "knows" or "shares" is not ENTIRELY REMOVED simply by clearing the browser cache you are wrong, pure and simple.
Flash is not essential. Get on the stick or you're done in the market.
...dupe the "French Response to Google is Microsoft" thing? It's indistinguishable from an actual April Fools.... joke.
o.O
Doesn't look like it. The Altair battery uses "nano-crystals" to vastly increase the surface area of the anode. Toshiba has come up with some kind of "nano-particle" that... absorbs more Lithium ions. Neither of these advances appear to directly contribute to capacity. They improve charging (and discharge) efficiency.
And who gets to use these?
Whoever can afford them.
Are these like only special coprocessors for million-dollar supercomputers?
No. These are not "processors" of any sort. It is a new way to modulate signal between CMOS and optical at high frequency and small scale. It may provide faster bus speeds, assuming the reality matches the funding hype.
Are they going to be x86-compatible? MIPS compatible? What?
It will be "compatible" with any CMOS device that needs a bus to communicate with some other device. Since that includes all useful CMOS devices, it will be compatible with everything!
It's high bandwidth (10Gbit/sec) small scale (130nm) modulation from CMOS to optical. This is not "processing" in the sense of optical logic.
But finding un-biased opinions is becoming increasingly difficult.
Un-biased opinion is an oxymoron. How would the UN, or anyone else, alter the "Internet" such that opinions are generally less "biased"?
"Biased" opinions appearing on the "Internet" is a good thing; it allows one to gauge to what degree people, generally, use objective fact in forming opinions. The various "sides" of various debates will, discernibly, permit (or not) facts to intrude or contribute to their arguments, and this is a useful measure of their credibility.
The "Internet" needs the UN like I need a hole in my head. For some reason I doubt whether Libya and China's influence on the "Internet" will be a positive contribution. How many hours after the UN obtains governance over the "Internet" will elapse before the UN begins to ponder who should and should not "have a place" within it.
I really can't imagine where such a hair brained notion will garner support. Stipulate with me, for a moment, the simple model of Left vs. Right. The Left has claimed the UN is a whore of international corporate hegemony and an rubberstamp for the West. On the other hand, the Right sees the UN as, at best, ineffectual and irrelevant and, at worst, a tool of whomever happens to be attempting to oppose them. Which of these two sides has some vested interest in federating "Internet" governance to the UN? Who, precisely, has this desire and why?
I can't blame the UN; it is simply the nature of any governing institution to attempt to fill whatever governance void is perceived to exist. The fault lies with anyone foolish enough to permit this. I, for one, value the lack of governance; it is very cool that the most powerful communications medium in the history of our species has no "owner." Anyone who feels threatened by this probably deserves it.
CCTV facial recognition is a joke, don't worry about that.
.org fool you; this thing is sponsored by the FBI and the Dept. of Homeland Defense. Ten vendors are currently participating. They are actively putting these systems through a testing regime. Interestingly, no results appear from prior year testing.
Worry about it.
The Super Bowl XXXV thing in Florida was a low budget pilot. It failed because the system couldn't cope with the poor resolution provided by the cameras used and the very poor ambient lighting. That problem does not apply in all cases where facial recognition can be deployed.
Here's an interesting site; Facial Recognition Vendor Test. Don't let the
You and I have no idea how good this stuff is. The important thing is the They haven't given up on it.
Text is better than pictures for describing anything complex. We have thousands of years of experience to back this up.
Wow. That's quite a generalization.
Most engineers born during the last few thousand years would disagree with you. Most (all?) structures, machines, circuits and other engineering constructs are described via pictures. Implementation follows directly from these with no intermediate "text". Recently various tools have had to "serialize" this data for the benefit of machines, but the reference document is the image, not the intermediate.
I'll take a stab at matching your generalization; Software has no generic visual representation because "we" haven't figured out how to do this yet. We're only recently beginning to generalize software constructs larger than a few lines of code as "Patterns".
Aardappel's own inventor broke down and created a textual equivalent language for the sample code in his PhD thesis.
The question that should occur is; what is wrong with Aardappel's visual representation that it is not sufficient by itself?
GIPSpin, Aardappel and many others reflect a desire by a long continuum of programmers to illustrate their thinking and, in turn, translate illustrations directly into implementation. Is there something provably wrong with this desire? Are you claiming to know this is misguided?
I believe we simply haven't had enough time to wrap our collective head around software. The fact that no formulaic or visual representation of software which is both general enough to encompass all systems and concise enough to be useful is not a reason to cop-out and claim "text" is the only way. It's a couple centuries too early for that conclusion.
this seems much more practical.
Indeed. At least until we deploy this all over the Sea of Japan in 2005.
Where is 2.7? I'd like to know this too.
I read in a recent Linus interview that he is waiting for all major distributions to move to 2.6. How is that suppose to happen if 2.6 is where all development is happening? Wouldn't handing 2.6 off to the Alan Cox's of the Linux world where development is restricted to "fixes" be a better way to encourage the distribution vendors to move, as it has for the all previous "stable" kernels? Distribution vendors are always one release behind the development kernel, and this is as it should be.
I fail to understand...
What had "Websphere" been using? Java exclusively?
Websphere is a full application server stack. One part of that happens to be the "IBM HTTP Listener", which is Apache repackaged. It is also a straightforward way to run Apache with a working SSL implementation on Windows. I used it a few years ago to run a PHP site on W2K. It worked pretty well and problems were actively addressed on IBM's support forums.
It was a good experience overall. If I ever have to run a PHP site on Windows again (as opposed to feeding my forehead into a belt sander) I'd use it.
a geek's best friend
Unless that geek is employed in the West. IBM is a pioneer in outsourcing; IBM makes geeks cheaper.
The real problem is the next stage of advert evolution, which will be when content providers still use third parties to sell and supply adverts, but start to act as proxies for the adverts.
This is dead on. Either they're going to use WebDAV (or something similar) to allow the popup people to populate some virtual directory (the low-brow way, suitable for low end hosts,) or they'll have the content provider proxy ads via the web server. The ad content will be indistinguishable from non-ad content and current ad blockers will fail completely. The latter method will be more desireable because trackers will still function (the web server just has to proxy the client cookies to the ad server.)